B00CACT6TM EBOK (2 page)

At least fifteen people in white and black blurred through a futuristic forest of steel and marble. Four people seemed to be doing the yelling, two chefs in white, two waiters in black tuxedos, separated by a wide counter and second higher shelf of steel: the pass, through which elegant plates slipped into the hands of waiters, who carried them into the dining rooms with—ideally—barely a second’s pause between when the plate was finished and when it headed toward the customer who was its destination. A wave of profound nostalgia swept Jolie.

“
Connard!
” somebody yelled.

“
C’est toi, le connard, putain!
”

A big body straightened from the counter closest to the door and turned toward the scene, blocking her view of anything but those broad shoulders. Thick, overlong hair in a rich, dark brown, threaded with gold like a molten dark caramel, fell over the collar of the big man’s chef’s jacket, a collar marked with the
bleu, blanc, rouge
of a Meilleur Ouvrier de France. That
bleu, blanc, rouge
meant the chef could only be one person, but he certainly wasn’t skinny anymore. He had filled into that space she had used to only imagine him taking up, all muscled now and absolutely sure.

His growl started low and built, built, until it filled the kitchen and spilled out into the street as a full-bodied beast’s roar, until she clapped her hands to her head to hold her hair on. Her ears buzzed until she wanted to reach inside them and somehow scratch the itch of it off.

When it died down, there was dead silence. She gripped the edge of the stone wall by the door, her body tingling everywhere. Her nipples felt tight against her bra. Her skin hungered to be rubbed very hard.

Gabriel Delange turned like a lion who had just finished chastising his cubs and spotted her.

Her heart thumped as if she had been caught out on the savannah without a rifle. Her
fight
instinct urged her to stalk across the small space between them, sink her hands into that thick hair, jerk her body up him, and kiss that mouth of his until he stopped roaring with it.

That would teach him.

And her
flight
option wanted to stretch her arm a little higher on that door, exposing her vulnerable body to be savaged.

She gripped that stone so hard it scraped her palm, fighting both urges.

Gabriel stood still, gazing at her. Behind him, the frozen tableau melted:
petits commis,
waiters, sous-chefs, all returning to their tasks with high-speed efficiency, the dispute evaporated. Someone started cleaning up the fallen dishes. Someone else whipped a prepped plate off the wall, where little prongs allowed them to be stacked without touching each other, and began to form another magical creation on top of it.

Jo tried to remember the professional motivation of her visit. She was wearing her let’s-talk-about-this-professionally pants. She was wearing her but-this-is-a-friendly-visit little sandals. Given the way her nipples were tingling, she would have preferred that her casually formal blouse have survived her one attempt to eat chocolate in the car while she was wandering around lost for hours, but no . . . her silky pale camisole was all she had left.

Gabriel’s eyebrows rose just a little as his gaze flicked over her. Curious. Perhaps intrigued. Cautiously so.

“You’re late,” he said flatly.

“I had a lot of car trouble,” she apologized. It sounded better than saying she had spent hours circling Sainte-Mère and Sainte-Mère-Centre and Sainte-Mère-Vieux-Village, utterly lost. Wait, how did he know she was late? This was a surprise visit. “I’m sorry. I know this is a bad time.”

“
Bon, allez
.” He thrust a folded bundle of white cloth at her. She recognized the sturdy texture of it instantly: a chef’s jacket. A heavy professional apron followed. His gaze flicked over her again. “Where are your shoes?”

“I—”

“If you drop hot caramel on those painted toenails, I don’t want to hear about it. Coming to work without your shoes. I thought Aurélie told me you had interned with Daniel Laurier.”

“Uh—”

Eyes blue as the azure coast tightened at the corners. “You made it up to get a chance.
Parfait
.
And
you’re late. That’s all I need. Get dressed and go help Thomas with the grapefruit.”

Probably she should have told him right then.

But . . . she had been having a hellish two months, and . . . a sneak peek into Gabriel Delange’s kitchens. . . .

A chance to work there through a lunch hour, to pretend she was part of it all.
Not
in an office. Not observing a chef’s careful, dumbed-down demonstration.
Part
of it.

She had spent the past two months dealing with hospitals and fear and grief, and he had just handed her happiness on a plate. What was an impassioned food writer to do?

Not the ethical thing, that was for darn sure.

Oh, God, her fingers hurt. It was so much harder to be part of it than it was to work through a recipe slowly or to observe it. She did try. She was not without kitchen skills, not by any means. But the speed, the intensity, the amount of competing motion she had to dodge, and the sheer repetition of task surpassed anything she had ever done before. Jo hated grapefruit. She hadn’t known that before, but now she hated it with a profound and utter passion. Maybe she should give up cookbook writing, become a microbiologist, and create a fungus that would wipe grapefruit trees off the planet.

She couldn’t even
see
all the beautiful things being created around her. She couldn’t look up from her task. Peeling and peeling and peeling, laying the sections out in glistening rows of pink for someone else’s use, until her fingers stung, and the acid sank into the stings, and the cold of the fruit made her clumsy.

Gabriel stopped by her station just as she was sneaking her thumb between her lips to suck the acid off it, for a second’s relief, and she glanced up to find his eyes on her mouth, his eyebrows lifting a little. Oh,
merde
, hygiene. She dropped a grapefruit and dove after it, right in the path of a sous-chef carrying a giant bowl of
financier
batter.

The
sous
dodged, the heavy bowl whirling him around as his knees slammed into her ribs, and just before both he and his forty-pound bowl came crashing down on her, someone caught him. “Umph
,
” she muttered weakly, peering up at the new hand cradling the bowl, as another hand gripped the sous-chef’s shoulder.

A broad, strong hand. Lots of little scars from nicks and burns. Dark brown curls of hair. . .

Gabriel slipped the bowl into its spot on the mixing machine, righted his sous-chef, sent him on his way, and gazed down at her a moment. Her body tingled in anticipation of a punishing growl. But he just looked at her.

Jo stretched a little farther—absurdly conscious of the angle at which her butt was sticking into the air as she arched to reach under the whirring mixing machine—and hauled out the yellow fruit. She waved the trophy at him brightly.

Gabriel sighed. “Please get up.” He reached down to grab her arm.

Wow, Jo thought as she floated feather-light to her feet. That was one strong grip.

“Maybe you should try something besides grapefruit,” Gabriel said.

Jo sent an envious look down the counters to his sous-chefs, concocting treasures out of—here a bit of foam being laid gently down on a bed of woodland strawberries. There a curl of jasmine over a strange, quixotic, Chambordian tower of chocolate. There someone was dipping something into liquid nitrogen, the vapor rising around him as if he were a sorcerer’s apprentice.

“Filling molds.” Gabriel took her shoulders and steered her to a bare counter space. A space very far from where the sous-chefs were finishing works of wonder and calling for waiters, “
Service, s’il vous plaît! Service!
”

“Just like this.” He pulled a great pan of rectangular molds out from under the counter, took a large pastry bag, and squeezed batter from it into a mold. Her eyes tracked that big hand’s gentle, precise squeeze with helpless fascination. “To just this level. And then the pistachios on top. Just this amount.” He sprinkled a pinch and glanced from the golden batter, with its scattering of green, to her face, a little smile flashing across his face as if he was enjoying some secret he didn’t expect her to know. “You can do that, right?”

He sounded as if he
should
be sure of her ability to do that, but somehow wasn’t.

“Of course,” Jo said, smarting. She was
Pierre Manon’s daughter.
Even if her father had always made her stay in his office, out of the way, staring through the glass walls at all the fun. And she was a really good food writer. She was going to be one of the best food writers in the world. She was working on it. She just—usually got one-on-one attention from the chef teaching her a recipe. They worked through it slowly. She got to concentrate, and take her time and lots and lots of notes and photos, and
feel
things, not just peel, chop, drop. . . .

She glanced up. In the time it had taken her to think three thoughts, Gabriel had gone about his business, accomplished six impossible things—she could see their fantastical incredibility waiting to be taken up to the tables—and now reappeared beside her, pressing in close to allow a
petit commis
to pass. No one took up more space than necessary in a kitchen. She knew that. There was no reason for her to feel so . . . small. Completely conscious of his proximity. Wishing he would roar again.

How would that feel, that bass vibrating over her skin from so close? He needed to shave, but under that two-day growth were good, strong lines of jaw, an intense—

“I was thinking you could fill all the molds
today
,” Gabriel said.

She looked back down at the four she had filled—in the time it had taken him to finish six desserts of such beauty and complexity she wanted to cry from pleasure just looking at them.

Her four filled molds looked absolutely perfect, too, she tried to convince herself. She was going to scatter the pistachios on them soon.

“Are your financiers made from ground pistachio?” she asked. “Is that your secret?”

“Why don’t we talk about my secrets later? Could you hurry it up? We’ll need those for the next round of tables, and they take twenty minutes to cook.”

Jo gritted her teeth and thought about telling him she wasn’t his new employee, but a chaos of people blurred around her as a new rush of orders came in, and maybe she should just shut her mouth, help as much as she could, and talk to him later. Leaving him in the lurch in the middle of the lunch service might not be the best way to convince him not to bring a lawsuit.

So she filled the first sheet of forty molds. Quickly. Tried to fill quickly. She scattered pistachios, pausing a moment to enjoy the effect of the little green-brown bits against the gold, and glanced up to catch Gabriel’s eye on her. She flushed, scattered more quickly, grabbed the huge pan and spun toward the ovens.

Smack.
The tallest of his sous-chefs, just slipping behind her, took it right in the chest. It went flying, flipped once, and landed face-down beside Gabriel, who was blowing foam off his hand so that it floated, oh-so-gently, to land on top of a little flower made of peaches, like an angel’s wing coming to rest.

He didn’t stop blowing because forty financiers ended up splattered over his feet. He let the foam drift gently down, while Jo stood caught by that careful pursing of his mouth, that delicate, controlled stream of air.

Ooh.
Could she just melt against the marble?

He slid the plate over to the counter where the tuxedoed waiters appeared, called, “
Service!
” and only then glanced at her and down at the pan. Her nipples tightened in longing for a roar, but he only sighed and shook his head.

Her heart deflated. She didn’t deserve a roar?

Crouching at his feet, she started to clean up the mess.

She didn’t know why her butt, thrust in the air, kept burning while she did that, because every time she glanced up, he was not looking at it at all.

Two hours later, Jo gave her knife a blurry look and thanked God in heaven that her mother had put her foot down when Jo wanted to leave school and become a chef instead of finishing her education. “Do something where you can live a normal life,” her mother had said, like someone who actually remembered what a normal life had been, before her failed marriage to Pierre Manon. “And have a family.”

What she hadn’t also added was
Do something where you can be a little lazier
. Like sit down, take a break, not cut off your own fingers from fatigue. There was something to be said for spending half your time typing into a computer.

A hand closed over her wrist, holding it firmly. Another deftly removed her clumsy knife, setting it on the counter. “Come here,” Gabriel said, quite gently.

Around them, people were taking off aprons and white jackets and slipping out into the street. Lunch was over, and the restaurant was closing until seven-thirty, meaning everyone had a break until five-thirty. She followed Gabriel Delange numbly into his office, smaller than her father’s old office but with the same big glass windows that allowed him to see the kitchens when he was in it.

She was half-expecting a muted roar or at least a dressing-down, but Gabriel smiled at her. Her heart sparked in ridiculous pleasure. Had she passed the test? Was she worth being taken on as a
petit commis
? Wait a minute, she didn’t
want
to be taken on as menial labor in his kitchen. That fantasy had died in the first hour of grapefruit sectioning. She wrote about this kind of thing, she didn’t have to
do
it for thirteen hours a day. Doing it was brutal. She tried to loosen her apron strings and discovered her fingers had grown too clumsy to work the knot. Plus, they stung.

“I think we know this isn’t going to work out,” Gabriel said gently.

She was so absurdly disappointed that anyone would think she had just failed a major exam. She jerked on the stupid knot, surprised to find her nostrils stinging as much as her fingers. Okay, that was just insane. Maybe she was a little on edge, between the book release, her father’s stroke, the lawsuit, and just getting hired and fired by one of the world’s greatest chefs in under three hours.