B00CACT6TM EBOK (6 page)

How did Pierre Manon always manage to manipulate his situation to get everyone else to give him their all, so much more than he deserved?

“Forget it,” he said roughly, shoving to his feet. “Don’t mess up your career with your publishing house. I’ll think of something else.”

He headed back toward the hotel door and paused in front of her. Her eyes ate him up, making him very conscious of his naked upper body, of the way his shoulders blocked out her moonlight.
Chaton, you don’t have to just look. I know what I make might mislead you, but I myself am more than happy to be devoured like junk food.
“Do you have a boyfriend or something? Fiancé? Married?”

Her eyes went enormous. She tightened her computer over her breasts, a defensive shield, but he saw her throat work again. “No,” she whispered.

He shook his head, feeling heavy, puzzled. Like some damn
beast
who had wondered out of the woods and gotten lost, baffled, in society. “Then I don’t understand why, when you want me to kiss you so damn badly, you’ll get so mad if I do.”

He strode out before he could crack and try it anyway and heard her tablet smack onto the stone terrace behind him.

Fallen out of her lap as she lost herself in dazed arousal? Or just poorly aimed at his head?

Why was he so bad at this? Surely no other man had to sue a woman just so he could make her put up with him long enough that he had a chance to figure out how to talk to her.

Gabriel was standing doing bicep curls at the crack of dawn the next morning when he recognized the
financier
-colored ponytail and sleepy face of one of the women doing deep breathing in the early morning yoga class. Her eyes looked so heavy, he wondered why she had dragged herself out here.

So disciplined she sought out a gym the first morning traveling? Or had she lain awake all night, tossing and turning in hopeless arousal, and now needed the calming influence? He grinned wickedly, thinking of all the ways he could help—eventually—calm her down.

The class moved to all fours, and for about the fifteenth time in the past twenty-four hours, Gabriel found himself staring at that little butt in the air. This time clad in skin-tight leggings. She arched her back, her head and butt rising higher, then flexed it like a cat, butt dropping. Then arched it again. Oh, that was . . . that was . . . there was only so much a man could take, here.

One of the bodybuilders who spent half his life in this place walked by, with a sardonic look for Gabriel, who realized he had been frozen watching the yoga class for a good five minutes.

“I was ogling someone specific!” Gabriel muttered, shifting to a machine, which just happened to keep that little corner of the yoga room in view. “Not the whole class!”

The bodybuilder rolled his eyes and moved on to his own weights. Easy for him to be judgmental. Gabriel had caught the other man ogling
him
a few times, and occasionally the serious bodybuilder women, so clearly big muscles were where his sexual interests lay.

Gabriel on the other hand—in the class, Jolie flowed again, hips lifting higher, chest pressing to the ground, little body seeming to grow longer, her back one supple arch—Gabriel was all about
flexibility.

Jo stopped at the top of the narrow stone staircase that led into the
vieux village
from the more modern town that draped below it like a skirt, which was where the closest gym had been. It was a perfect morning, just the first hour of dawn, the scent of jasmine releasing all around her from the brush of her hand along the vine that crawled over the old railing. Gabriel’s fountain played softly in the empty
place
, shaded by the plane trees with their peeling bark. For now, it was cool, a brief respite before the day’s heat began to bake down.

She felt strong, supple, centered, at peace, after the hour of advanced yoga. As if she could handle anything, even a beast, with serene assurance and without that ridiculous attraction. Really, stress must have awakened some biological instinct to search out strength no matter what the cost to herself. There was no other explanation for how much he had drawn her.

A hard body nudged hers very gently from behind.

“
Bonjour
,” a low voice rumbled in her ear.

She whirled to find him standing on the staircase, immediately behind her and face almost on level with hers. Her center flew right out of her body and got lost somewhere, her serene assurance swamped under a wild urge to grab him and kiss him and see just how direct and ill-mannered he could be.

His face zoomed in even closer, and her heart lurched in twenty different directions as if tumbled in a dryer, and . . . he pressed a proper
bise
against each of her cheeks. Her whole being pulled toward the press of his freshly-shaved jaw, until it was all she could do not to rise up after him as he lifted his head. Barely lifted his head. His eyes glinted very blue as he studied hers from only centimeters away.

She swallowed.

He drew a breath.

She bit her lip.

His gaze tracked that, darkening.

She backed up.

One of his fists clenched briefly by his side.

“Good morning,” she said stiffly. “You don’t sleep very much.”

“You either.” He looked quite pleased about it. “And here you thought the only thing we had in common was a lawsuit and mutual sex appeal.”

She turned on her heel and headed across the
place,
determined to ignore him, and he struggled to fall into step beside her. He kept having to shorten his long, fast stride and bring himself back even. He wore another soft, fitted T-shirt, gray-green today, and jeans. His hair was wet, his scent fresh, clean, some light apple-scented soap, and was it just her, or did his arm muscles have even more fantastic definition than they had the night before?

“Are you going into work
already
?”

“Actually, I’m free for a couple of hours.” He cut a hopeful glance sideways at her, his eyebrows rising in question.

She gritted her teeth. Just in case she wanted to invite him up to her room?

His eyes flicked over her expression, and for a second, he looked almost glum, rubbing one hand over the back of his neck. Then he shook the glumness off him. “Did your yoga teacher let your class out early? I thought I had another five minutes.”

“Are you
stalking
me?”

He scowled briefly. “In my bestial way? I was working out.” He showed her the gym bag slung over his shoulder. “You mean, you didn’t see me? You didn’t know I was watching you while you went through some of those poses?”

Yep, all peace, all tranquility, completely gone. In their place, a burning sparked small and then grew until it burned in every part of her body that she had flexed and worked and stretched. And it had been a pretty comprehensive yoga class. So thoughts of him burned through pretty much all of her.

“I can imagine what you were thinking while you watched, thanks.” She headed up the streets of the old part of town. Probably better to explore their empty morning quiet than to head toward her hotel room with him following as if that was exactly where he expected her to take him.

Okay, maybe not
better,
but certainly
smarter.

Pff. That’s what you think
, her body protested sulkily.
It’s about time some psychologist did some Body Q studies to balance out all these dumb E.Q. and I.Q. things.

“Can you?” His grin came back. “Imagine what I was thinking? We should compare notes. Just to see if our imaginations are compatible.”

Compatible. With the imagination of the man who had invented that exquisite fragile Rose guarding a melting heart of gold? Her own heart melted out of her at the thought.

Anyone would have supposed that man would be—elegant. Courtly. Careful and refined. Poetic. Ready to lay his cloak at a woman’s feet.

Not openly stating that she would love to have him take her doggy-style and they both knew it.

She glared at him as a curve and descent of the street led them into another little
place.
In this one, the fountain was much older, a worn marble face of a beast spouting water from his mouth into a tiny basin. Benches curved in a half-moon around it, near walls completely covered with the thick glossy green vines and delicate white flowers of jasmine. In the early morning, the
place
was still in shadow and utterly silent, except for the water and their footsteps.

She stopped in front of it, and when he stopped beside her, she twisted so that she was on the other side of it and facing him. “You’re lucky you’re so hot,” she said bitterly.

“I know,” he said despairingly, shoving his hands into his pockets as he leaned a shoulder against the jasmine. “It doesn’t bear thinking of, what my social life would be like if I was ugly on top of everything else.
Now
what have I said?”

“You are so—incredibly—
arrogant
.”

“I
know.”
He sounded exasperated. “But I don’t see how I’ve been arrogant with
you.
It seems as if ignoring your signals indifferently would have been a lot more arrogant, but apparently I have no idea.”

Her signals.
She ground her teeth over the urge to take two great fistfuls of his hair, yank his head down
hard
, so that it hurt, and
bite
that sensual, arrogant mouth of his. And that would teach him for finding her signals so obvious.

“You treat me like I’m your . . . your . . .” She searched her brain for the kind of French vocabulary she had never heard as a girl visiting her father and his family in the summer. “
Pute.”

Gabriel looked as if he had been walking along, whistling cheerfully, and out of nowhere found his face slammed with a skillet. Cartoonish. It took him a full minute to get any sound out at all. “I
what
?”

She pressed her lips together and glared at him, refusing to repeat the nasty word for a hooker.

He shook his head as if it was still ringing and sat down abruptly on the stone bench beside that worn marble face, the jasmine tangling wildly behind him over the stone walls. “I really do have bestial manners, then,” he said, smashed.

She started to wish she had bitten her tongue. He looked—distressed. He looked as if he wasn’t going to go around calling it as he saw it with her anymore, with that blunt accuracy that was so infuriating and so arousing.

“That’s not how I’m thinking about you,” he said after a moment. She hadn’t known he could sound so subdued. She didn’t like it nearly as much as she had thought she would. “Like a—
pute.
I mean, I don’t”—his hands squeezed the stone of the bench—“what qualifies as treating you like a
pute
, exactly? The fact that I want to have sex with you?”

Would her body
quit melting
when he said things like that? “The fact that you
act
like all you have to do is snap your fingers.”

He gaped at her. Indignation started to grow in his face. “Snapping my fingers is what I do with my staff. If they are really slow and I have to get pointed about it. I’ve never snapped my fingers at you. I talk to you like you’re an equal. Because you
are.
”

She folded her arms over her chest. Just in case her shirt wasn’t thick enough and he was reading her attraction to him like a three-step recipe again. “This is how you talk to all your equals?” she challenged dryly.

“
No
,” he said, as if she was dense. “But the others don’t look at me as if they wanted me to haul them off somewhere dark and dangerous.”

She was really going to have to kill him.

“It’s incredibly arousing,” he confessed.

Her eyes flickered involuntarily down his body—the way the T-shirt clung to the flat abs, and his arm muscles stood out from the tension in his hands, and the long legs stretched there, on that bench in that intensely peaceful space of jasmine and running water and ancient stone. The realization that he was telling the truth jolted through her: he was aroused. It was just the two of them, hidden here in the early morning, and he wanted her. If she walked up to him, if she leaned down into him, he would—

“I could probably behave better if you would quit looking at me like that. Maybe. It might be too late,” he admitted. “I’ve kind of gotten the idea in my head at this point.”

“So you’re behaving like this because I look easy,” she said bitterly.

His eyebrows drew together. “What? I never said that at all.” He hesitated. “
Enfin
—you can be. Easy. If you want to be. I won’t think less of you.” He snuck a hopeful glance at her. “I don’t
disrespect
you because you want to have sex with me, you know. If that’s where the
pute
thing came from.”

She gritted her teeth, torn between the overwhelming desire to hit him and the one to completely give in, to be just—easy. Just go with it. Just get hauled off to somewhere dark and dangerous and growled at some more.
Working with chefs does not mean you have to get sexually involved with them. You idiot. You don’t have to perpetuate any cycles.

“But I’m behaving—what is so wrong with the way I’m behaving?—anyway, whatever I’m doing, I’m doing it because you look like something delicious.”

Her lips parted.

So did his. “Just this sweet, buttery, golden-brown, pistachio-kissed deliciousness, like I could just bite my teeth into you so gently—” His hands were shaping the air as he talked. His tongue touched his teeth, and his teeth came slowly together as if they were sinking into something. “And you’re right there, just—right there, as if you
want
me to. And then I hit some electrified forcefield every time I try. It makes me feel like one of those dogs with the collar and the invisible fence.” He gave his wet, shaggy head a shake. “And it makes me
starving.
”

Starving. Her soul seemed to run right out of her body like the rippling flow of the fountain, into the palm of his hands. To think of this man starving for her.

He squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh,
putain
, you’re doing it again.”