B00CACT6TM EBOK (4 page)

He wanted to catch that fluttering strength and grace. Pick it up and gather it to him. Lose himself in it, kiss her, make sure she knew what good care he could take of it.

Except according to his every attempt at a girlfriend, he took lousy care of that kind of thing.

He pushed that thought out of his mind. You couldn’t accomplish anything impossible by focusing on all the tries you hadn’t gotten to work. Better to think about the present. Like the way she dug her teeth into her lower lip and focused with such intense, ferocious delight when she was trying to scatter pistachios just right. He felt so damn sorry for that lower lip, he wanted to prove to it that someone in its cruel world knew how to treat it right. And those painted toenails in her little sandals had about killed him. Exposed feet were so alien in a professional kitchen, it was as if she was wandering around naked.

Well. Not quite. But his mind found it astonishingly easy to start speculating on what she would look like, wandering around naked.

All things considered, trying to work with her in professional indifference sounded like a good way to ruin every single damn day of his life for the foreseeable future.

Unfortunately, it was astonishingly hard to meet women who
didn’t
work for you when your social life was limited to five to nine in the morning, three to five in the afternoon, and Mondays and Tuesdays. He tried to keep an eye out when he was running or at the gym, but women just didn’t seem to feel that flirtatious at five a.m.. Maybe he needed to get a dog, but that seemed a mean thing to do to the poor animal, given his working hours. Plus, did women really like being jumped on by dogs at five in the morning just so a man could introduce himself? He had even started giving serious thought to joining the women-packed, early-morning yoga class at the gym, before the cute daughter of his worst enemy showed up.

It was just a good thing he was suing her.

No, really. It had all kinds of perks.

He could see her again without having to figure out a way to convince her to go out on a date with him while he was firing her, for one. He might even be able to get his lawyer to get her lawyer to reveal her phone number.

His social life was so pathetic.

“This might take longer than I thought,” Jo told her sister Fleur on a grunt of effort, hauling her overnight case up the narrow stairs of the
auberge
across from Aux Anges. She stumbled on a step, dropping her phone, and the weight of the case disappeared so suddenly that she tripped and fell forward onto the stairs.

“
Pardon
,” said a voice roughened by far too many growls that day. She arched her back to look up, pushing with her hands against the stair.

Gabriel Delange, her case in one hand, studied her butt with incredulous appreciation. “Do you think it’s Freudian, how you keep falling in these positions around me? Thank God I fired you.”

“I never actually worked for you,” Jo pointed out between her teeth, scrabbling for her phone and pushing to her feet. He grabbed her upper arm with his free hand and hauled her up with that ease that made her feel as if her gravity had been shut off. Had he thought she was waving her tush at him
on purpose
? And if so, shouldn’t he be
regretting
having fired her?

“That’s right, you were just trying to steal more recipes.”

“You are the worst man for jumping to negative conclusi—”

“Thinking you were waving your butt at me on purpose is not a negative conclusion. Which one is your room?”

Fulminating, Jolie shoved her key into the lock. It was old and took some jiggling, but she got it open just as Gabriel was reaching to show her how much better he was at turning a key in a lock, being a man and all.

He strolled into her room as if he owned any space he happened to be around and deposited her carry-on by her bed. Wait. What in the world was she doing, letting him into her room?

“Look at that,” he said. “You’ve got your own little terrace and the most perfect view.” The view of his restaurant was, indeed, beautiful: the haphazard levels of its ancient mill structure, its old sun-worn stones, the white parasols on the terraces, the palm trees in front of it, and the vines climbing over the walls. The fountain the city had built in his honor shimmered gently in the sunlight
.
When all was quiet, she might be able to hear it.

“I thought we said we would meet tomorrow morning to talk about ways to resolve the book issue.” Jolie braced her feet.

“
Enfin
. You said that. But you never know when inspiration for resolving a problem might strike me. So when I saw you coming into this hotel, I thought I would come get your phone number and also make sure I know where I can find you whenever I want you.”

Find her whenever he wanted her?

Down, girl. That is
not
a good thing.

“Especially since, now that I’ve recovered from the shock of realizing you helped steal that Rose from me, I can’t stop thinking about your willingness to go straight to sex. You don’t go to bed early, do you?”

Jo gasped as if he’d just tossed her down on that white bed and curled over her with a lazy smile. A cruelly enticing image for a woman who didn’t believe in letting men treat her like that. Although come to think of it, where had she come up with such an idiotic principle? “I never said I was willing to go straight to sex!”

He held up a hand. “I never said you did. I said I couldn’t stop thinking about your willingness to go straight to sex, which is more like a guessing game. Would she be willing or wouldn’t she? You can’t blame a man for thinking things, when he’s spent half the day gazing at your
fesses
in that position you favor.”

“I do not favor—”

“I like it a lot myself,” he volunteered kindly.

She gaped at him like a hooked fish. Oh, damn,
why
did every erogenous zone in her body have to dissolve at that information? Did he think he could just grab her up off the street and haul her to the nearest bed, no stopping even for a damn dinner date?

The cheerfulness faded from his face as their eyes held. His eyebrows went up a little, and then something dangerous grew in the place of that humor. A tension invaded his body, and the room shrank around him. Stripped of his chef’s attire, he seemed even bigger somehow, the muscles and hardness of his body undisguised. He wore only a thin, fitted blue-gray T-shirt that highlighted his eyes, growing darker by the second. Jeans hugged his hips. No chef’s jacket hid the way those broad shoulders tapered to a lean waist or disguised the profound confidence with which he moved. As if he mastered everything around him. And if any of his environs ever resisted his mastery, he would flex his full strength and stamp them down with a roar.

His voice dropped to a rumble. “We could see if you like it, too.”

Damn it, that sounded so tempting.
Don’t let him treat you like trash, for God’s sake.
“You’re behaving
atrociously
.”

Surprise flickered. Then his hand opened in resigned acceptance of her judgment. “I always do somehow. I’ve spent my life in kitchens, since I was fifteen years old. All the manners are at the tables.”

“You didn’t get arms like that spending your entire time in kitchens.” The leanness, yes. The lack of fat, the abs, the long, supple muscles—that came from the adrenalin-intense work of a three-star kitchen. But the bulk of his shoulders came from serious weights. What was she doing, mentioning his arms? She
wanted
him to throw her down on that bed, didn’t she?

Oh, yeah, she really did.

He glanced down at his folded arms, expression flickering between smugness and, oddly, embarrassment. “It was either that or the bookstore,” he said cryptically. “And bookstores don’t open at five in the morning. Besides, I had to do
something
besides sink into depression when I lost my girlfriend and then had all my work and self-sacrifice betrayed by your father in the space of a year.”

More than ten years later, he still wasn’t about to get over her father’s role in his life, was he? “So you decided to become a beast?”

A tiny tick of silence. “A—beast?”

“You know—brute strength, unshaved, atrocious manners, ready to rend sick old men, roaring.”

He rubbed his chin involuntarily and looked surprised to find that much growth on it. Danger glinted deep in the blue eyes. “You like it when I roar.” A little growl seeped into his tone as he brought his body in to dominate hers, the bed one easy push of his fingers away. “I saw it.”

Definitely the most atrocious manners of anyone she had ever met. “You did not see any such thing.”

His eyes flickered down over her silk camisole. Damn it, she needed to change. “You must get cold
really
easily, then.” The little growl rumbled over her skin. “It’s thirty-five degrees today.”

Or, on American terms, in the high nineties. She glared, at a loss as to what to do with a man rude enough to mention the state of her nipples when their entire adult acquaintance had lasted four hours and was founded on his lawsuit against her.

Especially when her palm tingled with the need to test that three-day growth on his jaw herself. She wanted to lean just a little forward and see what those muscles would do in reaction to her weight. And how her own muscles would melt.

“Who wanted La Rose on the cover of that cookbook? I don’t have any trouble believing Pierre could be that arrogant, but . . .
was
it him? Or was it you? Or an editor?”

“I pushed for it,” she admitted uneasily. A big man she barely knew was looming over her in a hotel room, and she was afraid saying the wrong thing could end the moment. Okay, that was beyond stupid. “But—it
had
to be on the cover. It’s so beautiful.”

You wouldn’t think this rough man who came on to her so strongly could have made that Rose. It wasn’t good for her defences right now, to know that somewhere inside him was the heart that could produce that.

He drew a hard breath that brushed his chest against hers. Her head spun. “If it had been my name on that book, I would have agreed,” he said through his teeth.

She and her father had stolen that from him, too. When he did publish his own cookbook, and as a three-star chef it was a given that one day he would, he wouldn’t be able to use his own Rose on the cover without looking imitative.

“I really am sorry,” she said quietly. “It never occurred to me to think of it as anything but my father’s creation.” She had seen Gabriel make those Roses, when she was a young teenager, but her father tended to represent things as if Gabriel was just a handyman for Pierre Manon’s genius.

Gabriel’s mouth twisted hard. “No, I bet he never once acknowledged me, did he?”

No. He hadn’t. Jolie rubbed the back of her neck. “I’ll work with you to figure out fair compensation, if that helps at all.”

He moved away from her abruptly to look out over her little terrace.
Darn,
said her body.
Will you hush?
her head told it.

“I’m not doing it for fair compensation. There isn’t any. Besides, I know I’m never going to win that lawsuit. You can’t patent a recipe. I just want the attention it will generate. I want people to
know
that it’s mine, and how wrong I think he is to try to use it. Who knows, maybe it will even help change the way kitchen hierarchy works, in other kitchens besides mine.”

Arousal faded before the sickness growing in her stomach. Maybe what he wanted was fair. Maybe she understood his furious desire to expose an injustice. But the publicity, the judgment of their peers, was what would kill her father. “He’s just had a stroke,” she said desperately.

His mouth twisted. “Despite my bestial manners, I did hear you when you said that, Jolie. I’m still thinking.”

Maybe he should get one of those rule books for dating, Gabriel thought as he gilded a glowing yellow dome with a torch that evening. A beast. It was true he was arrogant, sure of himself, determined to have exactly what he wanted the way he wanted it . . . and he didn’t know why women yelled those things at him like an insult instead of a compliment.

And, fine, he didn’t always bother to shave. But . . .
already
he was a beast? He had been so nice to her when she kept causing catastrophes in his kitchen, too. And he hadn’t even blamed her when she told him
she
was the catalyst for stealing his Rose again. He had taken it as an involuntary and painful compliment, that the best thing she had seen come out of her father’s kitchens was his.

What was he supposed to have done differently with Jolie Manon? He threw out a prepped plate because three grains of powder had fallen in the wrong spot, so obviously he noticed when her pupils dilated every time she looked at him. Or those nipples. Even men who had no appreciation of subtle detail would have noticed those tight nipples. Then she kept finding excuses to stick her butt up in the air right in front of him. . . .

It would have been rude
not
to let her know he was equally attracted. Right? It wasn’t as if he was acting like that was his only use for a woman; she was the one with the one-track mind. He had
told
her he was willing to do whatever she wanted.
“Anything at all.”

How much more could a man offer to a woman, beyond anything at all she wanted? She had seemed to take that the wrong way, too, though. He didn’t know why he always had that effect on women.

He brightened, as he pulled another plate off the wall. He still had one thing in his favor. Jolie might think he was an utter jerk and pretend she never wanted to see him again, but he
was
holding her deathly ill father hostage.

There had to be something he could do with that.

Jo woke slowly, disoriented. A low tap sounded again on her door, throwing her heart into overdrive. Strange hotel room, unfamiliar area of the country, and it must be after midnight.

She stared at the door. The fountain in the distance played a soft lullaby through windows open to relieve the day’s heat. Two possibilities presented themselves: either a homicidal rapist had snuck into the hotel and chosen her room, or . . . somebody had just finished shutting down his kitchens and thought he would stop by.