“Why black sheep?” he asked, curious despite his silent promise to himself not to ask her any personal questions. The less he asked, the more quickly she’d work and run out of her own questions. Or at least that had been the plan until her comment piqued his curiosity.
Wendy sighed a little before answering. He got the impression that, though she was breezy and the closest thing to a nonstop talker he ever hoped to encounter, this was apparently difficult for her to talk about.
The whisk slowed and began to travel in an anemic semicircle as she talked.
“The Atlanta Fortunes are all high achievers. The whole lot of them are power-oriented and driven. I’ve never known a one of them to fail at anything they set out to do—they refuse to.” She stopped abruptly and looked at Marcos. He’d be right at home with her parents, she thought. “I guess you could relate to that.”
He blinked, caught off guard by the observation. She did that a lot to him, he thought. Caught him off guard. “Me?”
“Yeah, you’re a lot like them,” she told him, leaning back a little in order to look him over from head to toe. “They’d approve of you.”
The way she emphasized the last word made him wonder what she was really saying. It wasn’t as if he wanted to get to know her and this was wedging the door open, allowing him to get a better look inside her life.
Still, there was no missing her tone, so he heard himself asking, “And you think that they don’t approve of you?”
A rueful smile curved her delicate mouth. What he really hadn’t expected was his reaction to the hint of sadness. He found himself wanting to put his arms around her, to chase away that look. It didn’t really suit her.
But it did make her more real.
“They never said that in so many words,” Wendy admitted with a careless shrug of her shoulders, as if to make little of the matter. Her blouse slipped a little lower. He forced himself to look at her face. “But it’s there, in their eyes. Oh, I know they love me,” she was quick to add in case he thought she was feeling sorry for herself. She wasn’t, she really wasn’t. “But I’ve actually been a major disappointment to them for most of my life.”
It really hurt her to admit it, to actually put it in so many words, but she knew that it was best for her if she got right out in front of it.
So that no one else could throw it in her face.
And then the grin was back, a little forced, but there. “That’s why they’ve sent me out here. They keep hoping I can find something to do with my life besides just taking up space.”
She reached for the canister of powdered sugar and measured out a cup, then drizzled it along the outline of the new black-and-white pudding she’d managed to create while talking to him.
“I’m the last one of six,” she continued, then paused as she pressed her lips together. “Nobody’s ever come right out and confirmed it, but I’ve got a feeling that only five of us were planned.” The smile never reached her eyes. “I was the surprise they hadn’t counted on.”
This was a far different Wendy than the one he’d gotten accustomed to.
Maybe that was why he heard himself saying, “Sometimes a surprise turns out to be the best part.”
The sigh that escaped her lips was larger this time. She quickly pulled back her lips in another grin, attempting to cover up the moment of weakness that allowed him to peek behind the mask of cheer she tried so hard to keep up.
“Maybe. But sometimes maybe not.” She pushed forward the single dessert she’d been working on almost unconsciously. It was done. When he made no move to taste it, Wendy raised her head and looked up at him. She was clearly waiting for his approval. “So, what do you think?” she coaxed.
“Looks pretty enough,” he allowed.
“It’s got to do more than that and we both know it.” She moved the dessert a little closer to Marcos on the table.
They were still very much alone in the kitchen. No one had come in yet. The momentary silence pervaded all the corners of the wide, open room.
Somehow, as she’d lowered her guard and allowed him to look into the family dynamics she’d grown up with, she had let him see that beneath the banter and the sparkling, snapping brown eyes was a little girl who, no matter how much she said or did to deny the fact, still craved her parents’ approval.
Still wanted to hear that they were finally proud of her.
In a way, Marcos could relate to that. In his estimation, anyone from a larger family could. It was hard carving out your own individuality while caught up in a group scene. Hard to be your own person and still be the daughter—or son—your parents hoped you would be.
He was fortunate enough to know that his parents were proud of the man he’d become. But if things had gone a different way…
As she pushed the plate a little closer to him on the stainless-steel surface, the spoon beside it slipped off and landed on the floor.
“Oops,” Wendy murmured. The next moment she dipped down to pick up the utensil.
As did he.
Crouching down at the same time as Wendy, Marcos found that their faces met. Her breath, soft and maddeningly enticing, seemed to whisper along his skin.
Temptation tightened his gut to the point that he had no breath of his own. The breath he drew in was hers.
The spoon—and dessert—were forgotten, as was decorum. Her eyes seemed to hypnotize him, turning him into someone he didn’t recognize. Someone with longings that were being unleashed.
Marcos felt himself sliding his fingers around her face, framing it.
Wanting nothing more in life than to kiss her.
Chapter Nine
What the hell do you think you’re doing? Marcos upbraided himself.
He was about two seconds away from making a fatal mistake, one that would cost him.
Dearly.
He was the restaurant manager, for God’s sake. Her boss. He couldn’t just go around kissing the help.
But he was attracted to her.
Really, wildly, utterly attracted to her.
And he hadn’t a clue what to do about it. Ordinarily, he acted on his attractions without being the slightest bit concerned.
But this situation was different and he had to tread lightly. More accurately, he had to retrace his steps and not tread at all.
She didn’t understand it.
Why wasn’t he kissing her?
To Wendy it actually felt as if time had suddenly come to a standstill. Her heart was lodged in her throat, waiting.
But the sinfully sexy restaurant manager wasn’t leaning forward, wasn’t kissing her. Wasn’t doing anything.
Was he waiting for her to do something, to give him some kind of a sign that it was okay?
She’d give him a sign, all right. He might be having second thoughts about this, but she damn well wasn’t.
Just as Marcos was about to drop his hands from her face, she leaned in quickly and kissed him. Their lips brushed lightly, like two snowflakes falling onto one another.
One brush of lips begat another, then urged on a third. Wendy leaned further into him, taking all control out of his hands, just like that. Without thinking, without being conscious of how he had gotten from point A to point B, Marcos instinctively deepened the kiss…until the annoying voice in his head urged him to stop.
Reluctantly he dropped his hands from Wendy’s face. But needs raced so urgently through him, he caught himself gripping her shoulders as if to hold her in place even though she wasn’t going anywhere.
Maybe he had done it to anchor himself. To keep himself from floating off into space, riding the crest of the wave of heat that had suddenly, wantonly materialized out of nowhere.
As if they had suddenly merged into one being, they rose to their feet together.
“You find a way to put that on the menu and none of our competitors will ever touch us again.”
The amused voice had them leaping apart, startled, before the words were even able to fully sink in.
For her part, though equally breathless, Wendy didn’t look nearly as embarrassed as Marcos. In fact, she looked rather calm as she ran her hand through her hair to smooth it down.
She flashed a smile at Enrique, who was standing in the doorway, looking far more amused than a human being had the right to be in this kind of situation.
“I’m afraid there’s no way I could duplicate that for a stranger’s consumption,” she told the chef.
Her eyes shifted to Marcos.
He hadn’t a clue what she was feeling, or thinking, or even if she was feeling or thinking anything at all. For all he knew, this could be just standard behavior for her. After all, like the old saying went, the rich are different from you and me.
And most definitely different from him, he thought.
After a beat, Marcos realized that Enrique was saying something. He blinked. “What?”
“Do you mind if I try the dessert?” Enrique asked him again.
Unexpected anger surged through Marcos at the mere hint of what the man was suggesting, until he realized that Enrique was talking about the actual dessert, not Wendy. The pudding was still on the table where they had left it, completely untested.
He wished he could say the same about himself. But he had been tested just now—and had failed miserably.
It was Wendy who spoke when he didn’t.
“Sure, go ahead,” she urged Enrique. “I want to hear what you think of it.”
Producing his own very small spoon out of his breast pocket, Enrique skimmed just the barest part off the top of the pudding, then slid the spoon into his mouth and closed his eyes. He allowed the tiny morsel to slip down his tongue and into his throat as he savored the experience almost in slow motion.
“Well, what do you think?” Wendy pressed him for a response. More than a beat of silence had passed and the chef had yet to react.
Opening his eyes, Enrique looked at the young woman he now regarded with affection as his personal protégé. Delicately, he set the spoon down.
“What I think is that this latest creation of yours is simply much too good for the masses. It should only be served to those few who are blessed with a refined, discerning palate.”
“That’s not how we make money,” Marcos responded, finally finding his tongue. His wits, he had a feeling, were going to take him longer to locate. He had no one to blame but himself.
“A pity,” Enrique conceded with a shake of his head. He looked down at the rest of the dessert, regarding it the way a man might a particularly stimulating, beautiful mistress. “Do you have any plans for the rest of this?” he asked Wendy. She had wanted Marcos to sample it, but that little detail no longer felt important, having fallen by the wayside in the wake of other circumstances. They had wound up sampling each other and discovering something far more potent than a liqueur-laced black-and-white confection.
She pressed her lips together and tasted their kiss again. Definitely better than anything she could have come up with using a dairy product, she thought.
Wendy gestured toward the dessert, indicating that the chef should have at it.
“It’s all yours,” she told him, then hesitated at the last moment, turning toward Marcos. “Unless you want to try it.”
No, he had sampled enough exotic fare for one day. His toes were still seriously curled inside his expensive Italian leather shoes.
“That’s all right, I trust Enrique’s palate,” Marcos said, surrendering the rest of the dessert and rubber-stamping the chef’s seal of approval.
His mouth was painfully dry and his knees, Marcos realized, felt as if they were sticks of butter left out in the sun too long. Remaining where he was, he waited a second for the feeling to pass. The weakness did, the dryness didn’t.
Picking up a glass, he went to the large, double stainless-steel sink and turned on the faucet. He filled his glass to the top, then downed the water.
“Put that dessert on the menu,” he instructed Enrique.
“How many do you want me to have Wendy make?” Enrique addressed the question to his back.
Marcos turned around, considering his answer. They were booked solid this afternoon. Any walk-ins were going to have to stand in line and wait before they could be seated. The menu had already been set, but he wanted to lose no time in previewing this latest marvel she’d come up with.
“Start with four dozen,” he decided. “If that turns out not to be enough, make more.”
Enrique nodded, then realized he had one more thing to nail down before he let Marcos get away. “Do you have a name for this one?” he called after the manager. Marcos had wound up being the one to name the other dessert Wendy had produced.
Pausing, Marcos turned around again. He looked from Enrique to Wendy, both of whom were apparently waiting for him to christen this latest miracle in a fluted glass.
Names came easily to him, but not this time. Due to circumstances beyond his control, his brain wasn’t working at its maximum efficiency at the moment.
“Since this has become an ongoing thing, why don’t we just have a section on the menu called Desserts by Wendy? Under it we can describe the Special of the Day.” Marcos looked pointedly at the woman who had quite literally rocked his world—not an easy feat considering that he was hardly a monk and hadn’t been since he had turned fifteen. “I’ll leave the description up to you,” he told her.
That said, he turned on his heel and walked out, quickly this time, before anyone could think of anything else to ask him. Right now what he needed most of all was a little bit of space to himself and some time to attempt to sort things out and put them in their proper perspective. She really had set him on his ear.
That shouldn’t have happened. He was going to have to watch himself, Marcos thought, taking careful, measured steps to his office, still feeling more than a little unstable.
Thank God it had been Enrique who had walked in on them. He trusted Enrique. Enrique knew the value of keeping his own counsel and not breathing life into rumors.
Had it been anyone else, Marcos knew that he would have had a huge problem on his hands.
Distance. He needed to maintain distance between himself and Wendy, he decided. No matter how tempting her lips were, or how much he had thoroughly enjoyed that kiss—and he had—it was something that couldn’t happen again.
No one had to tell him that she would be moving on, undoubtedly soon. And he was going to be staying here. Nothing could be allowed to happen between them because it had no possible future.
Not that he wanted a future, Marcos immediately amended.
Besides, Wendy Fortune was his employee. He had to remember that. The not-quite-so-innocent kiss that had exploded between them had absolutely no place here. He was her boss, not her boyfriend, although he had to admit, if only to himself, that the latter was beginning to sound more and more appealing. But that didn’t change the facts and the facts were that they had names for a boss who forgot to behave like a professional with the woman who worked for him. It could be seen as taking advantage of the situation—and that was the very last thing he wanted.
Damn, but life certainly had gotten incredibly complicated, he thought humorlessly. When had that happened?
Wendy felt like a small lifeboat that had suddenly run aground. But obviously, she was the only one who’d felt the earth move during that kiss. Marcos had looked like a cool cucumber.
But then, she thought, the man did have a reputation as a playboy. Kitchen gossip had filled her in about that the first day she was here.
She looked at the chef, who was busy bringing out more of the same ingredients she’d just used to create today’s prototype dessert. She fell into step with him, lending another set of hands to the task of carrying back the industrial-size containers.
“I think Marcos hates me.�
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Enrique laughed. “It did not look that way to me from where I was standing.”
Wendy shook her head. “I kissed him, Enrique, not the other way around.”
“And he obviously hated every second of it,” En rique responded with amused sarcasm.
But she wasn’t convinced. “I caught him off guard. Surprised him.”
He tried hard not to laugh at her. He couldn’t help wondering, had he ever been this young himself?
“Maybe so. But, Wendy, I know the man. He is not now, nor has he ever been, a weakling. He would have found a way to gently but firmly stop you if he had wanted to. Since he didn’t, it is my professional opinion that he wanted to kiss you, too.”
“In your opinion,” she emphasized.
He smiled and nodded. He had no problem with that. “In my opinion,” he repeated. And then he glanced at the clock. His attention was drawn back to the fluted glasses they were lining up in rows of four. “But I will not be able to vouch for his feelings if we do not have these desserts ready in time.”
It didn’t take a genius to understand what the chef was telling her. “So I should stop talking and work faster.”
He smiled broadly, opening the first container. “Exactly.”
There was only one way to deal with this, Marcos decided as he sat back in his chair. What he needed to do was something drastic in order to put Wendy off. And, in his far from limited experience, nothing put off a woman better than seeing the man she was interested in out with another woman.
He didn’t know if he was being fair—or accurate—by putting Wendy in that category. She might very well not care about him. But the fact remained that she had kissed him, and that had to mean some thing, right?
Well, whatever it meant, he was fairly certain that if she saw him at the restaurant with a date, she would realize that he enjoyed his unfettered lifestyle and liked being in a position to see a different woman every night, if he was so inclined.
No woman liked being lumped into a group. Each thought she was special and should be treated accordingly. And while he might be willing in a moment of weakness to concede that, the way he’d remained free so far was by playing the numbers, rotating partners and always being one step ahead of a serious romance.
Fortune's Just Desserts Page 8
