Heat 1 (Heat: Master Chefs #1)

by Kailin Gow

  I nodded. “A food lab.” I picked up a jar marked ‘cream of tartar’ then spotted a canister of liquid nitrogen on the floor beside a vacuum cooker, and looked back at her. “So, what are you doing here?”

  “I have other talents than playing Mother Theresa in dark alleys at night.”

  “I have no doubt, but...”

  “I work here. I’m an assistant cuisine technician.”

  “Wow. Sounds impressive.”

  “Well, it helps pay the rent, and I do enjoy it.”

  “So what do you do exactly?”

  “Try out new products, new techniques. I formulate new recipes. The possibilities are endless and I’m here to discover some of the better possibilities.”

  “So what have you discovered?”

  She looked at me with a playful frown. “I’ve been working on a few special sauces, but that’s all I can say on the matter for the time being.”

  “Oh, secret stuff, huh?”

  “It’s really easy to steal a recipe. When we find something new and innovative that works, we try to keep it hush-hush for as long as we can.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned back against the counter behind me. “And here I thought you were just another pretty student. You continue to surprise and impress me.”

  “Good to know.” Clearly she wasn’t as impressed by me as I was by her.

  “How long have you been working here?”

  “About six… seven months.”

  She started to pull out a few jars and bottles, but then stopped to look expectantly at me. “I’ve really got to get to work.”

  “Sure. Go ahead.”

  “And don’t you have a class to go to?”

  Shit. I glanced up at the clock on the wall. I was already five minutes late. “Yeah, I guess I should get going.” I really didn’t want to leave. I had so many questions for her. I wanted to know everything about her. Still, I headed to the door and turned to her. “I’m Bobby Cummings, by the way.”

  “Again, good to know.”

  I was disappointed she didn’t offer her name.

  “And you are…?”

  She smiled and for a moment I thought she’d refuse to answer me. “Lilly Cooke.”

  “Cooke, huh? The name suits you. Cooke in the kitchen.”

  “Cute. I’ve never heard that one before.” But her crooked grin told me she’d heard it a million times.

  Shit, even when I tried to be cute I was missing the mark.

  I opened the door and stepped out into the hall, but stepped back inside for a final question. “Hey, I was just wondering. How did you find my sister?”

  “Taryn? Easy. When I got you home, I tried to find a contact in your phone, but it was out. I plugged it in and it immediately started ringing. I picked up and it was your sister. She was pretty freaked out.”

  “I guess you knew her already, right? Her and Errol King.”

  “Sort of. I mean, I know of them. I know Errol taught here a while back, but he was already on sabbatical by the time I got here. I think I heard something about him being back in New York running his new restaurant or something. And then he took time off to get married and go on a honeymoon. Am I all caught up now?”

  “Sure.” I was relieved to see she hadn’t really heard anything about me. I could just imagine what she would think of me if Taryn or Errol had inadvertently talked about me and my womanizing ways. I was usually pretty proud of my playboy status, but in front of this girl, I felt the need to hide that aspect of my life.

  “You really need to get going.”

  I nodded. “Hey, I’ll catch you later.”

  Chapter 3

  Needless to say, I was late for my next class, but it didn’t really matter much, because I didn’t hear a word the teacher said. The image of Lilly was stuck in my brain. Walking out of that class, I tried to shake the image of her face, of that black dress beneath that white lab coat out of my head. I had to concentrate. Taryn had already warned me about goofing off, and I certainly didn’t want to waste any of my mother’s money. Daydreaming about Lilly would have to wait until the end of the day.

  But, damn…

  I looked down at my lesson schedule to see what and where my last class of the day was; Le Science des Aliments in room 32-C. I glanced at the little map of the institute and hurried down the hall to my right. I was determined to make it on time, sit down and take in every last little thing from the next lesson. That said, having every class in French was draining. Not only did I have to learn the lesson, I had to first translate virtually every word spoken by the teacher. Fortunately I had a translation app on my phone to help me along, but it was still a tedious endeavor.

  Running to the door of the classroom, I reached it at the same time as a brunette girl wearing a white lab coat and we collided just as we entered the room. She looked up at me.

  “You again?”

  “Lilly? Great. I was hoping we’d have a class together.” I scanned the room and spotted two seats at the back of the class. “Come on. There are a few seats back there.”

  “You go ahead,” she said, her tone authoritative and strong.

  Was she really going to brush me off that easily? A little perplexed, I headed to the lone seat closer to the front of the class and sat down. My jaw dropped, literally dropped, when Lilly walked to the front of the room and wrote her name on the chalkboard.

  “Bonjour. Je suis Mademoiselle Lilly Cooke. Bienvenue a l’introduction aux sciences des aliments.”

  My French may have been sketchy, but I knew enough to understand that Lilly Cooke would be teaching this class. She was about my age. How could she be teaching a cooking class, even if it was a basic science of cooking class?

  As she went on with her introduction and her background, I quickly entered a succession of words into my phone to have them translated so I could try to keep up with what she was saying.

  Before coming to the institute, she’d been an apprentice at one of the largest food labs in France for two years. Before that she’d lived in the French countryside where she grew up in a convent.

  I had to enter that word in twice; couvent. I had to be mistaken. Maybe I was spelling it wrong. The gorgeous, smart girl standing in front of the class couldn’t possibly have spent years in a convent. It was insane. But she went on to explain how the convent grew much of its own food and prepared various products like sauces, soups and stews. Her love of cooking was born while she helped the nuns with new sauce recipes and tended to the fresh food products that grew in their own gardens.

  I was blown away. I was also a little intimidated. Up until then I thought I’d had a pretty full and exciting life. I mean, growing up in New York City, and working at my mom’s restaurant since I was, what, twelve?

  But this girl… this fragile beauty with the serene gaze and a world of wisdom. How could I ever measure up? No wonder she looked at me as if I were some punk kid.

  As she continued to speak, she pulled the lab coat back to set her hands on her hips. Man, what a sexy figure she made. And the best part was that she was totally unaware of it. But that simple black dress… it was tantalizing in the most innocent way. It lured me, making me want to slowly unwrap the gift it hid. I had no doubt she had a body that could drive men nuts… and making love to her… Mmm. I was getting a hard-on just thinking about it.

  Her gaze met mine and she licked her lips in a nervous and apprehensive manner that shot a blast of arousal to my hardening shaft. She quickly looked away, opened the folder on the desk in front of her and pulled out a small stack of paper.

  “Dites-moi ce que….”

  Like a madman, I punched key words into my phone to get the gist of what she was saying, but as she started to walk down the aisles passing a sheet to every student, I realized what she wanted.

  We were to write down the last five dishes we’d cooked. She wanted to know where we stood in the kitchen.

  Well, that was easy enough, I thought. Okay, let’s star
t with a pot au feu last Thursday, then I had some pasta with seared scallops in a white wine sauce the Monday before that, and a few days ago I made a delicious, fabulous grilled salmon with a mustard crunch over wild rice. Then what? Let’s see. I had a burger a few days before that, then had dinner at that crappy restaurant, grabbed a pizza on the way to the dorm… Oh, yeah, that braised brisket. That was great.

  A string of students had already begun to line up in front of Lilly’s desk to hand in their list of dishes and I got up to get in line. It was funny how nervous I felt as I slowly approached her. I was apprehensive, as if what I’d written on my list was of the utmost importance. I wanted to impress her. Damn it. Was what I’d put down enough? Stretching to my full height, I glanced over the shoulder of the guy in front of me; pigeons aux petits pois, navarin de homard, fricassée de volailles aux morilles… Shit. Where was this guy from? And more importantly, what was he doing in a beginner’s class?

  I had to go back and add something… change something. My list was so goddamned unimpressive.

  “Yes, Bobby,” Lilly said as the guy in front of me walked off.

  “I didn’t know you were going to be my teacher.” I knew, without a doubt, that I sounded exactly like a seven year old.

  “I guess I should have suspected you’d be one of my students.” Her smile was warm and genuine, but I could have sworn her eyes sparkled with interest. “Are you going to hand in your list?”

  “Um, I… I haven’t really cooked much these past… You know; new country, new residence, new language.”

  “That’s okay. It’s not a test, Bobby. It’s just a quick and easy way to evaluate where each student is situated.”

  And where am I situated? I wanted to say. At the bottom of the heap?

  “You’re awfully young to be teaching, aren’t you?” I said as I handed her the list.

  “I guess you could say that. Not a lot of twenty year olds teach other twenty year olds, right?”

  Nodding like an idiot, I grinned. “So how d’you land this gig?”

  Scrutinizing my page, she nodded as she read. “It was quite unexpected. At the last minute the teacher who’d been hired to teach this class decided he wanted to throw himself into a new bistro, so he quit. They didn’t have anyone else on such short notice, so, since I have a bit of time between lab experiments, they asked if I could fill in.”

  “Oh, good.”

  She looked over the page at me and tilted her head to the side in a silent question.

  “I mean, it’s just that… well, if you're officially my teacher… it could be awkward, but if you're not… If you're just a substitute…” Hell, I was making such a mess of this. “Like, maybe we could go out sometimes.”

  Setting the page down on her desk, she looked at me with the strangest expression. You’d think I’d grown antlers. “Like a date?” she finally said.

  “Yeah, like a date.” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone on an actual date, but the idea suited me. “I think I would really like to take my time with you. You know, the whole nine yards; dinner, movie… maybe some dancing. I’m usually a lot quicker to get to the serious business, but I want to take the slow road with you instead of rushing to do the nasty.” I bit my lower lip for emphasis. It always drove the girls wild.

  “Do the what?” Her lips parted in horror and her eyes went wide with astonishment as she glared at me.

  “Oh, don’t worry about sex for now. I can easily wait until our second or third date. It’ll make it all the more exciting, don’t you think?”

  “Mr. Cummings,” she said. “Thank you very much for handing in your recent cooking experiences. If you would return to your seat…” She looked past me and I turned to see another student heading up to the desk to hand in her list.

  Although the pretty female student smiled and batted her eyes at me, I stared straight ahead and walked back to my desk. I was like a deer caught in the headlights. What had just happened? And when had I turned into Mr. Cummings?

  Mr. Cummings? Shit. That was the worse.

  I plopped down into my chair and glanced down at the notes I’d taken as she’d made her initial introduction. My eyes were riveted to one word: couvent.

  The girl had been raised in a convent and here I was suggesting we do the nasty in a date or two. Shit, I was so damned clumsy. The girl had probably not even been kissed before and I… Shit. I wanted to smack myself over the head. Jackass… what a dunce.

  By the time class let out, I didn’t even dare look her way. I kicked myself all the way to the door at the back of the class and continued to kick myself all the way back to the dorm, but before I could fall into my room to lick my wounds in private, Errol came around the corner.

  “Can’t handle the rigors of your first day at the institute?” he said. “I told you this would be tougher than you thought. You thought you’d just sail through, didn’t you?”

  “It wasn’t that bad.” I wasn’t in the mood to talk. I wanted to hide in my room and not come out for the rest of the week.

  “Then what is it that has your face contorted with self-disgust. Or is that self-pity?”

  “You don’t really want to know.”

  “Try me.”

  “I just put my foot in my mouth.”

  “And you didn’t like the taste.”

  Was that his idea of a bad culinary joke? Well, I wasn’t laughing. “I tried to impress a girl and…”

  He guffawed and set his hand on the wall to steady himself. “Girl troubles already? You don’t waste any time, do you?”

  I groaned and glared at the ceiling.

  “Well, look, Bobby, don’t let this get in the way of the real reason you're out here to begin with.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time to take care of the ladies when you get your degree.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But, for now, you have to keep your grades up if you're going to keep that scholarship you got.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “And, exemplary behavior is a must.”

  “I know.”

  “Whatever you do, don’t go getting yourself into trouble.”

  Hadn’t we been through all this before? “Yeah, I’ll try.”

  He slapped me hard against the shoulder. “Good. Then start trying tonight.”

  “Tonight?” He had to be kidding me.

  “There’s a faculty student meet and greet. You're going with Taryn and me.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Yes, you have to. You also have to wear a suit. For God’s sake, make yourself presentable.”

  I looked down at the trendy jeans and crisp shirt that hung over them. I thought I looked pretty good, but didn’t argue.

  “Don’t embarrass your sister, Bobby. Taryn has worked hard and there’s a possibility she could get her degree a year early. If she can finish a year earlier, that means she’ll be able to accompany me as I travel the world to care for my restaurants, and for pleasure.” He winked at me. “Married life… It sure offers a lot of pleasures. It’s beyond my wildest expectations.”

  “Yeah. I bet.”

  He laughed and slapped my shoulder again. “Don’t become the stain on her good reputation.”

  “Shit, maybe I should change my name.”

  “Don’t change it. Live up to it.”

  Great, Errol. Pile on the pressure.

  “Be at la Salle de Montigny at seven o’clock.”

  “Right,” I grunted.

  “Don’t be late.”

  Anything else?

  Chapter 4

  Lilly

  “Miss Cooke,” a light female voice called out to me. “Mademoiselle Cooke.”

  Eager to get to the meet and greet, I reluctantly turned to the voice that called my name. “Oui,” I said.

  It was Marie France, an older student who’d decided to go back to school after a failed marriage and the death of her elder parents. Within seconds, I was trapp
ed in a circular conversation that seemed to have no end. She slammed her ex-husband and blamed him for everything, complained about the treatment her parents had each received in a retirement home and told me of her plans to get her degree and open up a gourmet restaurant if her lazy-assed ex-husband could come through and pay the alimony he owed her. And then she started all over again. Marie France had a lot to get off her chest and she’d quickly found an attentive ear in me.

  By the time I finally managed to free myself twenty minutes later, the large meeting hall in which the meet and greet was held was teeming with activity and buzzing with conversations about food, recipes, new methods and new trends. I looked around for a familiar face.

  No, not just any familiar face. I was looking for Bobby’s face. He’d left the class so quickly, I hadn’t even had a chance to explain my firm rejection of him. Then again, what had he expected? Who talks about doing the nasty with a girl prior to their first date?

  Bobby Cummings, that’s who. A boy too confident for his own pants.

  But instead of finding him, it was his sister and brother-in-law who caught my eye. As far as the institute was concerned, they were the royal couple; two talented and beautiful people brought together in the most seductive, harmonious and loving way. They were an enviable couple.

  Coming up behind them, I finally saw Bobby. He handed a glass of wine to Taryn and a cup of coffee to Errol. How sweet. I took a good long look at him. He cleaned up good, very good, in fact. Wearing a dark gray suit with a silver gray shirt and a deep mauve tie, he was beyond debonair and way beyond handsome. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, but then I had to remind myself of the type of man he was. The sharp suit and clean shaven cheeks didn’t change the fact that he was a real python, a man on the prowl, eager to capture his next feast. I was sure he saw women as disposable… take one, have his way with her and toss her aside only to start up with another.

  No one goes drinking alone in the 19th arrondissement just looking to dance and play. He was looking to hook up, or maybe he’d already had by the time I found him. Oh, gross. The thought brought a grimace to my lips. Had I really picked up and brought home a man who’d just expended himself with a cheap harlot? Well, whether he had or not, the fact remained; he was the type of man who played with women’s heartstrings, who flirted with ease and who jumped from one bed to the next without a second thought.