B00CACT6TM EBOK (21 page)

Gabriel had kind of figured
he
would be cooking dinner and Jolie would be setting the table. Maybe they could do the cooking together. The idea seized him too hard. It sounded so damn—warm. Wait a minute. He stiffened. “You cook dinner for
me
. Why should Daniel Laurier unnerve you?”

“Because if I screw up with him, I can’t redeem myself with great sex,” she told him witheringly. And laughed.

Yes, there was no way around it: if he couldn’t convince her that his heart was worth holding onto, it was going to leave one hell of a shitty, awful hole in his chest when she dropped it and walked off.

Gabriel and Jolie had such a fun time in the kitchen—between laughter, butt pinches, threats to make someone regret interfering in someone else’s recipe, a couple of growls, and Gabriel pressing her back against the counter with his big body and acting menacing more times than she could count—that Jolie forgot any thought of nerves.

Until they opened the door to see Léa smiling up at Daniel, who was saying something to her. Both the Lauriers turned at once as the door opened, dropping their exchange automatically, but Léa’s expression stayed with Jolie.

How did she
do
that, pour so much love and support out for her husband that it was as if it was his lifeblood? Did he give her that much of himself
back
? Was it worth it?

Was there something wrong with Jo herself, that she couldn’t seem to properly nourish her own father with enough love and enthusiasm, that she was afraid to offer that unstinting love and support to Gabriel, who so clearly deserved it? Was it some selfishness she had learned from her mother? she thought, with a lash of anger so old she hadn’t realized the emotion still existed: that rage and pain from her childhood, when their mother had divorced their father and taken her and her sisters to the other side of the Atlantic so that they almost never saw him anymore, the rage that had grown up, that had learned to accept her mother’s side of it as valid. More valid.

All of her flinched at the thought of changing, of becoming Léa, the person who gave all of herself up to the people she loved. And yet there was no denying that Léa’s generosity of spirit made her extraordinarily beautiful. Even Jolie wanted to bask in it, despite a certain flicker of resentment at the woman for being a better person than she was.

(Why was she better? that resentment thought stubbornly. Why did the ability to give herself up without stinting make her
better
?)

She glanced up at Gabriel and caught a flicker of wistfulness on his face as he looked at the other couple, before he pressed the wistfulness away and bent down to kiss Léa’s cheeks.

Sometimes, she just hated that French cheek-kissing tradition. She knew Gabriel and Léa were some kind of distant cousin, but last she checked, nothing prevented a man from being in love with his third cousin and wishing to hell he had won her for himself.

Gabriel straightened, shaking Daniel’s hand so briskly the other man barely had time to finish kissing
Jolie
’s cheeks, and pulled them into the apartment.

Jolie enjoyed watching the two chefs together. Despite his earlier expressions of jealousy, Gabriel seemed very happy to see Daniel, and it was soon obvious that he still felt an affectionate, older-brother style pride in the younger man, which must date back to their days when Gabriel stepped in to help keep his pastry kitchen running and probably gave out all kinds of advice that saved Daniel’s untried neck.

Daniel had such a contained elegance to him while Gabriel’s energy was so expansive, just filling the whole room, that Jo had the whimsical impression of a black hole and a supernova trying to sit down to dinner together while still respecting each other’s space. She wondered what Gabriel’s impressions of the contrast between her and Léa were. Selfless versus selfish? The generous mother goddess versus the stubborn mortal?

He had said she wasn’t selfish, but he could hardly miss the contrast, could he?

At the end of the meal, she sighed, told herself not to be ridiculous, and then went into the bathroom to double-check her lipstick anyway. Because Léa had forgotten to put on lipstick, and she could at least have
that
advantage to being self-absorbed: she could manage to make her lips look more tempting.

“You’re nuts, you know that?” Gabriel murmured from the doorway, and she looked from the mirror to him, her heart brightening instantly.

“I know,” she said ruefully. “But you’ve got to admit she’s gorgeous.” When Léa looked up at Daniel, she was.

“Of course she’s gorgeous,” Gabriel said, amused and maybe a bit annoyed. “What do you think you are?”

Jolie dropped her lipstick and walked right up to him, wrapping her arms around his waist. He just picked her up and kissed that lipstick straight off her. “I love you,” he said, dropped her back on her feet, and went back to the guests.

Leaving Jolie clutching the sink, staring at the space he had been as if nothing could ever fill the imprint he had left on it.

Putain.
It was all Gabriel could do not to groan aloud and break one of those geranium pots on his balcony over his head or something. Could he not sit on himself
ever
?

How many million times had he told himself to go slow, to be careful? And there you go, just blabbed right out like that, because she was so cute, and she wrapped her arms around his waist like it was a perfect place to be, and she looked up at him with that smile, and it was so ridiculous for her to worry about Léa.

Look at Daniel
, he thought with anguish, as his old protégé gave that slight smile of his down at his wife. There was a world of love in those gray eyes, in the angle of his head, in the way his fingertips rubbed just slightly, almost constantly, on her hip.

But he didn’t go
jostling
her all the time with all his wants, throwing his heart out there like it was some bouncing ball that would just hop around happily and recover, instead of the fragile, terrified, essential organ it was.

Gabriel hesitated, remembering a bit more about the Daniel he had known at nineteen, when the man barely out of boyhood had just married Léa. Fine, so maybe Daniel
had
thrown his heart out there all unguarded like that, but, but . . . he had been
nineteen.
Gabriel was thirty-four. He should know better by now.

The problem was, when Jolie looked at him like that, she made him think anything was possible, even her.

And when she looked at him the way she did when she finally came out of the bathroom—wary, searching, confused, doubting, wondering—she made his heart lose all its bounce and slink down in him like sludge.

She drew Léa out on the balcony after that, with the excuse of showing her how beautiful the street looked from up there, and that was fine, in a way, because he didn’t need her hanging close to him and Daniel, making contrasts between cool elegant princes and roaring uncontrolled beasts. But whenever he caught her eyes on him through the balcony doors, her lips were parted. Like he’d shocked the hell out of her.

Damn it.

He managed to ply her with another glass of the wine Daniel had brought. Given that it was Daniel who had selected it, and in addition as worthy of pleasing another three-star chef’s palate, the wine was beyond sublime, so it wasn’t like she resisted.

But she
still
didn’t throw herself at him and say,
I love you, too.

And it had been a whole half hour!

Damn it.

“Are you all right?” Léa Laurier asked Jo, in the careful tones of someone not sure she should intrude. The night settling over the old village was lovely, a softening of time, until they themselves grew eternal, two people who could have stood there at any moment over more than a thousand years, who could be here still a thousand years hence. The street, at that hour of the night,was not quieter than the afternoon, as one might expect, but noisier, laughter coming from one apartment, the clank of dishes from another, someone playing the guitar, and a woman’s voice, from another apartment entirely, singing along to the guitar player’s tune. The guitarist played a love song, and Jo found herself watching the shifting curtains from which the music came, trying to make out if it was a man or a woman who played, if the musician watched the window of the woman singing, if they knew each other or wanted to. “You look as if you’ve gotten bad news,” Léa said tentatively.

“Not bad, no,” Jolie said, surprised.
I love you.
Not
bad. Scary, though. Overwhelming, when she quite stubbornly did not want to be overwhelmed. But the energy in him was
so
bright. So unutterably tempting.

“You’re not in a fight with Gabe?” Léa asked. “We didn’t come at a bad time? Because we can go.”

“No, of course not,” Jo said, really startled now and discomfited. How in the world did the other woman manage to be so sensitive even to a near-stranger’s needs? Didn’t that get
exhausting
? God, and Jo didn’t even want to take care of her own
father’
s needs, when they were so grim and desperate. She didn’t even want to take care of
Gabriel
’s needs more than a couple of hours a day and maybe on the restaurateur’s equivalent of weekends, and Gabriel’s needs were actually fun, in their greedy way. Why did she need so much time to just do what she wanted, take care of herself? “I was just thinking about something. I’m sorry.”
Je t’aime.
For an expression that was only two syllables long, it sure packed in a lot of material for thought.

Down the street, the guitar player shifted gradually from the love song to something merrier, more teasing. The pretty contralto stopped singing in the other apartment, but Jo could swear there was the shape of a shadow against the woman’s curtains, as if she gazed across the street from a gauzy hiding spot. Jo wondered if they both knew the song, if there was some joke or flirtation in it that she didn’t get.

“How do you do it?” she asked Léa suddenly.

The other woman gave her a look of friendly inquiry.

“The chef’s wife thing. Just pour yourself all into him that way. You never get—tired?”

Léa’s face blanked a second, and she took a half-step back until her bottom pressed against the balcony railing, as if Jolie had just reached straight into her and hurt her. She didn’t say anything, staring down into her wine.

Oh.

Jo looked away guiltily. The guitar song had shifted again, to something slow in a minor key, with a low brush of sound over it, and she realized after a moment that the brush of sound was actually the guitarist’s voice. A man, then. Singing so very softly, she wasn’t sure even the woman across the way from him was supposed to hear. Maybe he wasn’t sure either.

Just for a moment, she was envious of the imagined careful, delicate courtship, a courtship that gave both of them all the time in the world to tiptoe through the eggshells between self and a relationship, to feel their way tentatively toward what they wanted. Gabriel would already have jumped across that balcony, probably. The man had
no
stop button. In fact, she might want to start locking her balcony door just to make sure he wasn’t tempted into doing something stupid and getting hurt.

“You do have to be careful,” Léa said, and Jolie looked back at her, surprised. She had thought the conversation over, having veered onto too fragile territory. “To keep something for yourself. No man really needs you to give all yourself up to him. Or he shouldn’t. I’m, ah, trying to learn that.”

Good lord, that look on Léa’s face when she gazed at Daniel was her trying to hold herself
back
? She was starting to make Jo feel like the Wicked Witch of the West.

“You have to be careful to let him keep something for himself, too,” Léa said quietly. “They have a very strong drive to give all of themselves without stinting, these chefs.”

Jolie’s mouth twisted wryly. “Sometimes I think
I
am the thing Gabriel wants to keep for himself.”

“Yes,” Léa said, as if this was the most natural thing in the world. “That’s part of the trick. To balance yourself with that need.”

Jo studied the other woman as if Léa held the mysteries of the universe. She had, after all, been married to a chef eleven years, and no sign of divorce yet. On the other hand, Léa was only a few years older than she was, right? Why did Jo feel so much more immature?

“It’s a beautiful thing,” Léa said, and Jo realized she, too, was gazing at the guitar player and the gauzy, dreamy curtains between him and the woman in the other apartment. The curtains that kept them both safe. “To be loved like that.”

Jo could hear the other woman’s throat tightening, and she closed her hand around the balcony railing uneasily. She hadn’t realized how fast her question would lead her straight into a near-stranger’s heart.

Léa took a breath, her voice growing stronger again: “But you have to be careful of your—time for each other. And apart. For both your sakes.”

Jolie gave that some thought, rocked gently by that guitar song, and finally shook her head. “I think I must just be too selfish. I want space for myself.”

A little silence. “I’m not even sure I really understand what you mean,” Léa said, with a tone Jolie couldn’t quite place. Not sadness, not wistfulness, not envy. But something—some hint of something of those. “But sometimes I think it wouldn’t have hurt us at all, Daniel and me, to grow up a little bit more before we married, to each have had a chance to develop a greater sense of self. Selfishness, if that’s what you want to call it. It’s a rather delicate process, to start developing it at this stage of our lives instead.”

Hunh. Jolie tilted her head a little bit, trying not to too obviously stare at the other woman in the soft night, as if she was examining an alien species.

“I wouldn’t knock selfishness, if you’ve got it,” Léa said wryly and lifted her wine glass in a little toasting gesture. Before Jo could toast her back, she realized the gesture was intended for Daniel, through the balcony doors. “A little dose of it could go a long way, when making sure you don’t get swallowed whole by the most extraordinary person in your life.”