Oh, yeah. He made her hungry. And he made her smile.
She grew happier, with each mile closer. Except when guilt tried to sneak back for the fact that she had slipped out Sunday afternoon after all, after having spent the day with her father. She wasn’t entirely sure that her father knew what to do with her around the whole weekend, anymore than she knew what to do with him, but she still cringed at the thought of leaving him alone.
And yet here she was, leaving him alone. Trying to convince herself she was doing it to protect him, when she knew perfectly well that Gabriel would never really do anything to hurt her father. Her soul got lighter and lighter, more and more eager, at the rate of over five kilometers a minute. And yet guilt twisted through it uneasily, unsettling everything, making some part of her long for freedom that no human with a heart could ever truly have.
She got into Sainte-Mère at eleven at night, while Gabriel was still working, and slipped a message to Raphaël. He came out as soon as he could, diners turning to eye him as he passed through the white-arched salle, murmuring to each other, Which one is that?
“This is going to make Gabe’s night,” Raphaël said with something of his brother’s grin. Raphaël looked as if he should have been a seafarer, a pirate, or in this day and age just someone who busked his way around the world. Despite a clear resemblance in facial structure and height to his brother, his shaggy hair was a little darker, his eyes gray-green, and he looked more—windblown and exposed to the elements, as if he got his non-cooking exercise windsurfing. “What can I help you with?”
Jolie felt herself grow a thousand pounds lighter just at his confidence that Gabriel would be thrilled. “Can I have your key again?”
He grinned, fishing in his pocket. “Why don’t you just ask him for a copy? You know he would give you one.”
Did she know that? Jolie thought, on a hiccup and a sudden, whooshing slide. Whoa.
Did she want to know that?
Well, yeah. In a way, it made her heart all fuzzy with delight. And that fuzziness terrified her. Never, never, never get involved with a chef, her mother said. They’ll suck everything out of you and never give anything back.
Don’t you dare fall for one of my chefs. Her father. Or any chef. Find someone you can make a life with.
Careful, some part of her said, slinking away, wanting to protect itself. Don’t let a man suck the life out of you. Don’t let a man claim your happiness and then crush it out like a weight.
And yet, big as he was, greedy as he was, Gabriel never felt like a weight. Or a vacuum.
“We’ve got some late tables, so he probably won’t be home until after midnight, just so you know,” Raphaël told her.
“Yes,” she said. “I know how it goes.”
Raphaël wiggled a key off his ring and looked at her a long moment as he handed it to her, and for an instant his grin faded. “Be careful of my brother, Jolie.”
Uh-oh. She wasn’t sure she knew how to be careful of Gabriel.
“Don’t . . . merde. Don’t—make him fall even harder for you, if you’re going to drop him when you get bored.”
Bored? Of Gabriel?
And—happiness lodged in her like a purring cat in a lap it was not about to get pushed off of—make him fall even harder for me?
“He’s not very boring,” she said.
“I need to meet a cookbook writer,” Raphaël informed the heavens very firmly. “Let’s say, when you get frustrated, then.”
Jolie burst out laughing. “I’ve been frustrated with him since before I even met him.”
Raphaël sighed. “This intervening in someone else’s love affairs doesn’t really work, does it? Just—don’t do anything mean, all right?”
Like don’t break up with him. Because he needed her, right. Just like her father needed her. Jolie waited for that uneasy sensation of someone else’s weight on her life to descend, that familiar sense of a man sucking more out of her than he was willing to give back.
She was still prodding curiously, trying to figure out where that feeling was hiding, when she let herself into Gabriel’s apartment.
Then she forgot all about it, laughing in anticipation as she rinsed the day off her in his shower and slipped into her little white cami pajamas. His favorite.
She was reading a book when she heard his feet on the stairs, and her body immediately thrummed with adrenalin. She ran across to open the door and grin up at him. “Surprise!”
Gabriel’s face just lit. Tiredness vanished in a burst of delight, and the next instant, she had disappeared in a bear hug.
“Pardon,” he said, when he finally released her. “I know I need to take a shower.” But instead, he framed her face and kissed her, deeply. “Jolie. That just beat Christmas. I’m never going to walk home to my apartment with quite the same attitude again. I’ll always be hoping.”
He was so big. With how much he felt, with how little he hid it. She bounced on her toes, face still framed in his hands, beaming up at him.
His fingers flexed into her hair before he dragged them reluctantly away. “Let me go take a shower. It was a crazy day.”
“I made you some more dal,” Jolie said, following behind him.
He stopped in the hallway so suddenly she ran into his broad back. Then he turned, cupped her head, and kissed her very hard again.
“It’s simple,” she said, a little embarrassed, since what he fed her received international awards. And he had yet to repeat himself, in anything he offered her. “And the ingredients were leftover from last time.”
“Are you apologizing?” Gabriel asked incredulously. “Jolie.” He kissed her again, fierce and hard. She was backed up against the wall now. “Let me go take a shower before I crack, okay?”
He pushed off the wall and strode away, fast, stripping off his T-shirt as he went. A smooth, muscled back was revealed for half a second before the bathroom door shut behind him.
Mmm.
She gave him a couple of minutes while she stood where he had left her, pressed against the hall wall, listening to that shower run over that beautiful, indefatigable, irrepressible body.
Then she walked into the bathroom and right up to the edge of the spray. He had no bathtub but a tiled shower walled with glass, so that she could just step between the panes of it.
He froze with one arm stretched up, one hand full of soap lather sliding over his ribs.
“I couldn’t wait,” she said and stepped in under the water with him.
Her little white cami and boy shorts turned instantly transparent, clinging to her skin. He made a sound as if he had taken a battering ram to the stomach, and the soap slid out of his hand and hit the floor.
“Oh, merde,” he muttered, in a frantic, drowning voice. “Jolie—you’re going to kill me.”
She stiffened, flushing all over her wet body. It was the first time in her life she had ever stepped in on a man in a shower, and she had been expecting a hot and happy reception. “Sorry.” She tried to step back, and his hand lanced out and grabbed her in a grip of steel. “If you’re tired,” she said stiffly, pulling at that grip, not in any hope she could break it, but just to show him her resistance.
“I’m not tired, I’m terrified. Jolie.” Still holding her by one arm so that she couldn’t get away, he brought the other, soapy hand to cup her breast through the transparent wet cotton. “You’re incredible.” His voice thickened. “Jolie. I promised to treat you right, and then you do this to me. I’m so happy I don’t even know what to do with myself, and then you layer sex on top of it. I can’t even remember my name.” His hand flexed helplessly on her breast, and she made a sound in her throat, as pleasure ran through her. “You turn me into an animal.” The hand holding her arm slipped from it and cupped her other breast. He squeezed them up and toward each other, lost in the view. “And then the next day you’re not sure you want me,” he muttered, so low and far back in his throat she almost couldn’t hear it.
Before she could fi
gure out what to say to that—who did know what to do with someone this big in her life in the morning?—he slipped his hands down the clinging wet fabric and gripped her butt, lifting her to ride against his nakedness, and she lost coherent speech. There might as well have been nothing between his hard sex and hers. Nothing but that annoying, frantically arousing slip of transparent wet fabric.
He twisted her against him, sliding her back and forth over his sex. The shower rained down over her face. He stared down at that, fascinated, his own head well above the spray, sliding her harder, watching her pure helplessness to the elements in which she was caught: him, the water, her own desire.
His own face flushed, his arousal turning him into something—animal. Feral. Dangerous. He twisted suddenly to protect her face with his body, pushing her back against the wall of the shower, and she blinked wet lashes up at him, feeling absurdly grateful for being rescued from what he had submitted her to. “I’m going to last thirty seconds.” His voice was guttural. “I might come right here. You have no idea what you look like, or what you’re doing to me.”
“I like it,” she admitted again in a whisper. “I really like driving you wild.” She twisted her hips, the wet fabric dragging against her clitoris, the lips of her sex struggling to cling to him through the cloth. “Make me come in thirty seconds, too.”
“Oh, no.” He dragged her up the wall, closing his mouth around one of her breasts through the cloth and suckling so hard she whimpered. “You I’m going to torture for at least an hour. But I think that’s going to have to come second.”
It didn’t, though. In a sudden change of resolution, he dropped to his knees and pulled her thighs over his shoulders, so that she was riding on them. Tilting his head back for one long look up at her, while the water streamed into his face, he waited for her to realize what was coming and to twist and writhe in a sudden panicked conflict of embarrassment and desire. His hands gripped her thighs hard, so that she couldn’t get away.
And then he brought his mouth to her, suckling her straight through the cloth. She made a little screaming sound, her hands clutching in his hair, pulling it too hard. “Twenty-nine more seconds,” he said. And bit her with exquisite gentleness, as if he was tasting some tiny fragile chocolate. “Twenty-five.” He sucked her clitoris slowly again, through the cloth, elusive and thorough as if he wanted her to melt on his tongue. Which she did, whimpering, her hands writhing in his hair. “Twenty-two. Twenty-one. What’s your name?”
“Gabriel,” she moaned, bucking helplessly, held like iron.
“Oh, good, you’ve forgotten yours, too. Twenty. Ah, Jolie.” Her body was starting to shake uncontrollably. Her head fell back in the waves of pleasure. When they took her over, she could have drowned under them, drowned in the shower, for all she knew, but as the world came back to her, it was a world made of his body. He was holding her again, pulling off the wet boy shorts.
“I think that leaves five seconds for me,” he said roughly and thrust deep into her, once, and then again, and again, as if he couldn’t stop himself, he couldn’t slow down. “Ma belle, you are so . . . so . . . ” Words seemed to fail him. He dragged himself out of her and found finally a word to describe her as he drove hard again: “Mine.”
His body pinned her to the wall in one deep, final thrust as he claimed her, her own body clutching helplessly around him.
Chapter 21
Gabriel sprawled again. His bed was much bigger than hers, but he still took up most of it. She had woken lying on her side, curled toward the edge of it, her knees thrust past the side. An arm was snug over her waist, keeping her from falling. She twisted slowly, carefully toward him. As before, he slept so heavily she had the impression his body would leave its imprint on the bed forever.
She could hear the sound of his breathing, close and soft and intimate. The warmth and weight of his arm pressed her to the soft cotton sheets.
She had at least one idea of what to do with him in the morning. She curled up against him again, throwing her leg over his, and fell back asleep.
When she woke up again, Gabriel was still sleeping like the dead. His body hadn’t even moved. It must be close to noon, which made her mouth curve wryly. Was this what he had been so determined not to miss Monday mornings? Sleeping? Or had he just thought that with her around, he would skip what must be his weekly recuperation from his short nights?
She did that, too. Slept short nights all through the week—working or reading late, her quiet time, then up early because she loved the dawn hours—then recuperated in one slothful, indulgent morning.
But she finally couldn’t stay still any longer and slipped into the bathroom. Trying to comb her hair after her shower made her eyes water. Gabriel didn’t have any conditioner, and his hands had left her hair in a mass of tangles. She tucked a towel around herself and went to the door, comb in hand, to see if he needed the bathroom space while she tried to get those tangles out.
He was lying on his back now, arms crushing the pillow on either side of his head, one knee bent as he stared at the ceiling. God, what a beautiful body. Her gaze drifted over the six-pack abs, the faint tan that suggested he did some kind of beach sport sometimes on his days off, the paler line at his hips, around that intimate part of his body that never saw sun but was all exposed to her.
Heat ran through her, and pride. That he wanted her.
It was enough to make a woman walk straight across the room and sit astride him to take possession again, if she could only get this blasted comb out of her hair.
His stomach muscles flinched. “Putain. What did I do to make you cry?” he asked, and she looked back at his face to find him watching her warily.
“You are so hot,” she said helplessly. “It’s probably a bad idea for me to keep telling you that.”
He rolled over onto his side and propped on one elbow, an eyebrow going up. “It feels good to me.”
“Yes, but you’re already so arrogant.”
“You keep saying that. And here I am, putting myself humbly at your service, trying to do everything you want me to do. No matter how unreasonable the demands.” He looked smug.
He was the most infuriating man in the world. She yanked extra hard on the comb to punish herself for being that damn obvious about what she wanted him to do to her.
“Now what did I say? Jolie, please. Don’t just stand there crying at me. Tell me what I did.”
“It’s my hair,” she said between her teeth. “I’m not crying over you, you, you—arrogant—animal.”
He sat up, swinging his legs over the side. “That is completely unfair, to walk into the shower in that little, instantly-transparent outfit like some porn film fantasy and then complain a man is an animal. I’m doing my damned best. Come here.” He tossed a pillow down between his spread feet.
She halted abruptly, giving that pillow and his spread legs a suspicious look.
His eyebrows went up, and then he grinned. “Honestly, you never think of anything but sex when I’m around. Are you sure you should be casting stones about me being an animal? I’m going to help you with your hair. And it’s cheating for you to give me ideas about the way you could occupy yourself while I do it.”
She narrowed her eyes at him.
He laughed out loud and pulled a prim sheet over his hips, tucking it firmly under his butt to hold it there while giving her a look like a stern nun. “Sit here. With your back to me, Jolie. Thank you.” She curled her knees under her, strongly tempted to nestle her wet head back against that pseudo-puritanical sheet. But before she could, one strong hand took control of her head, pressing her forehead against his thigh, and the other delicately worked the comb free.
She didn’t even feel a sting.
As the comb began to work through her hair, all the muscles in her back slowly undid, and she sank limp against his knee. He was so careful. This man who always seemed so big, so full of life he would break things just by the force of energy coming off him, and yet who every d
ay, in the midst of his roaring, handled non-stop such exquisite, fragile, complex things. The man who went so fast toward what he wanted, and yet who took, every moment of his life, as long as he needed to get those delicate things just right, without breaking them.
She never felt a sting once. He used two hands for the more complicated snarls, but she could almost believe that even then, he never broke a single strand of hair.
By the time he finished, shifting her head to the other thigh when he needed to change sides, she was in a state of pure physical bliss, boneless.
“You know, for a beast . . . ” she murmured dreamily, caressing her cheek against his thigh.
He slid those strong hands under her arms and picked her up, drawing her down on the bed, her back against his chest. “I know how to be gentle, Jolie.” He closed his hand around hers and stretched her arm out, turning it to expose the most vulnerable flesh of her inner elbow and wrist. A little stream of air blew over that sensitive skin, as if he was blowing gold dust over something delicious. “Haven’t I ever shown you?”
He dusted her all over in gold, with his breath, with his barely skimming touch. He was in no hurry himself, having had quite a night, and he made her feel so special she actually cried a little.
He sipped the tears off her cheeks, looking as if he didn’t know what to do with that particular flavor.
Gabriel sat over warm, golden eggs, soft and fluffy and with just the right touch of butter and dollop of cream, a little blend of cheese, a sprinkling of sea salt. She was good in a kitchen. Not good like him. Just confident and content. It made him terrifyingly happy just to watch her, scared his stomach off somewhere out of his body to imagine breakfasts like this every lazy Monday and Tuesday morning, maybe with some little kids clinging onto their legs or clamoring for more.
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