“You know I’m not playing games here,” he said, his voice hypnotic and low above her head. “So what’s up? What’s got you all upset?”
Curling her fingers into the rough poly/cotton of his chef’s jacket, Eva said, “I don’t know. My dad. The competition and the Cooking Channel, and that stupid producer. And…”
She swallowed and pressed her mouth to the front of his shoulder to stop the words.
And I’m going to miss you.
She didn’t say it, but she didn’t have to. Danny heard her anyway. “Yeah,” he said roughly. “Me too.”
This was insane. Eve wrapped her fingers around his elbows and tugged his arms down, sidling out from between Danny and the bar. She felt naked and cold without his arms around her, but she’d get used to it. She had to.
“I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m a nutjob. I shouldn’t have yelled at you, or accused you of trying to cheat. I guess I’ve spent too much time around people who wouldn’t hesitate to do exactly that.”
“Including your father?” Danny propped his hip on the bar and crossed his arms, with a sardonic lift to his brow.
Palming the back of her neck, Eva huffed out a laugh. “Yeah, maybe. He certainly likes to have his own way, and he’s not too fussed about how he gets it. Whatever works, right?”
Danny hummed noncommitally. He had his head cocked, all his attention on her, and that shiver of awareness, of need, fluttered through Eva again. Could she really give this up? Wasn’t there a way she could have it all?
Kicking herself into gear, she said, “Okay. So I called you up here for the wrong reason, but it’s good that you’re here. I just want to say…”
Maybe they could work something out. Maybe once this was all over…
Danny nodded. “I know. We can’t be together anymore, not if the RSC is going to be televised. I get it, Eva.”
The words were still caught in Eva’s mouth, and she had to swallow them down before she could croak out, “Right. Stuff like this is never really secret forever, people always find out, and then the validity of the whole competition is called into question, and I can’t have that.”
She laughed, and this time is sounded like more than a sigh. “God. I’m having a hard enough time convincing my dad I can do a good job.”
“Getting caught in a sex scandal with a contestant would probably not help,” Danny agreed, pushing away from the bar.
“And my father would be pissed.” She slanted a glance at Danny from under her eyelashes. “He warned me to stop seeing you.”
Danny’s eyes flashed blue and silver sparks. “Did he?”
He all but snarled it, and Eva felt a quickening low down in her stomach. She nodded. “It’s like he’s completely forgotten my teenage years. I was never very good at staying away from the things that would get me in trouble.”
Some of the hardness faded from Danny’s granite jaw as his mouth curled into a rueful smile. “Are you saying I’m forbidden fruit?”
She swallowed hard. “The forbiddenest.”
“And here I thought you liked breaking the rules.”
“Not this time.” Eva hugged her arms around her middle. “There’s too much riding on it.”
Danny was forbidden. For as long as the East Coast Team remained part of the competition, at least. Eva licked her lips, the words stuck in her dry throat.
It was so new to her, this yearning to plan ahead, to want more time with someone. Her heart beat loudly in her own ears, and the moment stretched between them, taut and thick with potential … and then it was over.
A shadow darkened Danny’s eyes, and his smile faded. “I should go, then, before your dad catches me up here again.”
She’d missed her chance. He was leaving. Which was what had to happen, she knew that. But somehow, the sight of Danny walking toward the door was more than she could stand.
“Wait!” He turned back, his face so purposefully blank, she knew he was feeling something strong, something volatile.
“What?”
Casting around for something legit to keep him there with her for a few more seconds, she said, “Don’t you want to know what the judges decided?”
Interest flared in his blue eyes before he banked it. “I’m pretty sure that would constitute preferential treatment,” he said gently. “And I don’t think you’d want to count on my ability to act surprised when you make the official announcement to everyone. I’m not a great actor.”
“I don’t believe that for a second,” Eva said. Pulling out her sultriest smile, she went on. “I mean, here you are, acting like you can’t wait to get out of this suite and never touch me again.”
There was that smile again, as if he couldn’t help himself. “Maybe that’s the truth.”
“No way.” Eva let her hips roll a little as she swayed toward him, one step at a time. Maybe she couldn’t figure out how to tell him she wanted him to wait for her until after the RSC—but she knew how to make him want her right here, right now. “There’s no way I feel like I could come out of my skin with the need to be touched by you, and you feel nothing at all.”
Fascinated, she watched his throat move convulsively as he swallowed. “Eva. Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” she breathed, reaching out to finger the snap closure of his chef’s whites. “Don’t break my own rules? But I know that’s what you like about me.”
“How long do we have before the official announcement of who’s going home?”
Startled by the abrupt question, she drew back. “My assistant and a couple of runners are gathering everyone in the kitchen.” She checked her watch. “The judges are scheduled to meet down there in twenty-four minutes.”
“Not long enough,” Danny said hoarsely, reaching for her waist and pulling her close, his palms scorching hot through the thin material of her shirt. “But it’ll have to do.”
Eva squeaked, although she’d deny it with her dying breath. The sound was muffled by Danny’s mouth, anyway, as he bent his head and took her breath with a kiss.
“One last time,” she gasped against his lips as her knees gave out and he cradled her on the way down to the thick, soft carpet.
Danny lifted his head to stare down at her, his body lean and hard and heavenly against hers. Dropping down to nuzzle at her neck, he said, “One last broken rule, then we’ll be good.”
“We’ll be good,” she promised, tilting her head back to give him better access. And as his lips found that spot behind her ear that always gave her chills, making Eva’s hips buck and her heart stutter in her chest, she had to wonder if she’d be able to keep that promise.
After all, didn’t she live to break the rules?
Chapter 23
As it turned out, there was no need to worry about her willpower, or lack thereof. What Eva hadn’t counted on was how much everything was about to change.
She was still producing the show, which meant that all decisions and crises having to do with the actual day-to-day of getting the contestants where they needed to go, getting the challenges set up, making sure the kitchen remained stocked and cleaned and ready for action, fell to Eva.
Not to mention the surprisingly heartbreaking task of sending the losing teams home.
She’d had a taste of how awful it felt to let a group of chefs who’d cooked their heart out know that they hadn’t made the cut, back during the finals. As producer and emcee, she was always the one who had to deliver the bad news. And it had always sucked. Every time.
But suddenly, now that there were cameras everywhere, black lenses like unblinking eyes focused on catching every snippet of human drama and suffering possible, it became a thousand times worse.
It started that very first day. After the hottest, most urgent, and intensely satisfying twenty-minute good-bye sex of her life, Eva had rushed to put herself back together and run downstairs to the kitchen where all the chefs and judges were waiting.
Holding her head high and pretending she hadn
’t just been rolling around on the floor with the East Coast Team’s pastry chef was a lot easier when she didn’t look said pastry chef in the all-too-handsome face.
So Eva had scanned the rest of the room, taking in the hopeful, fearful anticipation and dread, the heart-pounding, cold-sweating agony of not knowing, and she’d felt her own skin begin to prickle with a chill of unease.
God. I have to tell them their dream is over.
And their reaction would be filmed by Cheney and his damn camera, captured for the entertainment of anyone who happened to flip past the Cooking Channel.
Gulping, Eva grasped for the right words and wondered when her life got so freaking emotionally complex and hard to deal with.
No. Fun.
This first elimination hadn’t been all that tricky to decide on, back in the judges’ chamber. With relatively little back and forth or arguing among Kane, Claire, and her father, they’d picked a loser. She knew it would get tougher as the competition went forward and they narrowed the teams down to the best of the best.
But it was hard to believe that any elimination announcement could be more difficult than this one.
“It was a very tough decision,” Eva lied, clasping her hands behind her back to stop their fidgeting. “And I know no one wants to be the first team to be sent home, but unfortunately, the competition is over for some of you.”
An electric current of tension zipped through the room, and Eva dug her nails into her palms.
“After a lot of deliberation, and some dishes and flavors that truly astonished us from each team, the judges have decided that the four teams moving on in the competition are the chefs from the Midwest, the South, the West Coast, and the East Coast.”
A stunned silence met her pronouncement, followed by absolute chaos as the kitchen erupted into whoops of joy and celebration.
Amid the relieved high-fives and the backslapping, Chef Paulina Santiago and her crew quietly trudged back to their table and started packing up their knives and other gear, and Eva couldn’t watch them, didn’t want to see the way their shoulders slumped and their faces crumpled with disbelief, or the way they comforted each other with arms around each other’s backs.
But she forced herself to keep her eyes up and on them. She owed it to them to bear witness to this final moment on their journey toward a dream that she’d had a hand in snatching away.
Kane and Claire congratulated the continuing chefs, said good-bye to the Southwest Team, and left.
Probably to go have fun, happy, sexy times together, since nobody cared if two judges were boinking. Damn it.
Eva, however, had the first of many long nights ahead of her. Summoning her assistant, Drew, to her side, she’d immediately started laying out the battle plan for taking care of getting the Southwest Team back to New Mexico, having the kitchen reorganized with four team tables instead of five, to give the remaining chefs more space, and settling up the hotel bills.
A quick glance at the front corner of the room showed Cheney packing up his camera, and a bolt of panic shot through Eva.
From across the room, her father caught her eye, and it didn’t take a lifetime of struggling to live up to his expectations to read the clear message in his tight expression.
She had to keep Cheney interested. They hadn’t had any luck coordinating schedules with their potential celebrity chef judges, so far. What could she say to make him stay and give the RSC another shot?
The partying gaggle of chefs was beginning to disperse, calling suggestions about taking it out on the town, finding a chef-friendly bar or pub, and throwing back a few drinks to unwind from the insanity of the last few days.
Her attention was caught when she overheard her own name. “I’m going to ask Eva Jansen to come out with us,” Ryan Larousse muttered to the chef next to him.
Eva stilled, but kept her eyes on Drew’s inky black hair bent over the iPad where he was entering items in his ever-expanding to-do list.
“Dude.” Ike Bryar, the head of the Southern Team, frowned, cutting his eyes at her. “What are you doing? That’s like inviting the dean of students to a kegger.”
“There wasn’t an official winner of this challenge, but I bet if we get her liquored up, we can squeeze some good info out of her on who the judges really liked best.” The smug edge to Ryan’s voice made it clear which team he thought would’ve won, if points had been awarded.
“And why the hell would she tell you any of that?” The voice came from behind Eva, who couldn’t turn around to see the speaker without letting on that she was eavesdropping, but she didn’t need to.
It was Danny.
Mostly, she wanted to smack him—he really wasn’t a good actor, if this was the best he could do at pretending nothing had ever gone on between them—but there was a soft, silly, hard-to-deny part of her that wanted to melt when he leaped to her defense.
Especially when Ryan snorted and said, under his breath, “Because Eva Jansen knows how to party, man. Just look at her.”
It was nothing she hadn’t heard before. Chefs were a raunchy, irreverent, testosterone-fueled group. But something about Ryan’s comment caught Eva on the raw edge of her emotions, and she flinched.
Visibly flinched.
Drew looked up, eyebrows raised quizzically. And probably no one else would’ve noticed anything, except Danny was obviously as attuned to her as she was to him, because she could hear the pure rage in his voice when he snarled, “You take that back, Larousse.”
The entire kitchen paused, and Eva couldn’t keep pretending she wasn’t aware of what was going on.
Casting a quick look at Danny, who was a vision of protective anger, legs braced apart and scorched, blistered hands clenched into tight fists that must have hurt unbearably, Eva’s gaze swept past Cheney’s corner of the room and snagged on the camera still set up there.
Cheney had gone back to filming.
And in that briefest of moments before the other East Coasters leaped on Danny and held him back, before Ryan laughed that harsh, grating laugh of his and swept from the kitchen, Eva knew what she had to do.
Cheney wanted drama. He wanted hot chefs and kitchen fights and maybe a little romance, to bring the female viewers in.
If Eva wanted to make the RSC the biggest, best competition it could possibly be—if she wanted to open it up to every talented chef in America—she had no choice.
“Drew,” Eva said, her eyes never leaving Danny, who was whispering furiously with Beck, flailing hand gestures threatening to take out the rest of his team. “I’ve got a new job for you, one that should take priority over the rest of that list.”
“Go,” Drew said, fingers confidently poised over the touchscreen pad.
Eva hesitated, stomach roiling with indecision.
The RSC was her mother’s legacy. Emmaline Jansen’s dream was to found a competition that would elevate and draw attention to the work of amazing chefs around the United States. And when Eva had agreed to take it on this year, she’d done so partly because she wanted to get back to the roots of her mother’s original idea.
Eva wanted to discover and encourage the efforts of all chefs … not just the high-profile ones, or the ones who’d already achieved success. And the best way she knew to do that was to raise the profile of the RSC itself, to get bigger, better sponsors with deeper pockets, so that they could expand the competition to be more inclusive.
But was she really prepared to go this far to get what she wanted?
Yes. It was the only way. Everyone would benefit from the RSC gaining greater exposure on the Cooking Channel. She was doing this for everyone, not only herself.
There was more at stake than her career, or her conscience.
“You’re friends with that chef on the East Coast Team, Winslow. Aren’t you?”
Drew’s eyes got big behind his glasses, but he nodded, and Eva felt a slow curl of determination in her belly.
If Cheney wanted drama, then by God she’d give it to him
.
Chapter 24
The week following the first elimination was one of the hardest of Danny’s life. They all felt the loss of the Southwest Team; Paulina Santiago and her crew were nice people, solid competitors. And the fact that they went home brought it into sharp relief—this was a competition. They were playing for real stakes, and screwups had real consequences.
The chefs were given a few days off to rest up from the previous challenge, but most of them spent the time in the kitchen, anyway, shooting the shit, doodling ideas, and just generally staying amped on anticipation.
Danny didn’t do downtime. In fact, he sort of sucked at it.
So he practiced his soufflé technique, experimented with caramels, and watched.
He watched Max and Jules emerge from their lovebird haze and get their heads in the game. He watched Beck studiously not watching Skye Gladwell, who swirled across the kitchen in a dance of flowy skirts and jingly bracelets and curly clouds of strawberry-blond hair. He watched Winslow getting cozier with Drew Gallagher, Eva’s assistant.
But most of all, he watched Eva.
Eva, who flew from one task to another as if her stiletto heels had wings attached. Eva, who hadn’t stopped moving since the full camera crew arrived the day before. She was in motion from the moment he first caught sight of her across the crowded Gold Coast lobby as he came in with a sack full of light, flaky croissants from the bakery across the street for the team’s breakfast, till she bid everyone a distracted good night and went back to work.
Eva, who was starting to look worn and fragile, like pastry dough rolled out so thin it was see-through in places, and far too easy to tear.
She had a lot to do—the production team was gearing up for the next challenge starting tomorrow, and coordinating everything with the camera crew seemed to be quite the hassle. From what Danny could tell, the preparations involved a lot of phone calls, permits, and wrangling around.
While he and the other chefs had been taking in a little of Chicago—okay, mainly scouting out the local bar scene, but still—Eva had been running herself into the ground.
Some Like It Hot Page 20
