B00CACT6TM EBOK (10 page)

His closed snugly back around it, immediately. He, too, gazed down at their hands a moment.

The tension in his body eased, and a faint curve relaxed his mouth.

A strange, profound contentment filled her, all caught up with nerves and jittering sexual awareness though it was. She liked having her hand right there. She wished she hadn’t just manipulated him with a kiss, because now she would have liked to lean back into him again and kiss him some more.

But . . . “Gabriel.”

He smiled, with a sudden quick pleasure. Did his name on her lips make him that happy? That melted her again, and she almost forgot what she wanted to say. Oh, yeah. Damn.

“I really, really, really want to do this cookbook with you.”

His hand flexed. His smile grew surer, deeper. “Thank you.”

“I don’t know if I can risk our working relationship for sex.”

He stopped dead, his mouth opening and closing a few times. His hand tightened so hard on hers for a second, she made a little sound to remind him it wasn’t a stress ball. He dropped it. That hand he had insisted so adamantly on holding. “
Tu te
fous
de moi?
” he said incredulously. Or in other words,
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

“I
really
want to do this cookbook,” she said pleadingly.
And how am I supposed to work with you for a year, and hold hands with you, and maybe do lots of other stuff, and not fall for you?
An arrogant chef who never stopped working and never stopped thinking he was the most important person in the room.

“Jolie. It’s not mutually exclusive. The intention was quite the contrary,
je t’assure
.”

“But it might not work out. It probably won’t work out. And then the cookbook would be
ruined.
” Working on a cookbook with
Gabriel Delange
. Shattered. Because she couldn’t resist that combination of roaring bluntness and exquisite, wordless poetry, not even for the incredible chance of being able to concentrate on his
food
for a year. Not even for the chance to learn everything he was dreaming when he made it, to spend her nights thinking up the words to describe it.

“You need to look at the bigger picture, with your ambitions,” he said urgently. “Never choose half of anything just to be safe, when you have a chance to have something whole and
perfect
.”

She bit her lip.

His fist clenched at his side as he focused on her mouth. “Why
wouldn’t
it work out?” he asked hostilely, braced for attack.

She wrinkled her nose apologetically and touched her fingertips to her chest.

“You?” Gabriel looked startled.

“I’m not good at relationships.” Wait—was he talking about her when he said
whole and perfect
or him? Or his vision of them both together?
Whole and perfect?
Her insides softened squooshily.

“
You’re
not good at them?”

“What, you aren’t either?”

“That’s what everybody says.” He sounded morose. “I try my best.”

She searched his face, deeply curious now. In her experience, chefs weren’t the most self-aware people out there.

“It’s the hours.” He shrugged big, surly shoulders, his jaw setting, arms folding. “And maybe my bestial manners, I don’t know.”

“Ah.” Yes, the all-consuming nature of his work was a bit of a relationship-killer. Her own family certainly hadn’t survived it.

“What about you?” he challenged sullenly.

“I don’t know.” Her eyebrows knit. “I’m just not that good at it.”

He pulled them down one of those tiny alleys full of flowers and balconies, stopping before a narrow stone stairway that led up two floors to a tiny arched wooden door blocked by a profusion of red geraniums. He sat on the stairs and pulled her around to face him, standing her between his knees. “Jolie.” His voice dropped low, gentle, that growling quality to it burring oh-so-softly over her, like the purr of a sleeping lion. “If it’s sex you think you’re not good at, I—might treat you better than you seem to think I would.” His fingers rubbed gently over the insides of her wrists, over shiveringly sensitive skin and tendons and her pulse. She swayed at the caress, her body growing heavy, trying to beat her will and sink into him.

“I’m not really that worried about the se—”

“Kiss me again.” He pulled her down into him, and her heavy body, subdued just by his touch on her wrists, had no resistance. “You might like”—his mouth brushed over hers, stroked her lips apart—“the way I manipulate you”—he pulled her lower lip so gently between his teeth. Released it. Took her mouth with a slow, gentle slide of his tongue—“better.”

The stairs against her legs were awkard, the only purchase for her body his. She pressed her hands into his thighs, her torso sinking against his, the edge of a step digging into her shin.

He curved a hand under her bottom and pulled her in closer against him, taking her weight off that shin. Taking her weight off anything but him. She couldn’t find her way out of the kiss, and she couldn’t find her way to its center. It was a labyrinth of sensual delight, something she could stay caught in forever, getting ever more deeply lost in it. This time there was no one in the alley to see, only an orange cat on one of the balconies above them. It felt as if they could kiss here, sheltered by flowers and stone, until the end of time.

In fact, if someone told her that the world was about to end, this was what she would choose to do with the rest of her time: stay here and kiss Gabriel in the shadowed, flower-filled alley until the comet hit.

“You don’t taste sweet and golden,” he said with a surprised, rough laugh. “You don’t taste”—he couldn’t string a proper sentence, his words broken by strokes and bites and deep, deep kissing—“like anything—I’ve ever tasted—before.”

He dragged her in still tighter. The other hand thrust into her hair, pulling it out of the clasp she had it in, stinging her roots with the urgency. She whimpered a little into his mouth, panicked, drowning, and he bit on her lower lip, so gentle and ferocious, stroked it with his tongue, and took her mouth again. He clearly liked discovering completely new flavors.

Her hands dug into his upper arms and kneaded them, pushing away even as she held on more tightly, trying to find her way up again. She was sinking into an ocean of him. She couldn’t find a light to lead her to the surface, she could only find him, and she was running out of
her
.

He lifted her more and pulled her astride him, and she balked at being opened to him still more, at the pressure of his arousal against her sex.

She wrenched away, lost and panicked, panting, and he gasped at the sudden separation of their mouths. She wanted to fall back into him, to make amends for that separation, but at the same time, she squirmed, trying to pull her hips off his.

His fingers flexed hard into her bottom. And then he was lifting her off him, setting her sideways on his thigh. “I’m sorry.” His voice was rough, hoarse, as he coaxed her head down onto his shoulder with a stroking hand. “That was—was that too much for you?” His arm curved around her waist, his other hand stroking her hair, but every few seconds, his arm tightened, his fingers digging deeply into her scalp, and he had to force them to ease up. “God, you taste delicious.
Putain.
Another attempt to prove I’m not a beast gets thoroughly fuc—scre—ruined.” He laughed with a kind of despairing ruefulness, pressing his forehead to the top of hers. “But I wouldn’t have minded either of the first two, obviously.”

She really shouldn’t let him keep stroking her hair like that, keep her tucked up safe in his body like that. Keep her tucked up safe
from him.
It was far more vulnerable, far more intimate, than the kissing could ever have been. More vulnerable than full-out, tangle-with-a-beast sex might have been. And yet it was as if his kisses had shattered all her defenses, and now she quite desperately needed his strength around her until she recovered. She couldn’t bring herself to lift her head and slide off his thigh to her feet.

Why shouldn’t she let him? Just because she had never felt so beautiful and precious in her life, did it mean she wasn’t allowed to feel it now? It was such a dangerous feeling. A woman could learn to want it too much. A woman could give up part of herself for a feeling like that.

His stroking hand steadied slowly, fewer sudden flexings of strength he had to struggle to control. “This is nice, too,” he murmured, the vibration of his voice in his chest tickling her ear. “This is really nice.”

Jolie let herself sink more deeply into him, no muscles holding her back from him at all. For a little while longer, still, she tried to think. And then she gave up on it and tried not to think, since not thinking, just feeling, was so much more pleasant. She might have to revisit her conviction that all the best textures and tastes and scents in the world were in food. His textures—the hard resilience of muscle, the soft cotton of his T-shirt, the smoothness of his skin, the silk of his hair, the whisper of roughness of a jaw shaved that morning—were incredible.

“Really, really nice,” he whispered to the top of her head as he pressed a kiss there.

Gabriel insisted on taking Jolie to the Nice train station for her trip back to Paris, a gallant gesture that very clearly put him out of temper. They had sat on those stairs for far too long, until a low-voiced argument filtering down from a balcony above had disturbed the mood.
You never pay attention to me anymore
, the woman had been arguing low, as if she was crushing tears.
What happened to all that romance at the beginning?

You’re never satisfied!
the man had answered.
You want too much. Nothing I do is enough.

The words had worked into their hold and wedged them apart, Gabriel growing brooding, uneasy, Jo unnerved, scrambling for flight. Anyway, she had to get back to Paris, as she told him. She needed to get her life organized, and above all see her father, if she was going to be spending several days a week down here. Gabriel scowled. Jo worried. Worried about how easy she had found it to curl up in the lap of an arrogant, rude, aggressive beast she barely knew and feel as if it was the most beautiful moment in her whole entire life.

It wasn’t until they had passed a palm tree outside the Gare de Nice and entered the old Louis XIII building with its arch patterns in red brick and white stone, that it finally occurred to her. She looked up at him, suddenly, intensely relieved.

Gabriel looked from her face to the sleek silver and blue TGV behind her. “Happy to be heading back to Paris?” he growled.

“It’s not the sex,” she said confidently.

He gaped at her and then glanced around at the crowds. “Honestly, Jolie, can you think of
nothing
else?” He shifted in on her noticeably, much closer than a man should in crowds like that, but then, he had spent most of his life in packed, intense kitchens. “Not that I’m complaining,” he rumbled, blue eyes glinting down at her.

“The reason I’m bad at relationships,” she explained. “
I was not really thinking about sex!
” she hissed. Well, she hadn’t been before he moved in on her that way. Now she was getting a pretty hot vision of being crowded by his body. Rubbed and roughed and handled all the ways he wanted. “It’s because I like being who I am, I think. Not fitting myself around someone else.”

His eyes narrowed, piercing. “Why are we talking about being bad at relationships right this second? And what do you mean, not fitting yourself around someone?”

Of course, ever since he had become head chef, that was all the people he saw all day every day had done, fit themselves around him. Before he became head chef, he would have done the fitting. He probably couldn’t even grasp what she was talking about, the fact that she loved people, particularly food people, but she loved being alone, too. He wouldn’t be able to understand that desire to do her own thing, to be busy in her own head without interference, a desire nourished perhaps in the hours she had kept herself occupied in her father’s office as a child or in his apartment or roaming Paris while he worked.

“Guys just want so much space. And I run out of room for them. Or staying power, or something. I’ve always gotten sick of the guy pretty quickly.”

His face set. His blue eyes glittered oddly against his grim face. “Are you telling me that you make a
habit
of dumping men who fall for you when you get tired of them?” Her boarding call sounded. “And you just the fuck told me that
right now
?”

She grabbed the handle of her case, laughing out loud with relief. “Well, at least I don’t have to worry so much about working with you. I’m such an idiot to even think it. I would
never
end up down the same path as my mother.”

And she hopped up into the train, with a happy wave.

Leaving Gabriel standing, riven to stone.

“You picked a fine time to move to the Côte d’Azur,” her sister Estelle told her. “Jo.
I’m
busy in New York. Fleur’s got a job in San Francisco. I thought you were going to be here in Paris for Papa.”

Jo stuffed her hands in her pockets, her stomach clenching. Her father, all alone. Again. This time, without even his arrogance and his chef skills. “I’ll be here three days out of the week. An twelve-hour round trip to spend three days with him every week isn’t
enough
?”

“You were fixed in Paris! You could have been around for him
whenever
he needed you. I don’t think a lot of your timing.”

“It’s funny how your guilty conscience only works on my behalf,” Jo said sullenly.
Why did people always want so much of her? Why was she so stingy with herself?

“Oh, so what do you want me to do? Quit my job in New York? I’ve already stretched it out here as much as I can. I’ve got to get back.”

“What do you want
me
to do?” Jo asked. “Say no to this?
He’s holding a lawsuit over my head!
” Thank you, Gabriel Delange. Otherwise, she could never excuse this, to herself or anyone else. Otherwise, she would be in Paris, fighting her father’s depression every day.