B00CACT6TM EBOK (3 page)

“
Tenez
.” Big fingers brushed hers aside, and he dealt deftly with the knot.

It didn’t bear articulating, even in her own head, what it did to her to have him so competently remove her clothing. Tension rushed into her body, a sudden longing for him to keep going.

He folded the apron neatly and set it on his desk. “But I was wondering—
tiens
.”

Her mind noted vaguely the switch from
vous
to
tu,
like a long verbal step forward into someone’s personal space. His fingers brushed her fumbling ones off the tight buttons of the chef’s jacket. She swallowed as heat ran through her. If he got that jacket off her, he was going to see her nipples peek straight through her silky little camisole. . .

“If you would like to go out.” Gabriel peeled aside her jacket. His gaze flickered instantly to her chest and heated, his breath drawing in. His mouth compressed in a clear effort not to gloat over his soon-fallen prey.

Jo gaped at him. “Did you just
fire
me and ask me to dinner at the same time?”

“No, not to dinner. I never can ask anyone out to dinner. Or lunch. But I’m free for a couple of hours right now.”

She
was exhausted. And also . . . what exactly did that mean? Free for a couple of hours in the afternoon? That sounded . . . direct. Way too direct. “I think I need to correct a false impression.”

“Don’t worry,” Gabriel said dryly. “I’ve figured out that you didn’t work at Daniel’s.”

Jo clenched her teeth. “You know, I might have just been nervous! You could have given me the benefit of the doubt!”

“I tried. For three hours.”

“So I’m not good enough to work for you, but you’ll have sex with me this afternoon if I’m available?”

“Right. Wait—no. That is, you aren’t good enough to work for me, that’s certain, but. . .” While she heated with outrage, his blue eyes heated with something else entirely. “Were you contemplating straight to sex? I wasn’t actually proposing—that is, I was thinking—but whatever you like, of course.” He grinned, shifting his body as close in to hers as if they were still negotiating space in the kitchen, leaning in to dominate her. “Anything at all.”

He was suing her, had just fired her without even giving her a proper chance, and wasn’t even going to offer dinner. How could she possibly be so tempted to let him get away with this? “About that false impression. I’m actually
too good
to work for you.”

A tiny, choked laugh that about blew her head off. “I doubt it.”

“I’m not whoever you were expecting to start as a
petit commis
today. I write about food.” She took a breath, bit her lip, and gave a wry, lopsided grin. “I’m Jolie Manon.”

And she got that roar close up.

It started out as a growl that ran over every nerve ending in her skin. It built to a roar that buffeted her with its force. She tilted her head back into it the way she would into a wild storm approaching. It made her feel
glorious.

“You’re
this
Jolie Manon.” He yanked a great silver book out of the trashcan by his desk and pointed to the tiny script of her name, so easy to overlook with the PIERRE MANON and Gabriel’s gorgeous Rose dominating the cover. “He sent his
daughter
?” The roar blasted over her again, making her giddy. “To cover for him? That pathetic bastard. He can’t even deal with me himself or face me in court. He’s still using people.”

“You like leaping to negative conclusions, don’t you? He—”

“Letting you stay three hours in my kitchens is not me leaping to negative conclusions. It’s me trying my damndest to be reasonable and not just fire you so I can go out with you. That, you have to admit, would have been a terrible thing to do. But no, you deserved to be fired. And your
putain de père
—”

He reached up to the shelf above his head and yanked books and magazines down. “He called me. He begged me to come from the Leucé to help him get that third star. I was twenty. I said, I’ll get it. And I worked my damn butt off. My girlfriend dumped me. My family forgot who I was except when they wanted me to make a dessert for somebody’s Communion. I lost thirty pounds.
This—
” He slapped onto his desk a twelve-year-old copy of the top industry magazine. “It was the Holy Grail at the time to be in this. Whose name?” He pointed to the title of the article,
Pierre Manon Catches His Third Star.
“Whose work?” He pointed to the exquisite Rose on the cover. “Here.” He flipped open the magazine to a smaller image of the Rose in the table of contents. “Here.” Flipped further. “Here. And here.” A glorious full-page cut-out of that Rose and a close-up of a detail in the petals. “Where am I?” He pointed to a tiny photo of himself, very young, cheek to cheek with her father, both grinning for the camera. “That’s it. My name is never even mentioned. Not even
my exceptional chef pâtissier
or
I owe it all to.
”

He jerked open her cookbook. “This, this is my technique.” He pointed to one of her father’s famous
mise-en-bouche
, a mint-green drop caught on a spoon. “I invented it for a dessert, it was gorgeous, he saw it and immediately copied it for himself. This, this, this. . . these are all mine. I created these. He got Grégoire and my old sous-chefs to keep making them after he
had me fired
, but he knows I created them.
This.
” Again the roar, an anguished roar, as he placed his palm flat over the glorious Rose when the page fell open to its recipe, in a vain effort to snatch it back. “
This
gained
him
more fame than anything he ever did. That
I
made. That
he
never touched. It’s
mine.
And after he milked it and I got him that star, he made the hotel
fire
me,
after I got him a third star,
because I couldn’t treat him like he was God on earth every second. And because he was so fucking jealous of a magazine article they decided to do on
me.
”

Jo stared at him uneasily. She had been a sophomore in high school back in the States when all this happened. She had discovered on her next trip that her father’s new pastry chef wasn’t nearly as cute as the last one, but that was as far as her awareness had gone. Her father had always presented all the work that came out of his kitchens as his, and until that lawsuit notice showed up in her father’s mailbox, it had never occurred to her that this was not the case.

“That’s kind of the tradition,” she said cautiously. “French kitchen hierarchy. The chef cuisinier is on top, in charge of the chef pâtissier.”

“Yes, well.” Gabriel Delange gave her a tight, dangerous smile. “
Not
anymore.”

He had opened this place a year after his departure from the Luxe, the first and only chef pâtissier to take charge of his own restaurant. The chef cuisinier at Aux Anges, his younger brother, worked for
him
. Here, in this place in the jasmine-scented sun, every
mise-en-bouche
, every
plat
was foreplay for that final orgasm, his desserts. That was what the critics said.

She wondered if she could wear a wig and dark glasses to get back in and actually experience that orgasm herself. She had some pretty good wig skills, if she did say so herself.

She and the college friend with whom she had written restaurant reviews for their student paper had never been famous enough to need them, but they had liked to delude themselves.

“I suppose you think it’s traditional for a father to use his daughter, too,” Gabriel said darkly, tracing a finger over her tiny name on the cover of the book she had written. “He probably raised you to think that way.”

“Those
are
his recipes,” Jo protested. “I just wrote them down.”

Just. It was really hard to turn a top chef’s art into something you could express in words, in instructions. To tell the stories around the food, sometimes ones from her father, sometimes of other people’s encounters with it. She wouldn’t have minded having her name a little bigger. Her second book,
The French Taste,
already contracted and partly written, was going to be a collection of recipes from different top chefs, and the
name
on it was going to be
hers.

“They’re not all his recipes,” Gabriel said. “At least fifteen percent of them are mine.”

“And he gave me co-author credit.” In small letters. That had seemed logical at the time. Gabriel was starting to piss her off, casting doubts on her father and how much he cared about his daughter.

“Last I heard, the author was the person who did the writing. Did your father do any writing?”

“You must never have heard of ghost-writing,” Jo said dryly.

“I’ve heard of it. I haven’t heard of making
your own daughter
your ghost.”

She set her jaw. “I’ve got co-author credit. This is a big step in my career, and I had to talk him into doing it. Lay off.”

“Oh, did he play hard to get?” Gabriel sneered. “He loved doing that for the television shows. Especially after he lost that third star, without me. I don’t think it was as much fun, being called onto television sets so they could see how well he was surviving his humiliation.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Jolie said tightly. Those first three years after he lost that star had been one of the most ghastly periods of her life. If she hadn’t still had the excuse of her college classes to escape to, to save her sometimes from her father’s black moods, she didn’t know what she would have done.

“So where is he? I thought our lawyers would fight it out and the media would be great for me, bad for him. I didn’t expect him to send his daughter to handle his problems.”

Jolie gave him a hard, cold look. “He had a stroke. Not long before the release.” And if Gabriel was
happy
about that, she would cut his heart out with one of his own spoons.

Gabriel looked as if his head had just butted hard against a rock wall. “I—what? A bad stroke?”

“Pretty bad, yes.”

Gabriel blinked and gave his head a tiny shake, as if trying to get a stunned double vision to settle back into one image. “Is he all right?”

Jolie opened her hands. “He survived. He should recover well, the doctors said. With good therapy. He’ll probably always have slurred speech and more difficulty moving on one side, and there are all kinds of precautions to take to lower the risk of a recurrence.”

“
Merde,
” Gabriel said very softly. “
Merde,
Jolie. I—I mean, I despise your father, but—
merde.
I’m really sorry.” He closed a hand around her shoulder. For a second, she thought he was going to pull her in and pat her on the back. Maybe he did remember her a tiny bit from when she was a young teenager, grazing through his orbit. Or maybe he was just that shaken. He looked as if she had thrown his world upside down. “He’s lost some of the use of a hand?” he repeated almost inaudibly, flexing his free hand open and closed, rippling the fingers, as if he had to make sure they still worked.

“I’m not going to stress him right now. I’ll handle the lawsuit; I’m not even going to let him know about it. But I wanted to talk to you.”

He hesitated. His blue eyes grew wary, and he released her shoulder. “I can find out if that stroke story is true. You’re not just trying to soften me up?”

“No.” Jo glared at him. “No. I didn’t invent my father’s brush with death and permanent brain damage to soften you up.”

He curled his fingers around the edge of his desk and tilted his head back, gazing at the ceiling. He seemed to be trying to process. After a moment, he shook himself, like an animal shedding water. “You know, if you had told me right at the first that I was suing you, it could have saved me all that effort of trying to ask you out on a date.”

Her jaw tightened. She lifted her chin. “Don’t worry. As enticing as your offer of a couple of hours in the afternoon, no lunch, no dinner, sounded . . . the answer would have been no.”

Damn it, that was the last time Gabriel fired a woman just so he could go out with her. He should have known that wouldn’t work out well. The daughter of the man he hated most on earth, too. Didn’t that just figure?

She
hadn’t
been up to his kitchen standards, that was true. But she wasn’t hopeless. A couple of weeks adjusting to the intensity of three-star kitchens would have either led her to quit all by herself, loathing him for a brutal taskmaster, or forged her into someone almost capable of his team’s most simplistic tasks.

Then he could have gone around leaning in close to her when her head was bent in concentration, making her drop things. Or seeing if her pupils kept dilating when she looked up at him. Or if she kept waving her butt at him. Unfortunately, the chef’s jacket hid her breasts while she was working, but
something
had intrigued her nipples, when he first spotted her in that camisole peeking into his kitchen, and it certainly wasn’t the cold. It had aroused the heck out of him, trying to guess what those nipples were doing under that chef’s jacket every time he got close to her. And,
putain,
when he got that coat off, there they were, all tight for him.

That would make him evil, wouldn’t it? Constantly brushing up against a woman who was dependent on him for her livelihood. Or looming over her. Or curving his hand around hers on a knife to show her how to cut something. Or. . . .

He sighed. Between extended, long-term sexual harassment or just firing her straight off, also for sexual reasons, how was a man supposed to figure out the right thing to do? Working with her in professional indifference was definitely out.

Not when she stared at him with such fascination in those pistachio eyes of hers. The inner golden-brown ring shrank every time she stared up at him, the pupil swallowing up all but the green. She had three tiny
grains de beauté,
flat little beauty marks, on her cheek under her right eye, gathered close together, like a miniature constellation of stars. Her hair matched the deep golden-brown color of the
financiers
when they came out of the oven. When she didn’t know he was looking at her, her body seemed so strong and graceful that surprise struck him every time someone on his team stopped near her and made it clear how small she was. When she caught his eye on her, that strength and grace collapsed like a house of cards hit by a strong wind, leaving her scrambling after it as it fluttered away from her hands. Toward him.