Turning Up the Heat (9 page)

And again, that look of his which she used to try to capture so often as a teenager, brilliant through his lashes straight at her. She had gotten far worse at drawing since she was a teenager. It made her feel sad.

Daniel drew a slow finger over his own cheekbone in the drawing and looked at her. “Léa.”

She blushed and squeezed her fingers together so that they shut her eyes.

He kissed her right between her hands, her lips the one spot on her face left unshielded. Not touching her hands themselves, not trying to pull away her shield.

Then he spread out a couple of pareos on the sand and unzipped the soft cooler he had brought, watching her with bright eyes as she sipped juice made fresh from island grapefruits and barely sweetened with a secret touch of rosemary-infused syrup, then chilled to perfection. Her eyes met his as she sipped it, savoring his pleasure in offering it to her as much as the drink itself. “Thank you,” she murmured, and he smiled, turning back to the cooler.

Pulling out first pork sliced fine and intricately paired with slivers of avocado and pineapple. Then an elegant strata of mango and papaya and passion fruit, layered in perfect little ripples in a whiskey glass he must have stolen from the bar.

Sometimes she just loved him so much. His compulsion and his hunger and his pleasure in creating this and offering it to her. The way he took what he saw and tasted around him and refined it into something so perfect. She slipped her hand around his and kissed it, pressing a smile into his knuckles.

He turned his hand over and caressed her cheek as he let it fall slowly back down to the pareo. He watched her a while as she ate, a little smile on his mouth, and then relaxed onto his back, tucking his hands under his head.

“You’re not hungry?”

He shrugged.

“You nibbled in the kitchen.”

Another shrug. “Some.”

“Daniel, you were kayaking all day yesterday. You can’t survive on tasting sessions.”

He closed his eyes, the palms above them shading his face with here and there a brush of sun. She proffered him a sliver of mango, and he turned his head towards her immediately, lips parting willingly, kissing her fingers as he took it. But he didn’t sit up and reach for food for himself.

“You can’t possibly be snubbing
this
food. You made it.”

The faint tightening of his mouth. “I wasn’t snubbing the other food, Léa.”

She frowned at him.

Silence. Daniel locked his hands behind his head and looked at the palm fronds. “I can’t eat when I’m stressed,” he said at last, in what seemed an effort at evenness.

And eleven years—eleven years—of her trying so hard to feed him up as he prepped for something brutal, some championship or
Top Chef
competition, and of him swearing her food was delicious while he picked at it with a faint expression of revulsion…eleven years suddenly got put in a radically different perspective.

She stared at him. He gazed at the palm-filtered sky, his expression stoic somehow, determined.

“You’re stressed?” she asked cautiously. They were on a deserted beach, on a remote Pacific island, eating tropical delicacies that had just been made by one of the world’s top chefs and watching the waves. She wasn’t stressed. She had been thinking to hell with this attempt to discover a space for herself, that she wanted to curl up against his chest and not have any space at all.

Daniel’s expression didn’t change, but the tendons shifted in his forearms, as if something had happened to the hands hidden under his head. After a minute, he said, “I am enjoying this. Every single second of the waves, and the heat, and—you. I can’t remember the last time we spent so much time together. But I do know, Léa, that you don’t want me to be here, and that you’re just too sweet to kick me out. Plus, you can’t. I won’t go. So—yes,” that compression of his voice that made it so low, “I am stressed.”

“I don’t want to kick you out!” she protested. But she really wasn’t sure she wanted him to be here either.
I went away for me, and I don’t want this to become about somebody else.

“That’s what I said,” Daniel replied much too evenly. She wondered how exactly he had developed that evenness. She had seen the ability grow, over time, from the intense teenager who sometimes had no idea how to impose himself without anger to back him up. She wondered suddenly if it was still growing, if right now he was putting his ability to stay even to a great trial of strength.

“And there’s nothing to stress over, Daniel. This is not—honestly, this is just about me.”

Under that evenness, his jaw line was so tense. That tension reminded her of their wedding day, oddly. That taut profile beside her in the church, how straight his shoulders had been and how high his head. “All right,” he said. “But I’m just going to stick around, because I’m interested in things that are all about you.”

* * *

CHAPTER NINE

Daniel’s temper kept flicking him. He wanted to shout at her,
What the fuck do you
think
, that I can eat when you’re saying it’s all about you? As if you like it that way? As if you could get used to it? I’m the one who’s supposed to be the superstar, and I would
never
say that about
me.

But he didn’t shout because they had gotten past their tempestuous fights as teenagers trying to handle marriage and one of the world’s top restaurants, all at once. Other than occasional irritability, they hadn’t had a proper fight in years. He had learned to control his temper, and Léa—well, other than to give him a little leeway when he was clearly stressed sometimes, she hadn’t had that much to learn how to do. She had always been a sweet, infectiously happy kind of person.

He missed that infectious happiness for him right now so much that he was growing desperate, his stomach pure knots. It was a wonder he hadn’t cut his own finger off when he finally got a glimpse of that delight in him that morning.

And…he barely even saw her anymore as it was. How much less of him did she need, to let it be “all about her”? What the fuck had he not done right?

Once she had stopped traveling with him and started sleeping so damn much, they had pretty much been reduced to business contact at the restaurant and when he woke her up at one in the morning. And at the restaurant, he admittedly was not always at his best. Difficult, intense, driving everyone, all the time. Well…except that he
was
at his best—one of the best in the world—the only best of himself he had ever had time to be.

He sat up. “Léa”—

“Daniel,” she said at the same time, her head cocked, and he caught himself. On the alert for any fucking clue he could get as to what was going on. Her eyes searched his. “Have you ever regretted marrying me?”

It hit him like a bomb blast, no noise in his head, too much noise. His stomach already knotted, it was all he could do not to roll over and be sick. “
No
,” he said, strangled. Fuck. Fuck, what was she regretting?

Handing all her life, her inheritance, her sweet, beautiful self into the hands of a nineteen-year-old who hadn’t a clue how to be worth all that?

“It was so much work, at the beginning,” she said. “You were never sorry?”

“God, no, Léa.” He pressed his forehead into his fingers, shielding his face. And,
It’s still so much work. I can’t breathe for how much work I’m doing. I never see you.
“You—you were? Sorry?”

“
No!
” she sounded startled, and his head whipped up.

“Then what the fuck are we talking about?” he challenged harshly. “Why did you bring it up?”

“I—I just wondered,” she said awkwardly, pleating her hands. “I mean—I know you were always ambitious and wanted the restaurant, but I just”—

“You know
what
?” If it had been a bomb blast before, he didn’t even have words for this.

Her eyes widened. She scooted backward in the sand. “I mean, I just—Daniel,
you
know how you went after me, as soon as you saw the chef’s daughter.”

He was going to be physically sick. They might have to remove his stomach to let him live. “I went after the”—and then he exploded. If he could have touched her without hurting her, he might have thrown her somewhere. As it was, he lunged to all fours, digging fists into the sand to squeeze it, face into hers, making her topple back warily. “I went after you,” he said between his teeth. He wanted to
bite
that stunned mouth so near his. Bite it hard, so she bled as much as she had just made him. “Even though I thought your father would fire me when he found out. I can’t”—Him leaning over her against a wall of jasmine, slipping a flower behind her ear. The giddy pleasure of knowing it was working, knowing she was tempted by him. Shy, pretty, happy, eager…all for him. “You thought I was after the
restaurant
?”

“Not like that! Not—using me or anything. But it must have been part of my appeal. Subconsciously.”

“Léa.” He needed to tear something. Himself. Anything. “I admired your father. He was a huge man. It was a privilege to work for him. The first day I saw you, when you came back from that summer art class in Italy, I thought,
Don’t be an idiot. You can’t go after her. He’ll fire you in two seconds.
And the second day I saw you—I went after you.”

She sat on her butt, clinging to the sand, blinking at him as if he had just told her the Earth was actually a triangle. “Oh,
putain
,” he realized, the hurt so violent he didn’t know how to hold it. “You think I
married
you for the restaurant, too, don’t you?”

“Not
consciously
! You’re not like that!”

“You don’t think I was
conscious
of what that restaurant meant? I was
nineteen years old.
I hadn’t even risen to
second
yet. For my
career
, I needed to abandon ship like everyone else did, find another three-star chef to train under. But what the fuck would have happened to all your inheritance, if I took a different job? I married you because
no one
would have given an eighteen-year-old and her
boyfriend
any chance at all. I married you because losing your father tore you apart, and I wanted to fill that hole. I married you because I loved you, but fuck, Léa, we would probably have dated longer, until I was better established and you finished university, if your father hadn’t died, you know that.” His teeth clenched. The words slammed out of him. “How can you not know that?”

How could he have given his whole life to her, and she not realize it?

She sat staring at him, a sandy hand pressed to her mouth. Her eyes glittered, wet. Oh, fuck, not again. He could not
stand
it when she cried. He could barely even stand to be in the same room with her if she was in tears, like he had to shred his way out of his own skin.

“Léa.” He came up off his hands onto his knees, away from her. Sand spilled slowly from the fist he forced to open, as he fought for his breathing, labored and slow. “I married you because I thought you needed me. It never occurred to me to ask, back then, if you loved me, too.”

He stood. From his second fist, sand fell in a heavy clump. “I guess part of me knew you did, and part of me could never have believed I deserved it.”

And he really had to get out of here. He headed off down the beach.

It took him a long time to walk himself into any kind of calm. Walk and swim and walk some more. He didn’t come back until the sun was setting, an early equatorial night. The light angled across the water, astonishingly beautiful. How had he gone all his life without seeing this?

High up on the sand, someone had drawn giant letters. D-A-N…he stopped, his hands in his pockets. His name, enormous, encircled by a heart that was just starting to lose its tip to the tide.

All that anger still knotting his chest and his belly loosened, despite itself, his whole world brightening. She was just so sweet. He could imagine her dragging a stick, leaving it for him, an apology for letting him pour his whole life into her hands and still doubting he loved her. Or maybe just to remind him that she loved him, and that was the thing that mattered most.

Well, she was right about that.

But he didn’t go knock on her bungalow. She probably still wanted space.

Maybe he wanted some space, too.

He didn’t come back all day, and at night, after she finally saw his shadow move in the window of his bungalow, Léa slumped in her own window, staring out at the ocean horizon, her arms wrapped around herself, remembering his face. The shock of it. Those brilliant, beautiful eyes, that intense, driven face, the relentless man—all wide open with hurt.

He must love you more than you ever even began to guess.

How could that be?

The driven nineteen-year-old who wanted to become the very best. He hadn’t taken on the restaurant because it was his dream come true, he had taken it on because
she
was his dream, and he was willing to take her on, no matter how much she hampered him in the pursuit of that best?