B00CACT6TM EBOK

by Florand, Laura

  “Except for the fact that my father needs me, lives in Paris, and you hate him, of course,” Jolie said heavily and sighed.

  Damn it. He was going to have to solve that problem somehow, wasn’t he?

  He drove them up even higher in the hills, where the spaghetti road turned into angellini and made him think of twisting, turning soars of sugar with which he could grace something delicious. They pulled off in a parc naturel, and he lay back on the hillside soaking in the clear bright view of the sky, as he rarely had time to do during the rest of the week.

  But Jolie sat with her arms wrapped around her legs. Maybe she was trying to work up the courage to tell him she loved him. She took a deep breath. His heart sparked hopefully despite himself.

  “He’s so depressed,” Jolie said, low, and his heart slammed into a damn wall and thudded to the ground. Damn it. Maybe he needed to put protective gear on it or something. “He was depressed already—ever since he lost that star and resigned, of course.”

  Gabriel said nothing. He had had a hard time of it himself, when Pierre fired him just a few weeks after the girlfriend he lost while giving his all for his chef dumped him. It had taken him months to get mad enough to pull his act together and come back fighting, although to be honest, he hadn’t had time to brood about it nearly as much as he might have wanted to, because Daniel and Léa had been in such desperate straits. A man could hardly sit on his ass, nursing his wounds, while his cousins’ restaurant crumbled down on top of them in the earthquake of its great chef’s death. He’d admired Henri Rosier, too, after all; the man used to let him come into his kitchens all the time when he was a kid and gaze around in fascination. He’d done his apprenticeship with him, and it had been that training that let him take off like such a rocket in Paris when he got his first job there at nineteen.

  Where he had done so extraordinarily well until Pierre Manon fired him. So admittedly, his sense of sympathy when Pierre lost his star had been—entirely absent. Vicious satisfaction described his feelings a lot better. And then eye-rolling disgust when Pierre just caved to the blow. He’d wanted to go up to Paris and shake the man out of it—physically, with his hands gripping the older chef’s shoulders—but Pierre had lost the right to be saved by him. He’d tucked his fists under his arms and glowered at the computer which would have let him purchase a train ticket and thought, Tough shit to you. You don’t deserve my help.

  It would be devastating to lose a star, of course. Far worse than losing a job. Gabriel just felt—he might take a year off to safari through Africa or something, but he would still, in the end, come back fighting.

  “But now.” Jolie sighed heavily. She looked so sad and despairing, as if she just didn’t know what to do.

  Well, of course she didn’t know what to do. She would have to be desperate to be talking to him about her father.

  “I try to get him interested in things. He’s not even very badly off, you know—you should see some of the people who were in his rehab hospital. It makes you want to cry. He could be fine. But—it’s like he’s determined to give up. I can’t pit my will against his.”

  “So what do you do?” Gabriel asked abruptly. “If you don’t pit your will against his?” God knew, he had pitted his will against Pierre Manon’s before, and all a headbutt of titanic wills got you was a lot of bystander destruction and severe migraines.

  “What I did before, with the cookbook. I try to coax him into working on some of his recipes, because—well, I read that it was good for people to revisit what they were proud of. Like a scrapbook of accomplishments. That’s what the cookbook is!”

  “That’s how you got started cookbook writing,” he said softly. “To give your father your pride in him.”

  “Well, and I love it,” Jolie said, embarrassed. “Finally getting to sink my hands into a chef’s world, to be right in the middle of it, it’s so amazing. But . . . maybe, yes. A little bit of both, maybe.”

  “And what do you do when he says no? To working on the recipes.”

  “I don’t push it. I don’t want to stress him. His blood pressure. . .”

  “Isn’t he taking medication for that? Because if you have to keep Pierre Manon from getting stressed or losing his temper for the rest of his life to save him from a stroke, Jolie, it’s just not possible. He’s a stressé de la vie.” Everything in life stressed that man. Unlike Gabriel himself, who tended to let all his emotions out, one way or the other.

  “I’d like to let a little more time pass, get him a little more stable!”

  “Did his doctors say you needed to do that?”

  She hesitated. “Well, they said to make sure he exercised and to try to get him engaged in life.”

  Gabriel considered that, and Jolie. “I think you’re babying him.”

  “He just had a stroke!”

  Gabriel shook his head. “It sounds to me as if you’ve been babying him for years. Ever since he quit like a coward and fled the restaurant scene, instead of at least picking himself back up and making some stunning turnaround with a new restaurant two years later. He’s Pierre Manon, putain. He doesn’t need babying. Oh, I’m sure he laps it up. More than fifteen years with his family on the other side of the ocean? Who wouldn’t lap up the attention? Certainly not that narcissist. In fact, if you ask me, the depression is partly his way of making sure he keeps getting attention. What happens to him if he gets better? You stay down here in the south of France where you’re happy, that’s what.” He just went ahead and said that as if it was a given, because one thing he had learned in kitchens before he was even nineteen—to speak with authority about anything he wanted to make happen.

  Jolie folded her arms, scowling at him. Bon sang, she was copying his expressions. And it brought out the family resemblance to Pierre vividly. “Are you trying to twist the way I take care of my father after a stroke into whatever suits you the best?”

  “Look, Jolie, we’re not running a nursery school in a three-star kitchen—”

  “Yes, I noticed how much of a chance you were willing to give to a new hire,” she said, with dudgeon.

  “If they don’t have the absolute will to be the most perfect, most beautiful out there—”“How do you know I don’t have that will?” she demanded indignantly. “You didn’t give me a chance!

  “I mostly fired you so I could ask you out,” Gabriel reminded her.

  “Sexual hara—”

  “Can we just remember that you were not actually working for me at the time! Anyway, if they don’t have that will, and Jolie, no one who likes to have long periods of time in quiet solitude like you do should work in a three-star kitchen, then they’re gone. Are you trying to get me off the subject of your father on purpose?”

  She frowned and looked down.

  “Well, I’m not going to baby you either. Not in this. It won’t help you. Your father spent his life in three-star kitchens. He rose to the top of this field. He fought with people like me—and won. You can’t engage him in life by wrapping him up in padding. He responds to stressors, to urgency, to demand. He responds to the compulsion to be perfect, to create something beautiful, to prove his worth. He responds to people telling him he can’t do something and that he needs to try harder, not to people telling him he can and not to worry if it’s not as good as it could be. If you want to go around reassuring him that he has plenty of worth and not to worry about it, and that his daughter will love him while he sits on his butt not trying, then . . . I don’t know. Maybe he will live a long time without another stroke. Fine. Forty more years of watching TV. But he sure as hell won’t be engaged with life. Not Pierre Manon.”

  He fell silent.

  Jolie glared at her feet, but her teeth worried at her lower lip.

  Gabriel scowled himself, before he finally burst out with just one last word he had to say on the subject. “And my cookbook is not going to be a retrospective memorial of my life. It’s going to be the first tribute of many to all that I’m still going to do. Since
your father’s only fifty-five, I sure as hell hope no one is treating his cookbook like a memorial service either.”

  Because, you know, he still hated that man. And it was nothing but a guilty, ugly feeling, hating a man at his memorial service.

  Chapter 25

  Jolie was almost looking forward to the train ride. Five and a half hours away from anyone but strangers, no one wanting anything from her except to check her ticket and maybe get past her to go to the restroom. Her initial attraction to Gabriel could be likened to seeing a trickle of water coming from a great huge wall, walking up to it to get a sip to quench her thirst, and having the dam burst on her, carrying her away in its rushing flood. It was exciting, and unlike an actual dam burst it was fun, but since she wasn’t going to manage to get that rushing flood to slow down for anything, she wouldn’t mind finding a little island of rock where she could sit and take a break while she thought a while. Or just rested quietly with herself. A long train ride worked well.

  If only she didn’t have her father’s depression to face at the end of it.

  She winced away from the thought guiltily, but it was too late. Part of her mind was already sinking into the fantasy: her time to herself came not from a train ride but from Gabriel heading into work the next morning while she went to work in her apartment, and they met up again six hours later after the lunch service, to talk or stroll or make love or whatever struck their fancy, and then he went back to work, and she went back to work, and evening fell, and she slipped into the back door of his kitchen and watched his face light up. . . .

  If only her time to herself could be framed every day with that brightness, that energy, that delight in his face. If only she could fill his time off work with that delight he seemed to take in her. . . .

  I love you.

  What did that mean to him, exactly?

  Everything?

  Had he said it a lot, with that buoyant enthusiasm of his, to all the women who had dumped him? Did it scare him at all?

  It would be nice to know she was special somehow and not just the woman who hadn’t dumped him yet because she was tolerant of his hours.

  Tolerant. She wasn’t sure she understood his previous girlfriends’ inability to entertain themselves while he was working. If they got bored, surely there was nothing more fascinating in the world than a three-star kitchen on a Friday or Saturday night? Especially when it just made the three-star chef’s night to be able to feed his girlfriend something special. . . .

  Granted, in a long-term relationship, one that—oh, say, just for argument purposes, might include kids or something—it would certainly be nice to have a bit more of the weekend off to spend with the family, but . . . she and kids might have leverage on Gabriel. He wasn’t her father, and it was very hard to imagine him not wanting to swing his own kids up in his arms with all the greedy enthusiasm with which he grabbed her. If he wanted the time enough, he could make his sous-chefs handle Saturdays and Sundays, for example. Or he could close Sunday entirely and take the financial hit. Lots of things could be negotiated in a couple, if you were strong yourself and knew how to be both firm and understanding. Couldn’t they?

  Her parents hadn’t managed to negotiate those things, but then, had they actually tried. All she could remember were fights, and her mother’s increasing hatred of her father’s obsession with his work.

  Gabriel, with kids, crawling on all fours, playing growly gonna-get-you games. Gabriel with a couple of pre-schoolers sitting on top of him, pinning him to the floor as they got him back, wrapping him completely around their little fingers.

  Whoosh went her stomach, as if she had gone over an innocent-looking hill and found the road just dropped out from under her. That was—where had that come from? The only times she had ever even tried to think of a marriage-with-kids vision before, it had been at the man’s insistence, and it had made her frantic to get away, back to where she could be herself.

  Gabriel, making a little girl’s princess birthday cake. That little girl would have the most fantastical wonderland of a fairy cake ever.

  Okay, stop it already! she shouted at her brain.

  “Philippe Lyonnais,” Gabriel said broodingly, watching her while she got dressed and packed up her computer and the things she wanted to take with her. “All Saturday afternoon. He doesn’t want to go home and be with his fiancée, by any chance?”

  Jolie grinned. “Gabriel. I told you he was crazy about her.”

  “Maybe.” Gabriel lounged on the bed like a lion contemplating a fight. “But the last time I saw him, women were falling all over him. And you love aggressive men.”

  “No, I do not!” Jolie said indignantly.

  Gabriel cut a glance at her and raised his eyebrows. He was lying naked on his stomach on her bed, braced on his elbows, which provided a really glorious view of his strong, smooth back and tight butt.

  “I don’t love you because I love aggressive men, I—wait.”

  Gabriel raised his eyebrows, for all the world as if he was just politely inviting her to elaborate, but his eyes had gone brilliantly feral and intent. He rolled on his side, where he could face her more directly and have a hand free for grabbing.

  “Stop it! You’re not tricking me into saying—Gabriel.”

  Anger rose in the feral eyes, a thunderstorm.

  “Can you not just hold back, ever?”

  “No,” he said. “I can’t. I can persist. I can take rejection and keep going. But I can’t hold back to avoid the failure in the first place. I already tried.”

  She blinked at him for a moment. “With me? When?”

  He scowled. “I knew you couldn’t even tell.”

  “You are so arrogant! You’re worse than every man I’ve ever dated, times ten. You think you can just take over my life to suit yours.”

  He flung himself out of bed and hunted for pants, incensed. “You know what? That’s right, Jolie. I do take. I’ll take every last thing you’ve got to give. But it just might the fuck be that I might the fuck give you something back in exchange.”

  He found his pants and yanked them on, looking so furious and so hurt.

  “That’s worth you,” he muttered suddenly. “Maybe. You could let me the fuck try.”

  “Oh, you’re worth more than me,” Jolie exclaimed involuntarily, stunned he could ever think otherwise. And then she slammed her lips together, on a sudden wave of realization. Was that what she was afraid of? That she would just be the tiny font in his great, huge life?

  Because she didn’t like being the tiny font, she realized, for the very first time. She loved these incredible chefs and all they did, she was delighted to sing their praises to everyone willing to buy a book or look at a blog. But she wanted what she did to be worth something, too. Maybe a quieter worth. But front and firm and center.

  Gabriel looked enraged. Half-naked, all mad. Mad was really a glorious good look on him. It tightened all those beautiful muscles. “Don’t you ever think that! What I do is for you. The most beautiful thing I could possibly make in the world is only for you to eat.” He leaned in close to her, said it between his teeth. “To give you pleasure. I was calling to you like a damn firefly, and you found me, and now I think of you when I make them. Don’t you ever say you’re worth less than my best.”

  He bent over her where she sat cross-legged on the bed, his face too close, forcing himself into her space. His eyes glittered like sun off the Mediterranean, a lit blue that almost hurt the eyes. She lifted a hand and curved it against that taut face.

  She wanted to check if he had meant it, then, when he said he loved her. But then she thought, Of course he did, you idiot. It’s an insult even to ask it.

  She wanted to say, I love you, too. But he was so very big, in every way, and unless she counted all that time she had spent on her father’s cookbook trying to write the perfect description for his Rose as an exploration of his soul, she had only known him a few weeks.

  She just wasn’t ready. He was amazing,
but she just hadn’t relaxed those inner muscles of hers enough yet to let all this work.

  So she sat there staring up at him, not sure what to say, her fingers caressing his cheek in an unconscious tiny motion, just getting lost in those blue eyes.

  The tension slowly, very slowly, relaxed out of him, as they held still like that, and as it did, something in her—maybe those inner muscles—responded and started to relax, too.

  He really was amazing. She brought up her other hand, framing his face now, pushing back the lock of hair that had fallen over his forehead, gazing into those blue eyes. She started to smile, and just as her lips started to part—

  Gabriel heaved a great breath and let his forehead drop onto hers. “I just need more time,” he muttered, his arms going around her. “I hate it when you go off to Paris every week. I just need a way to know that you’ll come back.”

  The first fragile breath of those words got blown away, not something one could say unless everything was waiting to hear them. “I’ve got a legal contract to come back, Gabriel! What else do you need?”

  “I know.” He squeezed her harder. “I know. But Pierre—” He broke off.

  She tucked herself into his hold, a sense of defeat managing to sneak through her, even embraced by so much energy. This thing with her father, this depression, how could she ever overcome it? And this thing between Gabriel and him—how could she keep being the person caught in the middle? Sometimes she had to wonder if the need to beat her father was all that had drawn Gabriel to her in the first place. If she was really just the tiny font in the picture, the bit of debris caught in the flood and soon destroyed by it, when she was so busy deluding herself it was all for her.

  “Gabriel?” she whispered into his shoulder.

  “Oui, chaton?” he whispered back to the top of her head, the gentlest of breaths on her hair.

  “Will you make me your Rose?”

  Silence, the muscles that held her stiffening. He pulled away. “Jolie.” He turned his head away, his profile rigid. “Don’t ask me that.”