Hot and Bothered (Hot in the Kitchen) (13 page)

Tad was kissing her. This shouldn’t feel so good but the possessive claiming thrilled through her, confirming this man’s mouth could work miracles. She clutched at his shoulders, molding her body flush to his in recognition that she may never get this chance again. His arms encircled her, one hand tight against her back, the other cupping her arse professionally. The hard ridge of his erection pulsed against her belly.

Oh, wow.

Their tongues mated, tangled, delighted in the dance. His musky body scent, the taste of cocoa and
him
, all combined to send her reeling in a downward spiral of pleasure. It was a movie kiss, the one in the rain, the reunion in the desert. That first, humiliating fumble all those months ago, was finally erased by this most perfect melding of mouths.

He pulled back, breathless, before she could get busy with her hands. A helpless little sound, part lust, part disappointment, emerged involuntarily from her throat. She wasn’t proud of it.

“Jules, I’ve seen you with the Cheerio hair accessories and that Manchester United shirt so ragged you should burn it. Sometimes you look like you just fell out of bed and your hair hasn’t seen a brush in forever. All it does is remind me that your focus is your kid and that you’re the most unselfish person I’ve ever met. Seeing you, the real you, turns me on big time. So don’t tell me how I feel.”

She swallowed, absorbing into her bloodstream what taste she could savor from his lips and those heart-stopping words. Holding onto that taste for dear life. “Okay.”

Those flinty blue eyes, more navy than blue now, drilled into her. Unavoidably, she licked her lips to taste him again, drawing a flare of arousal in his eyes and a heated growl. A very erotic sound.

This is actually happening.

“Think about what I said.”

Maybe not.

“What you said,” she whispered, when really she wanted to scream at him,
Kiss me again,
because thinking was so not what she wanted to do right now.

He uncurled her clawed hands from his shoulders—she had been gripping him tight enough to bruise—and removed himself from her barnacle grip.

“You’re right to be worried. There’s a lot on the line here so we shouldn’t do anything rash, but you need to know that I want nothing more than to get all up in your business, Juliet Kilroy. Let’s sleep on it and give it some consideration, okay?”

She nodded.

He smiled.

Oh, mercy, that smile was like a hot lick to her mouth. She had seen that weapon in action. Worse, she had seen the consequences. Understanding his appeal had never been difficult—Good God, the man was sex-in-motion—but in this moment, she finally got why his rejection of her last year was the best thing to ever happen to her. If she were to wake up to that smile, even once, she would be finished.

“Sweet dreams, Jules.”

He may as well have said,
Sweet dreams of me, Jules.
Her response died in her mouth. Just as well when all her brain power was dedicated to keeping herself (a) upright and (b) from begging him to stay and audition for the role of Jules’s Summer Fling. As he turned to leave, she caught the twitch of his lips. The man knew what she was thinking.

He was her friend after all.

Dazed, she watched as he pounded down the stairs to the rhythm of not just her heart, but something infinitely lower. The guy looked as good going as he did coming. Unavoidably, her mind flew to the contents of her nightstand drawer and her battery situation.

“Everything all right?”

She jolted at the sound of Shane’s voice behind her. The door to the apartment he shared with Cara was a few feet down, but he couldn’t possibly have seen what just happened… how long ago was it now? She had no idea how much time had passed while she stared at the steps that took Tad away from her. Ten seconds? Ten minutes?

Binding her robe tighter around her overheated body, she turned to Shane. “Fine.” Tad had just kissed the stuffing out of her but otherwise, it was all cool.

At Shane’s bare feet, his cat Vegas—so named in celebration of the place and crazy circumstances surrounding Cara and Shane’s marry-cute—rubbed his owner’s legs.

“On walkabout with Vegas?”

Taking the utterance of his name as an invitation, the scrawny, mottled gray bundle of fur moseyed on over to Jules’s door and snaked by into her apartment. Since she’d moved in, the cat had scratched at her door at least three times a day trying to get inside his old digs. Shane let him walk about the hallway, trying to wean him off his reliance on his old environment. Spoiled rotten, he was, which didn’t bode well for the kids.

“Do you mind if he takes a gander?” Shane asked, resigned but indulgent. Vegas was already padding about in Jules’s living room, sniffing the living room rug and rubbing against the side of the sofa.

Shane leaned against the door frame, casually handsome in sweats and a tee. Although not related by blood, they had become close since he’d come into their lives about a year back. He and Jack shared a father; Jules and Jack shared a mother.

His lips scrunched in a grimace. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“When you were pregnant with Evan, did you get, you know, um…”

“Did I get what?”

“More, you know…” His cheeks flushed brick red and his gaze fell to a fascinating threadbare patch of carpet.

“Out with it, Shanester.”

He huffed a breath. “More interested in sex the further along you got?”

Oh, not what she had been expecting at all. They were friendly but not
this
friendly. Had he not heard of the Internet?

“Look, forget I asked.” His uncomfortable gaze sought out Vegas. “Come on, fur-bag, time to go.”

“No, Shane, it’s okay,” she said, regrouping. She had a certain level of experience here that she could expound on knowledgably. “So Cara’s insatiable appetites aren’t restricted to pickles and Cherry Garcia?”

His grin was shy. “She wants it all the time and while I have no problems giving her what she wants, I’m just worried it’ll be harmful for the babies.”

There had been moments in the latter stages of Jules’s pregnancy when her body was on fire with want, mostly with her inappropriate desire for Tad.

“Hormones can be tricky,” she said honestly. “There’s an alien being inside sucking the life out of you. There are days you want to eat everything in sight or punch whoever’s standing in the way of you eating everything in sight. Then there are other days when other urges take over.”

Shane stared, leading Jules to realize her dirty wants were plain to see on her face. Did everybody but Jules have to be having sex?

Time to wrap this up.

“I’m sure it’s fine. Cara’s a lot tougher than she appears.”

Jules knew Tad could give her what she needed. That one night to lose herself in ecstasy and pleasure, and with a man who would know a thing or two about how to please a woman.

“Shane, honey, I need you.” Cara’s sex-starved voice drifted out into the hallway.

“Looks like you’re on deck, stud.”

He couldn’t help his devilish, Irish smile as he scooped Vegas into his arms. “It’s a dirty job…” he murmured. Turning to leave, he threw a parting shot over his shoulder. “You could do worse than Tad, Jules.”

He closed his door, leaving Jules to ponder just how much worse it could get.

Chapter Eight

A woman is not capable of friendship, she knows only how to love.
—Italian proverb “You’re saving my ass big time, man. I can’t thank you enough.”

Tad liked to think he wasn’t scared of anyone but he was fairly sure if he found himself walking down an alley late one night and Derry Jones was coming his way, he might find the side of a Dumpster mesmerizing. Big and burly, with fists that could probably punch through stainless steel, Sarriette’s sous chef looked like he’d been hatched from a dragon’s egg. His thick arms were covered in wine and cheese label tattoos; his age ranked somewhere between twenty and forty. But the guy was a genius in the kitchen. And Tad needed all the kitchen smarts he could get.

Derry ran a hand over his close-shaved head and stared at the sample menu Tad had come up with. And stared. And stared some more…

“Lamb Merguez and feta sliders, pear and gorgonzola flat bread, duck rilettes…” Tad recited a few of his suggested favorites, all of which he knew would be child’s play for any chef with an ounce of talent. The man before him had pounds to spare.

Derry grunted something unintelligible.

“You could add dishes of your own, of course. I don’t want to stifle your creativity. Also, Jules will be making one of the special appetizers each day—”

“Juliet Kilroy?” His expression was pained. The poor guy probably thought his sabbatical from the high-pressure of Sarriette’s kitchen meant he was getting a vacation from the family Kilroy.

“Yeah, she’s actually good at this,” Tad said. Not to mention a few other things. Kissing him senseless, haunting his dreams, driving him wild.

Derry’s arched eyebrow said he’d be the judge of that.

“So I can leave it with you?”

The hulk shrugged, extracted a pen from his pocket, and dismissed Tad with a turn of his broad back.

Tad spent the rest of the afternoon performing cellar inventory and trying to parse last night’s events.

Was he out of his ever-loving mind?

He had propositioned his friend and when she laughed him out of the room, he had gone back for more. So going back had worked out fairly well. Very well. Even now in the cold, harsh light of day, his body heated in remembrance of those soft lips parting for him, giving up that last token of resistance. A preview of coming attractions. Jules was stubborn and he bet she was like that in bed.

He shouldn’t have kissed her, but hell, there was no unringing that bell. Now his brain was tripping on the taste of her lips and the flare of surprise in her eyes when he had taken her in his arms. That by-now familiar tug of desire in his groin turned sharp, but today it felt different. One erection should feel like another, but when images of a blond, green-eyed knockout met memories of how her soft, womanly body had felt against his hard-as-titanium dick, it was easy to see that this particular morning wood had Jules Kilroy’s name on it.

He looked at his phone. Too early to call her. Too desperate.

But damn he was dying to hold her again and feel her flush against him. See how her eyes changed color when he entered her and she arched into him, begging him to fill her. Do her like no other guy could.

“So this is it.”

Startled out of his fantasy, Tad looked up from the staffing schedule he had been unable to focus on and found his uncle Tony standing in the doorway of Vivi’s.

About freakin’ time.

He had played this moment out in his head and now it was here, he felt shockingly unprepared.

“This is it,” he said.
Genius.

Tony stepped inside and gave the place a good going over. His flinty blue eyes, the same as his father’s, appraised and judged.

“How many bottles?”

“Fifty-six to start; we’ll expand later.”

For the last two years, while Tad had tended bar at DeLuca’s, he had been working toward opening this place. Tony had been ambivalent, to say the least. When Tad had finally broken the news that he would be striking out on his own, his uncle had given a curt nod and returned to stirring the gravy. Talking had never been their strong point.

“You want the tour?”

Over the next ten minutes, Tad did the proud owner impression and tried to ignore his uncle’s clear disapproval at seeing Derry making himself at home in the kitchen. As they walked out to the front of house, Tad steeled his lungs for Tony’s pronouncement.

“Your father did not want this for you.” Leaning against the bar, Tony loosed the sigh of a familial patriarch. The younger generation of DeLucas was nothing but a thorn in the old man’s side. “But if you must be doing this, you should be cooking. It is where your talent lies.”
At DeLuca’s,
he didn’t need to add.

“I need to do something for myself. Something separate from the DeLucas.”

And cooking was not on that list. Tony needed a successor, given that Lili and Cara wouldn’t follow in his footsteps at the restaurant. Lili came close but she’d found photography and Cara was a born event planner, not a chef. Which left Tad, the only male cousin in a family overrun with estrogen. The natural heir to the DeLuca throne.

There was a time when Tad had wanted a life on the line more than anything. Afternoons with Tony, learning the ins and outs of a professional kitchen. Evenings with Vivi, learning how to infuse his food with love. Cooking had been fuel for his soul but all that changed one rainy night. A soul as black as his couldn’t be redeemed by the perfect ravioli.

Tony looked thoughtful. “Why would you want to be separate from your family?”

Tad choked back the bitter laugh that scratched the back of his throat. That was about the nicest thing Tony had said to him in the last ten years. Sure beat out the things he hadn’t said. Things Tad imagined hovering on his uncle’s lips, fighting to find voice.

Your selfishness killed my brother.