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  Gabriel stopped by her station just as she was sneaking her thumb between her lips to suck the acid off it, for a second’s relief, and she glanced up to find his eyes on her mouth, his eyebrows lifting a little. Oh, merde, hygiene. She dropped a grapefruit and dove after it, right in the path of a sous-chef carrying a giant bowl of financier batter.

  The sous dodged, the heavy bowl whirling him around as his knees slammed into her ribs, and just before both he and his forty-pound bowl came crashing down on her, someone caught him. “Umph,” she muttered weakly, peering up at the new hand cradling the bowl, as another hand gripped the sous-chef’s shoulder.

  A broad, strong hand. Lots of little scars from nicks and burns. Dark brown curls of hair. . .

  Gabriel slipped the bowl into its spot on the mixing machine, righted his sous-chef, sent him on his way, and gazed down at her a moment. Her body tingled in anticipation of a punishing growl. But he just looked at her.

  Jo stretched a little farther—absurdly conscious of the angle at which her butt was sticking into the air as she arched to reach under the whirring mixing machine—and hauled out the yellow fruit. She waved the trophy at him brightly.

  Gabriel sighed. “Please get up.” He reached down to grab her arm.

  Wow, Jo thought as she floated feather-light to her feet. That was one strong grip.

  “Maybe you should try something besides grapefruit,” Gabriel said.

  Jo sent an envious look down the counters to his sous-chefs, concocting treasures out of—here a bit of foam being laid gently down on a bed of woodland strawberries. There a curl of jasmine over a strange, quixotic, Chambordian tower of chocolate. There someone was dipping something into liquid nitrogen, the vapor rising around him as if he were a sorcerer’s apprentice.

  “Filling molds.” Gabriel took her shoulders and steered her to a bare counter space. A space very far from where the sous-chefs were finishing works of wonder and calling for waiters, “Service, s’il vous plaît! Service!”

  “Just like this.” He pulled a great pan of rectangular molds out from under the counter, took a large pastry bag, and squeezed batter from it into a mold. Her eyes tracked that big hand’s gentle, precise squeeze with helpless fascination. “To just this level. And then the pistachios on top. Just this amount.” He sprinkled a pinch and glanced from the golden batter, with its scattering of green, to her face, a little smile flashing across his face as if he was enjoying some secret he didn’t expect her to know. “You can do that, right?”

  He sounded as if he should be sure of her ability to do that, but somehow wasn’t.

  “Of course,” Jo said, smarting. She was Pierre Manon’s daughter. Even if her father had always made her stay in his office, out of the way, staring through the glass walls at all the fun. And she was a really good food writer. She was going to be one of the best food writers in the world. She was working on it. She just—usually got one-on-one attention from the chef teaching her a recipe. They worked through it slowly. She got to concentrate, and take her time and lots and lots of notes and photos, and feel things, not just peel, chop, drop. . . .

  She glanced up. In the time it had taken her to think three thoughts, Gabriel had gone about his business, accomplished six impossible things—she could see their fantastical incredibility waiting to be taken up to the tables—and now reappeared beside her, pressing in close to allow a petit commis to pass. No one took up more space than necessary in a kitchen. She knew that. There was no reason for her to feel so . . . small. Completely conscious of his proximity. Wishing he would roar again.

  How would that feel, that bass vibrating over her skin from so close? He needed to shave, but under that two-day growth were good, strong lines of jaw, an intense—

  “I was thinking you could fill all the molds today,” Gabriel said.

  She looked back down at the four she had filled—in the time it had taken him to finish six desserts of such beauty and complexity she wanted to cry from pleasure just looking at them.

  Her four filled molds looked absolutely perfect, too, she tried to convince herself. She was going to scatter the pistachios on them soon.

  “Are your financiers made from ground pistachio?” she asked. “Is that your secret?”

  “Why don’t we talk about my secrets later? Could you hurry it up? We’ll need those for the next round of tables, and they take twenty minutes to cook.”

  Jo gritted her teeth and thought about telling him she wasn’t his new employee, but a chaos of people blurred around her as a new rush of orders came in, and maybe she should just shut her mouth, help as much as she could, and talk to him later. Leaving him in the lurch in the middle of the lunch service might not be the best way to convince him not to bring a lawsuit.

  So she filled the first sheet of forty molds. Quickly. Tried to fill quickly. She scattered pistachios, pausing a moment to enjoy the effect of the little green-brown bits against the gold, and glanced up to catch Gabriel’s eye on her. She flushed, scattered more quickly, grabbed the huge pan and spun toward the ovens.

  Smack. The tallest of his sous-chefs, just slipping behind her, took it right in the chest. It went flying, flipped once, and landed face-down beside Gabriel, who was blowing foam off his hand so that it floated, oh-so-gently, to land on top of a little flower made of peaches, like an angel’s wing coming to rest.

  He didn’t stop blowing because forty financiers ended up splattered over his feet. He let the foam drift gently down, while Jo stood caught by that careful pursing of his mouth, that delicate, controlled stream of air.

  Ooh. Could she just melt against the marble?

  He slid the plate over to the counter where the tuxedoed waiters appeared, called, “Service!” and only then glanced at her and down at the pan. Her nipples tightened in longing for a roar, but he only sighed and shook his head.

  Her heart deflated. She didn’t deserve a roar?

  Crouching at his feet, she started to clean up the mess.

  She didn’t know why her butt, thrust in the air, kept burning while she did that, because every time she glanced up, he was not looking at it at all.

  Two hours later, Jo gave her knife a blurry look and thanked God in heaven that her mother had put her foot down when Jo wanted to leave school and become a chef instead of finishing her education. “Do something where you can live a normal life,” her mother had said, like someone who actually remembered what a normal life had been, before her failed marriage to Pierre Manon. “And have a family.”

  What she hadn’t also added was Do something where you can be a little lazier. Like sit down, take a break, not cut off your own fingers from fatigue. There was something to be said for spending half your time typing into a computer.

  A hand closed over her wrist, holding it firmly. Another deftly removed her clumsy knife, setting it on the counter. “Come here,” Gabriel said, quite gently.

  Around them, people were taking off aprons and white jackets and slipping out into the street. Lunch was over, and the restaurant was closing until seven-thirty, meaning everyone had a break until five-thirty. She followed Gabriel Delange numbly into his office, smaller than her father’s old office but with the same big glass windows that allowed him to see the kitchens when he was in it.

  She was half-expecting a muted roar or at least a dressing-down, but Gabriel smiled at her. Her heart sparked in ridiculous pleasure. Had she passed the test? Was she worth being taken on as a petit commis? Wait a minute, she didn’t want to be taken on as menial labor in his kitchen. That fantasy had died in the first hour of grapefruit sectioning. She wrote about this kind of thing, she didn’t have to do it for thirteen hours a day. Doing it was brutal. She tried to loosen her apron strings and discovered her fingers had grown too clumsy to work the knot. Plus, they stung.

  “I think we know this isn’t going to work out,” Gabriel said gently.

  She was so absurdly disappointed that anyone would think she had just failed a major exam. She jerked on the stup
id knot, surprised to find her nostrils stinging as much as her fingers. Okay, that was just insane. Maybe she was a little on edge, between the book release, her father’s stroke, the lawsuit, and just getting hired and fired by one of the world’s greatest chefs in under three hours.

  “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.

  Chapter 4

  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 recipe
s 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?”