The second kiss was as tender as the first, as filled with promise and heat. Their hands were unmoving now, fingers still linked.
Jake slowly, slowly turned his head, whispering, “I want to kiss you, Locryn…”
“Be my guest,” was the gentle reply as Locryn’s lips brushed against his.
Jake’s lips tingled at the touch of Locryn’s soft mouth and he only danced his lips against Locryn’s. He could have clasped Locryn with his dough-covered hands, he could have pressed him with the weight of his body to the wall and kissed him with all the fierceness of his passion. But instead, their kiss was as gentle as a murmur.
And when it ended, Locryn’s smile was gentler still.
“You’re not nearly so terrifying as I thought you might be,” was his conclusion.
“Terrifying, me? I’m a cute little lamb, really.” Jake rubbed the tip of his nose against Locryn’s. “Well, I am when I’m holding back. And I will hold back, if you want me to.”
“What I want is another kiss, Chef.”
“And you will have one!” Jake ghosted his lips over Locryn’s then, with a little more fire than before, kissed him. What would Locryn make of it? Jake didn’t want to send him reeling away in horror. There was something almost delicate about him, a gentleness that Jake had mistaken for that same prim quality that Locryn had accused himself of. In a world filled with Fionns, he was like a breath of fresh coastal air.
But he didn’t seem shocked at all. Instead he met the heat in Jake’s kiss with his own, his arms tightening around his waist.
Jake cupped Locryn’s face, dough stuck to his fingers, kissing Locryn with increasing fire. This was Locryn Trevorrow, for heaven’s sake, the quiet, meek, sugar and fiddlesticks baker.
It’s always the quiet ones.
And that definitely wasn’t a rolling pin that Jake could feel pressed against him. The image of Locryn naked on the bed returned, but naked anywhere would be just as wonderful. Even naked on a flour-scattered worktop in a cozy café by the sea.
Jake slid his hand down to Locryn’s buttocks and squeezed the firm flesh. A special massage? Jake would happily give it, and—
“Ahem, sorry.”
Jake looked up and found himself eye to eye with one of the show’s runners, a keen young man in a track suit. “What the fuck?”
Locryn stepped back then scooped up the well-kneaded dough, bustling away across the kitchen as though nothing irregular had happened at all. Nothing irregular that had left a clear and doughy handprint on his tempting bottom.
“I thought I’d left my clipboard in here.” The runner nodded over to the serving hatch. “Ah, there it is!”
Jake laughed. “Grab it and sod off, and I’ll see you tomorrow!”
Locryn called breezily, “I would’ve looked after it. Goodnight!”
“‘Night!” The runner grabbed the clipboard, then his eyes widened in surprise. “Mr. Trevorrow, you’ve got a—on your—erm…”
Jake willed Locryn to take the hint but instead he looked at the young man, his brow furrowed in confusion. Then he glanced over his shoulder and blushed a deep red.
“Clipboard,” Locryn told the runner with a bashful smile. “And grab a bun if you like.”
Terrible choice of words.
The runner glanced at Jake and Jake furiously rubbed a cloth over his hand. “Thanks, Mr. Trevorrow!”
And as the runner hurried off, Jake saw him pick up a cream horn.
It would be.
The door closed with a tinkle from the bell and the two men were alone again. Locryn drew in a deep breath then said with just a hint of mischief, “Oops!”
“Well, I wonder what they’ll be talking about in the guest house tonight?” Jake said as he picked the last bits of dough off his fingers.
“I’ll deliver the loaf there once it’s baked.” Locryn laughed. “It’s the least I can do to go with the gossip.”
“The sensual loaf? It’s a baguette, right?”
“I’m afraid it’s a standard white farmhouse. They’re perfect for teaching technique,” Locryn told him, tidying the worktop. “But a standard white farmhouse has plenty to recommend it too. Shall we have a wander up to your place? I’ll bring the saucy loaf along and bake it tonight.”
Jake zipped himself back into his leather jacket. “I won’t get lost in the dark with my very own local guide. I wonder what stray I’ll find on the way tonight? I’m hoping for a donkey!”
“I’ll introduce you to mine. They love making friends.”
Locryn put the dough carefully back into its bowl and covered it over with a tea towel, its jaunty sunflower print exactly what Jake had already learned to expect of him. He put on his coat and picked up the bowl, then balanced a small box on top of it and said, “Ready, Chef?”
“Ready, Baker!”
“Chef and Baker.” Locryn opened the café door onto the moonlit village. Jake could hear the soft lapping of the waves down on the beach, somewhere in the darkness. “That sounds like it deserves a Michelin star or two.”
“Oh, at least three!” Jake grinned. He was surprised to see Locryn offer his arm, ever the gentleman. Even Locryn looked surprised as he looked down at his own arm.
“Go on,” he teased. “Nobody’s going to see. Your fearsome reputation’s safe with me.”
“Well, if you insist!” Jake looped his arm through Locryn’s. He wasn’t used to wandering about arm in arm in public, he was more of a stride-along-hands-in-pockets sort of man. “Are you sure you’re not seducing me, Mr. Trevorrow?”
Locryn chuckled and admitted, “I wouldn’t know where to start. But I do have a little something for you in this mysterious cake box, which I hope might do the seductive job for me.”
“It’s not your haunted dildo, is it? No, hopefully you don’t have one of those!”
“I don’t need one!” Locryn’s laughter left Jake in no doubt that he was very much in on that particular joke. He nodded toward the box that rested atop the tea towel. “Go on, have a look.”
Jake unhooked their arms and opened the box. There inside it, innocent until it became an innuendo, was a cream horn.
“What’s the best way to tackle your cream horn, Loc? Shove it all in at once or do you suggest a gentle nibble?”
“My cream horn specifically? Never take a bite and try to suck out the cream—it won’t end well.” Locryn blinked, all innocence as he considered the question. “I suggest a gentle nibble to start with. Take your time. Savor it, let your lips caress it, taste it. And when you’re feeling confident, you can really settle down and enjoy it as enthusiastically as you like!”
Jake swallowed. His own cream horn had returned to his trousers. Locryn, in bed, stretched naked across a chintz quilt. What a picture that is.
“Well, you know me, I’m enthusiastic when it comes to food!”
“I imagine you have a healthy appetite.” Locryn glanced down, casual as anything. “I do do a rather good baguette, if I say so myself.”
“I know, one of your baguettes was pressing against me earlier!” Jake closed the box and linked his arm with Locryn’s again. They strolled along the harbor front, the only living souls as far as the eye could see, though Jake could hear seagulls crying overhead. “I was really fucking impressed by how fast your dough could rise.”
The Cornishman gave a laugh and admitted, “You had exactly the right kneading technique. How could it do anything but rise? We should practice together again, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, there’s more I need to learn. Much more.”
“And maybe we’ll share a Horlicks as well as a cream horn,” Locryn suggested, as saucy now as he had been prim earlier. It suited him though, Jake liked it. “I’ve been thinking about those pasties of yours. We need a neutral tasting panel, don’t we?”
“We do. What do you suggest?” Jake remembered the stacks of plastic boxes containing his hopeless prototypes. They paused and looked out through the bristling masts and fluttering pen
nants toward the open ocean, where stars were reflected on its surface like twinkling Christmas lights.
“I’ll put them out in the café tomorrow, free of charge.” The café? The place where Locryn supposedly created the most exquisite Cornish cream teas known to man? “And I’ll label them as tasty pasties, because if I put Cornish pasties, you won’t have a fair hearing. We can leave a little comment box and people can give their opinions. What do you think?”
Jake ran his hand back through his hair. Is this wise? “Oh, why not? But you have to read the comments first, and edit out the ones that might make me want to throw things.”
“I behaved badly earlier. But I am the king of Cornwall. And you are Captain Jake, they tell me.”
“Yeah, I am! Watch out or I’ll make you walk the plank on my pirate ship!”
Locryn chanced a kiss to Jake’s cheek and they strolled on, turning away from the harbor and into the narrow streets. They walked in contented silence between brightly painted cottages where soft lights glowed, catching the occasional snatch of a television program or the sound of laughter from within. It felt as though Porthavel was theirs and theirs alone, as though the pirate ship wedding might not turn into a catastrophe after all.
What would you call this feeling?
With a glance toward Locryn, Jake realized that it was contentment. There was no stress, no sense that it could all go wrong, just a peaceful sensation, as comforting as floating in a warm ocean. Was he finally relaxing?
Kneading dough was magic.
“Tell me about Jake,” Locryn said. “How on earth did you end up with boats as your gimmick when you drive round in a London bus on your programs?”
“Quite simple, really. The cheapest place I could find when I decided to set up my own restaurant was a retired canal boat café! The guys from the last kitchen I’d worked in took the piss and called me Captain Jake.” Jake laughed, thinking back to the faithful Lucy May on Regent’s Canal. To her traditional paintwork and the geraniums in salvaged buckets, to the small kitchen where he’d somehow managed to cook for thousands of people and made his name. “And after that, as you know, I ended up with an old party boat on the Thames. And I was set.”
Locryn laughed and said, “I wasn’t expecting that at all. How marvelous! I can’t imagine the sheer hard work that must’ve gone into a success like yours. No wonder you ended up being such a sweary so-and-so.”
“Hard work and luck!” Jake said. “Lucy May got a hole in her bottom—don’t laugh! And I would’ve lost her, I would’ve lost everything, if my canal boat family hadn’t leapt on board and bailed out!”
“Do you still have her?”
“She’s back to being a café again now. I let one of my staff have her. They’re doing quite well. Great coffee!”
“And leaf tea, I hope.” As they reached a bend in the road, Locryn paused. He turned and Jake turned with him, realizing as he did that they were now above Porthavel. Below them the village was laid out like a miniature, clustered around the harbor that gave it life and had, in the eye of the storm, taken it away. Locryn sighed softly and told Jake, “This is my family. My publisher and the TV people think I’m mad because I haven’t turned what I have into an empire, but then it wouldn’t be me, would it? Your restaurants are all you. That’s not luck, it’s passion.”
“Passion and being a tenacious bastard.” Jake put his arm around Locryn’s shoulder. “It’s a lovely place, Porthavel. I won’t lie, I cursed being sent here to start with. Well, okay, as you know, I passed out! But it’s grown on me, day by day, even if the weather did its best to get rid of me.”
“God, that was awful, I was worried sick.” Locryn tipped his head and let it rest on Jake’s shoulder. “I rang Fionn to ask how you were and she said you’d picked up food poisoning from a rival’s restaurant. She didn’t tell me who, but…not a very good advert for them!”
Jake could’ve clung to the lie, could’ve pretended that he was an indomitable male who never had a day off sick. But that wouldn’t have been true.
“Look, you should probably know, that wasn’t food poisoning.”
He felt the soft sweep of Locryn’s hair as the baker lifted his head and told him, “If it was the goujons, it’s okay to tell me. I won’t bolt.”
“No, it wasn’t that.” Jake took a deep breath. Precious few people knew what was really wrong with him, and even Jake wasn’t that sure. “To cut a long story short, it’s stress. Boring old stress. At least, my doctor says so. My blood pressure’s a bit too high and…well, she reckoned that spending a couple of months in Cornwall was one of the best things I could do, but she didn’t factor in a pirate ship, a storm or my producer pissing everyone off and breaking her leg!”
“Stress?” Locryn pronounced the word as though it were the most extreme obscenity he could think of. Maybe it wasn’t a word he was familiar with, living here in this storybook village, living a charmed life. “Then you’re talking to the right man. And you’re in the right place to give it the heave-ho.”
“Seems like it,” Jake replied, cautious. He didn’t want to jinx anything. “Maybe I should take up breadmaking? It takes so long to do, and I’m thinking, maybe that’s good. Nice and slow. None of this—” Jake clicked his fingers, “Come on, come on, hurry up, out the way, get on with it nonsense which is all I ever hear in London.”
“But I’ll bet you’re putting plenty of pressure on yourself too, aren’t you? You’re the very best at what you do, that’s not an accident.”
Jake shrugged. He didn’t want to admit it, but Locryn was right. “I don’t know how to stop, that’s my problem. But I wouldn’t have come as far as I have if I’d just sat on my arse and picked my nose.”
“The thing with being the best—and I know, because I’ve got one of the best for a father—is that it’s addiction.” He put his arm around Jake’s waist, his hand resting on Jake’s hip. “You have to keep on surpassing yourself. Or rather, you think you do.”
Jake wondered what on earth Locryn meant. “But aren’t I meant to? I can’t go backwards, Loc! I can’t close everything down and go back to the Lucy May. Or to jobbing in other people’s kitchens.”
“No, but you can take a bit of time off and actually enjoy what you’ve struggled to create, can’t you?”
Can I?
The idea had never occurred to Jake before and he stood there in stunned surprise. Vague notions drifted in his mind but he couldn’t grasp any of them long enough to turn them into words. Instead, his mouth moved as if he was trying to speak, but no sound came out.
Until he managed to say, “I’d never thought of that before.”
“You could always think about it now,” Locryn suggested. His head settled against Jake’s shoulder once more. “There’s a lot to be said for looking at the ocean when you want to put things into perspective.”
The edge of the sea was illuminated by the harbor lights, and beyond the ocean was dark, nothing that Jake could see but he could feel it, somehow. And when he closed his eyes, he could hear it—the roll and splash of the waves drawing back and forth on the sand, the chuckle of water against barnacled hulls, the distant rippling cry of night birds somewhere in the dark.
The sea didn’t care how many restaurants Jake ran, how many Michelin stars he’d accumulated, how many top reviews or television shows he had to his name. But it didn’t leave Jake feeling bleak. Instead, something else stirred inside him, a connection to something infinite, something that was inside him as much as it was out there in the sea. An echo in his genes, perhaps, of a time before people, when his ancestors had lived under the waves.
They stood there in silence together, nothing pushing Jake to move, nobody clamoring at him for an answer, for a signature, for a moment in the limelight. Looking out over the edge of the land, as so many had before him over the centuries, he didn’t feel like ‘TV’s Jake Brantham’ anymore. He felt like the young man who had dreamed of glory, who had lain awake planning elaborate menus and
whiled away his weekends experimenting in his mum and dad’s tiny kitchen with its old gas stove and the grill that never lit on the first try.
And it felt wonderful.
All the tension had gone from Jake’s body and his shoulders sagged. Not in a defeated way, but now Jake realized that it was his stress that had kept him going, had kept every muscle in his body taut.
And he didn’t need it. He didn’t need to be on point and raring to go when he should be raring to get to sleep. There wouldn’t be any restaurants if he kept blanking out.
“Yeah, maybe I do feel relaxed. A bit,” Jake said.
“And Dorothy’s waiting for a cuddle from her dad,” Locryn reminded him. “Let’s get you safely home to your little girl, and I can pick up those London pasties of yours ready for our unfocused focus group tomorrow.”
As his house came into view, the stones white with moonlight, Jake wondered how he could possibly have ended up lost the previous evening. It seemed like such a straightforward walk out of the village, but the ferocity of the storm had changed the very landscape itself. And he was glad it had, because he wasn’t sure he would be arm in arm with Locryn right now if it hadn’t. It felt oddly like coming home.
When he opened the front door, Dorothy trotted into the hallway then flopped down on the floor and rolled about.
“That’s quite a welcome!” Jake crouched down to stroke her, then she rubbed herself against Locryn’s legs. “It’s good to know she likes both of us!”
“She’s a lovely little thing. I wonder where she came from.” Locryn stooped so he could scratch behind Dorothy’s velvety ears. “I’ve had a wonderful night, in spite of the broken leg. Thank you, Jake, for not thinking I was an insufferable snob.”
Jake gently touched Locryn’s cheek before settling a soft kiss on his lips.
“I don’t suppose—” Jake shook his head. No, he couldn’t ask Locryn to stay. It was far too soon. In London he could start and finish a relationship within a week, but not in Porthavel. “I’ll help you load up Betsy.”
With the box containing the cream horn safely on the kitchen table under Dorothy’s, Locryn and Jake piled Betsy’s basket with the pasties, and nestled among the stacked containers was the bowl of dough, still covered with its bright tea towel. As Locryn stood at the door, holding the bike and its precious cargo steady, Jake knew that this was the right thing to do. Locryn was right too. Some things were better savored.
The Captain and the Baker Page 10
