B00CACT6TM EBOK Read online

  Table of Content

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Other Books By Laura Florand

  The Chocolate Touch

  Acknowledgements

  About Laura Florand

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  The notice of the lawsuit arrived two weeks after the cookbook came out. Jolie opened it, spotted the words “on behalf of our client, Gabriel Delange”, and felt the bottom drop out of her stomach.

  Oh, God. Jolie spread the letter by the cookbook, centered proudly on her desk. Her father’s name, PIERRE MANON, stamped its big, glossy, silver cover, right above the most beautiful thing to ever come out of his kitchens: the Rose. Back when she was a teenager, every TV crew that filmed her father filmed that rose, every magazine article about him featured it on its cover: out of all the beautiful dishes from his kitchens, the most sublime. Pink and red gently streaked great white chocolate petals, the outer ones spreading into bloom, the inner ones still curved, reluctant to break free from the bud, protecting for one last second the heart inside. That heart glowed under those petals, a sliver glimpse of pure gold. It was heartbreaking to eat it, and yet if you didn’t, it would die within minutes, the gold leaf collapsing as the Tahitian vanilla mousse it encased melted in the passionate heat of the raspberry coulis beneath it.

  Only her words and the food photographers’ images could catch such a thing and give it permanence, like catching a firefly’s glow.

  She remembered now her father’s hesitation when she had insisted on the Rose for the cover, how he had looked away and proposed other things and then at last smiled into her eager eyes and yielded.

  A lawsuit.

  Oh, boy.

  Brought on behalf of his former chef pâtissier, Gabriel Delange. A man she primarily remembered from over a decade ago as being tall and far too skinny, yet somehow managing to fill a room with his energy, until he was all a teenager stuck in her father’s office could look at. She had had a tiny fourteen-year-old crush on him. Gabriel Delange, who had made his own way after her father fired him. Who had opened his own restaurant, made it his, won his own three stars, and gained international celebrity as the first chef pâtissier to ever do so on his own. Gabriel Delange, who now stated that the work featured on the cover of the book as well as twelve other recipes in its contents were his. And that since he had previously warned Pierre Manon against appropriation of his work, he preferred to settle this in court.

  Although entirely French, her father had always had something of a pseudo-Russian villain’s face, with straw hair and blunt bones. He could have been the enemy in any James Bond film, and his former underling Gabriel Delange had clearly cast him in the role, but the brilliance of his imagination, the sensual joy he took in pleasing others through food, belied it.

  Now his villain face was subtly slackened, as if he had been drinking too much vodka. More on the left side than the right.

  Jolie bit the inside of her lip, watching him rock a French rolling pin back and forth on the table under his hands. Maybe he found the gesture therapeutic. Any work with his hands probably was. It had been two months since he had been released from the hospital.

  Most people would consider him lucky. His impairment was minor, leaving him, to most intents and purposes, fully functional. But his left hand was probably always going to be clumsy. Capable but clumsy.

  “Lucky” was one of those cruel words, sometimes. Her father had given his all to being one of the world’s top chefs. He had lost his wife and daughters to the career. He had lost himself to it. And now—the destruction of the essential deftness in his hands left him nothing. Nothing but himself.

  And her.

  “Am I getting the glaçage right?” She had chosen to make éclairs, because it was a pastry chef’s job and thus something her father wouldn’t have made with his own hands. His supervisory role, double-checking for perfection while she did all the work, should feel natural to him, not forced.

  Pierre Manon gave her éclairs a dull look. “No, but what does it matter?”

  What did it matter. From the Michelin three-star chef who had spent years recovering after he lost a star. Only in the past couple of years had he started to find his feet again, and that only thanks to Jolie’s inspiration to convince him to write a cookbook with her. An inch or two of his pride had grown back with every recipe he taught her, as if their work together was just the perfect blend of rain showers and sun to nurture his wounded amour-propre.

  “I suppose you’re planning on doing the demonstrations without me now,” he said, low.

  “No! I’ve put them off.” For over a month now. It wasn’t great, to delay the publicity events for the launch of the cookbook, but life happened. She could hardly be out signing books while her father, the chef whose name was on the cookbook, was hospitalized for a stroke. “We’ll do them when you’re ready.”

  He made a rumbling sound. “You think I’m going to get in front of a crowd and let them see me like this?”

  “Papa, I think people will admire you for recovering so well from a stroke and putting yourself back out there. Since we’re arguing that we make your recipes accessible to the home cook, I think it might even give them courage. If he can pull himself back after a stroke and do it, I can at least try, too.”

  Pierre Manon grunted.

  Jolie hesitated, studying him covertly. “Maybe we could get one of your old pastry chefs to demonstrate the pastry recipes for us. That could be the theme for some of the demonstrations. People would love it, I bet. Everyone would understand that you’re recovering from a stroke, Papa.”

  He thumped the rolling pin hard on the table. He didn’t say anything.

  She was probably stressing him too much already, just by mentioning his old pastry chefs. God, if she handled this lawsuit wrong she could kill him.

  She finished icing the éclairs, too dispirited to even bite into one, then took him out for a slow walk in the Jardins du Luxembourg. It was a nice June day, balmy and easy. A bright feeling seemed to glow in the people who spilled into the gardens at the perfect weather, in the laughter of the children playing with little sailboats on the pond in front of the Palace, in the fresh hope of new lovers clinging to each other, in the easy comfort of lovers of longer standing who lounged in chairs by each other reading, in the old, worn happiness of a white-haired couple walking hand in hand, whose love for each other had been used and worked like fifty-year-old shoes into something so exactly fitted to them that those bright new lovers wouldn’t recognize it in their high-heeled love. But oh, how they would be grateful for it, fifty years on, if they reached that perfect fit, too.

  Jolie loved walking in the Luxembourg Gardens at that time of year. She hoped it did her father good. But she couldn’t really tell. The door closing to his apartment afterward felt like she was locking him back into his chosen tomb, and she stood a long moment with her hand pressed against his door, her head bowed, heavy and anxious.

  Then she lifted her head.

  “I’m heading down to Nice,” sh
e told her sisters over the phone, striding out of the apartment building. “Papa doesn’t even need to know I’m gone. I should be back by tomorrow evening. I’m sure Gabriel Delange can see reason.”

  Chapter 2

  Jo knew the third time she missed the damn town that she was going to get there too late. Sainte-Mère. How many Sainte-Mères existed off the Côte d’Azur, and how many roads to those towns were under construction?

  She should never have accepted a stick shift from the car rental place. If they had held an automatic for her per her reservation, she would at least be negotiating these cobblestoned streets, narrower than her car, without fearing she would shift gears wrong and end up in a wall. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to get back before tomorrow morning, at this rate,” she told her oldest sister on the phone. “I’ll have to catch a late train. Cover for me.”

  “How?” Estelle asked.

  “I don’t know!” Jo cried, frantically trying to back down a near-vertical slope the size of a piece of spaghetti, in order to allow a car to pass coming the other way. “I’m sick or something and don’t want to expose him. You can come up with something!”

  It was twelve-thirty when she finally fit her car down the small spiral ramp that passed for the entrance to the parking lot for the old walled part of town. Plane trees shaded the little parking area, and she climbed a staircase from it to the place below Gabriel Delange’s restaurant.

  The scent of jasmine wafted over her as she stepped into the place, delicate and elusive, as the breeze stirred vines massed over sun-pale walls. A surprisingly quixotic and modern fountain rippled water softly in the center of a tranquil, shaded area of cobblestones. She stopped beneath the fountain’s stylized, edgy angel, dipping her hand into the water streaming from the golden rose it held. Fontaine Delange, said a little plaque.

  He had a city fountain named after him already? Well, why not? There were only twenty-six three-star restaurants in France, eighty in the world. He had put this little town on the map.

  His restaurant, Aux Anges, climbed up above the place in jumbled levels of ancient stone, a restored olive mill. She would have loved to sit under one of those little white parasols on its packed terrace high above, soaking up the view and exquisite food, biding her time until the kitchens calmed down after lunch. But, of course, his tables would be booked months in advance. In another restaurant, she might have been able to trade on her father’s name and her own nascent credentials as a food writer, but the name Manon was not going to do her any favors here.

  The scents, the heat, the sound of the fountain, the ancient worn stone all around her, all seemed to reach straight inside her and flick her tight-wound soul, loosing it in a rush. Stop. It will be all right. Your father is out of immediate danger, has two other daughters, and will survive a day without you. Take your time, take a breath of that hot-sweet-crisp air. Relief filled her at the same time as the air in her lungs. That breath smelled nothing like hospitals, or therapists’ offices, or the stubborn, heavy despair in her father’s apartment that seemed as unshakeable as the grime in the Paris air.

  She walked past an art gallery and another restaurant that delighted in welcoming all the naive tourists who had tried showing up at Aux Anges without reservations. A little auberge, or inn, gave onto the place, jasmine vines crawling all over its stone walls, red geraniums brightening its balconies.

  She turned down another street, then another, weaving her way to a secret, narrow alley, shaded by buildings that leaned close enough for a kiss, laundry stretching between balconies. Jasmine grew everywhere, tiny white flowers brushing their rich scent across her face.

  Kitchen noises would always evoke summer for her, summer and her visits to France and her father. The open windows and back door of Aux Anges let out heat, and the noises of knives and pots and people yelling, and a cacophony of scents: olive oil, lavender, nuts, meat, caramel. . . .

  As she approached the open door, the yelling grew louder, the same words overheard a million times in her father’s kitchens: “Service! J’ai dit service, merde, it’s going to be ruined. SERVICE, S’IL VOUS PLAÎT!”

  “—Fast as we can, merde – putain, watch out!”

  A cascade of dishes. Outraged yells. Insults echoed against the stone.

  She peeked through the door, unable to resist. As a child and teenager, she had been the kid outside a candy shop, confined to her father’s office, gazing at all that action, all that life: the insane speed and control and volcanic explosions as great culinary wonders were birthed and sent forth to be eaten.

  At least fifteen people in white and black blurred through a futuristic forest of steel and marble. Four people seemed to be doing the yelling, two chefs in white, two waiters in black tuxedos, separated by a wide counter and second higher shelf of steel: the pass, through which elegant plates slipped into the hands of waiters, who carried them into the dining rooms with—ideally—barely a second’s pause between when the plate was finished and when it headed toward the customer who was its destination. A wave of profound nostalgia swept Jolie.

  “Connard!” somebody yelled.

  “C’est toi, le connard, putain!”

  A big body straightened from the counter closest to the door and turned toward the scene, blocking her view of anything but those broad shoulders. Thick, overlong hair in a rich, dark brown, threaded with gold like a molten dark caramel, fell over the collar of the big man’s chef’s jacket, a collar marked with the bleu, blanc, rouge of a Meilleur Ouvrier de France. That bleu, blanc, rouge meant the chef could only be one person, but he certainly wasn’t skinny anymore. He had filled into that space she had used to only imagine him taking up, all muscled now and absolutely sure.

  His growl started low and built, built, until it filled the kitchen and spilled out into the street as a full-bodied beast’s roar, until she clapped her hands to her head to hold her hair on. Her ears buzzed until she wanted to reach inside them and somehow scratch the itch of it off.

  When it died down, there was dead silence. She gripped the edge of the stone wall by the door, her body tingling everywhere. Her nipples felt tight against her bra. Her skin hungered to be rubbed very hard.

  Gabriel Delange turned like a lion who had just finished chastising his cubs and spotted her.

  Her heart thumped as if she had been caught out on the savannah without a rifle. Her fight instinct urged her to stalk across the small space between them, sink her hands into that thick hair, jerk her body up him, and kiss that mouth of his until he stopped roaring with it.

  That would teach him.

  And her flight option wanted to stretch her arm a little higher on that door, exposing her vulnerable body to be savaged.

  She gripped that stone so hard it scraped her palm, fighting both urges.

  Gabriel stood still, gazing at her. Behind him, the frozen tableau melted: petits commis, waiters, sous-chefs, all returning to their tasks with high-speed efficiency, the dispute evaporated. Someone started cleaning up the fallen dishes. Someone else whipped a prepped plate off the wall, where little prongs allowed them to be stacked without touching each other, and began to form another magical creation on top of it.

  Jo tried to remember the professional motivation of her visit. She was wearing her let’s-talk-about-this-professionally pants. She was wearing her but-this-is-a-friendly-visit little sandals. Given the way her nipples were tingling, she would have preferred that her casually formal blouse have survived her one attempt to eat chocolate in the car while she was wandering around lost for hours, but no . . . her silky pale camisole was all she had left.

  Gabriel’s eyebrows rose just a little as his gaze flicked over her. Curious. Perhaps intrigued. Cautiously so.

  “You’re late,” he said flatly.

  “I had a lot of car trouble,” she apologized. It sounded better than saying she had spent hours circling Sainte-Mère and Sainte-Mère-Centre and Sainte-Mère-Vieux-Village, utterly lost. Wait, how did he know she was lat
e? This was a surprise visit. “I’m sorry. I know this is a bad time.”

  “Bon, allez.” He thrust a folded bundle of white cloth at her. She recognized the sturdy texture of it instantly: a chef’s jacket. A heavy professional apron followed. His gaze flicked over her again. “Where are your shoes?”

  “I—”

  “If you drop hot caramel on those painted toenails, I don’t want to hear about it. Coming to work without your shoes. I thought Aurélie told me you had interned with Daniel Laurier.”

  “Uh—”

  Eyes blue as the azure coast tightened at the corners. “You made it up to get a chance. Parfait. And you’re late. That’s all I need. Get dressed and go help Thomas with the grapefruit.”

  Probably she should have told him right then.

  But . . . she had been having a hellish two months, and . . . a sneak peek into Gabriel Delange’s kitchens. . . .

  A chance to work there through a lunch hour, to pretend she was part of it all. Not in an office. Not observing a chef’s careful, dumbed-down demonstration. Part of it.

  She had spent the past two months dealing with hospitals and fear and grief, and he had just handed her happiness on a plate. What was an impassioned food writer to do?

  Not the ethical thing, that was for darn sure.

  Chapter 3

  Oh, God, her fingers hurt. It was so much harder to be part of it than it was to work through a recipe slowly or to observe it. She did try. She was not without kitchen skills, not by any means. But the speed, the intensity, the amount of competing motion she had to dodge, and the sheer repetition of task surpassed anything she had ever done before. Jo hated grapefruit. She hadn’t known that before, but now she hated it with a profound and utter passion. Maybe she should give up cookbook writing, become a microbiologist, and create a fungus that would wipe grapefruit trees off the planet.

  She couldn’t even see all the beautiful things being created around her. She couldn’t look up from her task. Peeling and peeling and peeling, laying the sections out in glistening rows of pink for someone else’s use, until her fingers stung, and the acid sank into the stings, and the cold of the fruit made her clumsy.