She looked through his glass walls at the activity in the kitchens. “Papa’s stroke was only a few weeks before the release. I kind of had other things than happy excitement to focus on at the time.” She shot him a glance. “Sometimes I wonder, now, if he was stressing about what might happen when you saw that Rose on the cover.”
Fuck. Gabriel felt a weird shock of relief at the timing. Because if Pierre was heading toward a stroke, and it had occurred after Gabriel sent that lawsuit notice, then . . . what a hellish thing to have on one’s conscience. “You can’t blame me for that, Jolie. I hadn’t had any contact with him in ten years, at the time. Other than occasional subtle put-downs of his work in interviews, but come on. He’s spent his life in top kitchens, he can stand that much heat.”
She looked confused. “No, I’m not blaming you.” Her head sank a little. “Maybe I’m blaming me,” she muttered, very low.
“Blaming you? You couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old.”
“I pushed him to put the Rose on the cover,” she reminded him. “I wanted it so much. It was always my favorite.”
A quick flick of painful pleasure. That dessert had meant so much to him. Beautiful, famous, photographed by everyone. Proof in and of itself that Pierre Manon had been right to put his faith in him as his chef pâtissier, despite his youth, proof that he deserved more respect than Pierre was offering him, proof even to his girlfriend that he was really a beautiful man on the inside and she should be tolerant of the fact that she never saw him. And then. . . .
Jolie grimaced. “He hesitated. I couldn’t figure out why he didn’t want it, but I pushed him for it.”
“Jolie. All the reasons that Rose made him uncomfortable happened well before you had anything to do with it and are his own fault. He could have owned up to it with you, right then. Said, ‘No, I don’t really feel right claiming this as my work.’ If he had an uneasy conscience, he must have known enough to realize he shouldn’t do it. If. Personally, I think he felt completely comfortable claiming it as his work, that he didn’t give a damn at all about me and my reaction, and therefore his stroke didn’t have anything to do with the cookbook at all.”
She sent him a resentful look but didn’t have the nerve to argue. Yes, I do know your father better than you do, thank you. That’s the difference between working with him sixteen hours a day as his chef pâtissier for four years and visiting in his office from time to time.
Merde, no wonder she kept putting up that dog-collar-fence thing when he stepped close to her. She had her father’s complete absence from her family as a glaring warning. On the other hand, at least if he got through that fence of hers, she was never going to be able to yell at him, I didn’t know what the life was like!
No, she knew what the life was like, and so would skip the blame and just go straight to dumping him matter-of-factly.
Damn it.
“Maybe we should focus on your next cookbook,” he said.
Her face brightened immediately. “Would you—could you—I know this is probably not the best moment to ask, but could you possibly show me your Rose?”
An image of that ephemeral, blushing fragility flashed through his mind, that delicate, vulnerable thing he had poured out to the world to try to win—everything. The gift of himself that had been used and abused, leaving him with nothing. “No. I thought French Taste was meant to be an amateur cookbook.”
“I would just like to see you do it,” she said wistfully.
“You had your father’s version,” he retorted, clipped. “No. Now, for your French Taste, how long do you usually spend working with each chef you’re featuring?”
Jolie searched his face, her own slumping a second in disappointment. And he felt a pang, an urge he had not felt in ten years, to offer her a beautiful, delicate, hopeful Rose just so she wouldn’t feel a second’s disappointment in him.
He clamped that urge back, hard, covering it with a big, protective hand.
Jolie pulled on her professional attitude. “It depends on the chef and how much time he can spare at once. Simon Casset just spent the whole day with me. He said it was easier for him to focus on one thing, all at once. But I think Philippe Lyonnais wants us to work over several afternoons. He’s going to show me some macaron recipes. Dominique Richard has promised to show me his millefeuille recipe, and I might include his éclair au chocolat, but I’m not sure yet. He’s like Philippe, he wants several two-hour visits rather than one long one. And Luc Leroi can barely spare an hour at a time. He’s exquisitely well-mannered about it, though.”
Exquisitely well-mannered. Gabriel scowled. “There are a lot of exceptional French chefs who are sixty, too, you know.”
“But the focus of this book is on the new generation. The chefs under forty. Didn’t I mention?”
No, she had not mentioned that. Dominique Richard, for God’s sake. If she liked being hit on by big aggressive men, Dom would be right up her alley. And if she liked princes, she’d probably be fantasizing about Luc Leroi all night. Instead of him.
“Simon’s married now, you know,” she said, an annoyingly thoughtful amusement in her voice. How transparent was he? “And Philippe’s engaged.”
“Simon?” The man who was so obsessive and one-track minded, he got off work to go train for iron distance triathlons? How had he had the time?
“It’s really cute. His fiancée is so bouncy and so enthusiastic, and the expression on his face when he looks at her, it’s just—priceless.”
Simon Casset. Who pretty much defined geek. Putain de merde, Gabriel should never have stuck with the restaurant business. He should have opened some salon de chocolat with slightly more reasonable hours, even if you couldn’t in a million years do the same kind of melt-at-a-glance work in it that you did in a three-star restaurant. Simon was married. And Gabriel didn’t even have a girlfriend.
He was pretty sure Jolie wasn’t going to let him claim her as a girlfriend.
“And Philippe’s engaged now.” She said it like she was patting a dog reassuringly on the head. It made this particular dog want to growl. “I just mention it in case you haven’t heard.”
He had heard, and he didn’t need it rubbed in. He was the older than both the other men.
“None of them are in the restaurant business, though,” she said, which was exactly what he was thinking, although his reasons were considerably more defensive. “So it’s up to you, how you want to schedule interviews and the time to work with me. I’m grateful you’re willing to contribute.”
Was it unreasonable of him to be a little pissed off at her professionalism here? After all, he was holding her hand and kissing her in jasmine and promising to invade her apartment in the middle of the night. She could probably get away with expecting some personal favors.
Professional. He would show her professional. He gave her a slow smile. “Well, let’s get started.”
Chapter 14
“The trick is to find something of yours that a good amateur chef could have a remote hope of reproducing,” Jolie said, trying to keep a professional tone. That slow smile of Gabriel’s made her feel just a little—menaced. “It’s almost incompatible with the idea of a three-star chef, but that’s what I want to do.”
“How about this one with raspberries?” Gabriel opened a big binder, flipping to a photo.
Jolie looked at the dessert. And then looked at him. The bottom layer was a perfect flat rectangle of red, kind of like a fruit strip that had grown up, gone to college, and become President of France. It even had gold flecks in it. The next layer was an exquisite marbling of red and white. Then a rectangle of chocolate. Then curves of chocolate cream as perfectly spiraled as a unicorn’s horn. Then a red roll of melted sugar marbled with real gold leaf, like some fairy creature’s cigar. And finally one fine arch of red that soared up into the stratosphere before bringing the eye back down to the layered base.
She smiled. “You’re really cute, you know that?”
�
��Cute?” He looked at the photo, offended.
“Did I mention this cookbook is for amateurs?”
“You don’t think they could do that?”
She laughed. He was more than cute, he was adorable. This man just got to her, every way there was.
“If we took off the arc?”
She shook her head.
“And the gold leaf?”
“And the half-molten sugar that you have to roll with your bare hands into a perfect cylinder?” Jolie suggested dryly.
Gabriel sighed. “This might be harder than I thought.”
A moment ago her skin had been prickling with a sense of his sexual menace, and now she wanted to give him a hug. He charged her emotions like some super current. “You can do it,” she said encouragingly.
His head lifted. “Of course I can do it. Who ever suggested anything else?”
He flipped through a book of photos of different desserts he had done, thinking.
“You could do your Rose,” Jolie said again wistfully.
The page froze mid-turn. “For amateurs?”
“Well, no, but—you could show it to me, and I could take notes, and we could put it in your cookbook.”
“Thanks, Jolie, but I don’t care to imitate your father’s cover.” His jaw had gone very hard. “And I don’t care to hide the Rose in my cookbook like a secret. So I think you—he’s—effectively stolen that from me.”
Jolie hung her head. She couldn’t begin to tell him how much she loved that red-streaked white chocolate Rose flourishing around that secret, melting heart. Now that she knew the rough, wild man who had made it, she loved it even more. All the softness, all the beauty and wonder of him that he had ever put out there to the world was right there, in that Rose.
“You could make it just once,” she whispered. “For me to just try.” That would be—something wonderful in a way she didn’t know how to say, to taste that Rose from his hands. Made for her.
His jaw tightened even further. He did not look at her. “I thought we were going to work on your French Taste.”
Jolie rubbed the back of her neck. And nodded. “That’s—of course. Let’s do that.”
She felt guilty about how long it took him to relax again, flipping through his photos. Eventually he did, though, as she kept grabbing pages to look at a dessert more closely, to exclaim. A smile slowly softened that hardened mouth, and then all at once, his usual ready grin flashed back, as if it just couldn’t be kept away.
In the end he decided on a very simple—to him—réligieuse au caramel au beurre salé, a salted-butter caramel réligieuse.
“An exceptional take on a great classic.” Jolie nodded in approval. “That will be perfect. We can maybe even share the choux recipe between yours and Dominique’s éclairs.”
Gabriel stopped mixing, his eyes narrowing.
“Or maybe not,” Jolie allowed, grinning. “Maybe I can put both yours and Dominique’s choux recipe up on my website and challenge readers to test them both and vote for which one is best.”
“There’s not much variation on the classic choux recipe,” Gabriel told her. “But where there is variation, it’s because my way is better. Now break the yolks into the pâte and mix. Fort, Jolie.” His hand slid down her arm in one long stroke and closed around her hand on the wooden spoon. “Like this.” With the barest exertion of his arm muscles, he took over hers, bringing her stirring to the rhythm he wanted.
Jolie stared at her arm in some surprise. She was used to it being quite a strong arm. Even with her knowledge of Gabriel’s expertise and the obviousness of his muscles, she still hadn’t quite been expecting her own arm to be overpowered so easily.
Heat flushed through her. Until she stood in his kitchen door and heard him roar, she had never in her life been tempted by the thought of being overpowered.
And now it was pretty much all she could think of: that power and passion bursting into her life. Vaulting across a three-floor drop into her apartment. Taking over her body.
“Don’t stop,” Gabriel rumbled into her ear, as his hand eased on hers and her own slowed. “You have to mix it hard until all the steam rises off it.”
His body felt so hot and hard behind hers. Her nape prickled to be so exposed to him as she forced herself to concentrate on her mixing. The steam from the choux dough flushed over her face as a heavy warm sigh brushed over her neck.
All the hairs on her nape rose in pleasure.
“There.” Gabriel pulled the pan off the burner and turned away a moment to correct a junior cook’s plate preparation error that neither of his sous had caught. Even in the midst of his focus on her, he seemed to catch everything that happened in the kitchen. But in another sense, he barely seemed to notice the bodies brushing against them as his kitchen team continued their tasks. He was used to having people make space for him. For over a decade now, he had been the master of his domain, the one who heard yes, chef to anything he said.
Or—wait—her eyebrows flexed together, and she looked up at him. He would have been used to making space for other people, too, though, right? All his adolescence and adult life, working in a blend of many bodies, many motions. He ruled this space, but he had to rule it in a way that let everyone accomplish their incredible tasks, too, dozens of scrambling fairytale princes and princesses trying to fulfill the demands of a masterful monster. Spin this sugar into gold. Count these grains of salt, fleck by fleck. Cross this molten chocolate with a boat made out of snow.
Funny, no one ever wondered what drove the wicked monster to seek such impossible achievement.
“Meanwhile,” Gabriel said, “start the milk infusing with vanilla, and start the caramel.” He had two pans on burners, one with a vanilla bean floating in milk, the other with sugar over heat, before he even finished the sentence. “Keep an eye on those while you’re making the heads and the bodies.”
Jo grinned, filling a pastry bag with the choux dough. “I don’t think having an amateur chef do anything else while trying to make caramel besides watch the pan like a hawk would be a good idea.”
Gabriel looked around them blankly. “You aren’t doing anything else. I mean—just squeezing dough onto baking sheets. Can’t you watch a pan at the same time?”
Jo laughed. “You have to slow down. No one else moves as fast as you.”
He frowned. Then he frowned harder. “What is that supposed to mean? Are you talking about—damn it, I don’t know how!”
“Watch.” Jolie caught his wrist. He stilled. “Just—watch me. I’m an amateur. Tell me what to do, tell me all your tricks and tips to make my technique better, but let me do it. Everything you see, every time you think, oh, if she only knew how to do this, or, this is what she needs to know, tell me, and I’ll take notes and filter out the most feasible tips for readers.”
He blinked at last at the word readers. “Putain, Jolie, you should have warned me right at the beginning that you weren’t talking about sex for once. My brain nearly split. I can imagine quite a lot of impossible things, but you letting me give you tips to improve your sex technique is just not one of them.”
“I hope you weren’t talking about sex when you said you didn’t know how to slow down, either,” Jolie retorted dryly, before she thought.
He grinned—very slowly. And his hands flew. “No, see, Jolie, this caramel is going to melt fast, and has to be handled fast.” He tilted the pan over the burner as the sugar melted to gold. “And this milk is going to infuse slowly, and you have to let it simmer a long, long, long, long time.” He held a palm over the pan to check its temperature. “And these petits choux here”—his big hand closed over hers on the pastry bag and tightened, nice and slow—“have to keep going in a steady, firm rhythm until they’re all . . . ready.”
She looked from his hand entirely encompassing hers, up that strong arm, to the body enclosing her, and then to his face. He leaned into her even more, his grin wicked. “And I can do all three of those things all at once.”
/> He was impossible. He was delicious. She so desperately wanted to bite that smug mouth of his.
“But in fact,” he said soulfully, “I—and I don’t want you to feel self-conscious about your one-track focus, I keep telling you I don’t mind—but again, I myself was thinking about a broader picture than just sex. More the whole—” He made a big sweep of his arms around them, like he was enclosing them in a bubble, and then gestured back and forth between her chest and his.
“Has no one ever hit you?” Jolie asked. “That’s so hard to believe.”
“I think your father threw a pan across the kitchen in our last big fight, but I caught it.”
“Did you throw it back at him?”
“It spattered me with hot oil, Jolie! Of course I did. He was out of control.”
Funny, her strongest memories of her father from that same period were of the two of them slumped on a couch eating potato chips at one in the morning, their conversation drifting sleepily over all kinds of subjects—school, the latest political headline, food, what Jolie wanted to do when she grew up, how she had damn well better not marry a chef—until one or both of them fell asleep.
She had seen some of her father’s tempers in his kitchen through the glass walls of his office—from which standpoint they had seemed bright and fascinating, like flashes of lightning and thunderclouds from the shelter of a securely grounded house—but she had never really experienced them directly. For what little amount of time he did see his daughters, he tried to give them his patience.
Patience. She looked up at Gabriel, who tried hers—deliciously. Like she wanted to beat her head against his chest all the time but would have fun doing it. “All I was saying is that you need to remember that other people go slower than you do.”
A suspicion of a frown again, his eyes searching her face.
“Take your time.”
His frown deepened. “I do know how to take my time when it’s necessary, Jolie, but—”
“Just trust me.”
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