All Fired Up (Kate Meader) (31 page)

Oh, Shane.

The press of tears burned her throat. “What happened here, honey?”

She wanted to pretend the nanosecond of stiffness she felt under her touch was in her imagination. It would be so easy to pass over it and reap her reward, but too often, she had let his charm buy his way out of serious conversations about his past. Shane had an awful lot of long-healed scars, his father was a mean old drunk, and doctors were not his favorite people. Didn’t take a rocket scientist.

“Just a fight when I was a kid.” His lips returned to their hot interrogation of the sensitive spot below her ear.

“What kind of fight?”

“The kind that leaves scars.” More shivery kissing ensued.

Leave it. Don’t push.
“Did it have something to do with your father?”

Body in a clench, he left off his sweet assault. Agitation rolled off him in waves.

She held his face in both hands. “Shane, you can talk to me.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.” His tight, fierce stance told a different story. “Not all Irishmen are tragic, melancholy figures despite what you may have read in the literature.”

He smiled at his joke, but she recognized it for a fake. It was the same smile he used at Gina’s wedding when Jack asked him to make his wedding cake. The same one he had plastered on when they visited the kids on the cancer floor. A smile of distance.

Evidently, that comfort level she felt with him was a mirage. Being there for people was more Lili’s forte; Cara wasn’t the kind of woman whom people trusted. Feeling foolish for having tried, she pushed back and off the counter. She put her energy into stacking dirty plates.

“Ah, LT, don’t say you’re disappointed that my childhood wasn’t as dreadful as you hoped?” He stilled her arm. “I ran away to the circus and ended up on the wrong end of a lion tamer’s whip. How’s that?”

Wasn’t it enough that he had shunned her attempts at emotional intimacy, did he have to mock her as well? God, the man had some nerve telling her to open up to Lili and her family. There was something incredibly disingenuous about a guy who chose to shroud himself in mystery giving advice on the spiritual benefits of honesty.

“Forget it, Shane.”

“Cara.” He took a noisy breath, filled with condescension. “It’s not relevant to us.”

“How can you say that? You have this font of stories yet there’s always that part of you hidden from me.” She knew those scars came with a less-than-charming tale that not even a raconteur like Shane could spin. “I’ve told you all there is, Shane. This soul-baring business works both ways.”

He let go a breath that ruffled the damp strands curtaining his left eye. “What happened before we met doesn’t matter. It’s history. I refuse to let the past dictate my future.”

Such a strong, yet meaningless, statement. How many times had Cara spouted off something similarly trite to motivate her forward, to shake off the shackles of her insecurities? She put the dishes in the sink, their petulant clink suiting her mood to a T.

He filled her silence. “All that matters is that from the minute I saw you, I’ve wanted nothing more than to worship your body and make you mine. We’re good together. Forget about how we got here and let’s just enjoy the destination.” His voice was rich and soft to match the melted chocolate-drop swirls of his eyes. His warm, male scent made her dizzy with want but she refused to let him divert her like some easily distracted magpie.

“Do you think I’m too much of a princess to handle your problems?”

The muscles in his jaw bunched. “I think you’re reading too much into stuff I told you about a man I don’t particularly care for.”

She touched his arm, trying to transfer an ease she didn’t feel into a body that didn’t want it. “Shane, I’m here for you—”

“Cara, just bloody leave it.” The change was sudden, shocking. His eyes became flat discs of rage and his words whipped across her like a lake wind in February.

She’d fallen for a man who was stronger than anyone she knew. He was the rock she could lean on, the sponge that absorbed all her crazy and squeezed it out of existence. There was no denying that she had more baggage than the cargo hold of a 747 and now she was taking ownership. She was ready to let someone else climb aboard, but he didn’t have enough faith in her to share his own heavy burden.

It took her a moment to realize the chill she felt was his body’s removal from her personal space, a tacit invitation to take her leave. He wouldn’t even look at her.

We’re good together.
Every step away from him slashed those words to pieces. She left as quietly as she came. Worse, he made no effort to stop her.

Chapter 16

For years, Shane had been the man with the plan: perfect his craft and become an incredible pastry chef, all with the aim of putting distance between himself and the father he hated. He had ignored the badgering voice in his head telling him that he didn’t have to do it on his own, that he should seek out his brother and claim the connection between them. Women hadn’t figured much. Keeping it casual worked for him. People inevitably let you down.

Then he met Cara.

Seeing her cooking at his stove in those sexy sweats of hers had grabbed him by the throat. When she turned, his whole future flashed before his eyes like something out of the bloody
Waltons
. Gorgeous kids with Cara’s smile and blue eyes, big noisy dinners with his brother and his family, a life he had been pretending he didn’t want because even thinking about the possibilities of failure made him want to shrivel up.

He loved her, plain and simple. It might have started when he offered a beautiful woman his seat and then spent the night prying a reluctant laugh out of her, but today it had ended with his ludicrous evasion. Here he was urging her to be honest and he couldn’t even confess to the most important fact about his origins. Her finely tuned defense mechanisms sensed all that was wrong with him. How messed up he was inside, how his smiles papered over his lies.

Can’t charm your way out of this one, boyo.

She wanted to know who he was and where he came from. Who his people were and how he became the man he was. They were reasonable requests, but Shane had no doubt what would happen if he opened up about his father.

He wouldn’t be able to stop. It would all come out in a vomiting stream of pain—the “accidents,” the put-downs, the fucking unfairness of it all, ending with,
By the way,
you know
Jack Kilroy? Bloke’s my brother.
Get your popcorn popping for the fiery train wreck that ensued. Confessing his sins might scrub some of the scabbed-over blackness from his heart, but it wouldn’t get him Cara.

He took a long look in the restroom mirror at Sarriette and tried to see the resemblance to John Sullivan. It was slight, but it was there around the eyes. He definitely looked more like his mother, which was why his father had despised him. Shane was just a reminder of a drunken rut behind a pub in a one-horse coastal town. The bastard never let him forget it, either.

“Hey, boss,” Mona said when he’d made it back into the kitchen. “We need a lemon tart and two pot de crèmes for the chef’s table.”

The chef’s table. Unable to resist the siren call, Shane looked over to the recently installed four top in the corner of Sarriette’s kitchen. The space was too small for it but he could understand the appeal. The intimacy, the heat, the bustle—there was something very heady about the whole experience. Napier had brought a couple of loud, braying suits who were already three sheets to the wind by the time they swaggered in a couple of hours late. They’d left their manners at the last bar, too, their boisterous hooting sucking all the energy out of the kitchen.

Cara sat with them, practically painted into a plunging, backless emerald dress with shimmery threads that winked beneath the kitchen lights. Under any other circumstances he would be enjoying the hell out of her in that dress but he was too pissed off. Napier’s posse were enjoying it, though, judging by the how they ogled and panted like wolves in heat. Refusing to meet Shane’s gaze all evening, she played her hostess role to the hilt with simpering smiles and that tinkling laugh.

“Boss?” Mona urged. “You okay?”

Shane turned back to his second and absorbed the concern on her face. All throughout service, he’d been snapping at her about every tiny thing, from her supposed inattention to the icing details to the misshapen bread rolls she had whipped up earlier that afternoon. One of them had looked like a dick, for Pete’s sake. He didn’t really need to be here tonight—contrary to his nitpicking, Mona was turning out to be a great addition to the kitchen—but he’d told Cara he’d have her back while she worked her magic on Napier. That was before he’d run into the proverbial buzzsaw back at Chez DeLuca-Doyle.

Another raft of booming laughs echoed from the chef’s table, now ill-harmonized with Cara’s musical giggle. Sure, she was working the client but did she have to enjoy it so much?

His personal space diminished to nothing and he turned to find Jack at his shoulder.

“I think maybe you came back to work too soon,” he said, his eyes full of challenge. “You’re liable to overdo it.”

“I feel fine,” Shane spat back. He rolled his shoulder for good measure and relished the ache. Better to focus on that than what was happening twenty feet to his left.

More grating laughter drew his attention and his next glance over made him madder than hell. One of Napier’s crew had placed a grubby mitt on Cara’s silky forearm. Shane jerked forward, only to have Jack place a firm hand on his bad shoulder. Pain shot through him. Jack saw it but he didn’t care.

“She can take care of herself,” he said evenly.

Jack’s crystal ball powers were on the money tonight. Cara deftly removed the guy’s hand without missing a beat of the spiel she was delivering to Napier.

“You and I need to talk after service.” Jack headed back to the pass to expedite the outgoing dishes.

Shane fought for dominion over his emotions. If he didn’t look at that guy pawing over Cara, then it couldn’t hurt him, but what you don’t know is just as bad. Wasn’t he living proof of that? He’d come to Chicago because what he didn’t know about Jack had threatened to destroy him. Look where knowledge had got him.

Twisting back to the pastry station, he found Mona with the desserts plated, ready to put them up on the galley for service.

“I’ll take those.” He picked them up and headed to the chef’s table. The laughter continued as he set the desserts down, the group clearly used to ignoring the help. Looking up, Cara held his gaze, then blinked him out of her mind.

“Ah, dessert. Best part of the meal,” Napier said, switching on a man-to-man smile. “How’s the shoulder, Doyle?”

“On the mend,” Shane gritted out.

“I know what the best part of the meal is,” Napier’s lecher pal said. His bloodshot, wooly gaze slid across Cara’s chest and made her jump. No, that wasn’t right. It was the meaty palm sliding up her thigh that sent her five inches into the air like a scalded cat.

A well of anger bubbled in Shane’s chest but before he had a chance to act on it, Cara took a hold of the loser’s offending hand and occupied it with a dessertspoon.

“You’re going to love this pot de crème, Michael,” she said with a Cara-bright smile. “Sarriette’s pâtissier is a genius.”

Over the spoon, the sloshed sot squinted at Cara, seeking inspiration for his next move. As the woman had a consistent track record of inspiring drunken men to crazy acts, Shane was unsurprised when the moron dropped the silverware and took a face-plant in her lovely cleavage. Neither was Shane surprised when he took it upon himself to wrench Cara out of her seat and punch the guy in his slack mouth.

Cara grabbed at his arm—his bad one, of course. “Shane, I had it under control!”

Michael, or whatever the hell his name was, rubbed his mouth and tried to sit up straight. Shane lunged and the guy raised his hands up in frightened surrender. “Hey, man, I’m sorry.”

Shame sat leaden in his gut. What was wrong with him? Behind him, the only sounds were a stovetop sizzle and judgmental silence. His gaze panoramaed the scene before him—smug disapproval on Napier’s face, fear in the muddied eyes of the guy Shane had just struck, annoyance in the set of Cara’s mouth.

You’re no different than him. A brute bully, all twisted up inside.

Words of regret hovered on his lips, but a rough pluck on his collar rammed his apology back down his throat. Within seconds, Shane was hurled through the door of Jack’s office, his collar still attached to a strong hand with a few locks of hair thrown in. Shaking him off, Shane turned to face the boss.

“Get your hands—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Jack said before turning and storming out.

Shane rubbed the nape of his neck and took a few more deep breaths but he couldn’t seem to fill his lungs. He’d just assaulted a customer and Jack was going to sack him. In that moment, Shane realized he didn’t care one iota.

Less than three minutes later, the door opened and he braced himself for a fight. Jack walked in, followed by Cara, Napier, and…that was it. Cara’s ice-blue eyes snapped to his, then returned to Napier.

Shane felt his hackles rising. “Where’s your handsy pal?”

Napier smoothed hair that didn’t need smoothing. “Popped him in a cab. Mick could never hold his liquor. Almost as bad as you Irish boys.” His chuckle sounded gold-plated.