Free B00CACT6TM EBOK by Laura Florand Page A

meant.”
    His hand froze in the middle of the sweeping gesture. It turned, pressing flat against the marble, and his head bent. She couldn’t read his expression, as he stared down at his hand, so still. It was almost as if he was badly shaken, as if something was rising out of the shaking, warring inside him. At last he turned his head enough to give her a troubled, anxious look.
    Her own expression grew troubled in response. What was she doing ? Where was she going with this?
    “I’m done for a couple of hours.” He straightened and rolled his shoulders. His hands went to the white buttons on his jacket, and her erogenous zones all skittered like uncontrollable brats. “Shall we go talk about that Rose you stole from me?”

Chapter 9
    His path through town led them up a wide stairway lined with an ancient vine, thicker than his wrist, and along a pedestrian street so narrow he could stretch out his hands to touch both walls. Old arched doorways, painted in blues, greens, yellows, and burnt oranges, matched the beautiful sea-shades of the shutters above them. Wrought iron tables or old, distressed wooden ones with peeling paint stood outside doorways beside little chairs and potted flowers, creating inviting spots. Laundry hung above them from lines strung between balconies, like festival flags.
    They came out onto a flat cobblestoned terrace area with a wide gravel space for boules over to one edge, old men playing against a backdrop of distant sea. Jolie itched to frame them in her camera, the blue of the famously azure coast, the plane trees, the silver ball flying through the air, caught suspended against a far-off dream. Instead, she let the image soak into her brain, joining Gabriel at a café table with a view over the sweeping skirt of civilization draped below the hilltown, all its crowded, heavily populated way to the sea.
    Gabriel ordered coffee, and she asked for a Perrier. For all the opulent food she had been eating, she felt oddly light, fresh. He formed delight out of flavors, textures, beauty, never relying on an easy use of too much sugar or fat.
    As they sat, the tension in Gabriel’s muscles drained away from him slowly, his body growing heavy in the chair, as if he would never leave it again. But he would. Seven more intense hours at least tonight before he could sleep.
    “Do you ever make your Rose?” she asked. “I didn’t see it on the menu.” Or in his kitchens. She didn’t want to admit to him how heavily disappointment had squeezed her not to taste that Rose from his hands.
    He shook his head. “I stopped making it after your father stole it from me the first time. It—hurt too much.” He looked out toward the yacht-jeweled sea.
    She rolled her napkin-wrapped utensils, remembering him a little more clearly from when he was twenty-three, so skinny his bones stood out and burning with passion. I lost thirty pounds. And his girlfriend. And won a star. And got the very lousiest reward possible.
    Of course, so had her father gotten a crappy reward, years earlier, when his wife had divorced him and taken Jolie and her sisters to the other side of the sea. It took all of you, being a top chef. And all of everybody who loved you, too. As fascinated as she was by these starred creatures, she wouldn’t want to be one in a million years. Nor trust her life and happiness to one.
    Which made it increasingly terrifying that happiness seemed to spring out of her just being near Gabriel, great curling vines of it trying to tie her to him in an exasperated tangle.
    “So I had another idea,” Gabriel said.
    She bit her lower lip and waited. His eyes flickered to her mouth and stayed there a long, frustrated moment. But then the waiter arrived with his coffee, and he curled his hand around the tiny white cup like a life preserver.
    “You could write my cookbook for me. It’s something I need to do, I just hate trying to sit down and put it into words. If I had words for these things, I would be