Too Hot to Touch

by Louisa Edwards

  “Right, meditation circle, gotcha,” Max said, backing off with a questioning glint in his eye. “You guys coming?”

  “Be right there,” Jules promised.

  Heart in her throat, she watched him bound off to tackle Winslow. And when she finally glanced back, Gus was studying her, bushy eyebrows raised.

  “I don’t like lying to him.” The words burst out of her, fervent and choked.

  Gus’s watery blue eyes softened. “I know. But he’s got a life out there, opportunities to learn and grow beyond what his mother and I could give him. All we can do is not stand in his way. And if Max knew about my heart thing…” He shook his head.

  “He’d stay here.” Jules couldn’t help the longing in her voice, the layers of yearning that gave her away so neatly, Gus’s gaze snapped up.

  “So that’s it.”

  She swallowed and nearly gagged. “What?”

  “Something’s up with you two.”

  Struggling with her breathing, Jules forced her voice steady. “Okay, maybe. But it’s brand-new, and I wouldn’t even want to call it a ‘thing.’ Especially since it’s not going anywhere.”

  Gus pursed his lips. “Looked like a ‘thing’ to me,” he said. “And not a casual thing, either. Jules. Is it serious?”

  Only if you consider falling ass over stupid, idiotic heart “serious.”

  The busy conference center faded away, Jules’s vision graying at the edges. It was the question she didn’t want to answer, above all others, and here Gus was, standing in front of her with hope bright in his eyes.

  Before she could gather her shattered thoughts to figure out how to respond, like a miracle, their number was being called over the loudspeaker.

  Everyone erupted into a flurry of movement, last-minute advice, and hurried toward the stage.

  They massed at the steps on the left, waiting for the cue to mount the stage, and Jules ended up next to Danny. He leaned over and mouthed, “Are you okay? You seem a little out of it or something.” He tensed, shooting a glare at his brother. “Shit, what did Max do?”

  Jules shook her head, breath coming too fast in and out of her lungs. Everything was unraveling, the life she’d painstakingly carved out for herself here breaking apart like an overheated sauce, and she couldn’t go off somewhere and cry about it. She had to get up on stage in front of hundreds of people and answer questions. It suddenly seemed like an insurmountable task.

  Too late for nerves, though, and too late for the emotional breakdown she could feel looming over her head like an ugly summer storm.

  It was too late to do anything but square her shoulders, lift her chin, and move forward into the hot glare of the spotlights.

  Chapter 15

  The first few questions passed in a blur while Max was still riding the high of having finally done it. He’d told Jules what he wanted—and she hadn’t run away. This was going to work, and it was going to be amazing, and he couldn’t wait for this stupid competition to be over so he could get her alone and— Ow!

  Danny elbowed him sharply in the ribs, glaring. Max blinked and realized he’d blanked out of the competition completely, like some kid chasing butterflies in the outfield.

  Pathetic, Lunden.

  He straightened his shoulders, taking in the scene in front of him. Enemy team across the stage, looking fierce and focused and ready as hell to defend their spot. Max glanced toward the front of the stage. Most of the audience disappeared into a noisy, dark mass behind the bright shine of the lights, but the judges’ box was close enough to the stage for him to be able to make them out.

  Claire Durand was instantly recognizable from the head shot they ran beside her Letter from the Editor feature in every issue of Délicieux. She was magnetic in person, all cool and elegant, but with dark, snapping eyes that gave away the intelligence that had propelled her to the helm of an internationally renowned magazine.

  On her right sat Devon Sparks, looking carved out of cream cheese, as always, with his photo-shoot smile and six-hundred-dollar haircut.

  And in the middle … huh, that must be the rock star. Kane Slater. He looked more like a surfer than a musician, to Max, but whatever sold records, he guessed.

  It was Slater’s turn to ask a question, apparently. He rocked back in his chair, tilting it until the front legs left the floor, and wobbled there precariously.

  “Okay, I’ve got a good one,” he said, his voice a thick drawl that clashed with his tanned SoCal blondness and made Max think about cowboys. The surfer-cowboy-rocker seemed not to be consulting any notes. Max frowned. Both of the other judges had stacks of papers and books in front of them, passages marked with Post-its. And this guy, this nonchef nobody, was asking questions off the top of his head?

  Well, this ought to be excellent.

  Max checked the scoreboard. Shit. While he’d been having his emo moment, the other team had snaked the first two points!

  Okay, Max had just made a declaration of … whatever … to the woman he was having intensely delicious sex with. What the hell was the rest of his team’s excuse?

  Steeling himself for the lurch in his chest, Max leaned forward far enough to see down the table to where Jules stood, as stiff and lifeless as a mannequin modeling chefwear.

  Something was off.

  Instead of the laser focus she’d exhibited at every trivia practice for the last two weeks, Jules looked dazed. Her pretty mouth was a thin, bloodless line, not a muscle in her forehead or cheeks moved—but her eyes were swimming with fear.

  Max felt a chill that had nothing to do with nerves ripple down his spine.

  He’d wanted to get to her … and apparently, he really had. But instead of being able to savor the victory, all Max could feel was regret.

  Movement from the judges’ table caught Max’s eye as Kane Slater let all four legs of his chair hit the ground with a loud bump.

  “So. If you go to Central Texas, alongside all the barbecue and Tex-Mex, you’ll see a lot of signs advertising kolaches. Who can tell me what that is?”

  Max relaxed a little. Okay, that was something Jules should definitely be able to answer. He knew she’d been studying Southwestern food culture, Texas in particular, for a week, and this sounded like a dish she definitely would’ve run across.

  He looked down the table, expecting her hand to shoot out and whap the buzzer any second … but it didn’t.

  She was stuck. He could see her mind working frantically behind the glassy amber of her eyes, but nothing was happening.

  The other team conferred furiously behind their hands, clearly without an answer, but the way they were eyeing their buzzer, Max could tell they were going to jump on it and at least give a guess soon.

  The tension of the moment coiled tighter and tighter, as if some giant hand were cranking an old-fashioned metal citrus press, squeezing and squeezing until Max thought he’d turn inside out.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Max saw the lead chef of the other team reach for their buzzer, and he snapped. Without a single thought in his head other than beating the other guys, he whipped out his hand and smashed it down.

  The loud, harsh, unending buzz shocked Max back to reality, where he glanced down at his own hand still mashing the buzzer and realized that he didn’t have the first idea what the answer might be. Kolackees? It sounded Native American. Was that a clue?

  A long pause, broken by the smooth, cultured voice of the announcer lady whose name Max didn’t remember, a chic, sort of feline woman who said, “And the team from Lunden’s Tavern makes their first play. Answer?”

  Max’s tongue was abruptly filled with sawdust. He unstuck it from the roof of his mouth and said, “Um…”

  Winslow shot him a horrified look. “Oh no, you did not buzz in without knowing the answer.”

  Max met his gaze helplessly. “Oops?”

  Next to him, Danny went stiff-legged like a junkyard dog about to start a brawl. “Oops? Are you shitting me?”

  “We’re goi
ng to need an answer sometime this year,” the catty announcer said. Her tone was full of amusement, but Max had honestly never in his life felt less like laughing.

  He could feel every eye in the convention center like a separate needle gouging into his skin. And his dad—God.

  Dad’s out there, watching me blow this for him, for Danny, for Jules … oh God, oh fuck …

  “Anybody have any ideas?” Max whispered out of the corner of his mouth.

  They all looked at Jules, whose agonized eyes filled with tears. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

  “He said Central Texas,” Winslow reminded him desperately. “I don’t know, maybe it’s something with a tortilla?”

  “Come up with a guess,” Beck advised calmly from the other end of the table. “Take your shot; it won’t make or break our chances. We need to move past this.”

  The guy might have chilled cucumber water in his veins, but he was right. Max faced the judges’ table. Slater wasn’t smirking or doing anything obnoxious, but Max stared down and hated the little fucker anyway.

  Kolackees. No, that was wrong. Kolache? That sounded less Native American, and didn’t sound like Spanish at all. Shit, he was so screwed.

  “Kolache,” Max said, hoping he had the pronunciation right, at least. “It’s a Native American dish featuring cold smoked fish and sweet corn.”

  A spasm of what looked like genuine regret twisted Slater’s mouth. “Aw, man. I’m sorry, but no.” He glanced over to the other team. “Any guesses?”

  The muscles in Max’s shoulders clenched at the smug smile on the opposing team leader’s face. “A kolache is a pastry—semisweet yeast dough baked around fillings, which can be sweet, like the traditional poppyseed variety, or savory with spicy sausage or jalapeños.”

  “Correct!” crowed Slater. “Weirdly enough, Central Texas has one of the largest populations of Czech people outside of the Czech Republic. And I, for one, am grateful for that because I love me some kolaches. Although, technically, it should be noted that ‘kolaches’ is a total Americanization of the actual Czech, since ‘kolach’ is already plural. And authentic kolach would never have jalapeños in them. But still, another point for you guys.”

  Well, fuck. That puts the score at three to nothing. Max could feel the tension vibrating through his team.

  “Wow,” Max said, trying like hell to lighten the mood, get his team relaxed and centered again. “Heart attack on a plate. I bet it’s wicked addictive.”

  “You know it,” Slater agreed, leaning back in his chair again. “The hangover food of the gods, my friend.”

  Danny snorted a little, and Max felt the team start to breathe again.

  “All right, settle down. And step it up, Lunden’s,” Devon Sparks interrupted. “You’ve got a lot of catching up to do. And I’m not taking it easy on you with my question. Here it is: every good chef should be able to do recipe conversions in his or her head, to be able to quickly triple a recipe on the spot.” He grinned, and Max was alarmed to see the hint of wickedness in that smirk.

  “But what if you were cooking for a huge crowd of people, all showing up at the same time? Let’s do something simple—cream of tomato soup. The base recipe is—maybe you want to write this down?—three ounces of oil, one pound of mirepoix, two minced garlic cloves, half a cup of flour, twelve cups of chicken stock, two pounds of chopped plum tomatoes, twenty-four ounces of tomato puree, and two cups of heavy cream. It makes a gallon of soup, which serves eight as a meal with grilled cheese. Convert that recipe to serve eight hundred. Go.”

  Max stared down at his scribbled notes without really seeing them. If this was for real what it took to get in on the RSC competition, maybe he deserved to get cut, because there was no way in hell he was getting these calculations done anytime in the next half hour.

  Staring down his own table, he saw Win and Danny writing frantically, and he was happy to see Jules was back in the game, at last, bent so close to her notes that her nose almost brushed the paper. The only one not even trying was Beck, who stood staring off into the distance with a slight scowl, arms crossed over his chest.

  Big fucking help you are. Max attempted to telegraph the message directly into Beck’s brain, but it didn’t seem to have any effect.

  A quick glance across the stage told Max the other team wasn’t harboring any secret math geniuses—maybe he had time to figure this out after all.

  But just as he put his pencil to the paper, a large, square-palmed hand shot out and clapped the buzzer twice, in quick, precise bursts.

  Max felt the beginnings of a grin tugging at his mouth.

  It was Beck.

  “Go for it,” Devon Sparks said, glancing down at the legal pad in his hand. “I’ve got the answer right in front of me.”

  “For eight hundred two-cup servings,” Beck said calmly, “you’d need a hundred gallons of soup. That’s thirty-seven and a half cups of vegetable oil, a hundred pounds of mirepoix, two hundred minced garlic cloves, and fifty cups of flour, which is probably gonna be easier to measure by weight: about eleven pounds.”

  It was at this point that every eyebrow in the room shot straight up, Max’s included. Turned out, his team was the one harboring a math genius. Who knew?

  “Okay, you’re halfway there,” Devon said, nonplussed but clearly fascinated. Max was pretty sure he’d intended to stump the room with that one, or at least have the time run out before anyone could come up with an answer. “What’s next?”

  “Well, the chicken stock is easy, that’s seventy-five gallons. We’d need two hundred pounds of chopped plum tomatoes, I’m thinking canned for a job like this, plus you get more consistent flavor for a big batch of soup. Seventy-five quarts of tomato puree, fifty quarts of heavy cream, plus enough salt and ground pepper to bring out the other flavors. And personally, I’d add in about a dozen pounds of diced bacon, for that nice, smoky flavor, but maybe that’s just me.”

  “Um, it’s not just you,” Kane Slater said. “Bacon makes everything better.”

  Shooting his fellow judge an amused glance, Devon said, “Correct on every point. You adjusted some of the measurements to metric, though—can I ask why?”

  Beck shrugged. “It’s how I learned to do big conversions. It’s easier to visualize. And a lot of product is labeled that way these days, so that makes it easier, too.”

  Interesting. So Beck has actually cooked for huge groups of people, Max mused. It was the kind of revelation that made him realize he knew next to nothing about the big, silent guy who’d staked out his territory at the back of the Lunden’s Tavern kitchen.

  Shit. I don’t even know the guy’s first name. Which made Max feel like a grade-A dick.

  “Seriously, good job, man,” he told Beck, leaning on the table to offer him a fist to bump. “Talk about bacon—you saved ours.”

  Beck gave him a small smile, and it transformed his hard, stony face. Max grinned back.

  “Yes, yes. If we’ve finished with the male bonding ritual,” Claire Durand said, “May we continue? I believe it falls to me to ask the next question.”

  “By all means,” Slater said, his blue eyes vivid with laughter. “It’s been way too long since our last helping of vitriol. I’m sure the cheftestants are as starved for it as I am.”

  Max was unwillingly impressed. It would take balls of solid carbon steel to tweak a woman like Claire Durand. Slater either had an uncontrollable libido or no sense of self-preservation. Maybe both.

  Or maybe the guy just flirts with anyone of the feminine persuasion who comes within fifteen feet of him, Max amended with a frown, watching the way Slater’s gaze darted to Jules. The rock star gave her an encouraging thumbs-up coupled with a goofy face, as if he could tell just how unnerved she was and wanted to make her laugh.

  With a sidelong glare at her cojudge, Claire raised her stern, clear voice. “What are the three primary reasons to sift dry ingredients before baking?”

  Max felt his brother jolt next to hi
m. “Oh,” Danny said, and slammed his fist down on the buzzer. “Well, to blend them together, obviously. Also to get rid of lumps and whatever impurities made it into that bag of flour or whatever. And you want to aerate them, so they can mix into the wet ingredients more evenly.”

  Claire Durand bestowed one of her rare smiles on Danny, who flushed and straightened his shoulders. “Well done,” she told him. “Clearly, unlike most chefs, you know your pastry.”

  Max glanced at the rest of the team, whose faces registered a spectrum from delight (Winslow) to quiet pride (Beck). Even Jules appeared to have gotten control of her emotions and was giving Danny a one-armed hug.

  “The score is now three to two—you’re catching up, Lunden’s!” The announcer woman strolled over to their side of the stage and leaned on the end of the table, right next to Danny. She tilted the microphone away from her mouth and leaned in, her voice soft enough that only Max could probably hear what she said in Danny’s ear. “Not that it matters,” she cooed, “but I’m rooting for you. I’ve got a bit of a sweet tooth, you see, and it’s been a while since I had a pastry chef.”

  Electricity arced between them, hot enough to singe Max, a foot away and minding his own business.

  Yowza.

  Danny looked right at her and said, without even blinking, “I’m not as sweet as I look, dollface.”

  Max bit the inside of his cheek to keep from giving Danny an obnoxious, older-brotherly slap on the back. Sure, it was a little ick-making to be even accidentally privy to his kid brother getting prejiggy, but he was proud of Danny, too.

  This Eva Jansen chick was hot enough to scorch grill marks across his ass, and she wasn’t playing around, either. She had a sharp, predatory look about her, from the smooth, blunt swing of her dark hair against her jawbone to the way her mouth seemed to naturally curl up at the corners in a secretive smile.

  “Eva, we’d like to move on, if you please.” Claire Durand’s voice cracked across the stage, making half the contestants jump like beans in a hot, dry pan.