Ready To Burn (Due South Book 3)

by Tracey Alvarez

  She returned to her bed and picked up her phone. Whispered, “No, you can’t, I haven’t got a bra on.”

  She set the phone on the nightstand, where it promptly bleated again.

  I know yr awake, cupcake. Yr drapes twitched.

  Dammit, the man had eagle eyes. She wanted to know why Del put a camera in her kitchen, but she didn’t want to deal with him tonight. Dealing with him meant getting dressed again—and hell, no to talking to him in her baggy sleep pants and her dad’s old rugby shirt. Small mercies she couldn’t see her reflection in the room’s wall mirror. Her hair, after reclining on pillows for a few hours and out of its usual neat plait, would be horrific. Think electrified Cousin Itt.

  Her phone stayed silent. She whooped out a sigh. He’d given up.

  A soft knock sounded on her door. Ohmygawd—of course he hadn’t given up. He was a damned Westlake male.

  Her gaze skipped to the laundry sorter in the corner. Could she do a reverse Houdini trick and wriggle into her bra? The knock came again, this time louder and accompanied by Del’s deep voice saying, “Shaye. I know you’re awake.”

  Crapola!

  Shaye hot-footed it across the floor, wincing as her sore leg rubbed against her pajama bottoms. No time to change unless she made him wait another five minutes—so she yanked open the door far enough to hiss, “Go away!”

  “You need an explanation.”

  She caught a glimpse of tanned forearm braced on the frame, the dark and dangerous bulk of him blocking the light behind. Ah—nope—a horny woman who hadn’t had sex in oh, thirteen months needed to keep that kind of temptation in the hallway.

  Shaye got the door three quarters shut before a large hand shot out, forcing it to a halt. Keeping her crazy hair and unfettered boobs tucked out of sight, she swallowed a snarl. “It can wait until tomorrow. It’s after eleven.”

  “Worried you’ll turn into a pumpkin?”

  She shoved the cool wood, but nothing budged. While the man might’ve lost some weight, he sure hadn’t lost any muscle.

  “Or am I keeping you from fantasizing about one of your book boyfriends?”

  Hah! The only man she’d fantasized about in the last five days was him, and that wasn’t something she cared to joke about.

  A floorboard creaked from the room next door. Fudge. Short of causing a scene, she didn’t have a choice.

  “Five minutes. And the lights stay off.”

  The pressure from the other side abated, and she opened the door wide.

  He slipped into her room like an inky shadow, accompanied by a low-pitched chuckle. “You do seem like a lights-off kind of girl.”

  “Oh, shut up.” She stomped over and sat on the bed.

  “Are you always this cranky when you’re entertaining men in your bedroom?” He continued past her and yanked open the drapes.

  The streetlight outside lit up her room, highlighting kitten-print flannel and wild-child hair. The look every woman aspired to when “entertaining a man”. Although she wasn’t entertaining Del.

  “Four minutes, thirty seconds,” she said.

  With his back to the light, his expression was obscured, but she sensed he studied her every movement. Could he see her nipples hardening under her loose top? She crossed her arms, just in case.

  Del slouched down, propping his butt on the narrow windowsill and crossing his ankles. “The camera is to record footage for a reality TV series audition.”

  An audition tape? As in, people would see her and Vince and—holy crap! “You are not using that footage of me from tonight!”

  “No.” A lot of humor in that one word. “Pinky swear.” He held up a hand and wiggled his little finger.

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “You think I’m such a bastard I’d let that incident go public?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You recorded us without our knowledge.”

  His shoulders rolled forward. “If the staff knew a camera was recording, you’d all be delivering Oscar-worthy performances. I only needed a couple minutes footage of the kitchen in full swing.”

  “So what is this TV series?”

  “Ward on Fire. It’s Ethan Ward’s baby.”

  “The Ethan Ward from Ward’s?” The gorgeous celebrity chef owner of three Michelin starred restaurants.

  “Yeah. Him.”

  Del’s voice was as bland as boiled white rice, but something about the way he’d said Ethan’s name nettled the hairs on her nape. “You’re auditioning? Why?”

  “The winner gets to work for six months in his London restaurant. After the trial period, if the winner makes the grade, he or she will become head chef of another Ward’s restaurant scheduled to open in Chicago next year.”

  “That’s an amazing opportunity.”

  “Yup.”

  “Does West know? Your father?”

  Del’s head lowered, and his fingers, down beside his hips on the windowsill, drummed a quick tattoo.

  “No. I haven’t told anyone else. Look—” He pushed away from the sill and sat on the bed with her.

  The mattress dipped, forcing her to uncross her arms to steady herself. Without staff buzzing around and the buffer of work, she was once again uber-aware of him. And there she sat, next to a man who stirred her feverishly hot, naked apart from her pajamas and tee shirt.

  Nake-ed.

  She needed to stop acting like an awkward teenager who’d brought her first boyfriend home to an empty house. The fluttery feeling in her stomach was purely one-sided.

  “Ethan’s already started filming,” Del said. “The producers agreed to let me send in a last-minute audition.”

  “You’d be a wildcard entrant.”

  “I might not even make it past the audition.”

  “But if you do?”

  Del grinned at her. “Ethan and his crew will fly here later this month.”

  Ethan Ward, coming to Stewart Island? Working in her kitchen?

  Excitement and pure nerves flooded her system. “This would bring in some amazing publicity for Due South—for Oban, too.”

  “Exactly. But I’ve no idea how West and Bill will react.”

  “Ah.” She could almost guarantee West would be all for it. Bill, on the other hand, didn’t like change.

  From beneath the initial excitement, a dark thought rose. “What kind of reality series is Ward On Fire? A look at up-and-coming chefs in their fabulous restaurants, or…?”

  Del’s spine straightened and his hands, loosely relaxed on his thighs, turned to clenched fists.

  “Or,” he said simply. “The show’s premise is so unoriginal it’d be laughed out of the studio if it wasn’t Ethan’s idea. It centers on head chefs of failing restaurants in interesting locations. The producers promise the owner they’ll replace the contestant with one of Ethan’s hand-picked chefs, should the contestant make it to the finals. Then, with Ethan’s wisdom and British charisma, he saves the day and the restaurant.”

  “Due South’s not failing.”

  “It’s not doing well, either.”

  The slow but steady decline over the last year was undeniable.

  “So, you want this guy in your face, telling you what to do?” She couldn’t imagine Del taking orders from anyone, especially if he believed they were wrong.

  He glanced over, his face unreadable. “I want a shot at landing the Chicago gig, so if that means biting my tongue and working with Ward, I’ll do it.”

  Shaye pressed her lips together. “That’s why you’re really here, isn’t it? Not to help your dad, not because you care about Due South, but to get on a TV show.”

  They stared at each other across the narrow but bottomless gap between them.

  His throat worked then stilled. “Yeah.”

  “And if you don’t make it through the audition, you’ll be on the next flight.” Her chest squeezed around her lungs like a boa constrictor.

  “Maybe.”

  “To LA? Or have you burned all your bridges
there, too?”

  A flash of teeth in a grim smile. “Pretty much. There’s nothing but trouble behind me in LA. I thought Chicago would be a fresh start.”

  Much as it galled, she said, “Why the hurry to leave? If TV stardom doesn’t work out, and you can’t go back to Hollywood, why not stay until—?”

  God, she was thick sometimes! “The wedding! You’d miss your own brother’s wedding?”

  Del stood, stalking to the window again. “West’d be fine about it. It’s not as if we’re tight.”

  Shaye scrambled to her feet. “He absolutely would not be fine about it. You’re his best man—his only brother. He loves you.”

  Del’s shoulders hunched. “He loves the memory of a fourteen-year-old kid.”

  “Give him the chance to love the man the fourteen-year-old kid grew into, then. He’s family.”

  “You’re big on family, aren’t you?”

  He stepped toward her, and for some reason her knees wobbled.

  Del stopped in front of the photograph on her dresser. The picture had been taken on one of their family-and-friends beach picnics. She’d been ten, posing cross-legged on the sand. Ben and Piper flanked her on either side, with West leaning an elbow on Ben’s shoulder, making bunny ears behind Piper’s head. Beside Ben knelt her parents—her mum laughing, her dad whispering something in his wife’s ear. Missing from the photo, since he’d offered to take it, was Del.

  “The perfect Harland family, always there for each other.”

  “We weren’t perfect.”

  The churning in her gut over his dismissal of his relationship with West dissipated, because she remembered that day in great detail. It’d been one of the last picnics Del had gone on with the Harland family. They’d swam and dived for hours, played cricket in the sand, stretched out on beach towels and had competitions to see who could burp the loudest after drinking too much soda. Del had thrown himself into every activity with a hundred and ten percent effort, wrestling with his big brother with puppy-like affection. Almost as if he knew the summer was winding down, and nothing so wonderful could last forever.

  So something must’ve happened to him in LA for him to change so much that he’d miss one of the most important days in West’s life.

  “We fought like cats and dogs.” Shaye smoothed the folds of her shirt. “You were at our place often enough to hear it.”

  Del looked at her with a flat stare. “That’s right. Never a quiet moment in the Harland house. Someone always shouting over someone else, everyone trying to be heard at the same time—and there you were, a bossy little girl in the thick of it, sorting out everyone’s problems.” Breaking eye contact, he chuffed out a soft laugh. “You’re in the wrong job. You should’ve been a hostage negotiator.”

  “I often wondered why you and West wanted to hang with us so much.”

  He held the photo frame up to the light streaming over his shoulder. “I needed the noise and the chaos to make me forget. You guys had everything.”

  She smiled tightly. “And then we had nothing.”

  “I’m very sorry about your dad, Shaye.”

  His voice, so gentle when only a minute ago it’d scraped over her temper with sharp barbs, brought tears rushing to her eyes.

  “Thank you.” She swallowed the soggy lump in her throat and blinked rapidly. “He wasn’t perfect, either. He made some bad decisions that cost him everything.”

  “I can identify with that.” Del returned the frame to the dresser, touching the glass with a finger. “You’re wearing his shirt.”

  Shaye wrapped her arms around her middle. “After Mum cleaned out his clothes, I took it. I couldn’t bear to give it to the charity shop.”

  “Go Highlanders.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and angled his body toward the door.

  Ohthankgoodness. He was planning to leave. The back of her knees nudged the mattress, giving him space to move past. The room shrank as he walked closer, stopping so they stood toe to toe. She struggled not to breathe in his warm, manly smell.

  He reached out, tucking a flyaway strand of her hair behind her ear. “Your hair—”

  “Is a disaster, I know.” She squinted so she wouldn’t catch a glimpse of it in the mirror.

  “I was going to say pretty.” His eyes crinkled in the corners and he finally let go of the strand, leaving her scalp to tingle. “It suits you, being a little loose and mussed up.”

  She felt loose and mussed up. His big body seemed to have sucked all the oxygen from the room. The only logical reason for why she found it so hard to keep breathing steadily.

  “Oh.”

  She licked dry lips, and his gaze dropped to her mouth, which had the unfortunate side effect of waking up her happy-place. Telling her happy-place to go back to sleep when faced with such hotness was mission impossible. Her body swayed toward him.

  “I should go.” Before she touched him, Del shot to the door. “Will you let me tell Bill and West about the show, once I know whether I’ve made it or not?”

  Right. Reality check. Her cheeks flared. What the hell had she been thinking? Standing there, begging the man with her eyes to kiss her? All Del wanted was a promise she wouldn’t blow his cover.

  “I won’t say anything,” she said. “For now.”

  “Thanks.”

  He opened the door, stepped out, and closed it softly behind him.

  Shaye flung herself backward onto the bed with a groan. Such an idiot to want to put her mouth on that man.

  Even more of an idiot to soften toward him when she knew—by what he’d left unsaid—that he only cared about himself.

  Chapter 7

  Alone, at last.

  Del surveyed Due South’s kitchen. His kitchen. With lunch service over, the staff had dispersed for their break before dinner prep began, and Shaye had bolted the moment her duties were complete. Yet, they’d come to an uneasy truce during the weekend shifts, two days after talking in her bedroom.

  Talking. The last thing he’d wanted to do after seeing her all mussed up and sex-kittenish-sexy. Even thinking about their late-night chat made him sweat. Made him hard. Shaye’s nipples jutting against her shirt as they’d sat on her bed—close enough to smell the citrusy scent of her shampoo…

  Whoa, buddy.

  Del tore off his apron. Fifteen minutes of torture he’d better not dwell on if he wanted to work the rest of the day without a non-stop boner. Maybe he’d head outside, see if anyone else caught his eye.

  Scrunching his face in distaste, he hung up his apron. Apparently, he only wanted to hook up with a snarky, cupcake-tattooed brunette.

  The back door banged open, and his father lurched inside. Bill, once again, looked like a twice-reanimated zombie.

  “What are you doing here?” The words popped out before Del could hold onto them.

  Bill stabbed a finger at him. “Still my kitchen, Hollywood.”

  Frickin’ great. Shaye’s nickname had stuck. He’d told them ‘til he ran out of air that Cosset was in Santa Monica, not Hollywood. Like anyone cared.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be resting?” he asked.

  Snatching his apron off a hook, Bill grunted. “Can’t rest. My house is full of bloody women.”

  “You’ve got a house full of women? And you left?”

  Bill shot him a you’re yanking my chain glare. “‘Course I left. It’s your mother’s turn to host bridge club, and none of ‘em can shut up longer than three seconds. Betsy Taylor decided I should learn to play—she’s been on my case for years.”

  “Maybe you should give it a try?”

  “Wash your mouth out.” Bill finished tying the apron around his waist and made his way across the kitchen.

  “Or take up some other hobby to keep you out of trouble. Like knitting.”

  A bark of laughter from his father who’d opened the fridge door. “You always were a little smartass.”

  Is that why you sent me away? The little voice in his head made him feel like
a chunk of frozen steak had jammed in his throat. He brushed the question off with a roll of his shoulders. “You gonna start on some prep?”

  “Yep.” Bill dragged out butter and a small bunch of shallots. He shot a quick glance over his shoulder. “You staying?”

  If he didn’t know better Del’d think a hopeful tone had crept in Bill’s voice. Del hesitated, torn between getting the hell away and wanting to keep an eye on Bill, to make sure the old man didn’t collapse.

  “Though I don’t need a bloody nanny.” Bill walked stiffly to the counter and put down the ingredients. “Been running this kitchen under my own steam for almost thirty years.”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  All the times he and his mother and brother entertained themselves as Bill refused to leave Due South. How there’d been no Dad at Saturday morning rugby games—because Bill had lunch prep. No Dad taking him and West hiking and tramping and fishing in summer, because summer was prime tourist season, and Bill Westlake rarely had a day off work—in summer or winter.

  Del grabbed his jacket. “I’m off for my break.”

  He strode out the back door without a glance and headed to the foreshore road.

  Scuffing his feet and glancing around, Del paused. Where could he go to pass a couple of hours? Tourists opposite the hotel used the giant chess set by the kids’ playground. A pre-schooler shrieked in delight, flying down the slide into his mother’s arms. Del snuffed out a harsh laugh and shoved his fists into his jacket pockets. Yeah, no Mr. Popularity sash for him—unlike his welcome-anywhere brother.

  He shook his head. West’s place then—Del’d sneak in a power nap and maybe a quick run before service.

  His phone buzzed as he hit the corner to West’s road. He didn’t recognize the number flashing across the screen, but his heart jolted at the US country code.

  “Del Westlake speaking.”

  A pause and the faintest of hisses. “Del? Ethan Ward. Got a minute, mate?”

  “Yeah. Sure.” Del’s fingers gripped the phone’s cool edges. He’d never spoken to the man in his life, but something about the plummy accent mixed with commoner’s slang—once described as a slumming Mr. Darcy accent—caused his hackles to rise.