Hot and Bothered (Hot in the Kitchen) (29 page)

“Have you given any more thought to cooking professionally? I know you worry about how much time it takes you away from Evan.”

“Not really.”

“Hmm, I think you have,
bella
.”

She sighed. “I’d like to—well, it’s silly, really…”

He gave an encouraging squeeze with his sexy, hairy, thick-as-her-calf forearms. “Tell me.”

She gifted him a fatalist shrug, embarrassed by her homely ambitions. “I don’t have any special training or skills, but sometimes I think it would be nice to sell my dips and spreads in stores. You know, like Whole Foods.”

His silence made her as anxious as a kid on Christmas Day morning. God, she was so stupid to think she could be any more than a hobbyist at the food game.

“It’s ridiculous,” she said pitchily, thankful he was behind her and couldn’t see the panic on her face. “Jack and Shane have worked all their lives to get to where they are so it’s stupid to think I can just decide to do this.” But she had been deciding a lot of things lately. Taking what she needed and fighting for her and Evan’s future.

“You don’t have a clue how special you are, do you?” he rumbled in her ear.

Heat flared her cheeks and spread to her toes, and she tried to laugh it off. “Of course I do. Every day I do the daily affirmation thing in the mirror. I tell my reflection how much I like my nose or my ears today. That kind of thing.”

“Who’s your favorite Beatle, Jules?”

“What?”

“Your favorite Beatle. As in the mop tops from Liverpool, not the multi-legged scurrying kind.”

She gave it more consideration than it deserved. Men seemed to think questions like this were very, very important. “I don’t have one.”

“You have to have one. Everybody has one.”

“Okay, Ringo.”

“Except Ringo. No one picks Ringo.”

She sighed. “I suppose this is where I’m required to ask who your favorite is.”

His smile against the curve of her neck felt knowing. “George.”

She could feel an eye roll coming on but she suppressed it.

“I’ll bite. Why?”

“Well, for years he lived in the shadow of arguably the best songwriting duo ever, but when he finally got his chance, he outshone them both. On
Abbey Road
, name the two best songs.”

She thought about it for a moment. Jack had played that album constantly when she was pregnant because he wanted to infuse fetal Evan with a musical talent he had no hope of inheriting from his tone-deaf uncle.

“ ‘Here Comes the Sun?’ ” she offered, not wanting to disappoint him. She did love that song, though. Its breezy and optimistic feel, the idea of crawling out of a long, cold, lonely winter to embrace spring and rebirth.

“Correct, and the other one is ‘Something.’ Which Frank Sinatra said was the best love song of the twentieth century.” He raised an overly expressive eyebrow. “Frank Sinatra, Jules.”

“Well, if Frank said it…” Sylvia had pictures of the Pope and Frank Sinatra on her living room wall. These crazy Italians… oh, how she loved them all.

“Exactly. Both of those songs were written by George Harrison. Best album by the best band ever, and the best songs were by the quiet Beatle. Sure, he had written songs before that, but with
Abbey Road
, he came into his own. The late bloomer.”

Dawning realization crept up on her. In this scenario, her brothers were Lennon and McCartney, and she was the quiet Beatle. The one who took a while to find his stride but then went on to outdo them all.

“I’m not that talented,” she mumbled, close to tears. A tremor started up in her hand and she put down the knife she had been about to use to divide the ravioli into little parcels.

“You just don’t know it yet. But I do.”

Her heart exploded into a million fragments of light. Turning fast, she threw her arms around his neck and crushed her body to the chest that had always been there for her. Where she belonged.

Thank God he couldn’t see her lovesick, moony expression, now hidden in the warm crook of his neck. Ducking her head as she turned back to the ravioli, she focused on the backyard with its yellowing turf and unkempt grasses while she desperately tried to keep the tears at bay. Hints of lavender and wild mint wafted through the open window. The things she could do with this space. Tomatoes and peas on the south side, herbs near that back wall, room for a pig.

“Where did Ulysses hang his hat?”

He pointed to the north end near a dilapidated shed. “Over there. We had to keep him separate from the chickens.”

His voice washed over her with stories about Vivi and the errant chickens, half of which she didn’t hear because she was falling into a hole and scrabbling for purchase on the slippery, muddy slope.

A few minutes later, she scooted out of the danger in his embrace and pinned on a smile. “I should be getting back. This ravioli business took longer than I expected.”

He curled a hand to the back of her neck and tilted her head up to his. “You’re upset.”

“No, not at all.” It was completely illogical. He was talking about the bloody Beatles and chickens, for heaven’s sake, and now she had the jitters.

Her phone buzzed on the counter and her gaze flew to it on the wings of maternal instinct. At the sight of the number, her heart plummeted to her stomach.
No, no, not now.
She hit “ignore” and took a fortifying sip of the lovely, robust Barolo Tad had opened a half hour ago.

“I need to go.”

“So you said.” His brows dipped in a chevron as he digested the suddenly weird vibe between them.

The phone buzzed again, cutting loudly through the heavy silence and setting off a flap of panic in her chest.
Fight or flight. Fight or flight. Fight or—

“Someone wants to get in touch with you badly.”

She touched the screen. Took a longer slug of the wine. “Just a telemarketer.”

“Answer it and tell them to take you off their list.”

She waved it away. “It’s easier to ignore it.”

The phone screamed again, and this time, Tad grabbed it.

“I’ll get rid of them for you—hello, you’ve reached Sex U Up Productions, how can I help you?”

“Tad, don’t!” She tried to grab the phone, but he arched out of her way. It was a good ten seconds before she wrested it from him and hung up on the tinny voice she knew as well as her own. She turned it off altogether.

Rage thundered in his eyes. With those thick forearms, he caged her against the sink and loomed over her, bristling with barely tethered tension.

“That was him, wasn’t it?”

Whatever he saw in her eyes confirmed his assumption.

“How long have you been talking to him?”

“He called me a couple of weeks ago. The night of the opening.”

Recognition crashed over his face. The night she said she needed him inside her and now the connection between the two was inextricable.

“Why didn’t you tell me he’d been in touch?”

Her throat felt rough and scratchy. “Because I’ve been handling it.”

“How? By ignoring his calls?”

Cowardice was a legitimate strategy, and it had been working for her every time Simon called over the last fortnight. She clamped her lips shut. Cowardly.

Fury had sharpened his features to make him almost unrecognizable from the Tad she knew. “What does he want? Is he trying to get back with you?”

“No—no. He wants to see Evan.”

“After all this time.” His disgust at Simon’s supposedly despicable behavior rolled through her. He held her gaze fiercely, all blue determination, before his face softened. “Lili said you won’t tell Jack anything about him. Talk to me, honey.”

Apparently realizing that his huge, imposing presence in a cross-examining stance might not be especially conducive to a cozy tête-à-tête, he took a couple of steps back and threaded his arms over that blockbuster chest.

Her fingers tensed around the wine glass on the counter. “I wanted him. He didn’t want me. Oldest story in the book.”

Those clipped words were meant to be conversation-ending, but the look on Tad’s face said,
ah, ah.

“Christ, you are a stubborn pain in my ass. This is not the time to be stoic, Jules. Just let me the fuck in.”

Suddenly weary, she sat at the kitchen table. Keeping it all inside for so long was just so bloody tiring. She looked into those deep blue eyes and rallied her strength.

“He’s a chef. He runs a very fine restaurant in London and I went there for an interview and left smitten.”

“So you worked for him?”

She let out a bitter laugh. “No. I wasn’t even good enough to get the job. I bungled the interview. Just one in a long line of interviews for servers or hostesses Jack was always setting me up with because he thought I was wasting my life away working in a pub. I’d blow them off or sabotage them by not making eye contact with the chef, who was usually a good friend of Jack’s and only talking to me as a favor to an important culinary genius like my brother. A handshake and a pitying smile later, I’d be out the door. Until Simon.”

“Simon,” he said, tasting the name and not liking it. He lowered his body to the opposite chair.

“Simon St. James, chef/owner at Lilac in Islington. The interview had gone terribly, just like I planned. On the way out, he asked me why I didn’t want the job and I said, don’t you mean
why
I want the job? He smiled and said,
you know what I mean
, and it was like we had this secret between us. That night, he showed up at the Red Lion, the pub where I worked. He wanted me and—”

She stopped, the humiliation and desperation of it hitting her hard.

“Baby, go on.”

She swiped at a ridiculous tear. “I wanted to be wanted. I found myself telling him things I’d told no one else. About my reading problems and Jack and how I felt like I existed on the edges, looking in on this world I couldn’t grab hold of. All my life I had been waiting for someone to notice me. My aunt and uncle, my teachers, my brother. And here was this man, pursuing me.”

Even now, the intoxicating memory thrilled through her blood. That night he had come to the bar, she had thought it was a coincidence. He was with friends, muckety muck types who brayed too loudly and got handsy with the dogsbody who collected the glasses because she was too terrified to try anything more challenging. She had spotted him at the end of the bar, watching her silently while the noise faded around them. One of those dream moments where time stands still, except it hadn’t really. It had just slowed to a pace she could finally reckon with.

He had come to see
her
. Not a coincidence at all.

She headed to the back, knowing he would follow. Through the alley exit, the sound of him echoed behind her, a slow motion chase that sent her blood soaring. He had sought her out and just knowing that he wanted her even when he knew she was an odd, broken duck had taken her over the edge. Within five seconds of the cool air hitting her face, his hot mouth and body slammed into hers and she gave it up to him without a word.

More surprising was the fact he wanted to see her again. He took her home to his flat, one of those fancy lofts on the South Bank overlooking the river. She had felt as if she had entered a closed-off world. Jack’s world.

Two months it lasted. Fish and chips on the way home from the pub, scrambled eggs and rashers in bed, mornings spent tangling up the sheets before he went to work. She was finally someone else’s Number One, the center of another person’s universe, the sun in this man’s world.

She swallowed hard and met Tad’s steel-eyed gaze. “A couple months later, I was pregnant and he was back with his wife. The one he had neglected to mention.”

Anger simmered below the surface, finally coming to a head when he violently shoved back the chair, the scrape like a scream. He stood over her, the tension in his body fighting every muscle.

“And he was a friend of Jack’s?”

She nodded up at him. “He was the best man at Simon’s wedding. Of course, I only found that juicy morsel out later. Jack would go nuts.”

“This fucker took advantage of you. Of course he’s going to go nuts, but Jack’ll have to get in line and hope there’s something left when I’m done with him.”

Oh, he didn’t understand at all. There was so much wrong between her and Simon but she was done painting herself in victim colors. Standing, she placed a calming hand on Tad’s chest and took the measure of his overactive, macho Italian heart.

Emotion thickened like custard in her throat. “No one took advantage of me. In London, I was—I was a different person. I’ve slept with a lot of guys, Tad, but with every man I was with, I felt some measure of power. I played the bad girl, the girl who backed up every tease, and I enjoyed it. They used my body but I used them right back.”

Saying it aloud rang even more hollow than the mantra in her head. She had given it up easily, and while there were plenty who came back for more, she was under no illusions about what she did for them. Toward the end, even Simon got antsy the moment he had finished shagging her. Checking his phone (she knew why now), telling her he had to get up early to receive the deliveries at the restaurant, inching her to the door and kissing her into a cab.