Audrey felt the opposite. All she could do was work, lose herself in detail. In the absence of toil, there was only emptiness.
Idle time was an aching reminder of what she was missing. What she had always been lacking. Deep down, that love she’d never received from her mother was something she’d never stop yearning for.
Her heart spiraled downward in sputters until it reached despair. Then she set her intention and pulled herself back up to the surface as she’d done so many times before.
Asking Shane another question, she threw herself a rope.
“How does a recipe get created?”
“An idea starts to come together in your mind. And then you try it out. And it’s not right. You change it around. A little less this, a little more that, let’s add in something else. Then you try it again. And again. And again. Eventually, if you’re lucky, you find something that’s only yours.”
“You’ll find your way back.” She was sure of it.
Apparently having had enough of that conversation, Shane opened his car door. “Let’s get out.”
He came around to her side of the car and helped her out. There were no other cars anywhere. They were miles away from town, under the sunset and the hush of nightfall.
With no warning whatsoever, Shane rested one hand on each of Audrey’s shoulders. He leaned down and kissed her. His lips pressed against hers with closed-mouthed but adamant force.
Her neck flushed instantly. Having him close to her was a little bit familiar now after their bodies had writhed together with their sexy dancing at Big Top. But he hadn’t kissed her that night, and this new intimacy set off alarms in her system.
It was a shock she missed with all of her might when he took his lips away.
Shane let loose a laugh that echoed in the quiet of the desert. “My apologies. I don’t know what the heck I did there.”
Audrey’s lungs ceased functioning. She was furious at him for having taken his lips from her. All she could seem to want was for him to kiss her again. Oxygen in, carbon dioxide out—she reminded herself of the basic breathing process.
“Come here,” he said, filling her with the hope that his mouth would graze hers again. Her eyelids fluttered uncontrollably.
But no. He lifted her up and sat her on the hood of his Jeep. Then hoisted himself onto it, as well. He maneuvered backward so that he could lean back against the glass of the windshield with his legs outstretched on the hood. Then he helped shimmy Audrey backward so that she could do the same.
She somehow didn’t care that she was wearing a business dress and heels. His spontaneity was liberating.
Now they were able to continue to watch nature’s spectacle with a warm breeze gliding across their faces.
Audrey had to settle herself down. He’d obviously kissed her by mistake. Out of some kind of urge that probably had nothing to do with her. She shouldn’t read anything into it.
Maybe sensing Audrey’s discomfort, Shane thankfully broke the quiet. “What was Josefina saying to you about tragedies?”
She creased her forehead, not sure what or how much was appropriate to tell Shane. “I told her that my mother died three years ago. Josefina thought that loss was a similarity to share.”
Shane chuckled wistfully. “Does it work that way?”
Audrey shook her head. “I was wondering the same thing.”
They took in the majesty of the sunset again. The sides of their bodies pressed into each other.
“You didn’t love your wife,” Audrey mused, “and my mother didn’t love me.”
“What do you mean your mother didn’t love you?”
“She didn’t. She suffered from a debilitating depression. I wasn’t wanted and she never let me get close.” Three or four tears broke their way out of hiding and dripped down Audrey’s cheek. “When she was dying of cirrhosis of the liver, she didn’t let me near then, either. And I didn’t push. I let my dad watch her die while I studied market share statements.”
“I let Melina die. I didn’t protect her.”
“I let my mother die without forcing her to let me care.”
“We’re quite a pair then.”
“So we do have something in common, like Josefina said.”
Shane turned himself until he was facing her. He kissed the tears on her face, one by one, ever so lightly. A sigh slipped through her lips.
“So soft,” he murmured as he dotted kisses all over her face.
His beard stubble felt exactly as she imagined it would, rasping across her cheeks with a welcome harshness. Filling her with the wholly biological need for contact with something that was wholly male. Something that she’d dared not think of in years.
When his mouth inched down her neck, her head fell backward.
With a flattened palm, he caressed the length of her throat from behind her ear to the swerve of her shoulder. His lips moved under the collar of her dress. In a beat, her back arched to meet him.
Flowering with anticipation, her parted lips waited for him to return upward. As if he knew she couldn’t delay a moment longer, his open mouth rejoined hers. A quick succession of kisses was followed by a longer one that melded them into each other.
Her arms reached around his neck. His mouth possessed hers, communicating what she had to hear. She met his every sensation, the kisses swirling deeper, further, quaking both of them at their epicenters.
“What are we doing?” Audrey muttered against his lips as Shane’s kisses obscured the purple and orange sky from her view.
He whispered, “Sharing loss.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
SHANE SHOVED HIS blanket off and rubbed his bare chest and belly. He knew he needed to get out of bed but the blackout shades had done their job of shielding him from the Nevada morning sun and he was just that comfortable. Soft, soft, soft. Audrey’s face. Audrey’s hands. Audrey’s hair. Audrey’s mouth. The word soft could be applied to so many of the images that played like a video in his mind.
The sun had set and risen again yet he couldn’t concentrate on anything other than the memory of kissing Audrey on the hood of his Jeep yesterday.
Of course, it was totally inappropriate. It was all wrong the way their lips explored each other’s like they did. It wasn’t thought through. It wasn’t smart. It wasn’t professional.
But, man, was it a mind-blower.
He hadn’t had the desire to kiss a woman that way in ages. The long, long, slow dance with Audrey’s mouth had been totally unexpected. And left him certain that he’d never enjoyed kissing anyone that much.
His kisses with Melina had been different. Their physical encounters had begun with an aggressive hunger that was satisfied only too quickly. No time was taken for savoring.
With Audrey, all Shane could envision was the opposite. Were he to make love with her, which he was not going to do, he’d take all the time in the world. He’d bring her waters from warm to hot, and then keep them at a simmer long before he’d let them reach the boiling point. If he ever got her into his bed, he’d...well, that was never, ever, to happen.
Sure, maybe the time had come for him to start dating again. Though he’d never let a woman all the way back into his life. He couldn’t be counted on and wouldn’t bestow that unreliability on anybody. No one deserved that. Look what had happened with Melina.
If he did decide to fulfill primitive needs, there were billions of women in the world. Audrey was not an option. She was the most precious creature he’d ever encountered and she deserved the kind of dedication and protection he could never offer. Safeguarding was indeed what she needed after what sounded like a childhood filled with dashed hopes and disappointment. He would deny himself anything not to risk injuring her further.
Not to mention the fact that they were corporate partners and, with any luck, would be for many years to come. Messing wit
h that wasn’t a gamble to be taken. Business never mixed with pleasure, and with the stakes as high as they were for both families, no unnecessary chances should be taken.
In fact, he couldn’t risk any more brushes with her like yesterday’s kissing, or even the other night’s dancing. Anything further would take him past the point of no return.
Into the stuff of dreams.
Which could too easily turn to nightmares.
But soaping himself up in the shower, he couldn’t help riding on the high of those kisses.
* * *
After the drive to the restaurant’s kitchen, Shane flipped on the lights with one clear intention. Moving aside the jumble of odds and ends and files that had been shoved under his desk as they set up the office, Shane found what he was looking for. A big packing box that he had sent himself from New York.
Grandma Lolly’s pots and pans were easily his most treasured possessions. An instant smile crossed his lips as he opened the box. Like old friends, those pots and pans were his grounding on this earth. He’d let far too much time go by without visiting these beacons.
“Knock, knock.” Audrey’s voice called out from the back entrance of the kitchen.
“In here,” Shane yelled from his office, which was separated from the kitchen with a smoked-glass partition. She found him sitting in the middle of the floor with the box open in front of him.
How was she always so beautiful? She was the personification of the sunny morning. Her blond hair was shiny and clean, and her pink blouse accentuated her creamy skin. His belly lurched with the appetite to pull her down to the floor and pick up where they left off yesterday at sunset.
“What are you doing down there?”
“These were my Grandma’s.” He pointed inside the box. “These cooking tools are like someone else’s childhood teddy bear. I don’t have a memory that goes back further than these do.”
He lifted out a skillet. It was crusty and rusted but he caressed it as gently as he had Audrey’s glossy hair yesterday. “She taught me my first recipe with this pan.”
“What was it?”
“Just fried bread and eggs, but what she taught me was how to not fear fire. How to control it. That’s the most basic mastery a cook needs.”
Audrey stood in the doorway, listening. His impulse to talk to her about things that were important to him was growing every day. Maybe it was just that he’d cut himself off from everyone for so long, he was relearning how to articulate what was inside.
An internal voice corrected him. It was Audrey in particular Shane wanted to talk to.
“My grandma never had old-lady hands,” he continued. “Her skin stayed taut until the day she died.”
Now Audrey moved toward him. And even though she was in one of her work outfits, she sat down on the floor next to him.
“She had her fair share of burn scars,” he chuckled. “You can’t spend a life in the kitchen without those.”
He displayed the inside of his right arm for Audrey to see. “That was from buquerones fritos.” He used his left hand to point to the biggest welt, which was a good inch and a half. Then he switched to his left arm to show her another choice one. Two, actually, that formed a V shape. “And thank you, coliflor rebozada.”
“That’s a doozy.”
“But for all the cooking and dishwashing and running her diner in Brooklyn, Grandma Lolly had the nicest hands.”
Shane took one of Audrey’s small hands into his. Maybe his grandma had the second nicest hands. Audrey’s were pure. They were pink and rounded rather than bony. The orange nail polish was the only thing that revealed they weren’t the hands of a small child.
Without thinking twice, he brought her hand up toward his mouth, about to deliver a light kiss to each finger. He stopped himself in time.
No more kissing her, he chastised his urge. He must keep things only professional with her. Why was he finding that difficult to remember?
Shane returned Audrey’s hand to her lap without a word about his actions. Reaching into the box, he hoisted out Lolly’s large cast-iron pot.
“Ah, she taught me so many recipes with this Dutch oven. It was her favorite. Soups and mashes. Summer stews. Winter braises for cold nights.” He rubbed the bottom of the pot like it could appreciate his affection. “You know, this pot is really why I’m a chef. This is the first one I used to try to create my own recipes.”
He’d ask his grandma if thyme might add a good layer of flavor for mushrooms, or if the sweetness of carrots might enhance a potato puree. She’d lean down and give him a pat on the back with approval when he’d come up with something that tasted good. Years later, when he grew tall, she’d have to stretch up to pat the same spot on him.
And although the Brooklyn diner led to the Lolly’s chain and a formidable restaurant business for the family, it was Grandma Lolly’s special cash jar, which she diligently added to every week, that sent Shane to culinary school. She’d wanted it that way.
He owed so much to her. She’d hate what he’d turned into. Bitter and washed up at thirty-four years old. Lolly would expect him to dust himself off no matter how great his fall and pull himself back together.
Her small sauce pot was almost warm in his hands. He reached into the box for her knife roll. Which he spread out, and then he touched each blade. They were all dull, but a good sharpening could resurrect them.
Here he was in this humongous state-of-the-art kitchen with every tool and gadget at his disposal, his own equipment and knives the finest in the world, yet he knew that he needed to sharpen his grandmother’s knives and pretend he was a young boy in the safe haven of her home kitchen.
He stretched one arm up to his desk and grabbed a pencil and scrap of paper, which he pulled down and handed to Audrey.
“Can you write this down? I’ll start with the holy trinity of green peppers, onions and celery. But not with andouille, we’ll use chorizo. And lux it up with lobster...”
Four hours later, Shane finished his sixth version of a Cajun-style paella. “Taste,” he said to Audrey, who had been coming and going while she took care of other matters on the property but kept popping in to check his progress.
He spooned some of it into her mouth, noting that feeding her had become his new favorite hobby. She nodded her approval and circled the recipe on the piece of paper that was now covered in scribbles. “It’s roasting the garlic that works, and less of it?”
“I think I nailed it.” He did a shimmy with his shoulders that made Audrey giggle. He grabbed her arm and pulled her to him for a waltz around the kitchen even though the music was better suited to head banging. He kissed two fingers on his own hand and raised them up toward the ceiling. “Thank you, Grandma.”
“You’ve got it?” Audrey wanted to be certain.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Shane Murphy has finally developed a new recipe.”
* * *
If Audrey ever wondered who Shane Murphy was before he lost himself, she had her answer. To watch today as the creative juices flowed back into his hands was something to behold. To experience his earnest sense of hospitality, the way he cared to determine whether every single dash of salt would be pleasing to his diner, was magnificent.
She had been watching a painter at his easel. A composer at the piano. It was inspiring the way a resounding “crap” at any failure was quickly followed by the sizzle of oil in a clean skillet or the dice of a new onion. Labor was how he passed the time while waiting for the muse to tell him how to solve the next problem.
“You, sir, are poetry in motion,” she gushed to Shane.
Cardboard Shane, that is.
Back in the shelter of her bungalow she could let out what she’d managed to hold in all day. Namely, her wish against wishes that Shane would hold her, kiss her and dance with her again. When part of her yearning came true and he waltzed her a
round the kitchen after confirming that his paella was finally perfected, Shane fed her body a lifeblood she was sure she would have perished without.
Now, being totally honest, sitting on her bed with her shoes kicked off, gawking at that cutout that she was so enamored of, she wondered if every suite shouldn’t be adorned with one of them, and she could admit her revelation.
She wanted to make love with Shane. The prolonged, slow, “lasts all night” type of love. She wanted to do things with him she’d never experienced. The kind of lovemaking that leaves you exhilarated and sweaty and spent on the bed, unable to get up for work the next day.
Through watching Shane in action today, she could tell that he knew deep things about passion and about satisfaction, about modulation and temperance. She wanted him to teach her.
“Hello...” She almost blushed with embarrassment when she answered Daniel’s phone call.
She had a flashing moment of fury at her dad. What she was specifically angry about, she didn’t know. About her mother. About the twisted person Audrey had become, who told herself she didn’t want to be loved. And didn’t want to love in return.
Nothing was really her father’s fault. Back when her mother was alive, he had been so focused on just putting one foot in front of the next. Trying to take over the hotels from his own father, who had worked for decades to build their name and reputation. Directing and growing the brand. She couldn’t really blame anything on her dad. There was something so innocent about him. He’d never known how bad it had gotten for her, the loneliness and the isolation of day after day with a mother who stayed upstairs in a bedroom that was off-limits to Audrey.
The sound of her dad’s voice on the other end of the phone was a perfect reminder that she had no reason to be daydreaming about making love with Shane.
They were, and would remain, colleagues and nothing more. She wouldn’t even be spending this much time with him if not for the cookbook and the publicity campaigns. Which were necessary for both families. Time to zip it up, rein it in and put her steely face on. She was more than capable of that. That was classic Audrey Girard.
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