B00CACT6TM EBOK (11 page)

Again the thought of her father, those three days without her, sitting at his table rolling that rolling pin bleakly, weighed down on her, grim and gray.
Oh, Papa.
“He’ll still be seeing his therapists, and I’ll have someone come in every morning and evening to check on him.” Even though he was perfectly capable of taking care of himself, a voice in her head pointed out.

Estelle zipped her suitcase with grim intention:
I’m out of here.
“And what are you going to tell him? About why you’re spending half the week in Nice?”

“Sainte-Mère,” Jo corrected. Although . . . did her father have to know the exact location? There were a lot of good chefs around Nice. She just had to pick one in rare contact with her father. . . . “Daniel Laurier!” she said triumphantly.

Estelle looked at her blankly.

“
You know
, the guy who took over Le Relais d’Or in Saint-Amour when he was nineteen? Dark hair? Intense? On TV all the time?”

“I can’t believe you like chefs so much,” Estelle muttered. “You actually know all the starred chefs by name? Didn’t you get enough of that level of narcissism when we were kids?” She cast a guilty but bitter glance in the direction of their father’s apartment building, a couple of
arrondissements
over.

Jo frowned, and plowed forward. “I’ll tell Papa that I’m working with him. He won’t have any problem with that.”

“Going after a chef that’s worth something, I see.” Her father rolled that damn rolling pin. “I can’t really blame you.”

“Papa. I want to keep writing cookbooks. When I met with, with Daniel Laurier to ask about a recipe for
French Taste
, the idea just developed. Working with him is a great opportunity for me. You didn’t think the only cookbook I would ever do would be yours?”

Her father shot her a glance and said nothing.

Ah. Maybe he had, in fact, wanted to be her sole center of attention. He made her heart ache. And that heart stretched away from the ache toward the south and the scent of jasmine, in pure yearning to be free.

“Come on, Papa, help me with this recipe.” She pulled one from his cookbook, a simple but delicious pea puree that he could do perfectly well, even with a hampered left hand. “Please?”

But he got up and left the room.

And left her with her aching heart. Yes, he was the one who chose to isolate himself, but that didn’t make him any less alone.

“We’ve got Matt out there,” Raphaël told Gabriel, stopping on the other side of the pass from him. Younger than Gabriel by six years, Raphaël had fewer of those molten streaks in his hair than Gabriel did, a darker brown. Raphaël had been working with Gabriel since he was twenty, when it had seemed more normal to him that he should come on as chef cuisinier to his famous older brother and still work under him. These days, their unusual hierarchy was starting to chafe. Gabriel didn’t know what to do about it. He tried everything he could to share power equally with his brother these days, but old habits of control died hard. He was desperately afraid his brother was just going to up and leave him one day, and even more afraid that might be the best thing Raf could ever do for himself.
Fuck. Why were people’s lives always better without him in them?

“Oh, is that why he came by this afternoon? He wanted a table?” Gabriel was spraying the dome of a chocolate dessert last second with a blend of cocoa butter and chocolate so that it would arrive at the table glistening, glossy, perfect, reflecting every light in the room in its darkness.

It was beautiful, and yet for once, his heart wasn’t really in it. Some nights, it was harder to keep forcing your heart out there for people to eat than others.
She dumped people.
She let men fall for all that pistachio and gold of her, and then she dumped them. She had probably boxed up more shirts and mailed them to clear the last remnants of a man out of her life than all his ex-girlfriends put together.

“He’s got that, what’s-her-name, Nathalie?”

Gabriel stopped. “
Bordel
, is this going to her? You know she’s just going to run throw it up again as soon as she can get to the restroom.” He stared at the beautiful work of art, utterly deflated. Damn it, the very last thing he needed was to think of some wannabe actress throwing up this bite of his heart, on top of everything else.

“I think she only ordered coffee,” Raf said.

“What the hell is wrong with Matt?”
Only ordered coffee.
In
his
restaurant. If that wasn’t a sign a man should get out of a relationship with a woman while he still had a chance to survive, Gabriel didn’t know what was.

“She’s beautiful?” Raphaël suggested cautiously, in the tones of a man who had no idea but was making a wild guess.

“Raf. Remember her at his birthday party? I’ve never seen
anyone
insist on sucking up more attention for herself. It Matt even stopped to joke with one of us, she started worrying her looks must be going and that was why he didn’t love her anymore.” He wished Matt had never tried working up in Paris this past winter for Rosier SA, on his quest for something a little more adventurous than running a valley of flowers in Provence, his life destiny as the Rosier patriarch’s heir. In Paris, Matt had had to mingle with all those actresses and models with whom the luxury perfume houses packed their perfume launches, and it had turned out to be a very bad environment for a straightforward, wholehearted man who liked to fix things.

“I know. She’s as bad as a top chef,” Raf agreed, shaking his head in disgust.

Gabriel gave his brother a disgruntled look. “Well, at least we’re that way about our
food
. Not our actual bodies.” Fortunately, because he probably had chocolate spray all over his face right now.

“So that makes us better than she is?” Raf challenged wryly.

Gabriel sent the dome through the pass and scowled at his brother. “It’s not the same thing at all,” he said firmly.

Raf shrugged. “You know Matt’s an idiot. I think he tried to head-butt his older cousins into listening to him one too many times when he was little, and it did some damage.”

“She doesn’t even look at him! It’s like she literally cannot see him, only whether he is looking at her.”

“Yeah, but Matt’s a big man. He’ll pour himself out in the service of that need for a long time before he gets to the end of himself. Can we talk about something less depressing? How’s
your
love life?”

“Fuck you, Raf.”

Raphaël grimaced, with complete sympathy. “See, you need a girlfriend.”

“Don’t we all?” Gabriel said, even more tersely still. “If you’ve got any tips for getting a woman to put up with our hours, you just let me know, Raf.”

Raphaël shrugged, sticking with that flippant cockiness he had been practicing as the younger brother for all their lives. “I’m trying to land them with great sex, myself.”

A fractional pause of Gabriel’s fingers on a slim stick of a white
biscuit
dipped, just the tip, into brilliant red strawberry
coulis
, to be balanced expertly on a curlicue of strawberry sorbet. “And how is that working out for you?”

A brief grim glimpse in Raphael’s face of that same bone-deep loneliness Gabriel felt, and then he shrugged. Six years younger, that meant he had six fewer years of failure at relationships under his belt and correspondingly more cockiness. Or a determination to pretend so. “I believe I’m too big a fish for this small pond. Maybe we should think of opening a second restaurant somewhere more single women live.”

“That will certainly help with the hours problem,” Gabriel said sardonically.

“I could run that one,” Raf said, and Gabriel looked at his brother a moment.

He had had even less sleep than usual, in order to take a woman to a train station and have her tell him with beaming delight how the fact that she would have no problem dumping him resolved all her issues. It was not a good time for him to try to deal with his brother’s increasingly powerful, carefully repressed, desire to be in charge of his own place, to have his name lead.
Please don’t dump me, too, Raf. Please don’t dump me and make it clear that not sharing your life with me makes yours so damn much better.

Raf grimaced oddly and swiped one of the macarons Gabriel was setting up, biting into its sweet caramel. “So, Pierre Manon’s daughter looked cute.”

“Don’t even think about it, Raf.”

His brother looked surprised and then laughed. “She seemed to be pretty focused on you, Gabe.”

Gabriel couldn’t help smiling at that, despite himself. She sure as hell had, hadn’t she. The memory of her eyes dilating, as she let jasmine curl around her wrists and hold her trapped for him, kicked arousal all through him again.

She sees you
, a voice whispered through him.
She’s not like that Nathalie person Matt’s got. She looks at you, and she likes what she sees.

God, that was so deliciously enticing. Why the hell did she have to tell him she dumped people?

“So how is that idea of holding her father’s life hostage to get her to submit to your sexual desires working out?”

Gabriel huffed a breath and then growled at his brother, low and dangerous. “I am not exactly—we’re
not
sleeping together.”

“Oh, is that why you’re so grumpy? How the hell did you screw up? She looked at you like she could eat you up. It was so cute. You kept feeding her desserts instead of you.”

“We’re going to work on a cookbook together!”

“You
would
consider that a good substitute for sex. Has it ever occurred to you that you might be over-obsessed with your work?”

“It’s not a
substitute
. It’s just—” He loved her fascinated arousal—even if she was a damn sadist about not following through on it. But it was more than wonderful to watch her melt at everything he fed her. Like he was a prince. “It’s
bait,
” Gabriel growled. “She said it was a dream come true.”

“Poor kid.” Raphaël shook his head. “That’s how my nightmare started. Thinking that working with you would be a dream come true.”

Gabriel tried not to wince. Raphaël had been young and bright-eyed, and maybe Gabriel had suckered him into this job. But he was so damn good at it. And Gabriel liked working with his brother. They hadn’t killed each other, in over eight years, and before that, when he was Pierre’s chef pâtissier in Paris, Gabriel had hardly ever seen him. He had missed most of his brother’s adolescence, in fact.

Merde
, he had missed most of his own.

“It’s going to be an ironclad contract,” he snapped. “She
has
to finish the cookbook with me.” Has to. It made him sick to his stomach, to think of the woman who had been curled in his lap on those stairs deciding within a month or so that he was just a nightmare she had to get through. That she wanted to dump him but didn’t have the choice.

Raphaël reached across the pass and punched him lightly in the shoulder. “I’m just teasing you, Gabe. Just try not to be too much of a beast to her. And remember, no matter how much she wants to get away from you, you can always hold her father’s life over her head.”

Jolie’s little balcony in the
vieux village
faced Gabriel’s exactly, so that if each leaned far enough they could almost, almost touch each other’s hands, three floors above the flower-filled pedestrian street. She wondered if any star-crossed lovers in the history of this town had ever fallen to their death as they pushed just that little bit farther to try to brush fingertips. If she and Gabriel had been children, they would have had a system to send a little box back and forth with messages and tiny presents. If they had been friendly neighbors, they would have shared a clothesline.

Jolie stood on her bare balcony in the old part of town, amid those shady, flowered stone streets not far from the restaurant, and curled her fingers around the rail, gazing at Gabriel, who stood with his own hands curved around his railing across the way, surrounded by pots of red geraniums. It had been a bit of a surprise, after he finished carrying her suitcases up for her and left, to have him pop out on the other balcony and grin at her. “You just happened to have a cousin who didn’t need this apartment right across from you?”

He shrugged, noncommital. “The Rosier family, on my mother’s side, is pretty extensive. And they’ve been in the fragrance industry here for centuries, so it’s astonishing how many odd bits and pieces of property they have here and there.”

Yes, but that didn’t directly answer her question, did it?

She stretched her fingers out of pure curiosity. When he extended his own hand, about two feet rested between them. She leaned farther. He shook his head and dropped his hand back to the rail.

“You’re no fun,” she complained.

He laughed. “Do you want me to leap over the rail?”

Ooh. Yeah. Yeah, that would be hot, him bursting into her apartment in one monstrous lunge. . . .

His hands curled a little more deeply into the rail. His body shifted.

“It’s a three-floor drop!” she exclaimed, panicked.

“That is about like you, to look at me like that with a three-floor drop between us. Trust me, I can jump this. Keep looking at me like that and you’ll find out.”

Her breath stopped. Her body melted.

He gathered himself into a spring.

“Stop!” she yelled, covering her eyes. “I’m not looking at you, all right?
And I’m not looking at you any particular way, even when I do.
”

“You know what I would do, if I did leap over there?” he asked conversationally.

The lips of her sex curled just from the question. “Uhh—”

His voice deepened. “Give it some thought, Jolie. A man who has just jumped across a two-meter gap, three floors up, to get to you.”

She grabbed hold of the railing again.

“And it stays hot at night,” he murmured. “You’ll want to leave your windows open. Is that a nice thought to take to bed with you? That I might leap over that gap in the middle of the night?”

Hot damn.
Was that ever a thought to take to bed.

“And do . . . something. Let’s not go into the details.”