Too Hot to Touch

by Louisa Edwards

  Her face went kind of red and her chest heaved interestingly. “It wasn’t convenient, or some cynical scheme to get a job. Your family has been wonderful to me, and if all you want to do is talk shit about them, then you might as well go back to the west end of nowhere and leave us alone!”

  Emotion surged past any hope of Zen calm, uncontrollable and painful. “And you’d just love that, wouldn’t you? Tell me the truth. Hearing that I was coming home was your worst nightmare.”

  Some of the color drained from her cheeks, leaving her looking kind of blotchy and worked up. It should have made her ugly, but it didn’t. “Don’t flatter yourself,” she said. “You being here or not means nothing to me. Your parents think you can help us—and as long as you do, I’ve got no problems with you.” Her eyes narrowed, and she stepped close enough to jab a finger into his chest. “But the minute you start spouting off about things you know nothing about, or fighting with Danny and upsetting your parents? You and me are going to have a big ass problem, Max Lunden.”

  If she were a hedgehog, she’d be all pointy right about now. That mental image poked a pin into the balloon of anger filling his chest, deflating it. What the hell was he trying to accomplish, anyway? He tried to imagine what his Zen master would say if he could see Max now, and utterly failed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, making it as sincere as he could. “Obviously, I’ve got some issues to work out with my family, but none of this is your fault. And you really don’t have anything to worry about, here—I’m not back for good, or anything. Just for the qualifiers. I already told my mom. And after that, you crazy kids are on your own, because I’ve got an Italian butcher genius to learn from.”

  She hesitated for a minute, clearly not sure that was good enough. Max let his arms hang loose at his sides, hands open and unthreatening, as if he were confronting a wild animal in the jungle.

  Finally, she said, “Okay. So we understand one another. I’m the head of the RSC team, and you’re merely here to consult.”

  He shrugged. “Sure, whatever.”

  Those whiskey-colored eyes narrowed to suspicious slits. “And there’ll be no more weirdness between us, either. We’re teammates, and that’s it.”

  With the memory of that kiss still stinging his mouth, Max wasn’t quite so willing to agree to that. “What? There’s a rule about teammates getting together for … fun? I can’t believe that. These culinary competitions are usually pretty much an excuse for bacchanalian-style orgies scandalous enough to make a Roman emperor blush.”

  “It may not be an official rule in the RSC handbook, but it is my rule. And I’m not breaking it for anyone ever again.”

  Again, huh? Interesting.

  Max wondered what it said about him that he found the stubborn jut of her jaw and the snap in her voice so appealing.

  “Well, unofficially, I’m not giving up. A chance meeting like this, after all this time has passed—it means something, Juliet Cavanaugh. You may not believe in fate, but I don’t believe in coincidence. The universe isn’t random; it means something that you’re here. And I’m going to find out what.”

  Chapter 6

  That sounded like a threat. Jules couldn’t help the fine shiver that ran through her whole body, even knowing that the way they were leaning together meant he might be able to feel it.

  Hopefully he’d just attribute it to suppressed desire, rather than bone-rattling fear of making the same mistakes all over again.

  Which he probably would, the arrogant ass, she thought, ignoring the tiny voice of truth whispering that fear certainly wasn’t her one and only reaction to feeling that lean, hard-muscled form pressed tight to her body.

  Face it, girl. It’s been a while—and even if it hadn’t, no guy’s ever made you feel quite like Max Lunden.

  Sucking in a deep, fortifying breath and trying not to notice how it smelled like cake flour, rolled oats, and the clean, complicated salt-musk of Max, Jules forced herself to meet his wicked, laughing gaze.

  “It means nothing,” she said, as firmly as she could. “We’re teammates. I’m here to cook, to compete, to help some people who mean a lot to me—and most of all, I’m here to win. And no one and nothing is going to stop me … including you.”

  Max opened his mouth to reply, but before he could get a word out, there was a loud knock on the pantry door.

  Winslow’s voice was muffled and extremely welcome. “Y’all okay in there? Gus is starting to get his worried face on.”

  Oh God. The idea of Gus Lunden, who was more a father to her than any of the parade of losers her mother had dated throughout her childhood, standing around in the kitchen while Jules carried on with his son made her want to cringe. And after she’d promised him never to mix up her personal life with kitchen business again!

  “Win,” she called. “Can you get the door open from your side? It’s stuck.”

  “Saved by the bell, huh?” Max sauntered over, sticking his hands in the pockets of his ripped, faded jeans.

  Beck’s voice, deep and sure. “You’ve got to jiggle the knob hard then bump with your hip.”

  A low cackle of laughter sounded from the other side of the door. “That’s what he said. What? Hold on a sec. I got this.”

  Five seconds later, they were free. Jules gave Win a quick kiss on the cheek as a thank-you, smiled at Beck, then hurried back to her station, trying to pretend the flush she could feel heating her cheeks was nothing but embarrassment at getting stuck in the pantry.

  Danny raised one eyebrow at her in a clear, if silent, statement that he wasn’t buying it. From the rear of the kitchen, Beck snorted, which was as close as he usually got to a laugh.

  Winslow, hot on Jules’s heels, slipped back into his spot on the line next to her and slanted her a look—the one that, roughly translated, meant “Girl, you will be dishing some dirt later.”

  Jules scowled at him, which made him grin before turning piously to face the front of the kitchen where Gus was pacing.

  The old man’s faded blue eyes were fixed on something behind Jules, and she didn’t need to turn around to know it was Max. Which didn’t explain why she turned around anyway, but Max always seemed to have that effect on her. Whenever he was there, rationality went bye-bye.

  Evidently in no hurry at all, Max sauntered up the line, hands in pockets and looking all sexy and rumpled, to prop one indolent hip on his brother’s pastry board. Danny scooped a pile of pitted cherries out of the way with an irritable sigh, but Jules noticed he didn’t actually shove his brother out of his space.

  “If you’re done reminding yourself where everything is in the kitchen you practically grew up in, maybe we could get back to our practice?”

  Jules straightened her shoulders and grabbed her chef ’s knife, more than ready to take out her frustration and tension on some poor, unsuspecting ingredients.

  “Sure thing, Danny boy. No need to get riled up. We’re all here now and ready to work. Right, guys?”

  Gus’s knuckles stood out white against his red, weathered hands where he had them clenched on his hips. “Come on boys, stop that now. We don’t have time for this squabbling! The qualifying round to decide what team will represent the East Coast is in less than two weeks. We have to prepare, drill, get Max up to speed on the recipes…” He broke off, lines of strain bracketing his mouth.

  “Everything will work out. I promise,” Max said softly, straightening away from the pastry board and starting toward his father.

  “I’m fine,” Gus said briskly, holding up a hand. Max stopped in his tracks, an indefinable spasm of emotion tightening his face for an instant before he fell back into his default expression of lazy interest. “Just didn’t sleep all that well last night. Maybe … I should lie down for a while. Jules, you can take it from here, right?”

  A chill roughed up the hair on the back of her neck as she nodded. She’d never seen Gus Lunden walk off the line before. Not for any reason.

  “Good idea,” Max said calmly
, one hand clenching into a fist at his side, then slowly unfurling, finger by finger.

  Jules watched him struggle to maintain his air of serenity and wondered what it would take to make him lose it completely.

  Silence descended on the kitchen in the wake of Gus’s slow departure. No one was making eye contact; it felt as if something momentous and awful had happened.

  Max broke the silence by shaking out his hands and then clapping them together. “I’ve competed in cooking contests before, but not on this scale. And always as an individual, never as part of a team. Lay it out for me. How’s it going to go down?”

  “The qualifying round is rough—it’s intended to weed out the teams who aren’t serious or who don’t have the skill level and experience to truly compete,” Danny said.

  “So it’s a cooking challenge?” Max asked.

  “Not exactly,” Winslow said, grinning. “It’s more like kitchen Jeopardy.”

  “Seriously? Like, trivia and buzzing in and stuff?”

  “Exactly.” Danny shook his head. “And the questions are crazy hard. More than one team of cocky cooks has been knocked out before the competition even gets started, based on their scores in the qualifier.”

  “Well, crap,” Max said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I hate to tell you this, but I’m not sure how big a help I’m gonna be.”

  “Ain’t no thang.” Win slung an arm over Jules’s shoulders. “We got our ace in the hole already. Jules, here, is our resident nerd.”

  She poked him in the side hard enough to make him twist away, squawking. “You’re just saying that because you don’t want to get blamed when we flame out early because you didn’t study.”

  “You know that’s right.” Win laughed, unrepentant.

  Beck stepped up to the group, his large, solid presence quelling even Winslow’s antics.

  “We all study,” Beck said, his deep voice making it sound like an edict from on high. “We don’t want any weak links on the team. Jules shouldn’t have to carry us on her own.”

  “Thanks, Beck.” Jules smiled at the big guy.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Max’s fleeting frown, but all he said was, “I’m willing to study, but what kind of trivia are we talking about here?”

  Danny gave his brother the kind of scathingly skeptical look only a younger brother could achieve. “I’ll believe it when I see you actually hitting the books. And hauling off and punching them doesn’t count.”

  “The type of trivia is where this gets tricky,” Jules cut in, before the sibling spat could escalate. “All the questions will be cooking related, obviously, but the categories are really up to the judges. And we can’t even begin to predict what the judges might focus on until we know who they are.”

  “We know one,” Winslow pointed out, hitching his narrow hips up onto the high counter behind him and swinging his legs.

  “Claire Durand,” Danny agreed. “She’s a given.” Turning to Max, he started to explain, “Claire Durand is editor in chief—”

  “Of Délicieux magazine, I know,” Max interrupted, then rolled his eyes at his brother’s surprise. “Oh, come on. I’ve been out of the country, not dead. Délicieux is a huge deal, even internationally. Durand has quite the following in Thailand.”

  “Great,” Danny sniped. “You can tell her all about it when you meet her. She’ll definitely be one of the judges, because Délicieux cosponsors the RSC with the Jansen Hospitality Group.”

  “What the hell, Danny,” Max said, laughing. “Did you swallow the brochure, or what?”

  The tension in the room soared several hundred degrees, setting Jules’s teeth on edge. How in the world were they supposed to work together as a team if they couldn’t manage to get through a single practice without fighting?

  “It doesn’t hurt to know the rules before going into something,” Danny shot back. “Just because you like to wing it—”

  “Hey,” Winslow said, his bright green gaze darting between the two brothers. “I heard Devon Sparks was on the short list.”

  “He’d be a good one.” Jules rushed to follow Win’s lead, steering the conversation back to the competition. “There’s usually a celebrity chef on the panel, and I know he’s got some new charity he’s pushing, so he could probably use the publicity.”

  “I’ve watched tapes of past years,” Danny said, turning pointedly away from Max. “And Claire Durand usually asks very precise, technical questions about obscure points of classical French cuisine. Devon Sparks—he used to be super experimental with his food, so we should brush up on our molecular gastronomy. And his new charity deal, that’s what? Teaching kids to cook, or something? So maybe nutrition.”

  “That third slot, though … that’s still up in the air,” Beck reminded them.

  “So we study everything,” Jules ordered, which ended the confrontation for the moment, as everyone shuffled through their bags looking for reference books and comparing notes.

  But as Jules observed the subtle angle of Danny’s body away from his brother’s, as if unconsciously excluding him from the group, she felt a chill down her spine. And when Max glanced up from a battered, food-stained copy of the Larousse Gastronomique and caught her gaze with a slow grin, that shiver of fear turned to a cascade of something much warmer, but no less unsettling.

  And she’d already sent him about twenty mixed signals, let him flirt with her, and made out with him like a sailor on shore leave.

  Damn it all to hell and back. This swearing off men thing was tougher than it sounded.

  At least when Max Lunden was around.

  Chapter 7

  “All right, out with it. Who are you planning to saddle me with this year?” Claire demanded, glaring across her pristine glass desk at the bane of her existence.

  The bane had the audacity to laugh, sleek black hair swinging against her angled jawbone. “It always cracks me up when you bust out the Americanisms.”

  “I’ve lived in your country for more than fifteen years,” Claire said quellingly. “Approximately half your lifetime, little girl.”

  “Hmm. I also enjoy it when you try to pretend you’re old. Come off it, ma chérie. You’re … what? Thirty-five?”

  “Enough of your flattery. It won’t get you anywhere,” Claire snapped. She couldn’t quite stop a small, satisfied smile from giving her away, however. Ridiculous vanity, and she knew it, but there it was. She’d never relished the idea of becoming a woman of a certain age. “Besides, you’re off by about seven years, on the wrong side of forty. And your French accent is atrocious.”

  Eva Jansen grinned, a surprisingly roguish look on her perfectly tanned, discreetly made-up face. “Tell it to Madamoiselle Mireille, the worst French tutor ever born. Maybe if she’d spent more time making me conjugate verbs, and less time being conjugal with my father, I wouldn’t embarrass myself in front of native French speakers.”

  “I’m from Paris,” Claire reminded her. “We don’t think anyone outside the city speaks the language properly, not even the rest of France. Now state your business and get out, some of us have real work to do.”

  Being editor in chief of an international lifestyle magazine meant Claire spent most of her time lambasting terrified underlings and directing a multimillion-dollar operation for which she held full, final responsibility. Some women in that position might enjoy the chance to converse with a peer, to have an interaction that was completely devoid of coercion or intimidation.

  Claire Durand was not that woman.

  She pushed her desk chair back and stood to pace across her office to the enormous glass wall overlooking the magazine’s test kitchen on the floor below. The worker bees were testing recipes for the Fourth of July issue, and the rich, smoke-salty scent of Texas barbecue sauce wafted up through the vents, sharp with vinegar and caramel-sweet with brown sugar.

  “Right,” Eva drawled, tapping one manicured finger against the polished mahogany arm of Claire’s best office guest chair. “Because run
ning a top-rated hotel and restaurant group while organizing the biggest culinary competition in America is such a snap.”

  Claire waved a hand. “Your father still ran Jansen Hospitality, when last I checked. As for the competition … well. You’re a spoiled little girl playing with dolls. Only in this case, your unfortunate Barbie is me.”

  So what if Eva had inherited her father’s killer business sense along with her sizable trust fund? Claire was not impressed. Even if Eva also happened to mix a deadly martini and occasionally made Claire laugh hard enough to shake her chignon loose, none of that would save Eva from certain annihilation should the foolish girl attempt to replicate the fiasco of the last Rising Star Chef competition.

  “Oh, Claire.” Eva dismissed her friend’s concerns with a flick of her poison-apple-red fingernails. “It won’t be like last time. I’ve got fabulous judges lined up for you.”

  “You’d better have. I refuse to be the lone voice of reason in the wilderness of insanity again, Eva. Nor will I serve as au pair for your latest boy toy. Your father didn’t found this competition merely to provide you with bedroom playmates.”

  “I know. That’s just a side benefit. Ha! But don’t worry, I won’t be culling from the judging panel. As if I’d trust any man I’m interested in alone with a cougar like you.”

  Claire snorted. For the umpteenth time, she was glad she was French, and had learned at a very young age how to snort elegantly to show disdain. “Eva. I have a travel piece on Bali coming in, eleven versions of barbecue sauce to taste, problems with the layout for the photo slide show of the Milan Melon Festival on the Web site, and my new restaurant critic is an irretrievable idiot. I have no time for nonsense about large cats. Deliver your atrocious news and leave me to my frustrations.”