A brief grim glimpse in Raphael’s face of that same bone-deep loneliness Gabriel felt, and then he shrugged. Six years younger, that meant he had six fewer years of failure at relationships under his belt and correspondingly more cockiness. Or a determination to pretend so. “I believe I’m too big a fish for this small pond. Maybe we should think of opening a second restaurant somewhere more single women live.”
“That will certainly help with the hours problem,” Gabriel said sardonically.
“I could run that one,” Raf said, and Gabriel looked at his brother a moment.
He had had even less sleep than usual, in order to take a woman to a train station and have her tell him with beaming delight how the fact that she would have no problem dumping him resolved all her issues. It was not a good time for him to try to deal with his brother’s increasingly powerful, carefully repressed, desire to be in charge of his own place, to have his name lead. Please don’t dump me, too, Raf. Please don’t dump me and make it clear that not sharing your life with me makes yours so damn much better.
Raf grimaced oddly and swiped one of the macarons Gabriel was setting up, biting into its sweet caramel. “So, Pierre Manon’s daughter looked cute.”
“Don’t even think about it, Raf.”
His brother looked surprised and then laughed. “She seemed to be pretty focused on you, Gabe.”
Gabriel couldn’t help smiling at that, despite himself. She sure as hell had, hadn’t she. The memory of her eyes dilating, as she let jasmine curl around her wrists and hold her trapped for him, kicked arousal all through him again.
She sees you, a voice whispered through him. She’s not like that Nathalie person Matt’s got. She looks at you, and she likes what she sees.
God, that was so deliciously enticing. Why the hell did she have to tell him she dumped people?
“So how is that idea of holding her father’s life hostage to get her to submit to your sexual desires working out?”
Gabriel huffed a breath and then growled at his brother, low and dangerous. “I am not exactly—we’re not sleeping together.”
“Oh, is that why you’re so grumpy? How the hell did you screw up? She looked at you like she could eat you up. It was so cute. You kept feeding her desserts instead of you.”
“We’re going to work on a cookbook together!”
“You would consider that a good substitute for sex. Has it ever occurred to you that you might be over-obsessed with your work?”
“It’s not a substitute. It’s just—” He loved her fascinated arousal—even if she was a damn sadist about not following through on it. But it was more than wonderful to watch her melt at everything he fed her. Like he was a prince. “It’s bait,” Gabriel growled. “She said it was a dream come true.”
“Poor kid.” Raphaël shook his head. “That’s how my nightmare started. Thinking that working with you would be a dream come true.”
Gabriel tried not to wince. Raphaël had been young and bright-eyed, and maybe Gabriel had suckered him into this job. But he was so damn good at it. And Gabriel liked working with his brother. They hadn’t killed each other, in over eight years, and before that, when he was Pierre’s chef pâtissier in Paris, Gabriel had hardly ever seen him. He had missed most of his brother’s adolescence, in fact.
Merde, he had missed most of his own.
“It’s going to be an ironclad contract,” he snapped. “She has to finish the cookbook with me.” Has to. It made him sick to his stomach, to think of the woman who had been curled in his lap on those stairs deciding within a month or so that he was just a nightmare she had to get through. That she wanted to dump him but didn’t have the choice.
Raphaël reached across the pass and punched him lightly in the shoulder. “I’m just teasing you, Gabe. Just try not to be too much of a beast to her. And remember, no matter how much she wants to get away from you, you can always hold her father’s life over her head.”
Chapter 12
Jolie’s little balcony in the vieux village faced Gabriel’s exactly, so that if each leaned far enough they could almost, almost touch each other’s hands, three floors above the flower-filled pedestrian street. She wondered if any star-crossed lovers in the history of this town had ever fallen to their death as they pushed just that little bit farther to try to brush fingertips. If she and Gabriel had been children, they would have had a system to send a little box back and forth with messages and tiny presents. If they had been friendly neighbors, they would have shared a clothesline.
Jolie stood on her bare balcony in the old part of town, amid those shady, flowered stone streets not far from the restaurant, and curled her fingers around the rail, gazing at Gabriel, who stood with his own hands curved around his railing across the way, surrounded by pots of red geraniums. It had been a bit of a surprise, after he finished carrying her suitcases up for her and left, to have him pop out on the other balcony and grin at her. “You just happened to have a cousin who didn’t need this apartment right across from you?”
He shrugged, noncommital. “The Rosier family, on my mother’s side, is pretty extensive. And they’ve been in the fragrance industry here for centuries, so it’s astonishing how many odd bits and pieces of property they have here and there.”
Yes, but that didn’t directly answer her question, did it?
She stretched her fingers out of pure curiosity. When he extended his own hand, about two feet rested between them. She leaned farther. He shook his head and dropped his hand back to the rail.
“You’re no fun,” she complained.
He laughed. “Do you want me to leap over the rail?”
Ooh. Yeah. Yeah, that would be hot, him bursting into her apartment in one monstrous lunge. . . .
His hands curled a little more deeply into the rail. His body shifted.
“It’s a three-floor drop!” she exclaimed, panicked.
“That is about like you, to look at me like that with a three-floor drop between us. Trust me, I can jump this. Keep looking at me like that and you’ll find out.”
Her breath stopped. Her body melted.
He gathered himself into a spring.
“Stop!” she yelled, covering her eyes. “I’m not looking at you, all right? And I’m not looking at you any particular way, even when I do.”
“You know what I would do, if I did leap over there?” he asked conversationally.
The lips of her sex curled just from the question. “Uhh—”
His voice deepened. “Give it some thought, Jolie. A man who has just jumped across a two-meter gap, three floors up, to get to you.”
She grabbed hold of the railing again.
“And it stays hot at night,” he murmured. “You’ll want to leave your windows open. Is that a nice thought to take to bed with you? That I might leap over that gap in the middle of the night?”
Hot damn. Was that ever a thought to take to bed.
“And do . . . something. Let’s not go into the details.”
“Why not?” she squeaked. And clapped her hand back over her eyes. She had not just said that.
The purring growl from him crawled all over her bones. “Because when I do leap over that gap, I want you to tell me every single thing you imagined me doing. I wouldn’t want my own ideas to get in the way of your creativity. You seem to have a lot of it—where I’m concerned.”
He was going to kill her. “You had better not leap across that gap! You could fall! Knock on the damn door!”
A little pause, and then a slow, slow grin. “Why, thank you, Jolie. I may very well take you up on that.”
And, of course, her whole body just went yummy.
He watched her a second, his eyes glittering, but finally released his balcony railing with a sigh. “I’ve got to get back to the restaurant. The dinner rush will start soon.” He half turned and paused, suddenly diffident, hopeful. “Come eat with me?”
It just undid her, the way he said that. All aggressive, all yes-you-like-it arroga
nce all the time—and when he invited her to enjoy his work, so exceptional that people flew in private planes halfway around the world to eat it, he was as shy and eager as a would-be-cocky teenager trying to coax a girl into watching his baseball game.
“Of course, I will,” she said. “How could I resist?”
“We need a system,” Gabriel told Jolie the next morning, falling into step with her in the soft pre-dawn. Fortunately, he didn’t have trouble catching up with anyone, let alone someone half his size striding down cobblestoned streets with her head bent and a gym bag slung over her shoulder. Slowing down was more his problem. “Maybe whistles. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Jo?” He switched to English for the quote, making his voice as breathy as he could.
“You so do not resemble Lauren Bacall in any shape, fashion, or form,” Jolie told him grumpily.
“Well, then, you say it to me. And then all I have to do is whistle when I want you to come.” He grinned.
Jo cut him a dark look.
“Down,” he added limpidly. He took her gym bag and slung it with his over his own shoulder. “When I want you to come down from your apartment. So we can walk together to the gym.” This was nice. He was used to the ephemeral, to seizing the moment, to pleasures that took all his effort and then disappeared in a mouthful, but still he didn’t know if he dared think too much about how nice this was, walking through the pre-dawn streets. He had never dated anyone who got up as early as he did.
Jolie grunted. And she had been in such a good mood after he finished feeding her at the restaurant the night before. After she trailed, blissful and stuffed, back into the night to her new apartment, he had pretty much floated through the rest of the evening.
He peered at her. “Do you need coffee? I could have brought you a cup.”
“By leaping over the railings with it?” she said snappishly. “Don’t blame me when you get burned.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve handled hot things before.” He grinned at her.
Jolie stamped extra hard on the paving stones, and he caught her arm agreeably when that made her almost twist her ankle. He would have liked to be holding her hand again. It was just a little unnerving to reach for it, though, given what she had told him about her penchant for getting sick of men. He had been dumped so many damn times.
With aggressive come-ons, at least you knew where you stood. Holding hands, you got—hopeful.
“You don’t seem to have gotten enough sleep,” he said. “Thinking of me?”
She shot him a glare hotter than hot caramel.
His lips parted as realization sank deliciously all through him. “Merde, you were.” His voice dropped to a rumble. “Thinking of me. All. Night. Long.”
That was the sweetest, most erotic victory that had ever surged through his veins. She was going to kill him if she kept doing things like that.
She glared at him, livid.
“I thought we should date a little longer before I actually did come leaping over the balcony,” he said apologetically. “Considering the way you reacted last time I knocked on the door at midnight. I wanted to, though. Does that make you feel better?”
“If you don’t stop consoling me for not having had sex with me, I will kill you,” Jolie said between her teeth.
He sighed. “You are so illogical. Isn’t that what got you upset? What did you want me to say? That I didn’t come by because I wasn’t interested? That sounds a hell of a lot ruder to me. Plus, it’s not even true.”
“Nrggggh!” Jolie grasped a chunk of her hair and yanked.
“Here, let me have that.” Gabriel freed her poor hair from her fist and linked his fingers with the misbehaving hand. Putain, but that made the whole walk better. And it had been so damn fun already.
Walking through the pre-dawn streets, the scent of jasmine barely awake, cicadas singing, while the cutest thing he had ever seen sulked because he hadn’t invaded her apartment. It was so much more fun than every other morning he had ever walked by himself to the gym that he didn’t know what to do with that much enjoyment.
“You know, all coffee does,” he said, “is kick your heartbeat higher. So if you’ll excuse me”—He flipped her against the nearest jasmine-covered wall so fast she was still stumbling when his mouth closed over hers. One kiss, hot, hard, and headily deep. She made a sound, her fingers sinking into his biceps, and he jerked his head up before he could completely lose his mind. “There.” He took one of those hands digging convulsively into his biceps and placed it flat over his heart instead. “It worked for me. See? What about you?” His hand slipped over her heart, and it was hardly his fault that women’s hearts were tucked behind their breasts like that, was it?
Jolie gave a little sighing sound, closing her eyes as she sank against the jasmine, surprising him into having to catch her arm to help her stay up.
Heat flushed his entire body. Wow.
That was so hot.
He glanced back up the street. Really, carrying her back to her apartment before Madame Delatour saw them like that and spending the next two hours inside it with her was all the workout he needed this morning. He bet he could let her practice her flexibility, too.
Lava-hot joy surged through him. Now that would be an awesome way to start a day.
Jolie got her hand up to circle around his wrist, just above the hand pressed to her brea—heart. She didn’t seem to be able to do much with it, though, like force herself to pull it off. “About sex,” she said.
He grinned with pure, hungry delight. “I love how you think about that even more than I do.”
She tugged on his wrist in pique, but by accident he forgot to let her budge it. Her breast felt so damn good. And that glaze in her eyes even better. “If we—you know—do it,” she managed.
If, right. That was so funny. Gabriel was smart enough not to laugh, though.
“We have to be professional about it,” she said.
“What?”
She floundered. “I mean—just sex. And not let it interfere with our professional relationship.”
He scowled at her. Their professional relationship was him feeding her and watching her melt in orgasmic delight. How the hell separate did she want them to get?
Her eyes pleaded with him. “You have to not get upset when I say I’m done.”
He snatched his hand back, as if she had just crisped his palm black. You would think he would know after all those years playing with fire that getting burnt fucking hurt. “You say you’re done?” he snapped, for something to say to make himself feel better. “What about me? Why don’t I get to say it?”
She frowned. Well, good. At least it bothered her to have the idea turned back on her. It didn’t seem to bother her that long, though. “I don’t have any patience,” she explained apologetically. “You probably have more.”
No one, in his whole entire life, had ever accused him of patience, which was a weird thing, because there was almost nothing a man needed more of to succeed in his field.
Patience.
Persistence.
Passion.
And, all right, a healthy dose of fury when necessary. “No,” he said flatly. “No fucking way.”
She gaped at him. Damn it, there went his prince image again.
Well, tough damn luck. “If we have sex, and you dump me after you get all those orgasms out of your system, I get to get as upset as a I damn well please.”
He didn’t know how calming Jolie found her yoga after that, but he had one hell of a weight workout. It was just a damn shame the gym didn’t allow people to throw some of those weights across the room when they needed to.
Chapter 13
He half-expected Jolie to duck out of their cookbook session that morning, but she showed up—in professional shoes, with round black toes, rolling and tightening an apron over a white chef’s jacket, her hair all tucked up. Putain, but she was cute. He wondered if she thought that get-up quelled his imagination.
He smiled at her, the w
ay a sabertooth smiles at some adorable little herbivore wandering into its lair, and welcomed her into his office. It was the first time since every able-bodied family member among the Rosiers and Delanges had pitched in to renovate the mill to his specifications that he regretted his office was glass-walled.
She gave him a very stern, very professional look. He wondered what he could do to get her to produce that stern, professional look when he was sitting on, say, his couch, all relaxed, just as she wandered into grabbing distance.
“Are you free?” he checked. “I forgot to ask about your promotional events. Just let me know when you need to be gone for one.”
Her eyes slid away.
“You haven’t gotten invited to do any promotional events?” he realized, startled. With Pierre Manon’s name on the cookbook? “You need a better publicist. You want the number of mine?”
It outraged him to think Pierre would profit from it, but merde. Her tiny font name on that cover deserved something.
“Papa’s had a stroke, all right?” she said tensely. An unhappier tension than the one he inspired in her, he could feel the difference right away. Nice to have the confirmation that he was so much better for her than her damn father. “He’s not up to the demonstrations.”
“Really?” Gabriel tried to quell the sick feeling of pity. That salaud was not getting pity out of him in addition to every other damn thing he had stolen. “Was the stroke that bad?”
She looked at his desk a long moment. “He could do demos,” she finally muttered, low. “Not as fast, not as graceful, but he could manage. But he feels uncomfortable. He doesn’t want people to see him like this. His nurses told me depression was normal.”
Yeah, Pierre never could stand people seeing him when he was down. He had tucked his tail between his legs when he lost that star and crawled away like a dog. Gabriel had felt an acute sense of victory at the time. I guess you should have valued me, connard.
“But it’s your first cookbook,” it occurred to him, looking at that piquant face gone somber. Somber didn’t suit her. “You must have been so excited when it came out.”
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