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

by Laura Florand

  His face grew somber. Funny how his face always held for her a trace of the teenager with the shaggy hair and the intense gray eyes who had first teased her into letting herself be kissed. As if she had never gotten to know any other him.

  “You would rather I hadn’t come,” Daniel said quietly.

  She hadn’t the slightest idea. She took another step toward him. Maybe, yes. His energy made her so...empty.

  The line of his pockets shifted, a gesture she knew well, his hands clenching in them. “Is there someone here with you?”

  She blinked at him a moment. “A friend?” she finally guessed.

  Now his jaw hardened. He looked very bleak and dangerous suddenly. “Yes.”

  “No. I wanted to be by myself.”

  “Ah.” He looked down at the sand and scrubbed his toe in a small half-circle under the sketched hillside. He stared down at his foot for a long moment—he was still wearing shoes—and then without a word turned and walked back toward the bungalow.

  Léa stayed on the sand, no idea what she would say or do when she followed him, no desire to enter that bungalow with him and share that space of quiet and peace. The Southern Cross was up, far away across so many miles of ocean it was like there was nothing else in the world but sea and stars.

  Out of the corner of her eye, motion. Daniel had the battered duffel he favored slung over his shoulder and was heading down the wooden walkway from her bungalow.

  Her heart jolted. She ran suddenly, without thought, her toes digging into the sand, splashing through water, so that she didn’t have to go around to where the walkway started near the main hotel.

  Daniel stopped and looked down at her. Her white tunic clung soaked to her skin, moonlight and tiki torches lighting the water around them. He didn’t say anything, and he didn’t reach for her to help her out of the water.

  She touched her fingers to the edge of the walkway, lagoon wavelets lapping her chest-high, her face on level with his feet. “You’re going?”

  His jaw flexed. “You know, Léa, I might like an island vacation, too. But since you don’t want to share yours and I don’t have two days to spend traveling to some other lost-in-the-Pacific island, I’ll go over there”—he pointed to a dark, empty fare on the far side of the lagoon, past half a dozen other little bungalows over the water—“and hope that doesn’t impinge too much on your enjoyment.”

  He strode down the walk, his shoes loud in a world of flip-flops and bare feet. At the corner where the wooden walkway turned to join up with another bungalow’s, he stopped abruptly and pivoted back. “And are you out of your mind to spend three hours walking on a beach by yourself at night, when no one even knows where you have gone, in something that turns transparent the first second a man tosses you into the waves? Merde, Léa.” And he turned again and strode off.

  In the stupid bungalow, over on the opposite side of the lagoon from his wife, Daniel threw his duffel into a corner so hard it bounced and shoved the door violently. The action reminded him oddly of shoving some guy back from Léa and out of her office, yelling, some employee who didn’t want to respect an eighteen-year-old girl’s authority and wasn’t too happy to accept a nineteen-year-old man’s either. But he had done it, furious. Those first few years, they had gotten by on nothing but desperate determination, hers to save her father’s restaurant and his to be as big a man in her life as her father had been. You’re my world, I’ll do everything I can to be the best thing in yours.

  What the fuck was going on?

  She hadn’t even smiled to see him on the beach. He had kind of thought—hoped, all right—that she might burst into that delighted grin of hers and run toward him.

  At least she hadn’t been walking back hand in hand with someone else.

  Putain.

  He couldn’t believe the thoughts that were eating at him—about Léa, who would never, never do something like that. But...she would never run off to the South Pacific and not want to take him with her, either.

  Or so he would have thought.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, the moonlight gliding into the room to light a section of glass floor through which he could see the night water even while he buried his head in his hands. His stomach turned. It was the ultimate irony for someone in his profession that when he got too stressed, sometimes he couldn’t eat for days.

  He had to go into the kitchens and master the food again, tame it, until he and it reached some kind of rapport again where he could eat. And by mastering it, he didn’t mean in those damn Top Chef contests which he hated. Media putting two top chefs through their paces like they were some damn performing monkeys and daring to judge what they came up with. But Léa had squealed so much with delight the first time he got on the show, at twenty-one, which had knocked the restaurant reservations skyward, and even more the first time he won, at twenty-three, which had booked them solid for three months. She had been dancing all around him, hugging him over and over, and kissing his face everywhere she could reach.

  So he just thought of that, when he did them. Thought of her kisses raining wildly all over his face. It focused him extraordinarily. Commentators often talked about his calm during the competition, the half smile on his face in that blaze of stress.

  No kisses for freeing himself from all his obligations and showing up by surprise on her deserted island escape, though. He had had to go through her emails for the reservation confirmation and check out their credit card purchases to even find out where she had gone. Tahiti, it turned out, having been her very vague term for a few million square kilometers of the South Pacific.

  He hung his head more deeply, his hands locked, fighting his stomach for control.

  * * *

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When Léa first saw Daniel the next morning, she tripped and fell off her little deck into the aquamarine water. The fish darted away from her and she surfaced, conscious of the fact that she was in that white tunic top again, although this time her skin had healed enough to tolerate a bikini top under it.

  In shorts and a T-shirt, Daniel paddled up beside her and looked down at her, his expression very neutral. Daniel, in a kayak. It was almost like catching him playing.

  His arms and legs were pale—he spent so much of his time in protective kitchen gear that even the Provençal sun didn’t have a big enough window of opportunity to tan him. But the body was strong and extremely controlled, of course, and even though he had never gone kayaking in the entire time they had been married, he seemed already to have the hang of it. Maybe he had been out for hours already. She had stayed awake very late and thus slept very late, but when she woke, staring at her pseudo-thatched ceiling, she had, for once, not felt the least tired.

  Kind of rejuvenated. Like she wanted to go exploring somewhere. Or exploring someone. Even two someones.

  “You should be careful,” she told Daniel. “When you’re not used to the sun...”

  He shrugged. “Do you want a ride?”

  She looked at the empty front seat, hesitating, and Daniel’s face stiffened. “Why don’t we get two one-person kayaks?” she suggested tentatively. “It’s more fun.”

  “How do you know that?” Daniel asked tightly. “Have you ever kayaked before?”

  No, but—“It sounds more fun. To be able to go where you want and not just be along for the ride.”

  He stared at her a long moment, his kayak barely rocking in the protected lagoon. “Fine,” he said evenly. “Hop in, and I’ll take us over to where they have the kayaks.”

  She put her hands around the edge of the kayak—and had the startled realization that she was suddenly in control here. If she flipped that kayak or held it still, there was not much he could do to resist it. “How long have you been out, and did you put on sunscreen?”

  “The sun wasn’t even up when I went out, and you know I hate that stuff.”

  He did, too. He always scrunched his face up, wincing and enduring, on the rare occasions when they spent a day at
somebody’s outdoor wedding and she forced him to sit still while she put it on him. His distaste had always made her laugh, given some of the things he handled as a top chef. This was a man who, in the first years in kitchens at fifteen, had been given jobs like prepping snails and intestines, as he liked to tell chef-hopefuls when he was on television shows.

  She dragged the kayak to her little dock, looping one of its cords around the boat hook. “Wait a minute.”

  It only took her a second to come back with a beach bag and a bottle of sunscreen.

  “Oh, putain,” Daniel muttered when he saw it.

  She laughed, a sparkle of energy and happiness that surprised her.

  Daniel laid his paddle across the kayak, his eyes caught on her face. “You’re not mad at me for something, then?” he asked softly.

  She shook her head, her laughter fading. “I just wanted to get away for a little bit. I thought if I tried to ask you, you would be too busy until five years from now, and the impulse would fade, and I would never manage to do it.” That was partly true, but not entirely true. When she really thought about having him with her—she hadn’t wanted to risk it. She had gone the day before he got back, on impulse, just in case he might have tried to come with her.

  He nodded and looked out to sea, squinting his eyes against the reflection on the water.

  “Here.” She gestured with the sunscreen.

  He didn’t even make a face this time, as he swung out of the kayak onto the dock, lost in thought. But when she started to apply the sunscreen to his arms, he pulled off his T-shirt. “Might as well get the whole thing.”

  He sat on the edge of the dock with his feet in the water, facing out to sea, while she squirted handfuls of sunscreen into her palms and began from his back, rubbing over his shoulders. He had spent all his life in a profession that demanded speed, strength, grace, agility, and all of that without pause, unrelentingly. While there were chefs who managed to put on weight despite this, from their sheer love of food, Daniel was only thirty, and anyway, there were days he would not eat at all and get pissed off at her when she tried to push him. So he had a beautiful body. All lean strength, no fat.

  It was nice. Nice to be able just to stroke those shoulders, to appreciate the smooth skin and the strength underneath it. It had always fascinated her, the way his chest and jaw could prickle but his back be like a baby’s skin.

  She sank into the feel of it, smiling a little.

  “It wasn’t—that stupid announcer who kept trying to flirt with me on that last show?” Daniel asked suddenly, still staring out to sea. “I handled that right, didn’t I? I think she was just playing to the viewers.”

  “Aurélie Rochelle? She’s just having fun. Isn’t she almost twice your age?” With a shrewd, wry wit and warmth which pulled Daniel’s own warmth and humor out of him. The two of them always had a good time, when Daniel was on her show. Léa wasn’t sexually jealous of Aurélie, but she was jealous, just the same.

  “No, last week.”

  A tiny silence as Léa winced away from her admission: “I—may have missed that show.”

  His feet stilled in the water. He twisted to look at her. “You didn’t watch it?”

  “I”—A lot of times these days, she didn’t watch his shows. They had started making her feel so—hopeless. Once she had caught herself crying in the middle of one, for no reason she could explain, and decided it must be that time of the month. “I think I was helping my sister get moved into her new apartment. I forgot to record it.”

  “They put the link up on the web.”

  As shows pretty much always did. “Ah.”

  The muscles under her hands tightened, until she thought he might suddenly shove himself off the dock into the water. But he stayed. Bending his head as she stroked that sunscreen into him.

  He really had the most beautiful body. Funny, now when she looked back at their wedding pictures, she could see how young he had been. How he had filled out, filled into himself, becoming more strongly masculine as he grew older. But even as a half-formed teenager, he had always seemed hot to her. Sexy and perfect and he could just zero in on a girl, with that little teasing smile.

  Make her feel the most wanted, the most wonderful, the most precious thing in his whole world.

  She slid the cream down his arms. It seemed like her whole life she had loved his arms. How strong they were, how they could hold her, how they could reach high up things for her. Like stars.

  Things she couldn’t get herself.

  She frowned, circling the cream slowly into the backs of his hands.

  “Did the doctor have—news?” he asked suddenly, sounding stifled.

  “What?” What doctor?

  “Wasn’t that why you couldn’t go up to Paris with me, a doctor’s appointment?”

  It had been a legitimate excuse that time. And...she hadn’t traveled with him since. “That was three months ago!”

  “Oh.” His eyes flicked over her stomach, and he turned his head sharply away. “So—no news.”

  “I’m not pregnant,” she said quietly. He flinched a little, but she had no idea whether it was in disappointment or relief. Good God, kids. The thought of finding herself a mother, now, made her feel as if she was being buried under something and slowly crushed. “I just wanted a vacation. I guess you can’t understand that,” she added ruefully.

  He cut her a sharp, incredulous glance. “Not understand wanting a vacation?”

  “You can understand it?” she asked blankly.

  “Putain, Léa. What do you think I’m made of?”

  Stardust, probably. Something hard and brilliant, born out of the fires of the universe. With gorgeous gray eyes.

  “I would have wanted mine with you, though,” he said low, ground out, gripping the dock and staring at the water around his toes.

  Oh. Léa sat on the edge of the dock beside him. She didn’t know what to say. Except that he had the most beautiful back in the world and she could have stroked cream into it forever, but maybe that wouldn’t add to the conversation.

  Daniel took a slow breath, and she looked up from that hard grip of his beautiful, strong hand to find him watching her sideways, an elusive gleam of gray through those thick black lashes of his.

  “You didn’t do my chest.” He picked up her hand to squirt sunscreen in it. “It’s my least favorite part.”

  He twisted to sit cross-legged facing her, pressing her palmful of sunscreen against his right pectoral. It was true that it was his least favorite part. He hated the way it smeared in his chest hair. He had several times, in fact, threatened to shave his chest if she insisted on the sunscreen, but always yielded.

  She knelt in front of him, watching her hands knead the cream into his muscles. She loved his chest, too. Liked the feel of it, when she curled up against it, liked the taste of it, liked to rub her face back and forth against all his textures when they made love...

  She got lost in the pleasure of kneading cream into his chest, her hands running over and over him, until a hand curled into her hair, and he kissed her, a long, slow, deep hello of a kiss, like he kissed her sometimes at one in the morning, sliding into bed beside her. Like he kissed her sometimes on those rare Monday afternoons that were like sunlit, precious daydreams scattered through her life.

  Her mouth warmed to him instantly, as if he was some heady ambrosia she could drink to make her glowing.

  He made a hungry sound, his other hand coming up to join the first, angling the kiss as he dragged her into his lap. “Léa,” he muttered into her mouth. “Léa. I missed you.”

  Really? There were moments in his life when he had room to notice she was gone for a few days?

  “Ow,” she whimpered softly, still angling for more of his mouth despite the pain. “Daniel. That hurts.”

  Startled, he loosened the hand still in her hair first, his mouth lifting. But that just brought more pressure from the hand on her back. She made a tiny sound of distress, part hunger for mor
e of him, part sting at the contact.

  Both hands flew away from her. “What did I do?”

  “I’m sunburned,” she said, hating to stop him and at the same time inexplicably relieved. If they made love, surely he would assume he should move into that bungalow with her, at the very least. Why did that make her feel as if nothing would ever be possible again?

  He peeled the tunic off her body enough to peek down her back and grimaced. “Chérie.”

  “And that was with sunscreen,” she told him. “So”—She slid her hands down his ribs to get the last bit of taut stomach that tightened still more under her hands, and he drew a breath, gazing at her. Hands held wide. So very clearly wanting to touch her and not able to.

  Trapped by his own respect for her pain.

  She came up onto her knees again and kissed him for that, because he was so entirely wonderful. He made a little sound, responding hungrily, and she stayed on her knees a long time, kissing him more and more. There was something so—thirsty about the position. About his inability to touch her, so that she could lean into him and drink until she couldn’t drink another drop...and yet still want more. She kissed him and kissed him and kissed him, in unassuageable thirst.

  “Ma chérie. Minette. Léa.” He got lost in the kissing, too, whispering her name in ragged breaths, a flush mantling his cheekbones when she at last raised her head. His hands had dropped and dug hard into his own thighs.

  He looked inexplicably, intensely—relieved. “So you’re still—so that’s still okay,” he breathed and leaned forward, hands gripping his legs, to grab another kiss. And then another. And one more. He seemed insatiable, as if he had never kissed her before and didn’t know if he would ever have a chance again.

  She gave her mouth to him again and again. Yes, he still made her hungry. Even she hadn’t gotten that tired.

  The kissing and kissing and wanting more but not taking it reminded her with a strange sweetness of when they were teenagers. When they would kiss and make out in some secret corner, always hungry for more than they dared do. “I love you,” Daniel whispered, as he would sometimes then, that little cry of kiss-maddened longing.