At Your Service

by Amy Jo Cousins

  "Guess who these belong to?"

  Pushing a chair in front of her like a lion-tamer, Grace held her off.

  "Absolutely not, Sarah. No way."

  "Chicken. I'll even help you carry everything over there."

  "No way," she repeated, frantic for a way out of this. "He won't have something, salt, pepper. Plates. It'll never work."

  "Hey, my brother's a modern man. I bet he even has his own cheese grater." Sarah broke into a slow waltz around the kitchen with an imaginary partner, leering at Grace over her shoulder. "Besides, it'll be so much more private."

  Exactly what I don't want.

  "I am not cooking dinner for Tyler at his place. Impossible."

  An hour later, she watched as Tyler's apartment door closed behind Sarah. She flipped the dead bolt closed reflexively and then stood frozen, staring at a featureless white door. After a moment, she rotated slowly on one heel, took a deep breath and walked slowly toward the kitchen.

  Along the way, she trailed a hand along the back of a long, deep couch in the main room. A velvet nap, in navy, to balance out the feminine feel perhaps. The clack of her sandals on the hardwood floor disappeared in the thick pile of an Oriental rug blanketing the floor. A few pieces of wood furniture, with Shaker simplicity, were scattered around the room. In the same spare fashion, framed black-and-white photos decorated the plain white walls.

  Feeling enough like a Peeping Tom already, she deliberately averted her eyes as she walked past Tyler's open bedroom door. Not, however, before she noticed an unmade bed and a pillow abandoned on the floor. Reassuring signs of mess in what was otherwise a terminally neat apartment.

  Once in the kitchen, she discovered that Sarah was indeed correct. Tyler not only did possess his own cheese grater, but also a variety of pots and pans, colanders in three different sizes and every tool from a garlic press to a twenty-function food processor.

  Undoubtedly, the man could cook.

  What was already an attack of nerves threatened to mature into a full-blown panic.

  Don't think. Just cook.

  She peeled and then grated fresh ginger, shredding the tough lemony fibers against the rough steel perforations. Diced onions with her eyes clenched almost closed and hoped she wouldn't end up bleeding on the vegetables. Julienned carrots and cut up cauliflower into bite-size florets. Whisked tarragon-infused white-wine vinegar with a flurry of spices.

  After half an hour of prep work, she decided that what she really needed was a glass of wine, so she uncorked the spicy Australian Shiraz she'd brought and poured herself one.

  "Besides, the wine really ought to breathe." She toasted herself and made sure the oven was preheating. Then she went to invade Tyler's CD collection.

  Kansas City jazz was wailing brassily from the speakers and the scents of richly spiced dishes permeated the air when Tyler unlocked the door to his apartment and stepped into his fantasy.

  He kicked off his shoes at the door and walked with silent, padded footsteps to the kitchen doorway. Pausing there, he watched Grace sway in place to the music, standing in front of the stoye with a wooden spoon in one hand. The tips of her blond hair skimmed her shoulders, catching briefly on the skinny straps of her tank top. Ignoring the spoon, she dipped a finger into a pot for a sample.

  "It smells delicious. How does it taste?"

  She whirled around. Wide bright eyes and her finger still stuck in her mouth gave her the look of a startled five-year-old. She pulled the finger out, sucking on it reflexively. "Delicious. You know, if you scare the cook into a heart attack, dinner might arrive a 'little late at the table."

  "Sorry." He walked over to where an open bottle of wine and an empty wineglass sat on the counter. "May I?" The garnet liquid flowed richly into the glass. "So, what are you concocting over there, mademoiselle chef? Or should I call you mem'sahib?"

  "Let's put it this way. If you don't like Indian food, it's going to be a long, hungry night." She picked her own glass up off the counter and sipped it.

  He stepped closer, deliberately crowding her, watching her back up a pace before deciding to hold her ground. With a slight movement, he clinked his glass delicately against hers.

  "Fortunately, I happen to love Indian food. Anything spicy appeals to me."

  Her mouth opened slightly, small teeth glistening wet behind bare lips. A moment passed. She pressed her lips firmly together and stepped around him to turn off a flame on the stove-top. "Good. Because it's just about done." She looked up at him and bit her lip. "I wasn't sure where we should eat. Your kitchen table is a little small for all the plates."

  "We'll eat in the living room," he told her, and was immediately happy he'd bought the ridieulously tiny kitchen table Maxie had suggested. "You finish up in here and I'll set the table."

  At least the cleaning lady came on Saturday mornings, he thought at the sight of his orderly living room. Then he began to set the scene.

  In the kitchen, Grace let out a pent-up breath in a rush of air and sagged gently against the warm stove edge. Even after her heart had restarted itself from the shock of him suddenly there in the doorway, her nerve ends had refused to settle down. Sizzling beneath her skin until she swore she could feel the air move on her neck when he lifted his glass across the room.

  Shake it off, Grace. Remember, this is just a friendly dinner. Don't panic.

  Panic! Panic! the voice of caution locked in the cellar was shouting, lips pressed to a crack in the door. Grace ignored it.

  She got to work, transferring the various dishes from pots and pans to bowls and platters, and then stepped back to survey her work. A baked, marinated, fall-off-the-bone chicken dish. Dal, a staple Indian food made from lentils, and basmati rice. Spicy corn and a tangy carrot and cauliflower pickle. Flat nan bread, and raita, the ever-present yogurt sauce in Indian meals, cool and refreshing.

  Good grief. I've made enough food for an army.

  "I may have gone a little overboard," she called to the other room and picked up four plates at once, in true waiter style. She strode into the living room. "But you can always eat it for lunch tomorrow. And dinner and—"

  Only an instinct to keep the food on the plates stopped her from halting suddenly in shock.

  Tyler's idea of setting the table for dinner and hers were polar opposites. At least for tonight. She'd assumed they would simply sit on the couch, preferably at opposite ends, and eat off the coffee table. A casual, friendly meal.

  Well, casual still applied, but friendly seemed to have transformed itself into sensually romantic.

  They would indeed be dining at the coffee table, but Tyler had dragged it into the middle of the Oriental rug and placed bed pillows on either side of it, so that two people sitting cross-legged on the floor would face each other across the table. The overhead lights were extinguished, and a half dozen white candles of various sizes clustered on either end of the table. Silver flatware and crystal glasses caught and threw off flickering light from the candles. The jazzy brass band duels had been replaced by Billie Holiday, crooning softly about her lover man.

  "Well," she began and stopped. Tyler plucked the plates from her unfeeling hands and spread them on the coffee table, seemingly oblivious to her gape-faced shock. She tried again. "This is, um, awfully romantic, Tyler." He straightened and regarded her evenly. "Don't you think?"

  "I thought your meal deserved something a little more special than paper plates on our knees." He wasn't teasing her, she could see. Just speaking horfestly. "If you like, we can turn the lights on and the music off."

  "No, no. Of course not." She felt foolish now. "This is lovely. I'll bring in the other dishes."

  "No, you won't. You'll sit, pour yourself some more wine and relax. I can still bring out plates from a kitchen without dropping them."

  Shoes seemed inappropriate, so she left them by the front door, lined up neatly next to Tyler's. At the table, she looked at the pillow on the floor and then her straight black skirt. Shrugging, she hiked the
skirt up until its slit was high enough to allow her to drop gracefully into a cross-legged seat on the pillow. The scent of Tyler rose from beneath her, subtle and distracting with the thought that he had slept on the pillow on which she was now sitting. She squirmed in place for a second, uncomfortable with the idea.

  Tyler's return to the room froze her in place. She could still smell him. She wondered if he slept naked.

  Stop that, she scolded herself. There will be no picturing Tyler naked. Put some food on your plate and think about something, anything else. Think about baseball.

  "How about those Cubbies?" she asked Tyler as he sat across from her, and immediately grimaced at her own perky tone. Tyler looked at her as if confused by her sudden interest in Chicago's northside ball club. She wondered if he could tell that she was using baseball to keep herself from asking him if he slept in the nude.

  Get hold of yourself, Grace. He's just a man, like any other you've dealt with.

  Unfortunately she didn't buy that one, not for a second.

  "I'm not holding my breath, but if we pray hard for a bullpen, they've still got a shot at the post-season," Tyler answered her cautiously. Grace pasted an idiot's smile on her face and nodded, incapable of conversation at the moment. He spooned portions of each dish onto his plate and, picking up a round flat of nan bread, tore off a piece and built himself a mouthful, lamb, rice, raita. "Did you see Donnie the other night during the game?"

  She nodded and relaxed. Talking about work was easy. And Donnie, a little old man with a bushy mustache and an Indiana Jones' fedora eternally on his head, had quickly become one of her favorite regulars. "In the ninth inning, when the bases were loaded with a three-two count? I thought he was going to have a heart attack." She lifted her own nan-wrapped morsel to her mouth and ate it neatly, giving a discreet lick to her fingers before brushing them on her napkin. Did she imagine Tyler's eyes narrowing a fraction of an inch and returning over and over again to her mouth?

  "You should have seen him when I gave him his tab. Talk about heart attack." He smiled and shook his head. "I keep telling him that if he insists on buying drinks for the bar whenever the Cubs hit a homer, he's going to be a poor man. And I'll be a rich one. We may not have any pitching, but we can get the ball over the fence."

  "Ah, so it's just business to you, hmm, tough guy?" she teased him, finding herself somehow more relaxed than she'd felt in weeks.

  "Exactly, just business."

  "Then that wasn't you I saw taking twenty percent off his bill?" Tyler reached for the raita spoon. She reached out and pushed playfully at him, then gasped as she accidentally shoved his hand knuckles-deep into the yogurt sauce. He swore in surprise as she apologized, laughing, "Oops. Sorry about that."

  "Witch. Look at this mess." He waved his dripping hand threateningly at her. Pointing a finger at her, he shook it, drips of sauce flying and spattering the table. "I ought to—"

  She grabbed his hand and popped his finger into her mouth, licking at the cool, creamy sauce. The move was reflexive and shut him up instantly. His finger was hard and calloused in her mouth as she circled it with her tongue, pulling back slowly until her lips just kissed the tip. With a last flick of her tongue, she straightened and looked at him levelly.

  His hand hung in the air above the table for a moment longer until he visibly shook himself and retracted it.

  "If I'd known that was what it took," he muttered as he finished up the cleaning job himself, "I'd have rolled around in my dinner ages ago."

  She laughed deep in her throat and took another sip of wine. Tyler watched her, rising desire warring with puzzlement on his face. Grace couldn't blame him. After so many weeks of tiptoeing around him on a daily basis, careful not to let herself think of him as anything more than her boss, her sensual attack had surprised her, too. But somewhere between the moment he'd sat and when he'd begun to scold her for the mess she'd made, a switch had flipped in her head, her body, her heart.

  The heady, feminine power coursing now through her system was a new feeling for Grace, but one grounded in her certainty that he wanted her. And in her equal certainty, admitted fully for the first time, that she wanted him, too, and was through pretending that she wasn't going to give in to that desire. She'd made the decision yesterday, when she'd invited him to dinner, but hadn't allowed herself to acknowledge the reason.

  Now she did, and the thought alone was thrilling. I want Tyler, and tonight I am going to go to bed with him. Everything else in her life was off balance and happening to her without her consent. This was one thing she owned, one area where she made the rules, because Tyler had promised not to push and she trusted him not to.

  "Grace?"

  "Relax, Tyler." The feeling of control was a powerful one, making it unnecessary to watch her words. Or to give in too soon to the temptation she fully intended to pursue. "Just pursuing a momentary impulse." •

  "Pursue away," he said, and leaned forward on his elbows to eye her with fascination. "Is there anything else you'd like to lick off me? And if so, please be specific about the body part."

  She laughed and waved him off, gesturing at the still overburdened table. "Just eat. We have enough food here for a small country."

  "Or for breakfast." Testing.

  When she just raised an eyebrow and then smiled at him, he fell over onto the floor, groaning theatrically.

  "Have mercy, Grace. You're killing me."

  "Better finish your last meal then. Wouldn't want you to die a hungry man." She took another bite of her food, felt a morsel catch at the side of her mouth and used the tip of her tongue to remove it. "Are you hungry, Tyler?" The boldness of her sexual teasing was intoxicating.

  And intensely frustrating if you were on the receiving end, apparently. She delighted in the sight of Tyler pressing his pillow to his face and pretending not to hear her. After a moment, he sat up again.

  "I'm going to pretend you're still my little, innocent Grace and eat my dinner," he said almost primly. His eyes moved loftily around the room, refusing to rest on hers. He spread dal on warm bread and chewed it absently, eyes focusing on her after a minute. "This is terrific, by the way. I'm very impressed that you know how to cook all of this from scratch."

  "Mmm, hmm." Her mouth was conveniently full as she thought guiltily of the cookbook stuffed in her bag. She swallowed. "Sure you are."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "I saw your kitchen, Tyler. I cooked in it for half the afternoon, for crying out loud." At his look of confusion, she flung up her hands. "You've got a million and one gadgets and devices. A spice rack that rivals a gourmet chef's, and an oven the size of my recent hotei room. You obviously cook like a whiz. I'm sure my managing to put a meal together doesn't impress you at all."

  His slow smile was a mystery to her. "Aha. You obviously didn't open the upper right-hand cabinet by the sink."

  "Why? What's in it?"

  "Stacks of cookbooks. I don't mind cooking, but without a recipe, I'm pretty much limited to boiling water for pasta. But you're amazing, this meal is incredible."

  The guilt was enough to have her breaking into giggles. When he looked at her curiously, she half leaned and half crawled her way past the end of the table to where her leather bag rested against the couch. Lifting the flap and loosening the drawstring, she tugged it open and flashed the contents at him. Perched smack on top was her one and only cookbook.

  "Aha, a fellow connoisseur. You're still brilliant." He toasted her with chicken and basmati rice. "What else do you conjure up in your kitchen?"

  "This is it," she said, and shrugged. "I bought this cookbook when I needed to make something for a dinner party, and I got so many compliments that I never bothered to get another one. All I know how to make is Indian food."

  She tensed for a moment as she heard herself casually mention throwing a dinner party, as if that were something the average diner waitress did at the drop of a hat. In truth, she usually had her parties catered by one of the
Haley restaurants. She searched frantically at bookstores that morning for the cookbook, an identical copy to the only one she owned. When it seemed that he didn't find anything wrong with her story, she relaxed again.

  "You're a woman with fascinating talents, Grace. Who else knows what you've got hidden in there?" He laid his hand over hers on the table and curled his fingers around hers.

  She changed the subject rapidly, feeling he was moving too close to topics that would require out-and-out lies on her part, something she was uncomfortable enough with having done already. Lying to him while sitting across the table and sharing a meal seemed unnecessarily hard and rude.

  Tyler went along with the new conversation easily enough, and they spent the next hour comfortably talking about the restaurant, sharing ideas for possible improvements and concerns over where routines were still breaking down. Watching him talk about his business, Grace could see the shine that slid over him, the excitement that lit him up until she could practically see the light streaming from the tips of his fingers and shooting out the ends of his hair. He was filled with it, pure passion and vision and the steel-wrapped determination to make it all happen by sheer force of will if necessary.

  Her hands itched to reach out and grab hold of him, to hang on until she managed to absorb some of that certainty and confidence into herself. That absolute conviction that what you were doing was the right thing, the only thing, possible in your life.

  Tyler leaned back from the table, resting on his palms. Groaning, he pushed his plate in, away from the table edge, and let his eyes close slowly. "I think I should have stopped eating a half hour ago, but I just couldn't make myself."

  "That's my favorite compliment," she said, and smiled. Half rising to her knees, she started stacking plates, putting his on top of hers.