B00CACT6TM EBOK (15 page)

Her hand rose and curved around his cheek, surprising him and her both. But she didn’t yank it back. He went still under the touch, taking a long, deep breath, soaking in the sensation of it. “Thank you,” she murmured.

“For?” Blackmailing her with her father’s health to make her come work with him?

She seemed to search for words, her palm still curved over his cheek. He should have shaved. “For being you,” she finally said, as if that covered it.

It sure as hell covered a lot. For being him. He stared at her, immobilized, as she flushed suddenly, dropped her hand, and ducked out of the alley.

Heading off to see Daniel Laurier.

Who had conclusively proven already that he could get women to fall for
him
forever.

“Gabriel Delange mentioned that he helped you the first year after Henri Rosier died,” Jo said, following Daniel’s lean, graceful, ground-eating stride through the stone building, nearly two centuries old, that had been remodeled by Daniel’s wife’s father, Henri Rosier, into the famous Relais d’Or. Before Chef Rosier had repurposed it and turned it into the home of his legendary restaurant, the place had been used to extract the oils from the roses, violets, and jasmine the region was known for, and Jo could swear she could still smell the scents when she stood close to the stone walls. Or maybe that was some scent coming from the kitchens. Henri Rosier, a Rosier cousin who had had the audacity to branch out from the family fragrance business, was widely credited with starting the trend toward subtly incorporating flower flavors into dishes.

“That’s right.” A quick kick of that contained Laurier smile, the one that the cameras caught so well on television, where Daniel’s lips only turned up two millimeters but a person felt as if she had brushed close to something glorious. “That was an—interesting time. I wasn’t even remotely ready for a three-star restaurant. But I could hardly walk out and leave it on Léa’s shoulders. She was only eighteen herself and had her two younger siblings to take care of, too. Her father’s pastry chef didn’t have the same qualms about walking out on us, though, so we were rather fortunate your father fired Gabriel just then. If he hadn’t stepped in out of a sense of family—” Daniel broke off and shook his head, clearly unable to say they would have
failed
, and possibly unable to believe he was capable of failing, but some thought of it flinching across his mind nevertheless.

“Maybe it was lucky for him you needed him,” Jo suggested. Would it have done her father a world of good if he had gone to save someone instead of sinking into brooding defeat after he lost his star? “Maybe it gave him something to do besides just give up.”

Daniel’s smile deepened, not growing bigger or wider, just richer somehow, more feeling compressed into it. “Gabe? Give up? You don’t know him very well, I think.”

“So you liked him?” Jo guessed. Daniel was a hard read. All the chefs she researched were a hard read, now that she thought about it, each with a persona he hid behind. But Daniel was definitely the hardest. So contained you wondered how his body didn’t split from the density of his emotions, all packed in tight like that. That’s probably why he poured so many fantastical creations out of him so fast. “Liked working with him?”

A glance down at her, warmth in the gray eyes. “I had never met anyone like him. He was so—out there.” And the man known for his contained cleanness, who never gestured extravagantly, whose hands were usually in his pockets when he wasn’t working, spread his arms wide, as the only way he could express Gabriel.

Jo grinned.

Daniel’s face warmed further in response to her enthusiasm. “Even compared to Henri, who was quite a force of nature, Gabe was huge. He was only twenty-three, and he couldn’t keep a kilo on him, he worked so hard. But even back then you could feel that energy in him. You know, that force he has. These days it’s grown so big that you know if Gabriel Delange is in a room when you’re two meters from the closed door. You can feel him.” He laughed, a low, firm sound, nothing like Gabriel’s full-out happiness. “Sometimes you can hear him.”

Jo laughed, too, a memory of that roar of his burring over her, making her want to ditch this interview with Daniel and run right back to it, so it could rub over her skin some more.

Daniel came out on the busy terrace of his restaurant, hands in his pockets again, looking around in seeming casualness. But Jo knew chefs, and she knew that gray gaze was seeing every single square millimeter in the place, and woe betide the person responsible for getting something a millimeter wrong. Only one small table sat empty, at the far end, clearly reserved for them.

“And he’s such a hopeless romantic.” Daniel shook his head, a lingering curve to his lips. Jo peered at him, surprised at the depth of liking. It wasn’t that common for top chefs to truly like each other. Some part of them always wanted to make sure everyone knew who was really the best.

“Do you really think so?” she asked, her face softening despite herself.

A quick cut from those steel-gray eyes. “You didn’t pay any attention to that Rose you put on the cover of your father’s book?”

Ow. Steel could have a very sharp edge. But at least—“You know that Rose was Gabriel’s?”

“Every chef in the world knows it was Gabriel’s. You’re only fooling amateur chefs. And those
chefs cuisiniers
full enough of themselves to truly believe everything that comes out of the pastry kitchen is theirs by virtue of creative osmosis.”

“So if he put it on his own cookbook, no one would think he was copying?”

“Hardly,” Daniel said. “Everyone would respect him for reclaiming his own.” He looked at his watch, an elegant, understated titanium that suited his strong wrist perfectly, and glanced around. There was a sense of movement behind them on the stairs, and Jo shifted automatically to make way for waiters, but instead it was a woman with a straw-blonde ponytail, her hand touching the small of Daniel’s back.

He turned to look down at her, and his smile changed—shrinking even further but holding even more, something so intense and reined in so tightly that it hit Jo with a physical force. Wow, that was—what must it be like to be loved like that?

She looked at the other woman as Daniel introduced her as his wife. Léa Laurier was peculiarly beautiful, in a way that didn’t quite make sense, with the careless ponytail and the rough ends of hair that hadn’t been taken care of in a while, no make-up, high cheekbones, bony wrists, and long fingers currently stained with paint. She was like a super model whose angular body seemed awkward in repose, but who turned into something stunning when the camera hit. Only Léa didn’t need a camera. As soon as her eyes met Daniel’s, her face lit, and that generous radiance gave her a luminescent beauty no trick of camera or lighting could ever imitate.

And everything about Daniel softened, seemed to ease. He led them to the open table, holding out chairs for first Jolie and then his wife.

Léa, too, was tracking everything that happened in the restaurant, Jo saw, and Daniel smiled ruefully, catching his wife’s eyes after she finished checking the nearby table for the diners’ reactions to the dishes a waiter had just set before them. “We shouldn’t eat here,” he told her. “Maybe we should try the restaurant next door. Or I hear you’ve got a couple of cousins in Sainte-Mère who aren’t half bad.”

She laughed wryly and tried to turn her focus back on their own table.

“So Mademoiselle Manon is interviewing me about the decision to name an executive chef,” Daniel said, raising his eyebrows at his wife as if inviting her to comment.

“What did you tell her?” Léa asked instead.

He gave that restrained but somehow enormous smile of his, the one that held so much warmth. “So far, we’ve been talking about Gabriel Delange.”

She laughed, with open pleasure. “Gabe is wonderful. I guess the two of you never could have managed to share this restaurant—he wanted control, and it was yours to control—but he made such a difference, that first year.” Her eyes caught Jo’s, very warm. “What do you think of him?”

Jo was very surprised to find her own gaze lowering and herself blushing a little bit. Oh, come on. Traitorous cheeks.

Léa, on the other hand, sat up a little straighter, delighted. She caught her husband’s eyes just a second, glanced back at Jolie, and carefully kept her mouth shut.

“So about the executive chef decision,” Jolie said firmly. “How
were
you able to reach the point when you stepped back and left the day-to-day control in someone else’s hands?”

A waiter came up, and she paused to savor the luxury of choices for a moment, and when she finally chose and looked up, Léa had her hand curled over one of Daniel’s, and he was watching Jo with a faint, intensely satisfied curve of his mouth, making her glad she had let her delight in the menu show.

She waited until the waiter left before repeating her question about the executive chef choice. Interviewers had to be persistent.

“I didn’t have anything more to prove to anyone,” Daniel said slowly. “That could be proven in a kitchen.” He turned his hand over and closed it around Léa’s, without looking at her. One strong thumb stroked over the tendons in her hand, found a spot of dry paint by texture, and rubbed over it gently.

Jo let the silence draw out, an interview technique, waiting for more.

“I wanted a chance to be with my wife,” Daniel said, still low and quiet and careful. “And to be with myself. I thought maybe I didn’t have to put every single bite of my whole self out there on a plate for someone to eat. Maybe just some bites would do. And when you reach that point, it’s time to let another chef step up.”

“Someone who wants to let himself be eaten alive?” Jolie murmured uneasily. Images of her father and Gabriel both flashed through her mind, Gabriel’s enthusiasm, her father’s grim depression, as if he had been eaten up and spat out again.

“Yes,” Daniel said firmly. Léa linked her fingers with his and squeezed once.

“How did you feel about it?” Jolie asked her.

Léa was silent a long moment, that radiance of hers growing quieter and not in a bad way, as if a cloud had gently diffused the rays of the sun. “Deeply happy,” she finally said softly. And then, after a moment Jolie let stretch: “It’s good. Good to have time to be something else. But you know, don’t you? Your father was Pierre Manon.”

Jolie tried to hide the profound sadness that winced through her whenever someone referred to her father in the past tense, as if he was either no longer alive at all or, at best, he no longer deserved to call himself by his own name. No wonder her father believed the same thing.

Although . . . hadn’t he had some role in getting that attitude started? He was the one who had treated the loss of a star as his own death. He could have come back fighting. He could have shown everyone he was still alive. She brought a hand up to rub the nape of her neck.

“You have to know exactly how much being a top chef consumes everything else,” Léa said.

“And everyone,” Jolie agreed reluctantly. This interview wasn’t supposed to be about her. “Wife, children, friends, himself.”

Léa had married at eighteen, in a moment of terrible crisis—the sudden death of her legendary father, two younger siblings to finish raising, and the world-famous three-star restaurant on her shoulders. So Jo couldn’t blame her for getting caught in a cycle—marrying what she knew, another chef, getting sucked into that.

She wondered how long the abnegation of her own life had seemed natural to Léa, or if there was ever a moment when the other woman looked around at all the normal lives she could have had and realized what Jo’s mother had taught her own daughter so well: a woman had to be crazy, to marry a superstar chef.

“So you don’t need lunch now?” Gabriel scowled at Jolie from his balcony, ready to leap across that gap and strangle her. He had somehow just assumed that she would be drawn irresistibly back into his kitchens when she got hungry and would show up around two o’clock, toward the end of the service, to eat all the different delights he had decided to feed her. “What did you do, eat at McDonald’s?”

“I had lunch with Daniel Laurier,” Jo said, and his head blew off.

“Oh, you did, did you?” That damn self-worshiping twirp. After Gabriel had saved his whole damned pastry kitchen, too. The Côte d’Azur might not be big enough for both of them after all.

“His wife has such a generous spirit,” Jo said. “I wonder how she does it. It’s like she just pours herself out there to everyone else as much as he does.”

“That’s Léa for you,” he said, trying to pry his teeth apart so she couldn’t actually hear him speaking through them. Daniel had had someone pouring her generous warmth on him since he was
nineteen years old
. Younger, damn it. The two of them had been dating a year before they got married.
Why him?

Daniel’s hours were
worse
than his. He did all those television chef contest shows, and Gabriel mostly thought those were a pain. What did
he
have that Gabriel didn’t, that glued a woman like Léa to him with such loyalty? Had Jolie seen it in Daniel, too?

Why not me? Why not me? Why not me?

It made him want to kick something so he didn’t have to admit how much it hurt.

“And she’s gorgeous,” Jo pointed out, a little spark of humor in her eyes.

His arms locked across his chest. “
Fine
. Do you know how much I don’t care?”

Jo blinked at him a moment. She had added a pot of Tahitian gardenias to her balcony sometime that day, and the scent wafting across from her side was heady and sweet, competing even with the jasmine. “Meaning I really doubt he’s flirting with other women,” she explained, with the subtlest gentle amusement.

His arms flung out. “Have you fucking looked at yourself in the mirror ever, Jolie?”
Merde
, had he just admitted how jealous he was? To a woman who thought his jealousy was funny, because she wouldn’t have any problem dumping him? Could he not learn to sit on himself
ever
?

She blinked again. And then flushed rosy with pleasure. In fact, she didn’t seem to have the slightest idea what to say next, her head bending as she ran her fingers over one of her gardenias, sneaking glances at him across the stupid three-floor drop.