by Mindy Klasky
By now, the cameras were out again. Her heart was pounding as she threaded her way through the tables. All the could think about was reaching the door, twisting the handle, getting out to fresh air and the end of prying eyes. It wasn’t until she was standing on the street that she realized Josh Cantor had followed her out the door.
~~~
Josh watched her cross her arms over her chest, and he could read defiance in the tilt of her chin. “I don’t need your help,” she said, even though the last word came out sharp as a gust of November wind picked up.
“Nope,” he agreed. “You seem able to take care of yourself just fine.”
“Go back in. I’m sure Throckmorton’ll treat you to another bottle of wine, to make up for your ruined meal.”
He grinned. “I wouldn’t say it was ruined.”
“You didn’t get to finish the barbera!”
He had to laugh at that—a woman with priorities. “I had a glass before I invited you to join me.”
“Jesus,” she said, rubbing her hands against her arms. “He’ll take the whole bottle out of my last check. Your meal, too.”
“No, he won’t.” He patted his wallet in his back pocket. “I threw money on the table before I left—seemed the least I could do. The waitress deserved a tip. She did a good job until everything went to hell.”
“Yeah,” she said, and her teeth were starting to chatter. Her voice was wistful as she said, “Carrie’s a sweetheart.”
Christ. What had he gotten himself into? He hadn’t been lying when he said he was checking out the competition. He’d read the promotional crap from the TV station, the bios they’d put together for all the contestants. He’d figured he could find out about the food Ms. Ashley Harris cooked, work out some way to get his picture taken with her.
He’d planned on getting his recipe and giving Angel another week of happiness before she became too confused to enjoy anything. Yeah, call him a conniving little shit, but he’d never meant to cost Ashley her job.
He slipped out of his jacket. She barely seemed to notice when he stepped close and draped it over her shoulders, but her hands closed on the lapels. She dipped her head and he got a whiff of citrus in her hair—lemon from the kitchen or from some shampoo or soap.
“I can’t take this,” she said, even as she retreated into the coat’s warmth. “You’ll freeze to death.”
“Not if we go inside.” He nodded toward the end of the block and the trendy bar at the cross street. “Can I buy you a drink?”
What the hell was he doing? It was one thing to play Angel’s game, to get the goddamn blackmail picture she required. It was another to intentionally drag out this meeting.
But a part of him had to admit that he’d already planned on asking Ashley out for a drink. Sure, he was going to phrase it a little differently. Ask if she’d grab something after she got off shift, after the kitchen was shut down for the night.
There’d been almost a dozen female competitors in that green room, and not one of them had caught his attention the way Ashley had. He’d played enough ball to know he had to trust his instincts.
But that didn’t mean Ashley was going to play along.
He watched the debate play out on her face. She’d done just fine, standing up for herself back there. She hadn’t needed any knight in shining armor to get in her way, even if he’d wanted to deck the owner the first time he copped a feel. But Josh could see the realization dawning on Ashley’s face now, the way her eyes widened. She swallowed hard as she glanced back at Mangia’s door. She’d acted on impulse. It had never been her plan to walk out on her job that night.
He held his breath until she knocked the ball out of the park. “Yeah,” she said. “Let’s go. But the second round’s on me.”
Jesus. What a smile she had. Even with her hair pinned up and her nose turning red in the cold, that seductive curl of her lips pulled him forward a full step. He disguised his sudden eagerness with a quick shift of his hands, tugging his own jacket tighter around her shoulders before he led the way to the bar.
It only took a moment to grab a quiet table in the corner. The cocktail waitress was quick on a dead Monday night—they barely had to wait for his three fingers of Knob Creek, for Ashley’s dirty martini. He tried not to stare as she ate an olive off the pick. The last thing she needed tonight was another man treating her like she was a piece of meat, even if the sight of her lips closing around that ruby red spear of plastic kicked straight to his groin.
He sipped his whisky and told himself to behave. “So what do you do now?”
She lubricated her answer with a healthy swallow of gin. “Dustin’ll pick up my things.” To his questioning glance, she elaborated, “He’s back in the kitchen. Probably the head chef, just about now.”
“I was thinking a bit further down the line.”
“I’ll sleep in tomorrow.”
He grinned. “A bit further than that.”
She shook her head. “I don’t have any idea. Maybe wait until the show is over. See how that works out.” For the first time, she looked soft, shy, like she had a secret that she was too bashful to share.
“Spill,” he said.
She shook her head and folded both hands around the stem of her martini glass.
“Come on,” he said, and he nudged his leg forward, just enough to touch her knee.
She didn’t pull away. Instead, she leaned across the table and licked her lips like she was considering telling him top secret government information. Just that sight—the tip of her tongue exploring—was enough to make him rock hard.
“I shouldn’t tell you this,” she said. But he knew she was going to. The way she kept her leg pressing against his made him certain. And sure enough, she said, “I want to open a restaurant.”
He leaned back in his chair. It was that, or risk a grimace as his cock pressed even harder against his zipper. “We all want to open a restaurant. That’s why we’re on the goddamn show.”
She blushed, her cheeks suddenly turning as deep a red as when he’d pointed out her undone button. He suddenly wanted to make a list of all the things that might embarrass her, because he wouldn’t mind seeing that soft-tender look every single day of his life. “No,” she protested. “I’ve been planning this. Long before Wake Up announced the contest. I created my first restaurant business plan in college, and I’ve been updating it every year since. I’ve scouted out locations around town. I’ve been building recipe files since I was ten years old.”
Her voice got huskier with every admission, like she was telling him her favorite positions in bed.
Easy, cowboy, he told himself. Better not to think of her anywhere near a bed. Not when she was looking up at him through her eyelashes like that. Not when his body had apparently decided to act like he was thirteen years old and browsing through his very first Internet porn site.
He took another sip of bourbon, hoping the alcohol would remind him he was actually a fully-functioning adult, with all the sophistication and restraint of an almost-thirty-year-old man.
“But what about you?” she asked, and it took him a heartbeat to remember what they were talking about. “You’re a baseball player. Why would you even try to get on the show?”
He cleared his throat and tried to sound casual. “My lawyers have been after me to set up some investments. A lot of athletes do restaurants. You know, some place where our name has value, where we can stop by and say hello to customers and fill the tables…”
It sounded stupid when he said it. Cold and calculating. Like he didn’t have any respect for what she did, what she loved. He shifted his glass on the table and added, “I’ve got some old family recipes. Things that mean a lot to me, that I think other people could really get behind, could really enjoy.”
Her smile made his heart ache. Especially when she said, “That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Making amazing food for people who get what we’re doing?”
He was going to hell. He was going to
drown in a fiery lake, with devils shoving pitchforks up his ass. He was going to die a thousand deaths, each one stinking of hellfire and brimstone as he pleaded for mercy he’d never get, for mercy he’d never deserve.
Because he sat back in the booth and waved the cocktail waitress over for another round and started to figure out exactly what he could do to keep Ashley Harris talking to him for as long as humanly possible. And all he had to do was cover up the fact that he had a picture of her on his phone that would buy him another one of his grandmother’s recipes, so he could advance another round in the competition that suddenly seemed like the most important thing he’d ever done in his life.
~~~
Ashley sipped her second martini, fully aware that she should have quit at one. What the hell, though. It wasn’t every night a girl got fired.
No. It wasn’t every night a woman quit, leaving a job she’d clearly outgrown.
She fished the pick out of her glass with precise fingers and slipped an olive into her mouth. Chewing with relish, she let the brine saturate her tastebuds. She might as well enjoy these drinks. It wasn’t like she was going to be hanging out in trendy bars any time soon. Not without a paycheck.
“So,” she said, purposely squelching her self-pity. “What’s the worst thing you ever cooked?”
By the short bark of his laugh, the question surprised him. The glint in his eyes lit a fire deep inside her, fanning the ember already smoldering beneath the gin fumes. “That would probably be the birthday cake I tried for Angel.”
“Angel?” She was intrigued by the softness in his voice as he said the name. With his broken nose and his competent hands, Josh Cantor didn’t seem like a soft kind of guy.
“My grandmother. She hates to be reminded of her age, though. From day one, she insisted that I call her Angel.” He rolled his eyes, and she had to laugh with him. “Anyway, I was fifteen years old, just learning my way around a kitchen. I decided to make a butterscotch cake for Angel—three layers with boiled icing in between. It was a simple yellow cake batter but with a pound of butterscotch chips melted in. When I took the layers out of the oven, they were only about an inch high. Then they collapsed. I tried to tell myself everything was fine, so I slathered on the icing. By the time I served it up to Angel, it was about as thick as a candy bar. As dense as one too.”
His rueful smile was priceless. She said, “I bet it tasted good.”
“It did! Angel cut it into bars and served it up with ice cream, told everyone that’s what I’d planned on making all along. She made a big deal out of writing up the recipe, adding it to this huge old leather binder she keeps.”
“She sounds like a great person to have on your side.”
His face clouded. He swirled the dregs of his whiskey in his glass, staring at it like he might be able to read his fortune between the last remnants of melting ice cubes. “Another?” he asked her, but he was already twisting around to find their waitress.
“I shouldn’t,” she said. She felt like she should apologize—not for passing on the drink, there was no reason to worry about that. But she’d obviously poked at some sort of wound when she commented on his grandmother. Strange, because he was the one who’d brought her up in the first place. He was the one who sounded so fond when he talked about her.
Well, there were probably lots of things she didn’t know about Josh Cantor. And no reason to think he was going to pour his heart out to her tonight. She consciously pushed past the uncomfortable moment by saying, “The worst thing I’ve ever cooked is biscuits.”
“Biscuits?” There. That did the trick. He was laughing at her. And that was infinitely better than his dwelling on whatever problem he had with Angel.
“Every time I make them, they turn out hard as a rock. I can make mille-feuille pastry. I can bake a baguette with a perfect crust. I can turn out a seven-layer cake—”
“Show-off.”
She grinned and continued. “Yes, a seven-layer cake, without breaking a sweat. But every single time I try to make biscuits, they could substitute for hockey pucks.”
“You knead them too much.”
“I don’t!” she protested. She showed him her hands. “Five or six quick turns, just enough to combine the dough.”
His palms slid over hers, and his fingers closed around her wrists. Her pulse slammed through her veins, leaving her light-headed as all that blood forgot to rush back from parts below her waist.
She saw the decision in his eyes. He was going to kiss her. She leaned across the small table. She measured the shift in his body, felt the tightening of his hands against her forearms. Her belly flipped—no, that wasn’t her belly, not at all—and she caught her breath.
And she watched him change his mind.
His fingers slipped past hers, slowly, lingering just long enough that she thought he was acting against his will. He swallowed hard before he picked up his empty glass, before he brought it to his lips with the desperation of a man dying of thirst. He looked toward the bar, seemed as if he was going to order another drink for himself even if she wasn’t going to join him, but then he shook his head with a vehemence that was conveyed by every muscle in his body.
“A light touch,” he said, and the words sounded like a warning. “That’s the secret. For biscuits.”
There was some secret, and it didn’t have anything to do with bread. There was something he wasn’t telling her. Something that made him sit far back in his chair and fold his hands in his lap, and keep from looking directly at her.
He took a deep breath, and then he said, “But Angel’s birthday cake wasn’t my only cooking disaster. Once, I decided to smoke a trout in my mother’s kitchen. But I didn’t know the first thing about building a smoker, so I improvised with a lasagna pan and plastic wrap, because she was all out of tin foil…”
He spun out the story, detailing the melted mess of plastic. She laughed when she was supposed to. She even dug up some of her own failures in exchange—the tuna fish omelet she’d tried to serve her father before she’d mastered flipping eggs in a pan, the cornish hens she roasted with the net-wrapped giblets still in the birds’ little bodies…
She was surprised when the waitress came to settle up their check. They’d closed down the bar, without ever ordering another round of drinks. She reached for her purse, only to remember that it was stowed away in her cubby at Mangia. Well, hopefully it was with Dustin, at his home, by now.
“I—” she started to explain, embarrassed.
“I’ve got it,” Josh said, and he was already dropping bills on the tray, enough to cover both rounds of drinks and a generous tip besides.
“But I said—”
“You’ll get it next time.”
She looked at him levelly. “There’ll be a next time?”
There was something he wasn’t telling her. Some echo of the thoughts that had kept him from kissing her before. It creased the skin by his eyes, tightened his lips into a frown. But he said, “I hope so.”
Hunting for an explanation, she tested him with, “Maybe after the competition is over.”
He nodded with something that looked a lot like disappointment. “After. Yeah.”
She stood then and picked up his jacket from where it was draped across the back of her chair. As she started to hand it back, he shook his head, saying, “You’ll still need that.” She shrugged it on as he led the way out of the bar.
He was right, of course. The temperature was close to freezing, with a north wind that sliced it to even smaller numbers. He shoved his hands into his pockets as he walked beside her, escorting her down the empty street to the darkness of Mangia’s parking lot. He waited while she fished her keys out of her pocket, while she opened her door.
For a heartbeat, she thought again that he was going to kiss her. But he took a step to the side, a carefully orchestrated move that put the metal of her car door between them. His fingers curled into fists around the top of her window, and he said, “Drive safely.”
<
br /> Her palm itched to reach out for him, to cup his jaw, to feel the bristle of the five o’clock—no, midnight—shadow of his beard. But there was no mistaking the literal and figurative barrier he’d placed between them.
And who was she to argue? She had to compete against this man. She had to beat him in Who Wears the Apron—now that she’d screwed up the Master Plan, her entire future depended on it.
She slipped his jacket off her shoulders and handed it back to him. “Thank you,” she said.
“The pleasure was all mine.” The words were more a growl than a courtesy. She didn’t want to think about what he was saying, what he wasn’t saying. And so she slipped behind the wheel and nodded. He closed the door with a finality that clanged against her heart.
She watched in her mirror as he stalked to his own car. He tossed his jacket on the passenger seat and started his engine. But he waited for her to leave the parking lot first. And he followed a careful distance behind for three long blocks, until she turned to make her own lonely way home.
CHAPTER 3
Josh slid his phone across the table to Angel. “Here’s your picture.”
His grandmother clicked her tongue. “Now, now, young man. That tone of voice is never required.”
Shit. It wasn’t Angel’s fault he was in such a pissy mood. She wasn’t the reason he hadn’t slept the night before.
He’d hit the sack around one in the morning., but he’d tossed and turned for hours, playing and replaying the conversation with Ashley. He should have kissed her, there in the bar. He’d wanted to. And he’d been pretty sure she wouldn’t object.
In fact, she’d looked surprised when he pulled away. Downright hurt when he’d taken the coward’s route and hidden behind her car door. But what the hell was he supposed to do? He was using her, and that made him feel guilty. She had no idea what he was doing with her photo—with the very picture that had gotten her fired from a perfectly good restaurant job. Fired, made her quit. Whatever.
But it hadn’t been a perfectly good job, had it? Not with that asshole boss pawing her every chance he got. And who was Josh, anyway, to think he was the reason she’d quit? Ashley had a mind of her own. She’d made her own independent decision, and he’d be a Neanderthal jerk to think she couldn’t land on her own two feet.
