The unspoken part was that she had. But Parker was no typical customer. The reality of a restaurant on or near the Las Vegas Strip was that it didn’t really matter what your food tasted like as long as it got to the table fast, it was reasonably priced, and there was a lot of it. His place was better than most as far as quality so he wasn’t going to sweat a few mis-smoked meats every now and again.
Parker seemed to accept this and went ahead with her perusal of his smokers, turning knobs, sniffing inside for some reason, asking about the speed at which the trays inside rotated. Seemingly satisfied with his answers, she scooted past him to look at the wood piles and he got a whiff of sweet citrus, like how lemonade tasted on a hot summer day.
“Are you finished?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest, hoping the stance would hurry her along. While he was amused by her copious note-taking, he had a real agenda here, which was to get her into bed, and he wasn’t sure helping her beat him in a competition was going to make that a reality.
“Getting scared already?” she quipped, the first real smile he’d seen from her all night. She must really have a true affinity for barbecue because for the first time today she seemed completely comfortable.
He smiled back, meeting her crinkled eyes. “Sweetheart, I couldn’t care less if you beat me. I’m not a chef, I’m a businessman. And if your sauce is good, I’ll be happy to sell it for you.”
“You still haven’t told me what you get if you win,” she reminded, brow furrowed.
He thought about it, not really sure there was anything he wanted that he couldn’t just get on his own. “If I win, you work for me.”
A light eyebrow rose. “I’m not a waitress or a chef, pal, and I don’t need a job.”
“I know, but I have a lot of chefs on my payroll to add input to the menu, make tweaks, offer suggestions, and I’m opening new restaurants all the time. It’d be a good business move to bring another on board for free, especially since you’re so knowledgeable about barbecue.”
In the back of his mind, he also knew it was a reason to stay in contact with her after she left Vegas, and he mentally reined himself in. He’d more than learned his lesson in ignoring the warning signs in women. Amanda’s treachery had started with little white lies. Then the big stuff had crept in, no sex for months, going out with the girls every weekend and having no time for him, only wanting to be seen with him at team events where her lover also was, generally being annoyed with every single thing he did. He should have known, but he’d been so busy and had thought it was just a phase or stress about the wedding. Then the injury happened and he finally had the time to figure out what the hell was going on.
The news made it seem like Amanda had left him, but that wasn’t the truth, though if he weren’t a true gentleman, he’d have told them the real story. That first time he’d found the text messages between them and believed her lies that she and Todd were just friends. It wasn’t until he saw it with his own two eyes, the two of them fucking in his own goddamn bed, that he kicked her out. She’d apologized and even wanted to go forward with the wedding, claiming that she loved him and had made a mistake, but he wasn’t an idiot.
As if the situation couldn’t get more fucked, in the middle of all of it, she’d found out she was pregnant with Todd’s baby and he decided to marry her. Hugh didn’t know what the lovebirds were up to now and didn’t care. But he wasn’t going to ignore that kind of shit in the future. Parker had lied once. He’d give her a pass for sex, but he needed to be firm on not letting things with them go any further. Sex with her was already too close to the fire for his comfort.
“Sure, I can be in your consultant pool, but you only get a year of free service.”
She clapped her hands together. “Now can you show me the pantry?” she asked, nodding at the back door of the restaurant. “I need to get back to my room. I have an early breakfast tomorrow.”
He opened the restaurant door for her and let her pass through back into the kitchen. “So if you’re not going to tell me where you’re staying, at least give me your number so I can reach you.”
“Why? Now that you know my last name, you can DM me on social media.”
He rolled his eyes. “I’m not going to slide into your DMs, Parker. Do me a solid, make me a contact. I deserve at least that much for all my worrying.”
Lips pursing, she motioned toward his pants pocket. “Well, hurry up and put it in before I change my mind.”
He couldn’t help it; he snorted. “I feel like I’m getting a preview of what would have happened the other night if you’d stuck around.”
Her eyes rounded in surprise and then immediately narrowed in disgust. “Oh my God, you’re awful.”
And then she was leaving him in the doorway and heading back to the main kitchen area.
“Pantry’s this way,” he called, still laughing at himself.
He heard her huff, but then she appeared in front of him again.
“Rule number one of this contest,” she announced, spearing him with a glare, “no inappropriate comments. The physical part of our relationship was an anomaly and we will not be repeating it.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and gave her a glare of his own. “I’ll agree to the inappropriate comments, but there’s no putting the physical part of us in a box. It is what it is.”
“That’s nonsense,” she clipped. “Rule two is that Michael will be one of the judges.”
“It isn’t nonsense. You know what’s between us. I’m hotter for you than my fucking smoker right now.”
This seemed to irritate her extremely.
“I’m fine with Michael being a judge,” he told her, throwing her a bone. He was just trying to remind her how good that night had been, not drive her away. That said, he wanted her clear on what it meant to him and that he thought they should do it again as soon as possible. “But let’s also get someone local.”
“And probably a third person, too. Someone completely impartial.”
He shrugged. “To be honest with you, you’d really have to look under a rock to find someone who wouldn’t want me to win a contest. I’m pretty famous in case you didn’t know.”
Parker snorted. “I guess we’ll just have to find someone who you’ve already slept with. I’m sure they’re vaguely disappointed.”
He smiled slowly. “That’s a population who unquestionably knows I’m a winner.”
“You’re an idiot,” she muttered, pulling open the door to the pantry.
She stepped into the room, which was just as large as the kitchen itself, filled with enough food for an entire week of operation as was custom. Scanning the contents, she looked no-nonsense again as she wrote down what was on each shelf for her own esoteric purposes.
“Meat locker?” she asked.
He led her out of the pantry and down another hallway to the double doors of the meat freezer. He was running a barbecue place, so he’d spared no expense on where he kept his meat. It was a big enough place to store the huge monthly shipments of meat from Texas.
Opening the door, she peered in. “Holy shit,” she breathed. “That’s a lot of meat.”
He couldn’t help it, he chuckled again, but she didn’t seem to mind this time. Stepping farther into the space, she looked around at the hanging sides of beef in awe. “This is awesome,” she breathed, and he cocked his head.
He’d never shown a woman his meat locker before, but maybe that had been a mistake, because Parker was mesmerized by it, her eyes darting around in wonder. Hell, he was kind of jealous she wasn’t looking at him that way. It really brought a whole new angle to feeling like a piece of meat.
But then she was shooing him out of the room. “It’s freezing,” she claimed. “Let’s go. Should I get my own meat then or should we use the same?”
He led her back to the kitchen, turning when they’d reached her bag.
“You’re welcome to my meat anytime, Parker.”
“Honest to God,” he heard her mutter, her arms crossed over her chest and her head down.
He was smiling, but then her arms dropped and he saw her nipples through her thin cotton shirt, hardened from the freezer. Damn it, that comment had backfired on him, because now his own figurative meat was as hard as those frozen sides of beef.
“When do you want to do this thing?” she asked, her eyes on his, ready to get back to business. His mind was anywhere but.
“On a Monday when the restaurant is closed makes the most sense.”
“Great, let’s plan for Monday,” she said, clapping her hands together. “That’s two days for you to pretend you can beat me. I can hardly wait.”
He ignored her trash talk and pulled out his phone. “Your number, Parker,” he reminded.
She rattled off some numbers with a Chicago area code he recognized and he went ahead and called her right then to make sure she wasn’t lying. Her phone echoed in the empty space and she looked annoyed. Then she stuffed her tablet back in her bag and headed for the door out to the dining area.
“Parker,” he called when she’d reached the door. “I may lose the cooking competition, but that other part we discussed, where I need to win a night with you on my own wits? Just be warned, that’s one I won’t lose.”
He watched with satisfaction as she absorbed the words and left him alone in his kitchen, more determined than ever to live up to his own words.
CHAPTER FIVE
PARKER HAD NO doubt that she would win the competition with Hugh. She’d been perfecting her barbecue sauces for over ten years, making friends and renowned chefs taste countless iterations until finally calling them perfection. However, the industrial smokers in Hugh’s restaurant were the wild cards. In the past two days she’d been researching like mad to figure out the ratios of wood to meat in one of those suckers. She’d even talked Hugh into letting her have two practice runs with them before the competition.
Thankfully, he hadn’t been there when she’d done so, but he was here in the flesh now. Standing mere feet away from her at his designated oven, he was stirring a pot of sauce on a burner. In a pair of cotton black shorts and a light blue T-shirt with the Blue Smoke logo on it, all those muscles swelled out, their remarkable peaks and valleys on full and proud display. So distracted by thick calves that could crush a metal barrel, she could almost forget they were competing against each other.
“Are you ready for this?” she asked Hugh, checking her stopwatch to see how much time her ribs had left in the smoker.
“Yeah, I’m more than ready to be done with this, if that’s what you mean. It’s fucking nine hundred degrees and we could be making out in my pool, but instead we’re doing this cooking bullshit.”
After a grueling day in said heat, Parker’s hands flew straight up in the air. “You’re the one who ordered the competition! I was fine without it. But your pride was hurt by my review and here we both are, sweaty and hot, and not in a fun way.”
His shoulders shook with laughter. “I don’t give a fuck about my pride. But you deserved it for lying to me and making me worry.”
“We both know that’s not true. Quit yammering and cook. I have stuff to do,” she ordered, pointing her spoon at the pots on his stove top. “And that gas is too high. You’re probably burning your sauce.”
He rolled his eyes. “Mind your own sauce, lady,” he complained. But then, avoiding her gaze, he turned down the gas on his burner.
The timer on her phone went off and she went out to the smoker patio to get her ribs. Opening the double doors, she took the internal temperature of the pork and, satisfied, transferred them to the grill for a couple of minutes until they got a light char, and then returned inside.
Hugh spared her ribs a glance, but didn’t say anything. Parker scooped some of her sauce into three spouted dishes and arranged everything on a platter. The sauce needed a second to cool down anyway before it could be served. She was ready for the first judging.
After a few minutes, one of Hugh’s waitresses, a petite redhead, popped in to collect the ribs for the judges. Another Hugh admirer that Parker ignored. If anything happened between them, it would just be sex, and it didn’t matter if she was the only one or if he had someone else the next day. Which he probably would.
Shaking the unpleasant thought from her head, Parker got back to work on her other sauce for the brisket.
She noticed that Hugh was leaning against his oven, watching her again.
“Are you not cooking?” she asked, putting her hands on her hips. Only ten minutes left until she needed to get the brisket out of the smoker.
“Yeah,” he said, gesturing to his stove top. He ran a white towel over his forehead, collecting the moisture there. A bead of sweat slithered down his golden neck and into the open vee that revealed the start of an impressively defined collarbone, and she thought she might faint from the pure indecency of it, but he wiped that away with a towel, too, grinning knowingly at her.
“I don’t have time to flirt with you,” she barked, turning away from him to splash a bit more hot sauce into her pot.
“That’s a damn shame,” he said, his eyes on her chest. She knew there was a ring of sweat around the collar of her shirt. Felt it like a warm, wet hand around her neck, but there was nothing she could do about it. It was Las Vegas in summer, and even though the kitchen was air-conditioned to high heaven, she was still standing directly in front of three open flames and going outside every twenty minutes to check on the smokers that were baking in the sun. There was no getting away from the heat, literally or figuratively.
“Give it a rest, will you?” she begged. “I’m not going to sleep with you.”
He stopped stirring and watched her add a bit of salt to a sauce. “I’m confused about why that is again?”
“Because I don’t want to,” she told him. Of course, she wanted nothing more than to sleep with him, but perversely, she also didn’t want to give him what he wanted more.
“Liar,” he laughed, brushing his big body past her on his way outside to the patio.
She blew out a relieved breath. Being in the same room with him all day was hell. All she wanted to do was rip his shirt off and jump him, contest be damned. He could put her on his payroll all day if he wanted as long as she got to finish what they’d started that first night.
Her phone dinged. She rolled her eyes at Hugh’s text message.
Get out here! Your chicken is on fire!
Laughing, she texted him back a thumbs-down for his lame attempt to get her out to the patio again. He’d been doing it all day. Earlier he’d texted her that he saw a puppy, which had been a struggle not to verify.
When it was time, she did go out to collect her brisket. She’d made three and put them on completely separate racks just to account for any uneven cooking that might occur in the smokers. Basically, nothing was being left to chance. That just wasn’t who she was. Not in the kitchen and not in life.
However, one thing she had not planned on was Hugh lounging in a plastic chair, naked from the waist up and fanning himself with his shirt. He was such an ass and totally doing it on purpose to drive her bonkers—and it was so working. Between the heat, the pressure of the competition and resisting him, it was just too much. She was only one freaking woman.
“You are shameless,” she accused, pointing a finger at him.
He peered at her, still waving his shirt as he regarded her with slit, lazy eyes. “Pardon?”
“If you were that hot, you could have gone back inside,” she pointed out, yanking open the doors to her brisket. She would not look at his bare chest; he didn’t deserve it. If he wanted to sit over there looking like a sweaty Adonis, good for him. She wasn’t having it. She was here to win a contest and then...well, and then maybe she’d let herself ogle his bare chest.
Because it was really something to behold. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the eight-pack carved elegantly into his tanned flesh, corrugated like tough steel and covered with rough velvet. Dark hair covered his chest, thinning out to a perfect line that disappeared under his shorts.
“I could have gone in,” he admitted. “But I need to be out here to make sure you’re not turning up the heat on my meat. My ribs got too hot and you were the only person who could have changed the temperature.”
She rolled her eyes. “I did not turn up the heat on your meat,” she gritted, turning to him. But then she saw his eyes glittering and that he was once again teasing her, goading her into saying the ridiculous sentence about his meat.
“You’re a child,” she complained, sitting the last brisket on her tray before closing the smoker doors.
Glaring at him, she left him on the patio to glory in his own juvenile antics.
Within a minute, Hugh was back in the kitchen as well, with his shirt intact, just in time for the redheaded waitress to collect their new plates. Parker started cleaning up her space.
The waitress came back in to let them know they had ten more minutes until the chicken tasting, so Parker and Hugh returned to the patio to get their chickens. Once back inside, Parker immediately started shredding hers with two wooden devices that looked like large combs. Trying the meat, she was satisfied that it was tender and flavorful. She could taste the sweet smoke from hardwood coals permeating the meat and it was going to be delicious with the tangy mustard sauce.
Taking a deep, relieved breath that it was all over, she put the last of the sauce onto the judging tray, confident that she had it all in the bag.
As the waitress left the kitchen, Hugh threw his towel on the counter.
Sin City Seduction Page 6
