“What, you aren’t either?”
“That’s what everybody says.” He sounded morose. “I try my best.”
She searched his face, deeply curious now. In her experience, chefs weren’t the most self-aware people out there.
“It’s the hours.” He shrugged big, surly shoulders, his jaw setting, arms folding. “And maybe my bestial manners, I don’t know.”
“Ah.” Yes, the all-consuming nature of his work was a bit of a relationship-killer. Her own family certainly hadn’t survived it.
“What about you?” he challenged sullenly.
“I don’t know.” Her eyebrows knit. “I’m just not that good at it.”
He pulled them down one of those tiny alleys full of flowers and balconies, stopping before a narrow stone stairway that led up two floors to a tiny arched wooden door blocked by a profusion of red geraniums. He sat on the stairs and pulled her around to face him, standing her between his knees. “Jolie.” His voice dropped low, gentle, that growling quality to it burring oh-so-softly over her, like the purr of a sleeping lion. “If it’s sex you think you’re not good at, I—might treat you better than you seem to think I would.” His fingers rubbed gently over the insides of her wrists, over shiveringly sensitive skin and tendons and her pulse. She swayed at the caress, her body growing heavy, trying to beat her will and sink into him.
“I’m not really that worried about the se—”
“Kiss me again.” He pulled her down into him, and her heavy body, subdued just by his touch on her wrists, had no resistance. “You might like”—his mouth brushed over hers, stroked her lips apart—“the way I manipulate you”—he pulled her lower lip so gently between his teeth. Released it. Took her mouth with a slow, gentle slide of his tongue—“better.”
The stairs against her legs were awkard, the only purchase for her body his. She pressed her hands into his thighs, her torso sinking against his, the edge of a step digging into her shin.
He curved a hand under her bottom and pulled her in closer against him, taking her weight off that shin. Taking her weight off anything but him. She couldn’t find her way out of the kiss, and she couldn’t find her way to its center. It was a labyrinth of sensual delight, something she could stay caught in forever, getting ever more deeply lost in it. This time there was no one in the alley to see, only an orange cat on one of the balconies above them. It felt as if they could kiss here, sheltered by flowers and stone, until the end of time.
In fact, if someone told her that the world was about to end, this was what she would choose to do with the rest of her time: stay here and kiss Gabriel in the shadowed, flower-filled alley until the comet hit.
“You don’t taste sweet and golden,” he said with a surprised, rough laugh. “You don’t taste”—he couldn’t string a proper sentence, his words broken by strokes and bites and deep, deep kissing—“like anything—I’ve ever tasted—before.”
He dragged her in still tighter. The other hand thrust into her hair, pulling it out of the clasp she had it in, stinging her roots with the urgency. She whimpered a little into his mouth, panicked, drowning, and he bit on her lower lip, so gentle and ferocious, stroked it with his tongue, and took her mouth again. He clearly liked discovering completely new flavors.
Her hands dug into his upper arms and kneaded them, pushing away even as she held on more tightly, trying to find her way up again. She was sinking into an ocean of him. She couldn’t find a light to lead her to the surface, she could only find him, and she was running out of her.
He lifted her more and pulled her astride him, and she balked at being opened to him still more, at the pressure of his arousal against her sex.
She wrenched away, lost and panicked, panting, and he gasped at the sudden separation of their mouths. She wanted to fall back into him, to make amends for that separation, but at the same time, she squirmed, trying to pull her hips off his.
His fingers flexed hard into her bottom. And then he was lifting her off him, setting her sideways on his thigh. “I’m sorry.” His voice was rough, hoarse, as he coaxed her head down onto his shoulder with a stroking hand. “That was—was that too much for you?” His arm curved around her waist, his other hand stroking her hair, but every few seconds, his arm tightened, his fingers digging deeply into her scalp, and he had to force them to ease up. “God, you taste delicious. Putain. Another attempt to prove I’m not a beast gets thoroughly fuc—scre—ruined.” He laughed with a kind of despairing ruefulness, pressing his forehead to the top of hers. “But I wouldn’t have minded either of the first two, obviously.”
She really shouldn’t let him keep stroking her hair like that, keep her tucked up safe in his body like that. Keep her tucked up safe from him. It was far more vulnerable, far more intimate, than the kissing could ever have been. More vulnerable than full-out, tangle-with-a-beast sex might have been. And yet it was as if his kisses had shattered all her defenses, and now she quite desperately needed his strength around her until she recovered. She couldn’t bring herself to lift her head and slide off his thigh to her feet.
Why shouldn’t she let him? Just because she had never felt so beautiful and precious in her life, did it mean she wasn’t allowed to feel it now? It was such a dangerous feeling. A woman could learn to want it too much. A woman could give up part of herself for a feeling like that.
His stroking hand steadied slowly, fewer sudden flexings of strength he had to struggle to control. “This is nice, too,” he murmured, the vibration of his voice in his chest tickling her ear. “This is really nice.”
Jolie let herself sink more deeply into him, no muscles holding her back from him at all. For a little while longer, still, she tried to think. And then she gave up on it and tried not to think, since not thinking, just feeling, was so much more pleasant. She might have to revisit her conviction that all the best textures and tastes and scents in the world were in food. His textures—the hard resilience of muscle, the soft cotton of his T-shirt, the smoothness of his skin, the silk of his hair, the whisper of roughness of a jaw shaved that morning—were incredible.
“Really, really nice,” he whispered to the top of her head as he pressed a kiss there.
Chapter 11
Gabriel insisted on taking Jolie to the Nice train station for her trip back to Paris, a gallant gesture that very clearly put him out of temper. They had sat on those stairs for far too long, until a low-voiced argument filtering down from a balcony above had disturbed the mood. You never pay attention to me anymore, the woman had been arguing low, as if she was crushing tears. What happened to all that romance at the beginning?
You’re never satisfied! the man had answered. You want too much. Nothing I do is enough.
The words had worked into their hold and wedged them apart, Gabriel growing brooding, uneasy, Jo unnerved, scrambling for flight. Anyway, she had to get back to Paris, as she told him. She needed to get her life organized, and above all see her father, if she was going to be spending several days a week down here. Gabriel scowled. Jo worried. Worried about how easy she had found it to curl up in the lap of an arrogant, rude, aggressive beast she barely knew and feel as if it was the most beautiful moment in her whole entire life.
It wasn’t until they had passed a palm tree outside the Gare de Nice and entered the old Louis XIII building with its arch patterns in red brick and white stone, that it finally occurred to her. She looked up at him, suddenly, intensely relieved.
Gabriel looked from her face to the sleek silver and blue TGV behind her. “Happy to be heading back to Paris?” he growled.
“It’s not the sex,” she said confidently.
He gaped at her and then glanced around at the crowds. “Honestly, Jolie, can you think of nothing else?” He shifted in on her noticeably, much closer than a man should in crowds like that, but then, he had spent most of his life in packed, intense kitchens. “Not that I’m complaining,” he rumbled, blue eyes glinting down at her.
“The reason I’m bad
at relationships,” she explained. “I was not really thinking about sex!” she hissed. Well, she hadn’t been before he moved in on her that way. Now she was getting a pretty hot vision of being crowded by his body. Rubbed and roughed and handled all the ways he wanted. “It’s because I like being who I am, I think. Not fitting myself around someone else.”
His eyes narrowed, piercing. “Why are we talking about being bad at relationships right this second? And what do you mean, not fitting yourself around someone?”
Of course, ever since he had become head chef, that was all the people he saw all day every day had done, fit themselves around him. Before he became head chef, he would have done the fitting. He probably couldn’t even grasp what she was talking about, the fact that she loved people, particularly food people, but she loved being alone, too. He wouldn’t be able to understand that desire to do her own thing, to be busy in her own head without interference, a desire nourished perhaps in the hours she had kept herself occupied in her father’s office as a child or in his apartment or roaming Paris while he worked.
“Guys just want so much space. And I run out of room for them. Or staying power, or something. I’ve always gotten sick of the guy pretty quickly.”
His face set. His blue eyes glittered oddly against his grim face. “Are you telling me that you make a habit of dumping men who fall for you when you get tired of them?” Her boarding call sounded. “And you just the fuck told me that right now?”
She grabbed the handle of her case, laughing out loud with relief. “Well, at least I don’t have to worry so much about working with you. I’m such an idiot to even think it. I would never end up down the same path as my mother.”
And she hopped up into the train, with a happy wave.
Leaving Gabriel standing, riven to stone.
“You picked a fine time to move to the Côte d’Azur,” her sister Estelle told her. “Jo. I’m busy in New York. Fleur’s got a job in San Francisco. I thought you were going to be here in Paris for Papa.”
Jo stuffed her hands in her pockets, her stomach clenching. Her father, all alone. Again. This time, without even his arrogance and his chef skills. “I’ll be here three days out of the week. An twelve-hour round trip to spend three days with him every week isn’t enough?”
“You were fixed in Paris! You could have been around for him whenever he needed you. I don’t think a lot of your timing.”
“It’s funny how your guilty conscience only works on my behalf,” Jo said sullenly. Why did people always want so much of her? Why was she so stingy with herself?
“Oh, so what do you want me to do? Quit my job in New York? I’ve already stretched it out here as much as I can. I’ve got to get back.”
“What do you want me to do?” Jo asked. “Say no to this? He’s holding a lawsuit over my head!” Thank you, Gabriel Delange. Otherwise, she could never excuse this, to herself or anyone else. Otherwise, she would be in Paris, fighting her father’s depression every day.
Again the thought of her father, those three days without her, sitting at his table rolling that rolling pin bleakly, weighed down on her, grim and gray. Oh, Papa. “He’ll still be seeing his therapists, and I’ll have someone come in every morning and evening to check on him.” Even though he was perfectly capable of taking care of himself, a voice in her head pointed out.
Estelle zipped her suitcase with grim intention: I’m out of here. “And what are you going to tell him? About why you’re spending half the week in Nice?”
“Sainte-Mère,” Jo corrected. Although . . . did her father have to know the exact location? There were a lot of good chefs around Nice. She just had to pick one in rare contact with her father. . . . “Daniel Laurier!” she said triumphantly.
Estelle looked at her blankly.
“You know, the guy who took over Le Relais d’Or in Saint-Amour when he was nineteen? Dark hair? Intense? On TV all the time?”
“I can’t believe you like chefs so much,” Estelle muttered. “You actually know all the starred chefs by name? Didn’t you get enough of that level of narcissism when we were kids?” She cast a guilty but bitter glance in the direction of their father’s apartment building, a couple of arrondissements over.
Jo frowned, and plowed forward. “I’ll tell Papa that I’m working with him. He won’t have any problem with that.”
“Going after a chef that’s worth something, I see.” Her father rolled that damn rolling pin. “I can’t really blame you.”
“Papa. I want to keep writing cookbooks. When I met with, with Daniel Laurier to ask about a recipe for French Taste, the idea just developed. Working with him is a great opportunity for me. You didn’t think the only cookbook I would ever do would be yours?”
Her father shot her a glance and said nothing.
Ah. Maybe he had, in fact, wanted to be her sole center of attention. He made her heart ache. And that heart stretched away from the ache toward the south and the scent of jasmine, in pure yearning to be free.
“Come on, Papa, help me with this recipe.” She pulled one from his cookbook, a simple but delicious pea puree that he could do perfectly well, even with a hampered left hand. “Please?”
But he got up and left the room.
And left her with her aching heart. Yes, he was the one who chose to isolate himself, but that didn’t make him any less alone.
“We’ve got Matt out there,” Raphaël told Gabriel, stopping on the other side of the pass from him. Younger than Gabriel by six years, Raphaël had fewer of those molten streaks in his hair than Gabriel did, a darker brown. Raphaël had been working with Gabriel since he was twenty, when it had seemed more normal to him that he should come on as chef cuisinier to his famous older brother and still work under him. These days, their unusual hierarchy was starting to chafe. Gabriel didn’t know what to do about it. He tried everything he could to share power equally with his brother these days, but old habits of control died hard. He was desperately afraid his brother was just going to up and leave him one day, and even more afraid that might be the best thing Raf could ever do for himself. Fuck. Why were people’s lives always better without him in them?
“Oh, is that why he came by this afternoon? He wanted a table?” Gabriel was spraying the dome of a chocolate dessert last second with a blend of cocoa butter and chocolate so that it would arrive at the table glistening, glossy, perfect, reflecting every light in the room in its darkness.
It was beautiful, and yet for once, his heart wasn’t really in it. Some nights, it was harder to keep forcing your heart out there for people to eat than others. She dumped people. She let men fall for all that pistachio and gold of her, and then she dumped them. She had probably boxed up more shirts and mailed them to clear the last remnants of a man out of her life than all his ex-girlfriends put together.
“He’s got that, what’s-her-name, Nathalie?”
Gabriel stopped. “Bordel, is this going to her? You know she’s just going to run throw it up again as soon as she can get to the restroom.” He stared at the beautiful work of art, utterly deflated. Damn it, the very last thing he needed was to think of some wannabe actress throwing up this bite of his heart, on top of everything else.
“I think she only ordered coffee,” Raf said.
“What the hell is wrong with Matt?” Only ordered coffee. In his restaurant. If that wasn’t a sign a man should get out of a relationship with a woman while he still had a chance to survive, Gabriel didn’t know what was.
“She’s beautiful?” Raphaël suggested cautiously, in the tones of a man who had no idea but was making a wild guess.
“Raf. Remember her at his birthday party? I’ve never seen anyone insist on sucking up more attention for herself. It Matt even stopped to joke with one of us, she started worrying her looks must be going and that was why he didn’t love her anymore.” He wished Matt had never tried working up in Paris this past winter for Rosier SA, on his quest for something a little more adventurous than running a valley of flow
ers in Provence, his life destiny as the Rosier patriarch’s heir. In Paris, Matt had had to mingle with all those actresses and models with whom the luxury perfume houses packed their perfume launches, and it had turned out to be a very bad environment for a straightforward, wholehearted man who liked to fix things.
“I know. She’s as bad as a top chef,” Raf agreed, shaking his head in disgust.
Gabriel gave his brother a disgruntled look. “Well, at least we’re that way about our food. Not our actual bodies.” Fortunately, because he probably had chocolate spray all over his face right now.
“So that makes us better than she is?” Raf challenged wryly.
Gabriel sent the dome through the pass and scowled at his brother. “It’s not the same thing at all,” he said firmly.
Raf shrugged. “You know Matt’s an idiot. I think he tried to head-butt his older cousins into listening to him one too many times when he was little, and it did some damage.”
“She doesn’t even look at him! It’s like she literally cannot see him, only whether he is looking at her.”
“Yeah, but Matt’s a big man. He’ll pour himself out in the service of that need for a long time before he gets to the end of himself. Can we talk about something less depressing? How’s your love life?”
“Fuck you, Raf.”
Raphaël grimaced, with complete sympathy. “See, you need a girlfriend.”
“Don’t we all?” Gabriel said, even more tersely still. “If you’ve got any tips for getting a woman to put up with our hours, you just let me know, Raf.”
Raphaël shrugged, sticking with that flippant cockiness he had been practicing as the younger brother for all their lives. “I’m trying to land them with great sex, myself.”
A fractional pause of Gabriel’s fingers on a slim stick of a white biscuit dipped, just the tip, into brilliant red strawberry coulis, to be balanced expertly on a curlicue of strawberry sorbet. “And how is that working out for you?”
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