Oh, putain. Kids? Will you the fuck learn to sit on yourself ever?! How hurt do you want to get?
“Do you know you’re the first woman besides my mother who has ever offered to cook for me?”
She gave him a puzzled look. “You know, I’m quite a selfish person, but—”
“No, you’re not.”
“I am, really,” she said earnestly, as if she just had to confess herself.
It pissed him off. “Shut up, Jolie. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Selfish. Her.
Pouring out all her enthusiasm and sense of wonder on everything he did. Giving that body of hers—God, how she gave her body. Making him supper. And breakfast. Because she wanted to. Running back and forth between Paris and Sainte-Mère to please the demands of two insanely greedy men.
He looked down at his eggs. How the hell self-absorbed were all the other people in her life, to beat him? And leave her thinking she was the selfish one?
“Do you really eat this for breakfast in the U.S.?” he asked, to escape his own thoughts. “Eggs? I could get used to this.” Putain. Could he bite his tongue? Of course he could get used to it. That was his damn problem. He could get used to it so easily, and she could waltz on out and never even notice his world crashing down when its center disappeared.
It was her defense against self-absorbed people, maybe: her ability to leave them.
Or maybe her father lays such a weight on her life that she can’t carry anyone else, too, and he always wins.
Or maybe, just maybe, she clings to that idea of being able to dump someone the way a woman might cling to a life preserver going over the Niagara Falls, because it reassures her even though it’s not going to do a damn bit of good. He wished he had a life preserver.
Jolie’s eyes flickered, and she gave him a searching look, then refocused on her work. Now she was adding some American pancakes to the mix, laughing, teasing him about getting used to an American breakfast—getting used to one—and every time she flipped the pancakes with a little expert jerk of the skillet, he felt as if it was his heart tumbling in freefall through the air.
He held his breath each time until her skillet dipped neatly under the whirling pancake and caught it. And then he let it out again, absurdly reassured by the little smack the pancake made hitting the pan. She was pretty good at catching spinning, freefalling things, wasn’t she? At least it wasn’t on the damn floor.
He couldn’t believe he was looking for positive signs in the fact that she could flip a pancake.
“I was going to say, I’m pretty selfish, but—”
“Will you stop saying that? Merde.”
“But it kind of sounds like the other women you’ve dated have been real pieces of work. Did they ever look at anything but themselves in the mirror? I mean, is that why you picked them up, because they were pretty and you love to pour yourself out for people, and they were happy to let you do that without ever giving anything back?” She smacked the skillet down too hard on the burner. “Without ever getting their heads out of their own assholes,” she muttered.
He stared at her, wondering suddenly if she had just been beamed down to him from some alien planet. Maybe he needed to check the Web to see what the real, human Jolie Manon was supposed to actually look like. “I am Gabriel Delange. It’s natural they would assume I would do all the cooking.” Had he been doing the same thing Matt was doing all this time? Dating women who couldn’t see him, who only wanted to be seen?
Shit, how had he gotten lucky enough to meet her then? She saw him. She looked straight into him all the time and smiled at what she saw, too. Oh, God. This was so fucking scary.
“Really? Natural it would never occur to them that you might be tired when you get off after thirteen hours of merciless physical activity? Or hungry, as in, you know, that kind of thing burns calories?”
Why, she was pissed off, too, he realized, wonderingly. At least as pissed off as he got, when she said she was selfish.
“Why do you really get dumped, Gabriel? Tell the truth. Some woman gets all bitchy because you can’t take her out for drinks because you have the President of France helicoptering in to dine here with half the leaders of the free world, and so you have to work that night at your dream, the thing you’ve dedicated your life to. And she just wants you to drop that. Because, you know, she can’t figure out how to read a damn book by herself and maybe talk some of her friends into doing things Monday nights with you guys instead.”
Gabriel was gaping at her. Wow. She had picked up a lot more kitchen language than one would think through the glass walls of her father’s office. That was quite some attitude she had going there, too. “I, uh—”
“Eat your pancakes,” she said, sliding a golden one out of the pan onto his plate. “And we need some maple syrup in this apartment. I’ll pick some up at the Grande Épicérie when I’m in Paris.”
As in . . . supply his kitchen with things she might need on a long-term basis?
At least the other women he had dated had only left behind a few hair products. If he had to discover bottles of maple syrup in his cabinets months after she had dumped him and remember this morning, he didn’t know how he was going to survive it.
She slid him a jar of rosemary honey in place of the maple syrup and sat down across from him with her own pancake, just one and a little helping of eggs compared to his starving-man’s plateful of them. Her eyes met his across their plates, bright and warm, and he gave a little sigh of despair. Maybe the aliens had sent her to utterly destroy him.
“Speaking of Monday night, I talked to Léa,” he told her. “She said they would love to come over.”
Jolie looked pleased for just a second, before a sudden realization hit her, and she brought her hand to her mouth, eyes rounding. “Oh, no. I’m going to be cooking dinner for Daniel Laurier?”
Gabriel had kind of figured he would be cooking dinner and Jolie would be setting the table. Maybe they could do the cooking together. The idea seized him too hard. It sounded so damn—warm. Wait a minute. He stiffened. “You cook dinner for me. Why should Daniel Laurier unnerve you?”
“Because if I screw up with him, I can’t redeem myself with great sex,” she told him witheringly. And laughed.
Yes, there was no way around it: if he couldn’t convince her that his heart was worth holding onto, it was going to leave one hell of a shitty, awful hole in his chest when she dropped it and walked off.
Chapter 22
Gabriel and Jolie had such a fun time in the kitchen—between laughter, butt pinches, threats to make someone regret interfering in someone else’s recipe, a couple of growls, and Gabriel pressing her back against the counter with his big body and acting menacing more times than she could count—that Jolie forgot any thought of nerves.
Until they opened the door to see Léa smiling up at Daniel, who was saying something to her. Both the Lauriers turned at once as the door opened, dropping their exchange automatically, but Léa’s expression stayed with Jolie.
How did she do that, pour so much love and support out for her husband that it was as if it was his lifeblood? Did he give her that much of himself back? Was it worth it?
Was there something wrong with Jo herself, that she couldn’t seem to properly nourish her own father with enough love and enthusiasm, that she was afraid to offer that unstinting love and support to Gabriel, who so clearly deserved it? Was it some selfishness she had learned from her mother? she thought, with a lash of anger so old she hadn’t realized the emotion still existed: that rage and pain from her childhood, when their mother had divorced their father and taken her and her sisters to the other side of the Atlantic so that they almost never saw him anymore, the rage that had grown up, that had learned to accept her mother’s side of it as valid. More valid.
All of her flinched at the thought of changing, of becoming Léa, the person who gave all of herself up to the people she loved. And yet there was no denying that Léa’s generosity of spirit made
her extraordinarily beautiful. Even Jolie wanted to bask in it, despite a certain flicker of resentment at the woman for being a better person than she was.
(Why was she better? that resentment thought stubbornly. Why did the ability to give herself up without stinting make her better?)
She glanced up at Gabriel and caught a flicker of wistfulness on his face as he looked at the other couple, before he pressed the wistfulness away and bent down to kiss Léa’s cheeks.
Sometimes, she just hated that French cheek-kissing tradition. She knew Gabriel and Léa were some kind of distant cousin, but last she checked, nothing prevented a man from being in love with his third cousin and wishing to hell he had won her for himself.
Gabriel straightened, shaking Daniel’s hand so briskly the other man barely had time to finish kissing Jolie’s cheeks, and pulled them into the apartment.
Jolie enjoyed watching the two chefs together. Despite his earlier expressions of jealousy, Gabriel seemed very happy to see Daniel, and it was soon obvious that he still felt an affectionate, older-brother style pride in the younger man, which must date back to their days when Gabriel stepped in to help keep his pastry kitchen running and probably gave out all kinds of advice that saved Daniel’s untried neck.
Daniel had such a contained elegance to him while Gabriel’s energy was so expansive, just filling the whole room, that Jo had the whimsical impression of a black hole and a supernova trying to sit down to dinner together while still respecting each other’s space. She wondered what Gabriel’s impressions of the contrast between her and Léa were. Selfless versus selfish? The generous mother goddess versus the stubborn mortal?
He had said she wasn’t selfish, but he could hardly miss the contrast, could he?
At the end of the meal, she sighed, told herself not to be ridiculous, and then went into the bathroom to double-check her lipstick anyway. Because Léa had forgotten to put on lipstick, and she could at least have that advantage to being self-absorbed: she could manage to make her lips look more tempting.
“You’re nuts, you know that?” Gabriel murmured from the doorway, and she looked from the mirror to him, her heart brightening instantly.
“I know,” she said ruefully. “But you’ve got to admit she’s gorgeous.” When Léa looked up at Daniel, she was.
“Of course she’s gorgeous,” Gabriel said, amused and maybe a bit annoyed. “What do you think you are?”
Jolie dropped her lipstick and walked right up to him, wrapping her arms around his waist. He just picked her up and kissed that lipstick straight off her. “I love you,” he said, dropped her back on her feet, and went back to the guests.
Leaving Jolie clutching the sink, staring at the space he had been as if nothing could ever fill the imprint he had left on it.
Putain. It was all Gabriel could do not to groan aloud and break one of those geranium pots on his balcony over his head or something. Could he not sit on himself ever?
How many million times had he told himself to go slow, to be careful? And there you go, just blabbed right out like that, because she was so cute, and she wrapped her arms around his waist like it was a perfect place to be, and she looked up at him with that smile, and it was so ridiculous for her to worry about Léa.
Look at Daniel, he thought with anguish, as his old protégé gave that slight smile of his down at his wife. There was a world of love in those gray eyes, in the angle of his head, in the way his fingertips rubbed just slightly, almost constantly, on her hip.
But he didn’t go jostling her all the time with all his wants, throwing his heart out there like it was some bouncing ball that would just hop around happily and recover, instead of the fragile, terrified, essential organ it was.
Gabriel hesitated, remembering a bit more about the Daniel he had known at nineteen, when the man barely out of boyhood had just married Léa. Fine, so maybe Daniel had thrown his heart out there all unguarded like that, but, but . . . he had been nineteen. Gabriel was thirty-four. He should know better by now.
The problem was, when Jolie looked at him like that, she made him think anything was possible, even her.
And when she looked at him the way she did when she finally came out of the bathroom—wary, searching, confused, doubting, wondering—she made his heart lose all its bounce and slink down in him like sludge.
She drew Léa out on the balcony after that, with the excuse of showing her how beautiful the street looked from up there, and that was fine, in a way, because he didn’t need her hanging close to him and Daniel, making contrasts between cool elegant princes and roaring uncontrolled beasts. But whenever he caught her eyes on him through the balcony doors, her lips were parted. Like he’d shocked the hell out of her.
Damn it.
He managed to ply her with another glass of the wine Daniel had brought. Given that it was Daniel who had selected it, and in addition as worthy of pleasing another three-star chef’s palate, the wine was beyond sublime, so it wasn’t like she resisted.
But she still didn’t throw herself at him and say, I love you, too.
And it had been a whole half hour!
Damn it.
“Are you all right?” Léa Laurier asked Jo, in the careful tones of someone not sure she should intrude. The night settling over the old village was lovely, a softening of time, until they themselves grew eternal, two people who could have stood there at any moment over more than a thousand years, who could be here still a thousand years hence. The street, at that hour of the night,was not quieter than the afternoon, as one might expect, but noisier, laughter coming from one apartment, the clank of dishes from another, someone playing the guitar, and a woman’s voice, from another apartment entirely, singing along to the guitar player’s tune. The guitarist played a love song, and Jo found herself watching the shifting curtains from which the music came, trying to make out if it was a man or a woman who played, if the musician watched the window of the woman singing, if they knew each other or wanted to. “You look as if you’ve gotten bad news,” Léa said tentatively.
“Not bad, no,” Jolie said, surprised. I love you. Not bad. Scary, though. Overwhelming, when she quite stubbornly did not want to be overwhelmed. But the energy in him was so bright. So unutterably tempting.
“You’re not in a fight with Gabe?” Léa asked. “We didn’t come at a bad time? Because we can go.”
“No, of course not,” Jo said, really startled now and discomfited. How in the world did the other woman manage to be so sensitive even to a near-stranger’s needs? Didn’t that get exhausting? God, and Jo didn’t even want to take care of her own father’s needs, when they were so grim and desperate. She didn’t even want to take care of Gabriel’s needs more than a couple of hours a day and maybe on the restaurateur’s equivalent of weekends, and Gabriel’s needs were actually fun, in their greedy way. Why did she need so much time to just do what she wanted, take care of herself? “I was just thinking about something. I’m sorry.” Je t’aime. For an expression that was only two syllables long, it sure packed in a lot of material for thought.
Down the street, the guitar player shifted gradually from the love song to something merrier, more teasing. The pretty contralto stopped singing in the other apartment, but Jo could swear there was the shape of a shadow against the woman’s curtains, as if she gazed across the street from a gauzy hiding spot. Jo wondered if they both knew the song, if there was some joke or flirtation in it that she didn’t get.
“How do you do it?” she asked Léa suddenly.
The other woman gave her a look of friendly inquiry.
“The chef’s wife thing. Just pour yourself all into him that way. You never get—tired?”
Léa’s face blanked a second, and she took a half-step back until her bottom pressed against the balcony railing, as if Jolie had just reached straight into her and hurt her. She didn’t say anything, staring down into her wine.
Oh.
Jo looked away guiltily. The guitar song had shifted again, to som
ething slow in a minor key, with a low brush of sound over it, and she realized after a moment that the brush of sound was actually the guitarist’s voice. A man, then. Singing so very softly, she wasn’t sure even the woman across the way from him was supposed to hear. Maybe he wasn’t sure either.
Just for a moment, she was envious of the imagined careful, delicate courtship, a courtship that gave both of them all the time in the world to tiptoe through the eggshells between self and a relationship, to feel their way tentatively toward what they wanted. Gabriel would already have jumped across that balcony, probably. The man had no stop button. In fact, she might want to start locking her balcony door just to make sure he wasn’t tempted into doing something stupid and getting hurt.
“You do have to be careful,” Léa said, and Jolie looked back at her, surprised. She had thought the conversation over, having veered onto too fragile territory. “To keep something for yourself. No man really needs you to give all yourself up to him. Or he shouldn’t. I’m, ah, trying to learn that.”
Good lord, that look on Léa’s face when she gazed at Daniel was her trying to hold herself back? She was starting to make Jo feel like the Wicked Witch of the West.
“You have to be careful to let him keep something for himself, too,” Léa said quietly. “They have a very strong drive to give all of themselves without stinting, these chefs.”
Jolie’s mouth twisted wryly. “Sometimes I think I am the thing Gabriel wants to keep for himself.”
“Yes,” Léa said, as if this was the most natural thing in the world. “That’s part of the trick. To balance yourself with that need.”
Jo studied the other woman as if Léa held the mysteries of the universe. She had, after all, been married to a chef eleven years, and no sign of divorce yet. On the other hand, Léa was only a few years older than she was, right? Why did Jo feel so much more immature?
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