Hot and Bothered (Hot in the Kitchen) (14 page)

Don’t think about it. Don’t think about how it feels to lose the two people in the world you care about the most. Don’t imagine their mangled bodies twisted up with blood-scored metal or lying in a hospital bed with tubes and electronic heartbeats for company.
And the worst of it was that all he could do was imagine.

Because he had been dead to the world in a drunken stupor with not a care.

If he had been somewhere else—if he had been someone else—then his parents would be here today. In their house, cooking and laughing and nagging him about when he was going to settle down and give them chubby little bambinos.

He had robbed his parents of the opportunity to meet Jules and Evan. Given the chance, they would have fallen madly in love with Jules’s sunshine grin and Evan’s boundless energy. It would be impossible not to.

At Tad’s silence, Tony’s face softened slightly. “Taddeo, we have not talked properly in a while. If you have time—”

“I’m sort of busy right now.” He gestured to the paperwork in front of him on the bar. The last thing he wanted was a lecture from his uncle; there was enough self-recrimination simmering in Tad’s gut as it was. “Thanks for stopping by. I hope you can make the opening next week.”

“Of course. Your aunt has talked of nothing else.”

Tony left, leaving Tad to ponder the old man’s question.
Why would you want to be separate from your family?

If he really wanted to be his own man, he should have stayed away from Chicago for good, but those years in the wilderness after the accident had wound him tight as a spool of wire. He had missed his sister and cousins, and it was time to rejoin the land of the living, even if it was only a half-life. Everywhere there were reminders, but it was preferable that he endure them here with the people he cared about. His family, for better or worse.

Each year he thought it would be better. That time would make his skin looser and his heart less tight. Grief was supposed to pass, or at minimum, mutate into something less sharp. But as he got closer to the anniversary of their death, the same old responses clawed at his internal organs. The need to crawl inside his own body and wait it out with the help of hard liquor. No upscale cellar choices for this bender. Just a prayer that he could control, alt, delete his way into a reboot of his life to get him through the next year.

What a selfish bastard he was. Here he was contemplating a possibly friendship-ending affair with Jules, grasping at the messed-up notion that losing himself in her curves would give him the peace he needed. Last year, when he’d turned her down, he had known his reasons. He couldn’t give her what she needed, the long-term commitment that a woman like Jules deserved. He already cared so much about her and Evan. If he let it go any further, if he tore down those guardrails around his heart, he would be a goner. And if something happened to them… if he was to lose them…

No, it was good that Jules would never have to see how low he could go. No one deserved that.

* * *

While working in the garden at Jack and Lili’s was one of her favorite pastimes, there was nothing Jules liked more than strolling through Green City Market in Lincoln Park to buy the produce and herbs she couldn’t force out of the soil. Beneath a warm May sun set in a storybook blue sky, a sea of white canopies beckoned, each one host to a self-contained world of new tastes. The largest market of its kind in Chicago usually never failed to inspire her. This morning, though, she had a different source of inspiration.

The memory of Tad’s soft lips and the taste of his tongue as he licked the corner of her mouth then tangled with hers had kept her awake all night and fueled a less than satisfactory session with her vibrator. Once you’ve had close to the real thing, battery-operated couldn’t cut it.

It was craziness. He was feeling protective. Okay, a weird way to feel protective but perhaps there was something to Lili’s theory that Italian men felt territorial even with women who weren’t strictly in their sights as a sex object. But that kiss hadn’t
felt
protective. It had been possessive and sexy and more than a little friendly.

He was her friend. The friend she had a massive lady boner for.

Sweat trickled between her shoulder blades.
Stop thinking about the lady boner you have for your friend.
Vegetables. Focus on the crisp, fresh vegetables. She loved talking to the farmers about their products, learning how to cook vegetables she had never heard of, and coming up with new recipes in her head. Seeing the raw materials up close, touching them, imagining the possibilities. Parsnips and tomatoes and carrots.

Long, lovely carrots.

Oh God, she really needed to stop thinking about carrots. Think of anything—anyone—else. Ah, there he was. Farmer Joe.

Of course that wasn’t his real name; she didn’t know it and the mystery was all the sweeter. He wasn’t like any farmer she had ever imagined when she lived in Camden Town where the markets were full of cheap tat and bootleg CDs. Farmer Joe put the brawn in brawny and with his big shoulders and barrel chest—covered in plaid!—he was the kind of guy who made mud-streaked rain boots look good.

Usually, she had Evan in tow, but Cara had offered to look after him this morning so Jules could move faster. Farmer Joe always had a pepper for her toddler. Good for his teeth, he’d say, and Jules would conjure a ridiculous fantasy of wearing wellies and getting up at four in the morning to milk the cows, then crowding round the Aga like something out of a Jamie Oliver cookbook.

“Mornin’.”

He wasn’t one for small talk either. He always got straight to the point in that blunt, flat voice of his that made her think he didn’t really like her. But the last few visits she’d come home and found a little extra in her bag, such as a bunch of beets or a nice bouquet of kale. Wooing by vegetable.

“I brought you some of the
caponata
I made with the aubergine from last week.” She pulled a Mason jar of the sweet and sour side dish out of her cloth shopping bag and handed it over to him.

“Eggplant,” he grunted.

“Pardon?”

“Here it’s eggplant, not aubergine.”

Hmm, the old
two nations separated by a common language
line. Was he flirting with her? Was this how farmers flirted? He scrunched up his face and studied the jar, then put it down on the table. He gave a terse nod of… thanks?

Okay.

“A bunch of cilantro, two of basil…” She scanned the array, stopping to rub the leaves of a plant she didn’t recognize between her finger and thumb. It looked like Italian parsley, but the word on the tag whirled before her eyes. “What’s this?”

His eyebrow raise signaled his impatience and scuttled her heart to her stomach.
It’s right there in front of you, dummy.

“Chervil,” she heard in her ear, as if it were a secret message. “Great over eggs, and with soups and fish.”

“You stalking me?” she said to Tad, not turning around.
Playin’ it as cool.

“I was just about to ask you the same thing.
I’m
here to visit the prettiest cheese monger in Chicagoland.” He thumbed over his shoulder and Jules got an eyeful of impish, red curls framing a heart-shaped face above a spitfire body. Bree—her name was actually Bree—hawked cheeses from a farm in Michigan and Tad had always had a crush on her. He refused to take it further, claiming he didn’t want to cross state lines to get his jollies.

“So what’s your excuse for being in this neck of the woods?” he asked.

“I don’t need an excuse to—”

“Go five miles out of your way to buy herbs you could get at Wicker Park Market?”

“Maybe I like what I see here better.”

Tad gave a dismissive glance at the herbs that managed to take in Farmer Joe. Her fantasy boyfriend held up the bunches she’d already chosen.

“I’ll take some chervil too,” she said with her brightest smile at Farmer Joe, who still looked grumpy. No heart-shaped beets for her today. She paid up and moved into the path of walkers.

“So what’s on our minds this morning?” Tad asked, mockery in his voice.

“I’m thinking of running away to the country with Farmer Joe.”

He released a bored sigh. “So, my suit has not found favor then?”

Back to sarcastic, jokey Tad. He had realized what an idiot he had been the night before and had decided to downplay what happened. She tried to convince her heart that disappointment and relief existed side by side on the spectrum.

“Lili says it’s a fault of all Italian men. Chest-thumping and amateur dramatics when they see a woman in their immediate circle take charge of her own sexuality. Across the pond, we call that willy waving.”

He stopped, evidently expecting her to stop with him and acknowledge his dramatic halt in his tracks. She kept going. His nonsense was not going to sway her.

A few quick steps, and he’d caught up with her. “Are you saying I’m threatened by your sexuality?”

“All men are threatened by a woman’s sexuality. They don’t like it when she makes clear her needs.”

“I offered to take care of your needs,” he said loudly.

A couple of people looked at them strangely. Jules hovered at the Jenkins Farmstand and picked up a vine-ripened tomato, eager to feel the heft of something solid. The thud of her heart was so loud she imagined everyone could hear it.

“Yes, but why? Want to know what I think?”

“I’ve no doubt you’re going to tell me.”

“I think it’s because you’re worried about upsetting the status quo. Your Italian insularity can’t bear the thought of strangers infiltrating the group and upsetting the fine ecological balance. Lili’s with Jack, Cara’s with Shane, and according to conventional wisdom, you and I are supposed to be paired off, right?”

He looked at her as if she were mad. Subtle contortions worked over his mouth and a few beats passed before he spoke.

“We are?” Strain underlined his words.

“No, but everyone seems to think so. Frankie, Aunt Sylvia, the rest,” she said, enjoying his discomfort much more than she should have. She didn’t really believe a word of what she was saying but it was interesting to see what Tad thought about her cockamamie theory. “We do tend to be drawn together at the parties and the family gatherings”—she smiled serenely—“and the farmers’ markets. There’s a certain comfort in knowing that I’ll have someone to chat with when everyone else is so sickeningly in lurve.”

“I suppose so,” he said slowly, “but we’re friends and that’s what friends do.”

“A pound of the tomatoes,” she said to the farmer in front of her. She waited until he had counted back her singles in change, potently aware of Tad exuding enough tension to split the ground under their feet. It also gave her the time she needed to get her thoughts in order.

“Yes, we’re mates, Tad. Really good mates. And I know you think you were being a mate last night when you made your offer, but I’d like to know that after I’ve had my heart broken by some accountant whose mother hates me or an unemployed stockbroker who’s living out of his car and needed to borrow money, that I could still sit with you at Sunday lunch at Casa DeLuca, and that we could still talk about whoever screwed us over last week. Though in your case, it would be whoever you screwed over. I went a little nuts last year, and you put me straight when you told me it was a bad idea. You were right.”

He blasted her with a dark look. “I was?”

“Enjoy it, because that might be the only time I ever tell you that.”

She had been trying to tease him about his macho need to protect her, but it had turned into something else about halfway through. It wasn’t just that she wanted to keep him as a friend; it was that
he
would be the one breaking her heart. He wouldn’t do it purposefully—he was too good-natured and guileless to do that—but he would do it all the same.

“Sounds like you have it all worked out,” he said, a touch morosely. Men hated when women were the logical ones.

“I do,” she said in as chirpy a tone as she could manage. “Bloody hell, protection sex, Tad? That’s just crazy.”

She was starting to hate that word.
Crazy.
If she emphasized how crazy this was a million more times, it might eventually ring true.
Crazy, crazy, crazy.
There, much better. Why then did her heart contract painfully as her desperation-tinged cheeriness tainted the air?
Because it wasn’t so crazy, Jules.
Okay, the “protection” bit was out there on the city limits of Nutsville, but the sex part of the equation? Not so much.

She wanted him. More than ever. Shit.

His unwavering stare twisted a dangerous curl of hope around her heart.

Say it’s not crazy. Tell me we can do this. Fight for me, Taddeo DeLuca. Fight for
us.

But whatever famed intuition he had in the ways of the opposite sex was off today. He was a man after all. Laughing softly, he shook his head.

“I suppose it was pretty crazy.”

Oh yeah, that word sucked donkey balls.

Shoving her disappointment deep, she gave a mental hitch of her pants, inordinately proud of how adult she had handled this very awkward situation.

“Now tell me all about this cheese monger you’ve got the hots for.”

Chapter Nine