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

by Laura Florand

  Daniel stared at him incredulously. “I’m busy.” He never, ever, ever stopped. Even the five hours he slept a night, he was usually working in his dreams. “And when have you been talking to Léa?”

  “She ate lunch with us yesterday.” During the rose harvest, as during the jasmine harvest, even those of the Rosier family not usually directly involved with the production of raw materials often pitched in, particularly when there were problems with the short-term labor supply. And the family, as well as some of the closer, long-standing employees, would all eat together under an old oak tree in between the extraction plant and the old patriarchal farmhouse. Léa liked sometimes to join them, boxing up macarons or some special cake from the restaurant to share, and once in a while, on a Monday when the restaurant was closed, Daniel managed to join her.

  It was—really nice when he could. Sitting in the shade, talking to their neighbors, her distant cousins, sipping wine someone had thought to set aside ten years ago to bring pleasure to their later selves. It made him feel—young again. It made him turn his head in his chair and smile at Léa in a lazy, easy pleasure, and almost always, if he still had time, he would make love to her later in their room high above the sea and roses. Everything happy. Everything pleasure. Monday afternoon.

  If he wasn’t in Japan, or Paris, or tracking down some supply issue before it ruined the restaurant, it was his favorite time of the week.

  Lately, especially as Léa grew more detached somehow from the restaurant, it often seemed as if he worked all week just for that one afternoon. Sometimes he worked all month for it, having to work through Monday after Monday but knowing that eventually, a week or two or three from now, he would manage to sink into another Monday with her again.

  “What did she say?” Daniel asked.

  Matt looked rather blank. “I don’t know. I just remember us talking about Tahiti. Did anyone ever dream of running off there, that kind of thing.”

  Léa had never mentioned Tahiti to him in their entire life together. Maybe when they were teenagers, before her father died, she had said something about it being fun to honeymoon in Hawaii? Before they had seriously talked about marriage, two kids playing with the idea without ever really broaching it. He had liked the daydream himself, imagining them snorkeling among bright-colored fish and him being an instant success at surfing, striding cockily out of the waves toward Léa, stretched in a bikini under the shade of a palm tree.

  But her father’s death had put paid to any possibility of a honeymoon. Still to this day, when Daniel remembered that time after her father’s funeral and the pressure on him at nineteen not to lose that restaurant for her by losing all its stars, the hair rose all along the back of his neck and his skull tightened.

  And Léa. Putain, but she had been brave. Putting her trust in him. Setting her shoulder beside his. We are in this together. And I love you.

  Merde, had she been wanting a honeymoon in the tropics all this time? Why hadn’t she ever said anything?

  And rising under that, something colder, deeper, darker, that he didn’t know how to articulate except in hunting for kidnappers or possible adulterous lovers: when a wife disappeared for a “week or two, I don’t know” without even talking about it with her husband first, what did that really mean? Had she left him?

  Was she thinking about leaving him?

  Was she deciding that right now?

  Why would she leave him? What more could he possibly do for her?

  * * *

  CHAPTER THREE

  Léa lay on the wooden deck over the water on day three of her escape, head on her folded arms, gazing at the colored fish swimming in aquamarine water. The heat baked into her back. She felt like a solar panel, energy slowly charging from that sun. Recently constructed on one of the more remote and lesser-known French Polynesian islands, the resort clearly wasn’t drawing the clientele hoped for. Thus the Internet deal that had caught her attention and started her thinking about running away to the tropics, the escape nearly affordable.

  Not that they were hard up. Daniel’s fees for consulting and Top Chef appearances were outrageous, and the restaurant itself did extremely well. Back when she was terrified she would manage to lose everything her father had worked for before he was even cold in his grave, she had learned how to cut pennies without affecting quality, how to run it efficiently, without waste of people or products. She and Daniel used to fight sometimes, him insisting that some food item had to be absolute top quality, her arguing against the price, until he kissed her desperately and said, Trust me, trust me, trust me.

  So she would try to trust him. Try to relax. And he had deserved that trust and more.

  The first tear drops, thinking of that, surprised her. Her eyes opened very wide, staring into the aquamarine, but another drop fell and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, only a long-tailed white bird flying toward the sun.

  More tears. A silent rain of them. She didn’t know where they had come from, and the orange fish bobbing up at their plop slipped away frustrated that they could not eat them.

  What was this? She raised her hand to her cheeks, still not convinced that the tears could be coming from her. But yes...those were her cheeks that were wet.

  I’m so tired. That must be it. What the hell is wrong with me? She had even taken a pregnancy test at one point, her stomach knotting, but it had come up negative. She had put her hands over her face, almost sick with relief and something else, an inconsistent grief. It filled her with a strange dread, to think of children. And yet she was twenty-nine and had been married more than ten years.

  The dread centered all around Daniel. His gray eyes flashed in the middle of it. But he had never brought up children at all.

  She closed her eyes on the tears and the disappointed fish and fell asleep.

  Léa’s sister raised her eyebrows to see Daniel in the doorway to her apartment and looked past him down the hall. Her eyebrows knit, and her gaze shot back to his face, searching now, worried.

  “You—haven’t seen Léa.” It was obvious already.

  Maélys’s eyes widened. His sister-in-law was...what she was. Blonde like her older sister but much more glossy: polished and elegant in that edgy but vaguely academic way, always in some chunky boot heel and fitted jeans. Daniel had liked her and her brother better when they were younger, more innocent, more vulnerable, and less ensconced in the idea that Léa would take care of them. As they grew older and he and Léa supported them while they got their first degrees at the university, and then their second, because, God forbid that they should have to do something practical for a living, they had started to set his teeth on edge. Maélys had gotten her maîtrise in history, for God’s sake, finishing at the age of twenty-three. When Léa, only three years older, had given up her hope of an art degree at eighteen to take care of them and never once mentioned it again.

  At fifteen, Maélys had been a cute enough kid, and Daniel had taken on the responsibility of two teenagers—two teenagers even younger than Léa and himself—the same way he had taken on the responsibility for everything else. Just—done it. These days, Maélys seemed like an over-glamorized, manicured version of Léa, and the need for the real thing made his stomach knot so hard it would be a wonder if his internal organs ever let him eat again.

  “Léa’s missing?” Maélys said, on a breath of panic, which well she should feel, given that Léa was the warm hearth at which her siblings curled up. It would be so damned cold without her. He felt icy just letting the possibility ghost past his thoughts.

  He fisted a hand, warring with himself. Nobody helped him, once they knew Léa had left a message. But... “She went on a trip,” he said reluctantly. Because, merde, Maélys had lost her mother when she was ten and her father when she was fifteen, and her face was going very white, her eyes getting that bleak, stunned look they used to have when he would find Léa stroking her hair, looking so helpless and sad herself he didn’t know what to do. Except work harder.

  Ma�
�lys blinked a few times. And reached out to grab the doorjamb, taking a deep breath, that white pressure around her mouth easing. “A—trip? Léa? Who with? Hugo? I just saw him last night, and he didn’t say anything about a trip.”

  “I don’t think it was with Hugo.” Léa taking her younger brother with her while she escaped to Tahiti was a bit of a stretch, even for her.

  Maélys blinked a couple more times. “Well, then—who?” A slight edge of sulk slipped into her voice, a why-not-me?

  “I don’t know,” he said tightly. “So you think it had to be with someone?”

  “Well, I mean...” Maélys rubbed the nape of her neck. Her hair was up off it in an elegant deconstructed chignon. Léa usually just pulled her hair up into ponytails, unless they were going to a wedding or she was getting nervous about the fact that she had to meet the president. The time they had been invited to the Élysée, Léa had had the president wrapped around her finger in two minutes, which had been kind of fun to watch from the safety of an arm in firm possession of her waist. Yes, she’s mine. My sweetheart. I won her. You only won the fucking country. “Why would she go away by herself?” Maélys asked. “Léa loves people.”

  She used to like to spend time by herself a long, long time ago, in that safe, halcyon period before her father died, when she would spend hours painting and drawing. He remembered it mostly because of the way her face would light whenever he showed up to disturb her concentration.

  “Do you have anyone in mind?” he asked, his voice growing so icy that Maélys stiffened the way she had when he had had to deal with that damn predatory professor when she was seventeen. Maélys had been so hungry for a father figure. The professor had been fifteen years older than Daniel himself was, too.

  “No! Daniel! I mean...” Maélys bit her lip.

  Daniel’s fists tightened in his pockets. “Who?”

  “Nobody. I mean—you checked with the Rosier cousins, right?”

  ´They’re all here,” he said between his teeth. He felt white and sick. He should never have trusted those bastards. Third cousins. Third cousins was a relationship both too close and too far for comfort, when it involved aggressive, good-looking men Léa’s age. Not that he ever had trusted them, but he had trusted Léa.

  “And—and Marc?”

  “Marc?” His sous-chef? What the hell? “Marc?”

  “Well, I’m just trying to think of possibilities! You’re the one who thinks she must have someone with her.”

  “No, you came up with that idea all by yourself,” he snapped. Just like Grégory. Putain, how many men got a chance to lap up her smile while he was away in places like Japan? How wide a window of opportunity had he left, that everyone found it easy to assume a lover had slipped in through it? “We’re very happy, Maélys.”

  Weren’t they?

  Weren’t they?

  “Well, of course you are,” Maélys said very softly, with genuine, cautious pity, as if she was trying to break it to him as gently as possible. “You’ve got Léa.”

  “She’s got me, too,” he retorted, low and hard. Merde, he had worked so damn much. He was one of the top chefs in the world. She had something special in him, too. Damn it, she did.

  “Well, she’s got you some of the time,” Maélys said and shook her head, half-talking to herself. “I guess it makes sense that she imprinted on Papa, but I hope to God I have more sense than to fall for a chef.”

  Daniel just looked at Maélys, his jaw hard. Léa’s younger siblings were the most ungrateful brats. You’re welcome for making sure you were fed, clothed, and could wallow in your university studies until some little light about actually making money for yourself finally clicked in your brain. Yes, and you’re welcome for making sure you didn’t get pregnant by any of those men twice your age you fell for instead of a chef.

  Maélys’s head tilted. She was still talking to him as if she were thinking out loud, as if whatever she said, he would be strong enough to take it. They had that conviction of his invulnerability, his siblings-in-law. His heart hiccupped in panic, as if it had looked down and discovered someone had just shoved him right up to the edge of a cliff so high he couldn’t see the bottom. Did Léa, too? Did she think he could take whatever she threw at him, too? “Funny,” Máelys murmured. “Hugo just moved out six months ago. They say a lot of couples only hold together until they can get their kids raised, and then they lose that glue and...”

  Daniel reached up to grab the doorjamb over his head, digging in to hold himself up, struggling against a wave of violent sickness. The curse of his stomach. Not that. I can’t take that. Not Léa leaving me, oh, God.

  Léa. Oh, God. He got through the day just on the promise that sometime that night he would be able to smell her hair. Oh, shit, he could not go home to any empty bed that did not smell of her. He couldn’t. He couldn’t do it.

  “Have you actually seen anything to suggest Léa might be unhappy, or are you just making all this up?” he asked tightly, fighting the nausea.

  “No!” Maélys said. “But if she told you she just went on a little trip and you believe that, what are you doing here scaring me?”

  * * *

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Léa strained to get aloe gel on her back. The sunburn ached all along the outside of her triceps, her neck, and the whole of her back except the strip of skin protected by the band of her bikini. The backs of her knees stung so badly all she wanted to do was lie on her stomach, but of course, if she did that on the beach during daylight hours, they might have to fly her to a hospital. When she did sit, she balanced precariously on the part of her butt that had been covered by her bikini bottom.

  But oddly, the sunburn pain seemed to wake a little energy in her.

  So she rubbed a whole bottle of aloe gel on herself through the course of the day and bought a loose, white, long-sleeved cotton tunic from the resort’s gift shop, which clung unpleasantly to her sticky skin. Hiding from the sun, she went for a hike through the tropical forest to a waterfall a couple of kilometers back from the coast and stood in the cold water for ages, surrounded by rich green forest and glimpses of white and red flowers.

  “Do you know where I might buy paints?” she asked the young manager at the hotel reception desk, who was doing double-duty as receptionist until his resort had enough guests to justify hiring more staff.

  He looked blank. Then he called to a young woman passing through the airy, rattan- and palm-filled lounge and talked to her in Tahitian. The woman shook her head, too, and they both looked at Léa worriedly.

  “It’s all right,” she said and bought a notebook with tropical island motifs filling its page corners: tiare flowers, waves, outrigger canoes, waterfalls.

  She perched on the non-burned portion of her butt in the evening on the deck outside her overwater bungalow and tried to draw the moon on the water. A frustrating exercise—moonlight with a pencil—that turned into Daniel’s face and gray eyes and the Southern Cross framing it.

  She hoped he wasn’t missing her too much and turned the page suddenly, closing his face out of her view. That made her feel so much lighter that she was surprised when a great tear splashed on the fresh page.

  What was wrong with her?

  But it felt oddly good to cry like that, perched there watching the moonlight and the soft lagoon waves, with far out the higher waves crashing against the reef. Silent tears, with no spasms, sparkling with stars and moon.

  She missed her father suddenly so much, it was as if she had never cried for him, back then. Maybe she hadn’t cried enough. There had been so much to do. And Daniel had needed her. He couldn’t do it alone, all that for her.

  She missed Daniel so much. But she had no sense that going back would solve that problem.

  And worst of all, she thought she missed herself.

  But she didn’t even know what self that was.

  She was so tired again. She went into her bungalow, with all the windows open to the waves that lapped around it, and fell a
sleep.

  Day Four. Léa’s tunic top prickled against her sunburned skin. She wondered if she could stay here forever.

  Daniel might miss her.

  He might.

  She sighed. She didn’t know why he might, though. She must be a dead weight on him, all that energy, all that drive. He needed someone like—oh, maybe one of those elegant women who hosted him on their television shows. Someone with energy and ambition to match him.

  What had happened to hers? How had she grown so ill-suited to him?

  Or had he just grown so big, while she had become nothing at all?

  She went for a long, long walk on the beach, all the way to the next point, stopping sometimes to draw pictures in the sand.

  The effort made her feel oddly rested. The waves brought peace.

  Almost back to her bungalow, she stopped at the sight of a surreal figure in that tropical world. In pants and shirt, his hands in his pockets, he stood gazing at her first sand-drawing, a rough sketch of the hills framing the Mediterranean island that could be seen from their bedroom window back home. Masculine and strong and unbreakable, black hair a little long, revealing the wave in it, a lean, beautiful body that never stopped, a steady, clean profile that filmed so well.

  He looked up from the drawing to meet her eyes, and a hard breath moved through his body and sighed out of it. “Léa,” he said with profound relief. But he did not run toward her. He did not walk toward her. He did not take his hands out of his pockets. He watched her warily.

  His wariness built wariness in her, slowing her steps as she came closer.

  “Daniel,” she said, stopping the other side of the big drawing. They had been married for more than ten years. There was no problem at all between them. And yet she could not go closer.