B00CACT6TM EBOK (27 page)

Luc gave that brilliant, intense dark look of his, first down at her and then at the cameras. About thirty cameras went
click
in the same instant, as if they just couldn’t help themselves. Luc didn’t even seem to notice, although he
must
be playing to the cameras, surely. The angle of his jaw was just too perfect. “It’s a pleasure to have here with us today the legendary Pierre Manon and the woman who could make sense of his genius to the rest of us,” he told the gathered guests. Her father stood on the other side of him, in pride of place. “Patrick Chevalier and I had originally offered to demonstrate a couple of the desserts in his cookbook, but fortunately, one of this cookbook’s authors has a certain pull on someone even better suited to show them.”

Jolie looked up at Luc quickly at that and then, already,
felt
that energy filling the space. As if a subsonic roar had just made everyone in the kitchens vibrate to alert. She turned as Gabriel appeared and came forward, in his chef’s jacket.

Several people in the crowd gasped. And then everybody burst into applause.

Gabriel smiled wryly, as he took Luc’s place between the Manons, his eyes meeting her father’s only for one packed second before they focused on Jolie. “Whatever else I can say about my relationship with Pierre Manon, and I can say a lot,” he told the crowd, to a rumor of laughter. The group was full of food critics and experts in the French restaurant scene, many of whom knew the Manon-Delange story quite well. “He always pushed me to be my best. So . . . it’s an honor to demonstrate one of the recipes I developed under him. At one point, it was the most photographed dessert in France. And”—he picked up the nearest display copy of the cookbook and held it toward the crowd, with a little quick grin sideways at Jolie—“my girlfriend really likes it.”

Jolie bit her lip, gazing up at him. Her father had placed both his hands on the counter and was eyeing his former chef pâtissier, body rigid. It was amazing how much good
anger
did her father, not a bitter, brooding anger, but a healthy urge to beat out all challengers, that driving need to compete re-awakened.
Don’t forget this lesson, Jolie: if Gabriel ever goes into depression one day, put him in the company of his rivals and do something to provoke a fight.

“So, Jolie. This is for you.” And Gabriel stopped smiling.

Stopped playing the audience. Stopped even noticing them. That bubble of concentration that he could create no matter how many people and how much pressure surrounded him—the knack of anyone who had spent his life in top kitchens—descended around him and enclosed her with it, shutting out the rest of the world.

As if she didn’t know already that it was for her. He would never have done it for her father, and he would never have done it for the world. The only way he had managed to drag this back out of himself again—this Rose that represented so much that he had given of himself and so much that had been stolen from him, so much he did not want to risk again—was for her.

He worked so quickly and so beautifully, his face somber in concentration, in a way she had never seen on any of those Youtube videos showing his other demonstrations. His work itself was like watching a miracle take place: the breath of gold dust across the plate, the red- and pink-streaked chocolate petals he loosened from molds. He must have slipped in last night sometime and prepped the whole thing. When he called her last night, complaining she was spending too long in Paris and that they had an ironclad contract, had he been standing here in this very kitchen, grinning in anticipation of his surprise?

A small torch flamed in his hands. Nitrogen vapor rose around his face. Hot, liquid chocolate was poured into a small round shell of hardened chocolate, the whole tucked into an aerated mousse of white chocolate and raspberry that was heartsblood red, that mousse dipped into the nitrogen and out and completely covered with gold leaf, and all of that within ten seconds. Because what was hot had to stay hot, what was cold stay cold, until it reached the mouth that would savor it, all of its heat and coolness shielded in the heart of that half-bloomed rose.

A very tiny smile from Gabriel to her, nothing like his usual big grins. And he adjusted the last petals.

“I changed it, just a little, for you,” he murmured and slid it in front of her. Facing her and not the crowd.

Near translucent fragile petals . . . opened. Just enough. The gold heart that had, in this dessert’s original form, been tucked like a secret inside them, was now revealed, although not to the crowd. Just to the person right in front of it. Just to her.

Unprotected. Beautiful.

From this great, aggressive man who didn’t know how to stop going after what he wanted . . . the most romantic, most fragile dessert Jolie had ever seen.

Dimly, she was aware that people were taking photo after photo, but it didn’t really penetrate. It was more as if hers and Gabriel’s intimate bubble of concentration was lit with little sparkles.

“Why?” she whispered. Why now? Why so publicly and for his enemy, acknowledging her father’s claim on the dessert even as he re-affirmed his own?

“I thought you deserved it,” he murmured, looking down at her with a little smile. So quiet, for Gabriel. So wary and hopeful and tentative. He touched one of the innermost chocolate petals very lightly with his thumb, where the gold heart gleamed for her. “I thought I deserved it, too.”

She could feel her face lighting.
He
deserved it? To offer her this?

This thing. The one thing he had allowed to be crushed out of him. The one thing that he had loved so much, that had meant so much of his heart, that he just could not risk it again. This one thing—he now offered, in public, to her.

The one man he hated the most—he paid tribute to. For her. In fact, he barely even seemed to care her father was there anymore.

With the thumb that had caressed the curve of the chocolate petal, he now caressed her lower lip. “I’ll trade a rose for you,” he said softly, certainly.

His thumb flicked up and caught something under her eye, smearing the teardrop gently against the fragile skin there.

“Maybe you’ll excuse us,” he told the crowd and wrapped one arm around her, picking up the plate with the Rose on it as he led her away.

Hushed, delighted murmurs filled the space behind them, but they were like echoes in a seashell, coming from far away.

“Always trying to steal the show,” Pierre Manon told the crowd very dryly, as they disappeared into the walk-in that was kept at fifteen degrees Celsius, that and the even colder refrigerator being the only private spaces in the whole kitchens. “That hasn’t changed.” From her father, that was, in its way, almost an acceptance. He had chosen Gabriel for his chef pâtissier; Gabriel had reached up into the heavens and caught a star for him. Despite the impossibility of two such powerful personalities coexisting in peace, somewhere he, too, had to realize Gabriel’s worth.

Gabriel double-checked the release on the inside of the walk-in door and then pulled it closed behind them. “You had better eat it now,” he said. “Otherwise it will be ruined.”

“Is there a ring in there?” Jolie asked, low. It would be so exactly like him.

He sat them cross-legged on the floor of the storage room and set the plate in her lap. “I didn’t want you to choke.” He pulled a small box out of his pants pocket. “You can have this one any time you want, though. Or something else if you prefer.”

It was an exceptionally beautiful ring, red gold twining through yellow, the ruby set deeply into the pattern of leaves and petals delicately etched around it, a secret rose.

Jolie stared at it, her lips parted. He smiled, setting his arms on his knees in an attitude of deep, infinite patience. “Eat, Jolie. I can wait.”

The first bite of the Rose tasted so good it almost made her cry. Just the fact that she had to eat it—that there was no way to save it forever—made her want to cry. And then the flavors hit, and the textures, the cold and the hot, a texture like new-fallen snow, a thin shell that barely resisted teeth, and then the warm, dense ganache inside it, rushing over her tongue. Everything blended together into a marriage of flavors and sensations so perfect, so enticing, so many ways deliciousness could be packed into one small bite. How could
anything
be that wonderful?

And Gabriel watched her, a profound satisfaction growing ever larger in him with every bite.

“I think I might have found something better to compare your heart to than a marshmallow,” she said.

“Well, it was about fucking time,” he said. “You’re lucky I’m so patient.” He reached out and drew one thumb over the shimmering toenail peeking from the totally inappropriate-for-a-kitchen shoes she had worn because she wanted to be glamorous for such a luxury setting. He was smiling a little. “Jolie.” He proffered her the ring again. “I really think we know this is going to work out.”

She gazed at it a long time, thinking about space. The thing was, she
wanted
to share her space with him. She
wanted
to give up part of her life to him. He took so much. But he gave so much.

Maybe she hadn’t ever wanted to give up part of herself before because no one else had deserved it.

“You have the most beautiful heart I’ve ever seen,” she said softly.

He took a sharp breath, and his hand lifted to cover that heart, as if it suddenly felt fragile. “Not a marshmallow?” he managed, but the attempt at dryness in his voice was a little rough.

“It’s so big,” she said. “It fills all of you. It fills everyone around you. And yet inside”—she touched the flecks of gold left on her plate—“I think there’s this precious center that, if I’m careful, if I show you can trust me with it, you’ll give only to me.”

His hand shifted helplessly over his chest. His lips had parted, and she noticed with some astonishment that red was streaking his cheeks. “You think my heart is
beautiful
?” he managed. He sounded as if his voice was being dragged through a rough tunnel.

“Doesn’t everybody?” she asked blankly and spread her hand over his own larger one against his chest.

He didn’t say anything. He was staring at her with that look he had gotten once before, over scrambled eggs and pancakes, as if she had been beamed down from another planet.

She wiggled her fingers in under his palm and found the ring hidden in his belated attempt to protect that glorious heart of his. Too late now. She worked it out and looked at it a moment, then up into his face again, her smile feeling so tender and strange. Yes, she could share her space with this man. The fight to keep him from taking over might be an infuriating trial their entire lives, but nothing about him dragged her down.

“Yes,” she said. “I think we really do know this is going to work out. But Gabriel—you have to give me time.”

He looked down at the ring, balanced on the tip of her finger, and then back at her. “Another week?” he asked cautiously.

“I was thinking more along the lines of sixty or seventy years,” she said softly, letting the ring slide down to her knuckle. “Quit rushing things, Gabriel.”

He took a deep breath, watching that ring stuck above her knuckle. “About kids—”

Her breath hiccuped in shock, and then she gave a half-laugh, half-groan and thumped her bare hand against her forehead. “Gabriel, you are
hopeless.
”

“I think it’s the opposite,” he said carefully. “About the hope. But I was going to say—you’re eight years younger than I am. We don’t have to rush it. I can wait a few years.”

“Thank you,” Jolie said awfully. “For your patience. Since, you know,
I
would be the one pregnant.”

“It’s all right,” he allowed magnanimously. “I kind of want you to myself for a few years.”

On the point of saying something very sarcastic about his generous permission, Jo took another look at him and stopped. “You kind of want to make sure I won’t dump you first, don’t you?” she realized, softly.

He flinched. “I just—I really couldn’t handle that, Jolie. What your mother did to your father.”
Or my father, in a way, did to you.
“I just—I might honestly die.”

She brought her bare hand to rub his hand against his heart, soothingly. After a moment, she nodded slowly, solemnly, without speaking.
Understood.

His gaze moved back to the ring, resting at her first knuckle. He watched it with a kind of wary compulsion, as if it might be the one ring to rule them all. “You know how you’re always saying I go after what I want and don’t know how to hold back? I didn’t know how hard it would be, letting you say
yes.
”

“I know you gave me your heart without question,” Jolie said very softly. “But do you think you’ll learn to trust me with it one day?” She was sorrier than she could say that she had ever been stupid enough to brag about dumping men easily. She’d just been trying to protect herself, and he had always seemed so big, so sure. Why hadn’t she thought of that Rose before she spoke and kept her mouth shut?

“It might take me a while,” he said low. His hand shifted to curve over her left hand, thumb playing with the ring, back and forth against her first knuckle. “Sixty or seventy years. I’ll try. It would help if you could reassure me you love me on a daily basis. You don’t have to say it, just—do it. Look at me that, that way you do sometimes. You know, with that—smile.”

“I promise to smile at you at least twice a day except when I’m on vacation,” Jo told him, bringing their hands to her mouth so she could kiss his knuckles. “I’m planning an annual beach retreat to get away from a demanding husband for a week each year. I don’t think letting you know I love you the other fifty-one weeks will be that hard.” She smiled. “And if I ever yield to the urge to bop you over the head, I promise to use a foam sledgehammer.”

His thumb nudged the ring a tiny bit farther down her finger. “Do you really think my heart is beautiful?” he asked, barely above a whisper.

“It’s adorable,” she said. One of his eyebrows went up a little at that. He looked dumbfounded. Which was just a damn tragedy, that a man with as extraordinary a heart as his should be surprised that anyone else realized it. “And yes, it’s incredibly beautiful.” Her voice went very soft. “Thank you for sharing it with me.”