Hot and Bothered (Hot in the Kitchen) (10 page)

Now she looked amazing to the world.

Lili had caught her in a pose that suited her. It was more sensual than sexy, an acknowledgment of how much she had to offer. Her head was cocked to one side, a jaunty tilt that revealed her humorous side. Some guys didn’t care how funny a girl was, but Tad liked that in a woman. Jules was one of the funniest people he knew, with a dirty mouth that would shock a trucker.

“Oh, Lili, it’s—it’s…” Jules turned to Tad with her hand over her mouth, her eyes sparkling like stars.

“Gorgeous,” Tad finished for her. Croaked, more like.

“Do you really think so? You don’t think it’s too much?”

Oh, yes, he thought it was way too much, but he was playing at friend right now. The good friend who supports his gal pal in everything she does even when she created a visual invitation to take her slow and deep until they both collapsed in a sated, sweaty heap.

“So you like it, cuz?” Lili cut into whatever-the-hell-that-was. “Cara’s done all this research. Apparently red is supposed to be the color that men find most attractive. Some evolutionary junk about how a woman looks flushed when she’s ovulating.”

What?
Man, he hated Cara’s guts right now.

“Yeah, it’s great. It’s just…”

“It’s just what?” Jules asked, concern pitching her voice a couple of octaves higher than normal.

He backpedaled… “It’s just that it gives off a certain something.” …into dog shit. “I mean, it just might attract the wrong sort.”

“What do you mean
the wrong sort
?” Jules snapped.

Careful.
“Guys who are looking for a good time.”

So much for careful. That statement cannoned straight from his gut to his mouth without checking in with his brain first.

Lili eyed him shrewdly. Of everyone in the DeLuca menagerie, they were the closest and she always saw right through his bullshit. “Maybe
she’s
the one looking for a good time.”

“Yeah, maybe I am,” Jules said in a huff. She glared at him for a second before shaking her head in disapproval. He felt her disdain to his toes.

“I’ve got to go and pick up Evan from Frankie. Thanks a lot, Lili. Maybe we can talk later about how to make it more suitable for
the right sort
.” Without saying good-bye to him, she strode quickly out the door, her suit bag flapping over her shoulder like a stiff cape.

Clang
went the door.

Lili started a slow clap.

“Oh, shut it.”

“Proud of yourself?”

“She has to hear it, Lili. This isn’t some indictment on your art. I just think she should have something a bit more wholesome. Guys see that picture and she’s going to be fighting them off with a stick. And the kind of guys who use those sites are weirdos. Men who can’t get dates in the normal way.”

She blinked at his outburst, which had sounded a bit overcooked. “So is Jules a weirdo for doing this?”

“It’s different for women, especially women who don’t get a chance to meet people through the usual channels. I can understand why she’s doing this.” Hated it, but understood it. “The men are bad news. At least, if she looked like—”

“Like a mom?”

“What’s wrong with looking like a mom?”

“Nothing, but maybe she’d like to look like a sexy, gorgeous, bangin’ mom. A MILF.” She wrinkled her nose. “Do they still say that?”

He cleared his throat noisily. “Yeah, they still say that.”

“She’s beautiful and there’s no reason why she shouldn’t be allowed to have a little fun.”

Not on his watch. “I thought she just wanted to find someone to have dinner or go to a movie with.”

Lili looked at him like he was an idiot. “Perhaps she’d like to take a turn around the block a few times with a down ’n dirty pop-pop before she digs into the husband hunt.”

His head was building to explode. How the hell was he supposed to get Lili and Cara on his side when the two of them made such a formidable team? He’d said it before and he’d say it again: every single woman in his family was a menace.

“Jack’s not going to like that at all.”

Lili laughed, a naughty tickle. “I know. He’s going to hate it, but he’s got to admit his sister is all grown up and she’s ready to play.” She cocked her head and considered him.
Here it comes.

“There’s nothing to stop you from asking her out yourself.”

“She’s my friend,” he said, not feeling in the least bit friendly toward anyone right now, especially one Juliet Kilroy.

“I know you like her, cuz. What I don’t understand is why you won’t do anything about it.”

“I like her too much to inflict someone like me on her.”

“Whatever that means.” She stared at him, her grin fading. “God, you’re serious, aren’t you? You really think you’re not good enough for her.”

Crap on ciabatta, that had not come out right. Before he could respond, she was out of her seat, looking like… Jesus, like she wanted to hug him or something. That was not how they operated. He was the one who gave the comfort. Always had been.

“You want to talk about it?” she asked, biting her lip.

“About what?”

“The price of olive oil, dummy.” She rolled her eyes. “How about how you look at her like she’s the only woman in the world or how your eyes light up like Michigan Avenue at Christmas every time you hold Evan.”

His heart seized at her words, at the rightness of them. As close as they were, they didn’t talk about the important things, or at least about what was important to him. And they were not about to start.

“She’s like a sister or cousin to me,” he said, getting back to Jules and his brotherly concern. “Annoying, pain-in-my-ass, whatever. I wouldn’t be doing my job as an overbearing Italian relative if I didn’t have an opinion about this.”

His cousin gave him the DeLuca stare down. She’d always been the best at it but he’d always been the best at withstanding it.

When he refused to melt under the weight of her glare, she asked archly, “Just doing your job?”

“Just doing my job.”

* * *

Baking focaccia sucked.

Jules loved focaccia, the oily, crunchy chew, and her brother made a truffle oil version that she sometimes considered worthy of her child as payment. But this lump of dense, dry,
dead
bread was nowhere near Jack’s level of perfection.

A basic staple, and she couldn’t even get that right. She glared at Vivi’s recipe, not that it would help. Frankie had written out an English translation on a post-it note so really she didn’t need the original piece of sepia-tinted paper, but Italian mama had insisted she take it home with her all the same. Something about drawing strength from the original words, as though the mere presence of this magical object blessed Jules’s entire, dodgy enterprise.

While she’d combined the water, flour, and yeast, and kneaded the dough—using the stand mixer didn’t fit in with the Old World vibe she was cultivating—she had felt close to this woman who had meant so much to Tad. She had even worn a peasant blouse and gauzy ankle-length skirt.

So much for that. All she was left with was a big old rectangular block that not even the layer of olive oil on the bottom of the sheet pan could salvage. Who had she been kidding when she’d thought she could do this?

Failure in the kitchen, failure all round. Damn Taddeo DeLuca.

Who the hell did he think he was to tell her that photo might attract the wrong sort? Who the hell was the wrong sort, exactly? He thought she looked like she was asking for… Lord knew what. Just that it had sounded insulting. Like she was a girl-woman incapable of making her own decisions when it came to her own dating choices. Her own sexuality.

Back in London, she had been determined to own her choices, sexual and otherwise, but as much as she tried not to let it, her reading problems informed so much of her life. She had gone through moments of not feeling worthy, feeling stupid around everyone, self-destructive blue periods where she slept with guys because if she couldn’t offer sparkling repartee, she could offer her body. She found herself drawn to macho, pushy guys who got aroused at the thought of ordering for a woman in a restaurant.
You order for me, babe, I’m sure you know what’s best,
she’d say with an eyelash flutter over the menu she couldn’t read. That small surrender of power would manifest in the heightened flush of red on their cheeks. A flash of something in their eyes that mirrored the shift in their seats to accommodate the hard-on.

Sometimes they didn’t even make it home. Her date would meet her at the restroom, push her back inside and take her there and then. It was funny how this flaw of hers and these little tricks she had for covering it often ended with hot and heavy sexual encounters. They liked that she didn’t keep up with the news, though she played a touch dumb there. She watched TV but if she tried to read web pages, she got a headache as she puzzled out the words. They liked the ditzy blonde who was happily unambitious with her menial bar job collecting glasses—she didn’t even want to work with the cash register. They liked her until she started talking back, not quite embodying that blond stereotype. There would be a curious narrowing of the eyes, as if they couldn’t quite compute what they were hearing.
Oh, you have an opinion on Wall Street bankers or human rights abuses in China?
They’d laugh uncomfortably, like the mannequin had come to life, and then she would realize she’d made a mistake. Shown too much.

Until Simon. Simon St. James with his easy smile and his arctic-blue eyes. The man who understood immediately that her tough dummy act was a well-crafted show of smoke and mirrors. Who called her on it and wanted her all the same.

Oh, God, she didn’t want to think about Simon but she had no choice because the man was clearly thinking about her.

Jules wiped her hands on the apron and picked up her phone, all while burning her retinas into the screen, as if she could change what she saw into something that made a lick of sense. It was only a number—the same missed call on her phone over the past couple of weeks—but now it looked like the most ominous string of digits she had ever seen.

Because this time it was accompanied by a voice. A voice mail, to be exact. After more than two years, Simon St. James had knocked her off her feet. Again.

There was a time she would have done anything to hear from him, especially during those first nights clutching her pillow in a strange bedroom when she had landed in Chicago. She had told Jack she couldn’t return, that she had to get out of London. She had acted as though she were on the run, and in a way, she was. From the memories and the pain of finding out the man you loved and whose child you carried saw you as merely an inconvenience. Crying herself to sleep during those first few lonely weeks at Casa DeLuca, she had vowed not to return, but a whisper in her heart said she would cave if he called.

Her weak-as-water resolve was never put to the test because he never did.

Now he was ringing from a new number. Had he lost his phone? Was that why he couldn’t call for two years?

Not. A. Chance.

Jack visited his businesses in London every couple of months and she often wondered if he ran into Simon, who was one of his closest friends. Did he mention that his sister lived with him in Chicago, that her child was a bonny, blond tyke with shocking blue eyes just like his father’s?

Those first couple of calls with no messages left—was he nervous about what to say? Was he unsure how to bridge the gap between them after so long?

I’d love to catch up with you, Jules,
the message had said. Detached but friendly. Everything and nothing.

She’d love to bean him with a rock but then we can’t all get what we want, can we?

Chapter Six

One may have good eyes and yet see nothing.
—Italian proverb “Sometimes, I think he misses my kid more than he misses me,” Jules said to Lili, not in the least bit bothered that her brother might hear her.

Jack lay in a sprawl on the living room’s floor in the townhome he shared with Lili, propelling Evan into the air with ease. Her son whooped and laughed every time Jack faked his ability to maintain such a fat little lump in the air.

“At least I don’t have to worry about Evan,” Jack threw out between push-ups. “Kid’s got more sense than you do.”

Jules let go of a sigh. Jack was not coming around to the notion of her dating. He hated that she was out on her own, especially after they had become so close since she sought his help two years ago. A lifetime of not being there for her had transformed him into Mr. Overprotective. She loved how much he cared, except when she didn’t.

Lili flipped open her laptop and pulled up the Bonds of Love dating site. It sounded like a BDSM hook-up thing but Cara insisted it was legit. Her dating mentor thought she should put herself out on a few different ones, but Jules preferred to start with one and get the lay of the land.

“I know I said it before,” mused Lili, “but hot damn, you clean up well.”

“I think you just have the magic touch with your camera.”

It had been yonks since Jules felt anywhere close to sexy and just slipping on that new dress had started something. Lili had applied her make-up, although she insisted she didn’t know what she was doing. But she did. Between the dress and the charcoal eyes, Jules looked hot. Possibly smokin’.