B00CACT6TM EBOK (24 page)

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.”

No. And it was absurd to be that disappointed. He had moved on from that dessert, that was all; it held too much pain for him. It wasn’t as if he had ever held back from her, or—she remembered uneasily his statement
I tried
—not that she had noticed. She didn’t know why she felt that if he made that Rose for her, she would be able to trust him with her. Maybe it was because it would feel as if he was trusting her at last with the most vulnerable part of him. That for all the ways he wanted to push his way in, take over her life, grab it for his, he would invite her into this most fragile, most precious part of himself.

She sighed and pressed her forehead a moment against his shoulder before she pulled herself together and to her feet. “It’s probably a bad moment to mention this, but I need to get moving, if I’m going to catch the train,” she said.

And Gabriel went to the window and stood there, staring across at his apartment, one fist clenched and his jaw rigid.

Well, there went the life out of his week, Gabriel thought an hour later, watching the train pull away. He curled his fists in his pockets—trying to channel elegant princeliness as hard as he possibly could—and wondered, abruptly, how badly the life went out of
her
week.

When the train pulled away, and she settled into that six-hour commute to go face her father’s depression, did she feel all her energy being sucked away? Did it convince her that was what men did, suck the life out of anyone who let herself love them?

Did every kilometer back toward that depression make her more wary of love in general and of loving chefs in particular?

He couldn’t even share the commute with her, because if she knew what he was planning, there was no way she would let him take over her life like that.

He really, really wanted to be a prince for Jolie. But he was afraid that what she needed was a beast.

Pierre Manon wasn’t quite as tall as Gabriel, but he wasn’t small, and he had always had that Russian KGB look to help him seem bigger and tougher. He had let himself go, about the way you could expect of a man used to burning through thousands and thousands of calories a day who suddenly stopped working and went off to sulk for years. But the slight drag at the left corner of his mouth wasn’t nearly as bad as Gabriel had feared. Fortunately. Otherwise, even Gabriel might not have been able to go through with this.

“Gabriel Delange,” Pierre said flatly, when he recovered from the shock of seeing Gabriel on his doorstep. “Come to gloat?”

“Yes,” Gabriel said and shoved his way in, bumping the older man out of his way and striding into his living room. He could have gotten past Pierre without bumping him, but he wasn’t here to make friends with his old chef, or to baby him, or to pamper him into feeling better about himself in any way whatsoever. In his pocket, his phone rode reassuringly against his butt. He’d texted Jolie a couple of hours ago from the train, just to make sure her session with Philippe Lyonnais was still on for this afternoon, and she had texted him back a photo of one of Philippe’s beautiful desserts just being offered to her by the man to tease him.

It had done more than tease him. He’d had a strong desire to punch the other man, but he supposed he was going to have to get used to that, since Jolie was a food writer. So he just channeled that extra dose of aggressive energy into what he had come here to do—be the damned beast.

He could hear Pierre’s outraged gasp behind him.
I bet that woke up some old instincts, didn’t it? Let’s see how long you put up with me.

He turned and looked Pierre over with a sneer. “I told you when you fired me you were going to regret it. Look at you now. You’re pathetic.”

Pierre Manon went rigid with fury. “You try having a stroke.”

It made him feel sick with dread to even imagine it. He shoved the compassion away. “Well, if you’re still alive when I do have one, then
you
can gloat. If you still have a gloat in you, the way you’re going.” He upped his sneer. “But you were pathetic long before you had the stroke. You’ve never been worth anything without me, have you? Even your cookbook had to have my Rose on the cover to get any attention.”

Pierre’s eyes had gone brilliant. Funny, for all the times they had glared at him, Pierre’s eyes had never stuck in his mind, but they were the exact same color as Jolie’s. “Without
you
?” the older chef sneered right back. “You’re nothing but a
pâtissier
with delusions of grandeur!”

“Yeah, all three stars’ worth,” Gabriel said.

Pierre’s mouth firmed. Even that stricken left corner of it pulled tight into line.

“Did Jolie tell you she’s writing
my
cookbook next?” Gabriel forged ahead, before the other man could speak.

“She’s
what
?”

“Oh, you fell for that Daniel Laurier story, did you?” Gabriel said derisively. “What’s the matter, are you so out of touch that you didn’t even remember what other top chefs were around Nice?”

“I remembered the memorable ones,” Pierre sneered, in his turn.

Ooh, nice one. The man would be back to his old
salaud
self in no time, at this rate. “And I bet the cookbook she does for me sells
well
. Since the name on it won’t be some has-been.
I’ll
be glad to demo and do signings with her until she thinks the sun rises and sets on me.”

A flicker in Pierre’s green eyes.
Yeah, we all like the idea of Jolie’s hero worship, don’t we? We’d all like to be the fucking prince in the scenario. Not—this.

Damn it, did his eyes have to look so much like Jolie’s?

“It’s too bad you haven’t bothered training any new chefs in years. Maybe if you had at least been able to land a few consulting jobs, there would be someone around who still respects you enough to host a promotional event for you. A few people willing to act as your
sous
for the demos.”

“I never tried to land consulting jobs!” Pierre Manon hissed.

Gabriel laughed. “I can’t believe
you
just used
not trying
as an excuse. And I thought I didn’t have any more respect to lose for you.”

“And I have respect! Luc Leroi is begging me to come to the Leucé for an event.”

“Really?” Gabriel raised his eyebrows. “That’s the first I’ve heard of an event for your cookbook. It didn’t get much attention, did it?”

Pierre Manon’s lips slammed together again.

“Wait. Luc? Luc Leroi? My old
sous-chef
at the Luxe? You can’t tell me he has fond memories of
you
.”

Pierre glared at least as hard as the time Gabriel had gotten fired. “I made that kid,” he said between his teeth.

Gabriel snorted. “More likely he wants to impress your daughter.”
Merde
, and Luc Leroi looked like a damn god had decided to walk out of the Fires of Creation and make sure Earth got built up to his standards. He made an elegant prince look like a step
down.
Gabriel’s heart tightened anxiously, because it couldn’t help it, because the damn thing was always yanking his emotions around like that.

“More likely he wants to impress
me
,” Pierre Manon retorted. “Hugo Faure is retiring next year. They’ll need the best to replace him.” Hugo Faure was the head chef de cuisine at the Hôtel de Leucé, and Gabriel thought it extremely unlikely the Leucé would replace Faure with a chef known for losing a star for their rival hotel, but Pierre locked eyes with him, with a hard defiance, when he said it, so Gabriel contented himself with sneering, to give that hard defiance a little nourishment.