Turning Up the Heat (A Novella in the Vie en Roses Series) Page 7

  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?

  Being the best was what drove Daniel. His absolute, dominant need.

  He loved her, she had never doubted that. But he had to be the best. Right?

  Top Chef, her brain whispered, as if she was missing something still. He said he didn’t want to do Top Chef.

  His fingertips touching his jaw, tracing a memory of her kisses...

  She pressed her forehead into her palms, knotting her fingers through her hair, not even sure what to do anymore. She was heart-soaringly enraptured by the thought that he might love her so much. And yet, how could she soar on that love when her wings felt atrophied?

  Daniel, she thought, to his shadow across the lagoon on his dock, I didn’t mean to hurt you. I don’t mean to hurt you.

  I don’t mean to hurt us.

  And because of that, she would make it up to him. Tomorrow she would. She would stop trying to defend her space. Exhaustion swept her at the thought, and she tried to fight it with images of Daniel. Angry, hurt, too tense to eat, sand spilling from an unclenched fist...each image she used to fight her own fatigue seemed only to increase it. I love you, I love you, my wonderful white-knight hero, who fought every dragon of the food world. For me.

  The burns, and the critics, and the brutal unrelenting work, and the hostility of the whole world toward two teenagers with hubris. There had been so many dragons.

  If he did all that for her, how could she possibly have the right to want still more of something for herself?

  And yet...what if it was even more important than I realized, that this little escape be really, truly...all about me?

  * * *

  CHAPTER TEN

  When Daniel came out of his bungalow just before sunrise, Léa was sitting cross-legged on his wooden deck, a quiet, dark figure in the gray-blue light, the first hint of gold sliding over the water.

  She reached up a hand, pulling him down to sit beside her. Then she leaned her head against his chest and wrapped her
arms around him, not saying anything, just pressing into him.

  His stomach relaxed for the first time since the waterfall. He slipped an arm very carefully around her. “How’s the back?” How are you? How are we? Is everything okay now?

  She nodded against his chest without speaking, which he took to mean it was better. Maybe that a lot of things were better. He checked under her top, another tunic from the gift shop. Skin starting to peel. So, safe to the touch.

  He tightened his arm abruptly, and then, control snapped, it went tighter, and tighter, until she made a little sound of protest. His own skin flinched and begged him to stop, but that he could ignore. He had had worse burns than the sunburn he had earned spending the entire day brooding on the beach and in the water. Burns from everything from hot oil to liquid nitrogen to—the worst—molten caramel. Just not all over every inch of his chest and back and arms at once. With her arms wrapped around those burns, squeezing them.

  Still, it was worth it. She was the one who protested his tight hold.

  “Pardon.” He loosened his hold, breathing deeply. It was the first time since he had discovered her missing that he felt like he could breathe. The sky flushed pink, the sun reaching the horizon on the other side of the island.

  “Spend the day with me?” she said.

  Oh, thank God. A smile kicked across his face, and Léa’s brightened in relief. His stomach loosened enough to point out that it was pretty damn hungry and could they eat soon. It made him feel a little giddy. After all that anger and hurt and that desperate knot of fear. “If I can make love to you until you beg for mercy, I might be persuaded,” he told her, with a slow sideways smile. “Otherwise, I should go help Moea in the kitchens. This place is in serious need of a restaurant that can draw guests.”

  She blinked and looked down. Then she glanced up at him sideways and away.She didn’t say anything, but a slow blush climbed up her cheeks, like the flush on the horizon. Exactly like when they were teenagers, she had always been too embarrassed to say what she wanted out loud, at least until they got a lot more into the heat of things.

  And just like when they were teenagers, if in the end he didn’t get to make love to her and just got his hands under her shirt, he would probably still manage to be happy as hell.

  “You’re the one sunburned today,” she reproved him. Although she was tempted. He had tried to tempt her often enough to know when it was working, and it always made heat press through his veins.

  “Back and front, too.” He went ahead and pulled off his shirt, using the moment it passed over his face to hide an unusual self-satisfaction. Sometimes it paid to work like a dog at an extremely physical job, too stressed to eat enough. One thing he had was definition. He liked the rare occasions when he got to make love to her in the daylight, where she could get a proper look at that definition, because he liked reminding her that he had more things going for him than being her superhero chef. Sometimes it was nice to be—just the man she liked to touch.

  He twisted a little, ostensibly so she could view the sunburn both back and front, but really because it flexed his abs and made her eyes track down his body and her pupils eat up a bit more of her pretty gold-brown eyes. He leaned into her, savoring the way her eyes stroked up his whole body as he grew closer, until they caught on his. He lowered his voice, a husk of sex all through it: “This time you won’t be able to touch me. You won’t even be able to fight me off, while I do what I want to you.”

  Good God, this tropical island vacation must be going to his head. Or maybe it was just the fact that she had finally wrapped her arms around him, like she was glad to hold him again. He hadn’t felt so—boyishly cocky since they were teenagers, and he leaned over her on a hillside, and saw her eyes widen, and knew she was going to let him kiss her because she just couldn’t resist any more than he could.

  Things had just gotten so intense, not long after that. He hadn’t had any energy left for boyish cockiness. He had needed it all for hard-driven arrogance, the refusal to let anyone or anything keep him down when she needed him to rise.

  She drew a breath, like someone making sure she had enough oxygen for a plunge. “What if I just run my nails very lightly down that sunburn?” she managed, her own voice husky even while she tried for dryness. “Would that fight you off?”

  He laughed and picked up her hand to kiss the inside of her wrist. Her pulse jumped under his fingers. “As if you could be that mean. But my butt is free. Unlike you, I kept mine covered.” He slipped her hand right under his waistband, curving it around one cheek. “You can grab that as much as you want.” He brought his mouth right to her ear. “And even pull hard.”

  She twisted her head into his neck, a slow, sensual nuzzle, and it hit him with an erotic jolt: she was savoring his scent. Oh, putain. That was so—hot. And so deliciously love-filled and sweet, all at once. “At least let me put aloe on you,” she murmured.

  “Mmm, now you’re getting kinky.” He pulled her to her feet with him. “I’ll tell you what. Let’s do my idea first, about making you beg for mercy, and then you can put nasty stuff on me that no one would want to touch. When I need a break from your insatiable demands.” He was enjoying being outrageous far more than he had ever had time to realize he could.

  She laughed helplessly, that old delight in him all twined with arousal. Heat surged higher in him. “Daniel, the sooner you put some on the better.”

  “Well. I guess you’ll have to wear me out fast.”

  He drew her into her bungalow to pack a bag for the day. Getting inside it without any of her strange, terrifying resistance relaxed him yet another degree. Everything was going to be just fine. He could breathe again. They had cleared up a misunderstanding, and she was sorry, and she still loved him, and it was all going to be okay. It hurt still, yes, that she could ever have thought that he had married her for the restaurant. Ever have thought it for one second, let alone as the backdrop of her opinion of him for eleven fucking years.

  But...he could get past that. He was—not difficult, with her. He never had been. A heart in the sand, her head pressed against his chest in apology—

  He would do anything, for her. For that. A claim that had been tested, over and over, after her father’s death, when he had had to make good on all his claims. He had, indeed, done anything. Everything. Over and over and over.

  These past few months, when she had stopped traveling with him, he had begun to feel stretched beyond bearing. But maybe this was a lesson to him. He could stand the pace, after all. As long as she was there as his reason.

  When she held onto him so tightly, his world re-stabilized. He could do the rest, as long as he didn’t feel as if the entire granite base on which his world was built had just turned into a sandcastle on some tropical beach, with the tide coming in.

  He tried to pack up her art supplies for their walk, and a shadow shifted across her face. “They’ll be a pain to carry, don’t worry about them.”

  He straightened slowly, the tote in hand, something uneasy twisting through his sense of relief. “I don’t mind.”

  “Just let it go.” She looked oddly tense, like when she had to fire someone at the restaurant, or those early years when she had tried to do their taxes on her own. The first time she had tried to do them, at eighteen, he had found her sitting over the papers crying.

  It had about killed him, and he had gone straight back into the kitchens and worked all night, experimenting with new dishes, determined to wow the critics so much that they could finally afford to pay her father’s old accountant again. He wondered suddenly if, instead, he should have stepped into the office and given her a hug. That would have been so much harder to do, though, face her tears helplessly.

  “I’ll just carry them,” he said. “You might change your mind.” Putain, she had better not give up on something just because it didn’t turn out perfectly the first time. Not after the way he had lived his life.

  “You don’t need to have a strap rubbing ag
ainst your shoulder,” she snapped.

  His eyebrows went up a little. Léa could get snappish under pressure at the restaurant, but not in many other circumstances. It was more his style, to be honest, and usually, unfortunately, directed a bit at her, his reason for taking on so many stressors.

  “How about a sketchbook and some pencils?” He tucked them into a backpack with their lunch. “Here. You can carry them.” He slipped the backpack onto her shoulders and was deeply offended when she accepted that matter-of-factly, not with the startled indignation he had expected. “Okay, give it back.”

  “No, I’m fine.” She tried to tighten the shoulderstraps for her smaller build. “Put the aloe in there, too, all right?”

  “Léa, give me that.” He pulled on the pack.

  She tightened her hands around the straps. “It will hurt your shoulders! It’s your own fault for not putting sunscreen on.”

  “So I’ll carry it in one hand. It’s not that heavy. Léa”—He worked his fingers under hers, prying a hand away from the straps. She locked it back around as soon as he shifted his efforts to the other hand.

  “I’m fine.” Her mouth set stubbornly.

  He shifted in frustration, profoundly uncomfortable.

  “That will teach you not to wear sunscreen,” she informed him.

  It would indeed. The sight of his wife carrying their load made everything about him itch to right the situation. “You know what? Let’s just stay here.” He pushed her facedown onto her bed, and while her hands were trapped under her weight, flicked the straps completely undone and pulled the backpack off her, setting it to the side. Fast hands came with the profession. “This would be a beautiful place to spend a day out of the sun.”

  It would, too. Like his, her bungalow had a little glass section in the floor through which they could watch the fish. She had closed the shutters facing the resort’s main area, for privacy, but all the other wide windows were thrown open to the wind and sea. Staff from the resort had set a bouquet of tiare buds on the nightstand, so that the sweet, rich scent filled the space, wafted gently back and forth by the sea breezes. Rattan furniture emphasized the vacation feel of the room, as did the great blue hibiscus quilted onto her white bedspread.