Free B00CACT6TM EBOK by Laura Florand

chef warily.
    Gabriel closed his hands around her hips and shifted her a few inches to the left, allowing the commis to get what he needed. “You might have to move around a lot, though,” he admitted. He sounded—wary. Anxious? Surely not. “There’s not really anywhere you can stand that someone won’t need to get through you once in a while.” One of his thumbs flexed into her hip. “Unless you would rather sit in my office?” he asked reluctantly.
    Her heart tightened. Not the office exile again. Not standing on the other side of that glass, watching perfection rise out of chaos. Not all safe and protected from his heat and growls and the scents and sounds around him. “Would that be easier for you?”
    “ No.” His hand flexed hard on her hips. “No, and I don’t do easy. I do things the way I want them.”
    Yes. Just that Rose on the cover of her cookbook proved that. And every other thing he had ever done with his life.
    And he had not been talking about doing her the way he wanted, so her mind could just quit going off on those kinky tracks. For crying out loud. Once a woman’s body started down the dark side in its fantasies she could never get it back, could she?

    He said something rough to one of his team, glanced back down at her, and got caught by her expression. A little smile kicked across his face and right in her belly at the same time. He bent his head. “I could probably do things the way you want them, too,” he whispered and grinned. “At least, you seem to think so.”
    Jo glared helplessly. To absolutely no avail. He took a plate from a black-tuxedoed waiter and set it in front of her, and then it was all over but the sighing.

    He fed her. The arrogant, rude, you-know-you-want-me chef. Sweeping in beside her. Sliding a plate in front of her. Excitedly telling her how he did it. Checking for her reaction. Leaving her to enjoy it while he kept working at the speed of a Tasmanian devil.
    He never took one single bite himself. He was just too busy—constructing plates with intense speed, magical things that disappeared, swept away by the black-clad waiters moving through with their elegant grace. He threw himself wholeheartedly into the work, as if he was of no higher rank than his gifted sous-chefs, or as if he just could not help it; he had to make sure it was done exactly right.
    It was like watching a superhero cartoon: a blur of motion and all the sudden a city had been built, a world saved—only instead of skyscrapers, his city was a fairytale wonderland. The only pauses ever in his motion were beside her. To offer her . . .
    Caramel melting inside a shell . . . a glistening dome of chocolate, flecked with gold . . . the sweet touch of peach. She couldn’t figure out why he seemed so—eager, careful, wary, almost shy—every time he slid something in front of her.
    Silk slid over her lips. Tender, fragile textures melted on her tongue. Gossamer beauty broke under her fork. Sometimes he had to force her to break it, grabbing the utensil from her and dashing it into some fantastical treasure: “All at once, you have to eat it all at once, all the flavors together, before the hot cools and the cold melts.”
    Until she started to wonder . . . if she wasn’t eating his heart.
    An exquisite, complex, vulnerable heart.
    A roar broke out, as she gazed down at the dessert he had set before her, its pale green shell shattered by her fork, the fresh, sweet red center of cherries spilling out like a wound. The roar wasn’t directed at her, but she looked toward it, breathing it in.
    The roaring beast shrugged his big shoulders, turning back toward her, and took his own deep breath when he saw her looking at him. “Do you like it?”
    “You’re beautiful,” she said involuntarily.
    His smile grew wider, a boyish delight. “You mean, this.” He gestured to the marble counter, indicating her dessert and everything that had come before or been served to others.
    “I said what I