B00CACT6TM EBOK by Laura Florand

much more pleasant. She might have to revisit her conviction that all the best textures and tastes and scents in the world were in food. His textures—the hard resilience of muscle, the soft cotton of his T-shirt, the smoothness of his skin, the silk of his hair, the whisper of roughness of a jaw shaved that morning—were incredible.
    “Really, really nice,” he whispered to the top of her head as he pressed a kiss there.

Chapter 11
    Gabriel insisted on taking Jolie to the Nice train station for her trip back to Paris, a gallant gesture that very clearly put him out of temper. They had sat on those stairs for far too long, until a low-voiced argument filtering down from a balcony above had disturbed the mood. You never pay attention to me anymore , the woman had been arguing low, as if she was crushing tears. What happened to all that romance at the beginning?
    You’re never satisfied! the man had answered. You want too much. Nothing I do is enough.
    The words had worked into their hold and wedged them apart, Gabriel growing brooding, uneasy, Jo unnerved, scrambling for flight. Anyway, she had to get back to Paris, as she told him. She needed to get her life organized, and above all see her father, if she was going to be spending several days a week down here. Gabriel scowled. Jo worried. Worried about how easy she had found it to curl up in the lap of an arrogant, rude, aggressive beast she barely knew and feel as if it was the most beautiful moment in her whole entire life.
    It wasn’t until they had passed a palm tree outside the Gare de Nice and entered the old Louis XIII building with its arch patterns in red brick and white stone, that it finally occurred to her. She looked up at him, suddenly, intensely relieved.
    Gabriel looked from her face to the sleek silver and blue TGV behind her. “Happy to be heading back to Paris?” he growled.
    “It’s not the sex,” she said confidently.
    He gaped at her and then glanced around at the crowds. “Honestly, Jolie, can you think of nothing else?” He shifted in on her noticeably, much closer than a man should in crowds like that, but then, he had spent most of his life in packed, intense kitchens. “Not that I’m complaining,” he rumbled, blue eyes glinting down at her.
    “The reason I’m bad at relationships,” she explained. “ I was not really thinking about sex! ” she hissed. Well, she hadn’t been before he moved in on her that way. Now she was getting a pretty hot vision of being crowded by his body. Rubbed and roughed and handled all the ways he wanted. “It’s because I like being who I am, I think. Not fitting myself around someone else.”
    His eyes narrowed, piercing. “Why are we talking about being bad at relationships right this second? And what do you mean, not fitting yourself around someone?”
    Of course, ever since he had become head chef, that was all the people he saw all day every day had done, fit themselves around him. Before he became head chef, he would have done the fitting. He probably couldn’t even grasp what she was talking about, the fact that she loved people, particularly food people, but she loved being alone, too. He wouldn’t be able to understand that desire to do her own thing, to be busy in her own head without interference, a desire nourished perhaps in the hours she had kept herself occupied in her father’s office as a child or in his apartment or roaming Paris while he worked.
    “Guys just want so much space. And I run out of room for them. Or staying power, or something. I’ve always gotten sick of the guy pretty quickly.”
    His face set. His blue eyes glittered oddly against his grim face. “Are you telling me that you make a habit of dumping men who fall for you when you get tired of them?” Her boarding call sounded. “And you just the fuck told me that right now ?”
    She grabbed the handle of her case, laughing out loud with relief. “Well, at least I don’t have to worry so much about