B00CACT6TM EBOK

by Florand, Laura

  He turned to look down at her, and his smile changed—shrinking even further but holding even more, something so intense and reined in so tightly that it hit Jo with a physical force. Wow, that was—what must it be like to be loved like that?

  She looked at the other woman as Daniel introduced her as his wife. Léa Laurier was peculiarly beautiful, in a way that didn’t quite make sense, with the careless ponytail and the rough ends of hair that hadn’t been taken care of in a while, no make-up, high cheekbones, bony wrists, and long fingers currently stained with paint. She was like a super model whose angular body seemed awkward in repose, but who turned into something stunning when the camera hit. Only Léa didn’t need a camera. As soon as her eyes met Daniel’s, her face lit, and that generous radiance gave her a luminescent beauty no trick of camera or lighting could ever imitate.

  And everything about Daniel softened, seemed to ease. He led them to the open table, holding out chairs for first Jolie and then his wife.

  Léa, too, was tracking everything that happened in the restaurant, Jo saw, and Daniel smiled ruefully, catching his wife’s eyes after she finished checking the nearby table for the diners’ reactions to the dishes a waiter had just set before them. “We shouldn’t eat here,” he told her. “Maybe we should try the restaurant next door. Or I hear you’ve got a couple of cousins in Sainte-Mère who aren’t half bad.”

  She laughed wryly and tried to turn her focus back on their own table.

  “So Mademoiselle Manon is interviewing me about the decision to name an executive chef,” Daniel said, raising his eyebrows at his wife as if inviting her to comment.

  “What did you tell her?” Léa asked instead.

  He gave that restrained but somehow enormous smile of his, the one that held so much warmth. “So far, we’ve been talking about Gabriel Delange.”

  She laughed, with open pleasure. “Gabe is wonderful. I guess the two of you never could have managed to share this restaurant—he wanted control, and it was yours to control—but he made such a difference, that first year.” Her eyes caught Jo’s, very warm. “What do you think of him?”

  Jo was very surprised to find her own gaze lowering and herself blushing a little bit. Oh, come on. Traitorous cheeks.

  Léa, on the other hand, sat up a little straighter, delighted. She caught her husband’s eyes just a second, glanced back at Jolie, and carefully kept her mouth shut.

  “So about the executive chef decision,” Jolie said firmly. “How were you able to reach the point when you stepped back and left the day-to-day control in someone else’s hands?”

  A waiter came up, and she paused to savor the luxury of choices for a moment, and when she finally chose and looked up, Léa had her hand curled over one of Daniel’s, and he was watching Jo with a faint, intensely satisfied curve of his mouth, making her glad she had let her delight in the menu show.

  She waited until the waiter left before repeating her question about the executive chef choice. Interviewers had to be persistent.

  “I didn’t have anything more to prove to anyone,” Daniel said slowly. “That could be proven in a kitchen.” He turned his hand over and closed it around Léa’s, without looking at her. One strong thumb stroked over the tendons in her hand, found a spot of dry paint by texture, and rubbed over it gently.

  Jo let the silence draw out, an interview technique, waiting for more.

  “I wanted a chance to be with my wife,” Daniel said, still low and quiet and careful. “And to be with myself. I thought maybe I didn’t have to put every single bite of my whole self out there on a plate for someone to eat. Maybe just some bites would do. And when you reach that point, it’s time to let another chef step up.”

  “Someone who wants to let himself be eaten alive?” Jolie murmured uneasily. Images of her father and Gabriel both flashed through her mind, Gabriel’s enthusiasm, her father’s grim depression, as if he had been eaten up and spat out again.

  “Yes,” Daniel said firmly. Léa linked her fingers with his and squeezed once.

  “How did you feel about it?” Jolie asked her.

  Léa was silent a long moment, that radiance of hers growing quieter and not in a bad way, as if a cloud had gently diffused the rays of the sun. “Deeply happy,” she finally said softly. And then, after a moment Jolie let stretch: “It’s good. Good to have time to be something else. But you know, don’t you? Your father was Pierre Manon.”

  Jolie tried to hide the profound sadness that winced through her whenever someone referred to her father in the past tense, as if he was either no longer alive at all or, at best, he no longer deserved to call himself by his own name. No wonder her father believed the same thing.

  Although . . . hadn’t he had some role in getting that attitude started? He was the one who had treated the loss of a star as his own death. He could have come back fighting. He could have shown everyone he was still alive. She brought a hand up to rub the nape of her neck.

  “You have to know exactly how much being a top chef consumes everything else,” Léa said.

  “And everyone,” Jolie agreed reluctantly. This interview wasn’t supposed to be about her. “Wife, children, friends, himself.”

  Léa had married at eighteen, in a moment of terrible crisis—the sudden death of her legendary father, two younger siblings to finish raising, and the world-famous three-star restaurant on her shoulders. So Jo couldn’t blame her for getting caught in a cycle—marrying what she knew, another chef, getting sucked into that.

  She wondered how long the abnegation of her own life had seemed natural to Léa, or if there was ever a moment when the other woman looked around at all the normal lives she could have had and realized what Jo’s mother had taught her own daughter so well: a woman had to be crazy, to marry a superstar chef.

  “So you don’t need lunch now?” Gabriel scowled at Jolie from his balcony, ready to leap across that gap and strangle her. He had somehow just assumed that she would be drawn irresistibly back into his kitchens when she got hungry and would show up around two o’clock, toward the end of the service, to eat all the different delights he had decided to feed her. “What did you do, eat at McDonald’s?”

  “I had lunch with Daniel Laurier,” Jo said, and his head blew off.

  “Oh, you did, did you?” That damn self-worshiping twirp. After Gabriel had saved his whole damned pastry kitchen, too. The Côte d’Azur might not be big enough for both of them after all.

  “His wife has such a generous spirit,” Jo said. “I wonder how she does it. It’s like she just pours herself out there to everyone else as much as he does.”

  “That’s Léa for you,” he said, trying to pry his teeth apart so she couldn’t actually hear him speaking through them. Daniel had had someone pouring her generous warmth on him since he was nineteen years old. Younger, damn it. The two of them had been dating a year before they got married. Why him?

  Daniel’s hours were worse than his. He did all those television chef contest shows, and Gabriel mostly thought those were a pain. What did he have that Gabriel didn’t, that glued a woman like Léa to him with such loyalty? Had Jolie seen it in Daniel, too?

  Why not me? Why not me? Why not me?

  It made him want to kick something so he didn’t have to admit how much it hurt.

  “And she’s gorgeous,” Jo pointed out, a little spark of humor in her eyes.

  His arms locked across his chest. “Fine. Do you know how much I don’t care?”

  Jo blinked at him a moment. She had added a pot of Tahitian gardenias to her balcony sometime that day, and the scent wafting across from her side was heady and sweet, competing even with the jasmine. “Meaning I really doubt he’s flirting with other women,” she explained, with the subtlest gentle amusement.

  His arms flung out. “Have you fucking looked at yourself in the mirror ever, Jolie?” Merde, had he just admitted how jealous he was? To a woman who thought his jealousy was funny, because she wouldn’t have any problem dumping him? Coul
d he not learn to sit on himself ever?

  She blinked again. And then flushed rosy with pleasure. In fact, she didn’t seem to have the slightest idea what to say next, her head bending as she ran her fingers over one of her gardenias, sneaking glances at him across the stupid three-floor drop.

  He tested his strength against the balcony railing, making sure it wouldn’t cave away from him when he launched himself off it. Because those glances . . . a man sure as hell should not have a three-floor drop between him and responding to those glances.

  “Hey.” She straightened, holding up a flat hand. “Don’t even think about it.”

  He gave her a sweet smile. “Oh, I’m thinking about it.” His smile got meaner, as he leaned into the gap. “What are you thinking about, Jolie? Would you care to share some details?”

  “If you ever try to leap across that, I will murder you! You could die! You could break your spine and be paralyzed for the rest of your life! Don’t you dare!”

  “You’re going to murder me so I don’t die?”

  She crushed the gardenia in her hand and threw the petals at him. He tried to catch one, but they floated too far out of reach, wafting down to the street below.

  “Aww,” he said. “Now you’re throwing flowers onto my balcony. Isn’t that sweet? Do you play the guitar?”

  Jolie’s fingers curled around the edge of the big gardenia pot in an ominous fashion. He was pretty sure he could catch it intact, but could she throw it far enough, that was the question. He didn’t want some passing pedestrian to end up with a cracked skull.

  “Come for a walk with me before you do something desperate,” he said. “You know you like me better when I’m within reach.”

  He had to admit he preferred sitting with her astride him, her pelvis riding his and driving him out of his mind as he kissed her, but still, there was something to be said for lounging near her on the stone wall by the boules court, shaded by pines, looking down at the spread of population to the sea, in the background the soft toc of the boules and the rumble of conversation from the older men playing. Was she remembering how successfully and cruelly she had manipulated him with their first kiss, only a few meters down the wall?

  “Did you eat lunch?” she demanded suddenly.

  “Raphaël was inventing something new with a lamb confit. I tried that.” Was she taking care of him? His mouth curved, and he looked down, rubbing his thumb against his jeans.

  She was so damn pretty. Was she willing to consider this a date yet?

  “I think Daniel and Léa are trying to wind it down a notch,” she said, making him blank. Where the hell was her mind? Off at lunch with Daniel again?

  “Their marriage?” he demanded, horrified. They had always seemed so happy. It made him bitter and jealous, but, since his heart was so incorrigibly optimistic that way, it gave him a little bit of hope.

  “No! No, how much of themselves they put into the restaurant. I think they’re trying to create a more balanced life. Have time for themselves, for a social life. Make actual friends they can hang out with.”

  Gabriel considered that blankly. Hunh. Really? But then, of course, Daniel wouldn’t have the same problem Gabriel did, whenever he did try to take a Friday or a Saturday evening off and discovered that he had absolutely no one to spend it with, and the whole stupid evening stretched out before him so bleakly that he finally he went back to work, where he could pour his heart into something. Daniel could pour his heart into his wife. Probably children one day soon, too. Gabriel slouched a little lower on the wall, brooding.

  “Maybe we should have them over for dinner,” Jolie said. “I liked them. And I’m interested in how he and Léa are going to find that balance.”

  We should have them over. Like a couple. He sat on his surge of energy as hard as he could, but he was just not very squashable. “Sure,” he managed to say. Neutrally enough. “Monday or Tuesday would work best. I’ll give him a call.”

  And then he spoiled it all by bursting into a grin. “We?”

  Jolie blinked, took a moment to think through the implications in what she had just said, and then looked shocked.

  He just grinned at her.

  Her gaze slid away but then back, very curious. He wasn’t the one staring at a man with eyes dilated, then hopping back whenever that man politely reciprocated, so he hoped she was searching her own convoluted soul.

  He leaned in, so she didn’t search her soul too hard, to the point she found doubts, and kissed her. Thorough and hungry and in no hurry.

  After all, why hurry, in her head they had time to develop long-term friendships as a couple now. He grinned again, even as he kissed her, and lifted his head before the surge of hunger could overtake him.

  Amused comments came from the nearest group of old men playing boules. “Try, try again?” one of them called. “You never give up, do you?”

  He stiffened and pulled Jolie to her feet, his jaw setting. Damn seventy-year-olds. Nothing better to do than gloat over the younger men, knowing there could be no payback. And damn small hilltowns where everyone had witnessed the fiasco of his dating life for the past ten years, too. Yes, he had kissed a few other women in the past decade, but did they have to bring it up right then?

  He drew her down the alley of his now very-favorite stone staircase in the world, arousal surging through him instantly at the memories. If he had been Pavlov’s dog, he would have been a damn quick study.

  “Try again?” Jolie demanded, bridling. Maybe he could steal all the old men’s boules or something. That would make them suffer, although not nearly enough. “What did that mean?”

  His jaw set. He would have folded his arms, but he had managed to get hold of her hand again, and she wasn’t trying to get it back. “You know how you’re always dumping men when you get sick of them? I’m always getting dumped.”

  And wasn’t that just a wonderful thing to have to admit to someone you could eat for breakfast, probably every damn day for the rest of your life?

  Jolie stopped under a line of three shirts hung high above her, tugging him around to face her. “Women dump you?” she said incredulously.

  His heart swelled with pleasure, even while it got confused. She didn’t understand other women who did the same thing she liked to do?

  She took a step into him, her fingertips rising to his chest. “They don’t get addicted?” she asked softly, her eyes just eating him up again.

  Oh, that—he squeezed her into him in a rushing hug, kissing her until he had to reach out and twine his fingers around the nearest iron staircase railing to remind him that they were in a public street. Breathing raggedly, he flexed his arm too hard around her, driving her into his body, and when he finally forced his head up, she pressed her cheek against his chest, her breathing crazy, too, her hands curled into his shirt. All her weight lay against him. The triumphant, starving joy of it, to be what was holding her up. To have made her that weak.

  He sure as hell felt strong. Strong enough to carry her weight in one arm, and break down doors, and rip clothes, and. . . .

  He drew a long, shaky breath, rocking them minutely on their feet, trying to calm himself.

  Jolie rubbed her cheek against him and curled her fingers more deeply into his shirt, not trying to step away. He could feel her breath in little puffs through the thin knit. Her body was so pliant. He could just swing her up in his arms, her apartment was only a couple of streets away. Everyone would see them, and she would want to crawl out of herself with shame when she recovered and realized, but he wouldn’t mind.

  He would feel rather savagely victorious striding through the street to her apartment with her in his arms in full view of the world, in fact.

  He heaved another deep breath, rubbing her back with one hand, every calming gesture for himself he could think of.

  Then she finally looked up at him, and before he could stop himself, he had leaned down to sip another kiss off those parted damp lips.

  It wasn’t his fault.
That face, tilting up from his chest like that—how was he supposed to control himself?

  One little kiss, and then another, and then another three, his hand slipping free of the rail, petting her hair back from her face in urgent strokes, her mouth so delicious and so his. He couldn’t get enough of it and of her reaction to him.

  Madame Delatour’s little dog saved him, sniffing at his ankle. He managed to lift his head again, to see Madame Delatour passing, not really looking at them, her face almost neutral except for the little smile that curved her mouth.

  “I can’t touch you anymore,” he gasped. “I might die.” Stretching both hands behind him this time, he locked them around the twisting wrought iron bars of the railing. Jolie forced herself to take a step back, but then her gaze got lost on him. Her eyes ran slowly from his hands knotted around the iron, up his corded arms, over his undefended chest.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, twisting his head away. “Non, non, non, don’t look at me like that. Jolie, you have no idea—” She probably didn’t. He always did seem to feel things more powerfully than anyone else around him. Out there, unshielded, and subjugated by his damn senses.

  He peeked, and Jolie’s eyes were brilliant with hunger, the black of her pupils eating up the gold again. She lifted a hand to touch, very lightly, his straining chest.

  He snapped, on a quick flick of pure rage. Damn her, she shouldn’t toy with him like that. Cruel little I’ll-dump-you-when-I-please.

  “I’ve got to go back to work,” he growled, striding away as fast as he could. And it was a good hour into the evening service before he calmed down enough to want to beat his own head against the wall, instead of the heads of everyone else around him. You idiot. What a stupid moment to lose your temper.