Feel the Heat (Hot In the Kitchen) (7 page)

“
Oui
. We met in Paris many years ago during our apprenticeship, but we didn’t work together again until a few years later when he needed a sous-chef for his first restaurant in London. I have been with him for all his restaurant openings, but I am now based at Thyme on Forty-Seventh in New York.”

“You don’t want to run your own restaurant?” It seemed strange he would be satisfied to remain in Jack’s shadow, but then, that’s what she’d been doing for years with Cara. Some people were just born to play sous-chef.

He hesitated, and while she would usually put it down to the alcohol, there was something faraway in his expression. “I would like to be in charge at Thyme but Jack is not one to give up the reins so easily. He likes to be in control.”

Bet he does.
The mere mention of that word in relation to Jack sent a long, shivering pulse through her body.

“But I like working with him,” Laurent continued. “He’s the smartest and most creative guy in the business.” He inclined his head to hers, and the fumes knocked her sideways. His eyebrows arched up like accent marks. “Why are you so interested in Jack? You should be interested in me,
chérie
. The Italians and the French have always been close,
oui
?”

She pointed with her beer bottle. “Except when the Romans conquered France. And that whole Napoleon thing. And World War Two. But other than that, we’ve always got along exceptionally well.” She grinned. “Not like the French and the British. Aren’t you supposed to be terrible foes?”

“There is a lot of the rivalry,
oui
. But not between Jack and me. He is my best friend.”

Aw, Lili couldn’t help but be touched by his loyalty. After another few minutes of good-natured ogling, he excused himself to hit the restroom.

Gazing around the room, she spotted Tad at the other end of the bar chatting with Shannon, the buxom bartender who reminded Lili of a female Bond villain. The kind who could crush walnuts with her thighs. Her cousin sent an impudent smile her way and bowed in the direction of Jack, who now had his hands full trying to fend off the attentions of a gaggle of DeLuca women.

Do it
, Tad’s grin said.

Not on your life
, her frown replied. After her mouthy put-down earlier, there was no way Jack would still be interested, and even if he threw his hat into her ring again, she was so rusty she wouldn’t know what to do with it.

This night was a wash on the man front, but all was not lost. There were cookies. Double-chocolate chip cookies. And they were waiting for her less than a block away in her apartment. She had just put a foot to the floor when a heady, expensive man scent, straight from the perfume counter at Macy’s, stopped her cold.

“Hey, Lil.” Marco was a sidler, one of his many talents. If his cologne weren’t so potent, he might have had a promising career in Special Forces.

“
Ciao
, Marco.”

“Exciting about the show, isn’t it? It’s going to be great for business.” Her ex’s favorite topic of conversation, after his Lamborghini, his Italian shirt maker, and his net worth, was how to make his twenty-five percent investment in DeLuca’s worth the time he didn’t want to put into it.

“Sure is,” she said, all too aware of Marco’s undertone. He was thinking about the personal loan he’d made to her father covering her mother’s medical bills and how soon it might be repaid.

While he yammered on about getting a local news crew involved, she observed him closely, drinking in his golden looks, that deep baritone that used to make the hair on the nape of her neck stand on end, and his habit of talking too loudly when he got excited. This past winter, she had needed a warm body to get her by, and he had been kind enough to step up. Not exactly fireworks between the sheets, but he had given her what she needed—arms to hold her for a couple of hours when she felt overwhelmed by her mother, the restaurant, and her life half written. In true Lili fashion, she had listened to all his problems and kept quiet about her own. Then the inevitable happened: she fell for him hard just as he realized he could do much better.

He rolled his lips in, his usual signal that he didn’t approve of something. He did that a lot. “I heard you’re going to make a play for Kilroy.”

Lili almost fell off her barstool. “Where’d you hear that?”

Marco delivered a condescending smile. He did that a lot, too. “Someone’s running a book on it.”

Madre di Dio
, she was going to drown Tad in wet noodles. At Marco’s sympathetic expression, Lili could feel the knuckles whitening on her clenched fist. It would be so easy to hit him on that square jaw. He wouldn’t even see it coming because his gaze had already wandered to a boobs-on-a-stick blonde draped over the jukebox. She flexed her hand; Marco’s hazy focus returned.

“I don’t think Kilroy’s your speed, Lil. Maybe you should stick with the frog. Aim a little lower.”

Aim a little lower.
Marco’s words went down like Pepto—they tasted awful but they were probably good for her. She could fake it up to a point, but no way, no how could she pull a league jump of this magnitude.

A glass of clear liquid appeared in front of her with uncanny timing and a wink from Shannon. Tad saluted a bottoms-up cheer with his beer bottle. Marco raised a disapproving eyebrow. She knocked back the shot—ugh, mint schnapps—and her Benedict-Arnold hormones did the rest.

Pinned against the dartboard, Jack had been stunned into submission by a crescent-shaped line of brunette admirers with a blonde thrown in for variety. Lili watched as he engaged in a rally of repelling tactics, from slow nodding to diversionary swigs of his beer. The blonde loitered at his shoulder with intent, her hand glossing over his bicep. Angela was two baby steps short of clambering on top of him. Gina, despite her affianced status, was trying to outflank her cousin with a couple of undone shirt buttons and frenzied eyelash batting.

Jack’s gaze locked onto Lili’s, and she felt a sudden and startling jolt of attraction right down to her toes.

“Kilroy’s working it, I see. You’ve got no chance there, Lil,” Marco said, his tone jovial but laced with something else. She looked at her ex with interest. If it was possible for eyes to sneer, Marco’s were doing it right now. Her own eyes were drawn back to the evening’s entertainment and found Jack still staring above Angela’s frizzy curls, his gaze direct and true. His sexy mouth hadn’t moved a muscle but his eyes, in that rare green hue…they promised everything.

That look enveloped her like a curl of flame, immolating all her hesitation in a fiery burst. Just one night was all she asked. One night to see stars, to experience scorching passion, to get a little lost. A combination of the corrosive burn from the liquor and Marco’s smug grin decided it. She was tired of aiming lower.

“Later, Marco.”

Sidestepping him, she skirted around the fan club and addressed Jack. “Hey.”

His eyes widened and shifted to a smoky darkness. “Hey, yourself.”

“We should talk.”

“We should?” he asked in a graveled voice that guaranteed talking would be low on the list for the rest of the evening.

“Logistics,” she said, playing along. “Getting into the kitchen tomorrow to test your dishes. That kind of thing.”

“Right, we should talk about that.” He bowed to his rapt audience. “Ladies, business calls.”

The ladies shot her unladylike glares aimed at sending her six feet under, twice. Jack tucked his hand under her elbow and with a gentle, but very deliberate, pressure propelled her toward the bar.

“How can I ever thank you?” he murmured close to her ear.

Lord, that accent. Combined with his touch and that delicious male spice, it set off a high-frequency vibration throughout her body.

“Oh, I’m sure I’ll think of something.”

Chapter Four

The crush at the bar was tight, the sliver of space between them shrinking fast, and Jack’s world was all the better for it.

“I’m sorry about the girls,” Lili said, not sounding sorry at all. “They’re just excited.”

He stole a look back at the kettle of vultures.
Excited
wasn’t the word—more like
ravenous
.

“We don’t get a lot of famous visitors,” she added. “You’ve caused quite the stir.”

“I’m not even that famous,” he said, the familiar irritation creeping into his voice.

“They’re easily impressed.”

Evidently she wasn’t, and that turned him on to an unreasonable degree. She pushed one of her dark curls behind her ears while he shoved a twitching hand into his pocket, wishing he could have got there first.

“So, did you enjoy the food?” she asked with a sly smile.

“It was amazing. Your father’s a great chef.” Lip service wasn’t Jack’s style. The pastas were out of this world, especially the fluffy, melt-in-your-mouth pillows of gnocchi. The steak was cooked flawlessly, the fish flaking off the bone. All the same, Jack wasn’t too worried about the contest. He’d been cooking on the right side of perfection for years.

What did worry him was how he’d made an arse of himself in front of her father, and he cursed Cara for neglecting to give him a heads-up. Luckily, Tony had been a gracious host and gave him a tour of the kitchen, in spite of Jack’s half-drunken drooling over his youngest daughter. A little acrimony might make for good TV, but he didn’t want to be on Tony’s shit list. He wasn’t sure why.

“Ready to throw in the towel yet?” Lili asked.

“I never back down from a challenge.”

She laughed, a low throaty chuckle that blossomed into something full and husky and left him scrounging for air. Her mouth was lush and he had to take breaks to stop himself from staring at her. From staring at her mouth and imagining what he’d like to do to it.

On one of his air-grasping sorties away from her mouth, he spied Laurent with a dangerously stacked blonde near the jukebox. So much for love Italian style. Not far off stood that Maximo-Mario guy, glaring in Jack’s direction. Earlier, while he and Laurent waited for the staff to arrive, this loser had tried to lease him a building for Jack’s new restaurant, the one he already had half built in Chicago’s West Loop.

“What’s the deal with him?” he asked, nodding in the loser’s direction.

Lili’s eyes sparkled, and Jack speculated that she might be buzzed.

“Marco? He’s my father’s business partner.”

“My condolences,” Jack muttered.

“And I used to date him.”

A mouthful of beer went down the wrong way. “Jesus, my sincerest condolences.”

Marco was speaking animatedly on his cell, though it had all the hallmarks of a one-sided conversation. He probably had the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth as his ringtone and answered his phone with
Yello
. Tosspot.

Lili smiled thinly. “He’s not so bad. He’s actually quite sweet.”

Oh no, he wasn’t. Jack knew Marco’s type. With his pinkie ring, his manicure, and his shark eyes, he was the embodiment of a flash geezer. As if that wasn’t enough for Jack to hate him on sight, he sported the one thing no man over the age of twenty-one should ever leave the house with—a ponytail. That Lili had found him date-worthy, and maybe more, unsettled him.

“He can be…” Her voice hummed so low he had to lean in to hear her. Standard bar trick. “He just needs a little support.”

“And that was your job? The great woman behind the little man?” What would it be like to have a woman like this at his back? Pretty damn nice, he was willing to bet. To come home and talk to her, to listen to that beautiful laugh, then bury his tension in her softness.

To come home and talk to her?
That whack to the head must have knocked a few screws loose. How else to explain the leap from unbridled animal attraction to choosing china patterns and cozying up on the couch to
Law and Order
reruns?

For a while now, he’d been hovering on the edge of ready, but every potential relationship was fraught with suspicion about the other party’s motives. After Ashley’s tell-all to the tabloids—and it didn’t matter that most of it was a bald-face lie—he was more careful now. More circumspect. He needed to keep that train of thought on the track and not get derailed with fantasies of waking up with Lili’s soft body curled into his…Jesus.

Her mouth quirked like she could read his thoughts. “Doesn’t every man need a great woman, or a great man, behind him?”

“What about the great woman? Doesn’t she have her own needs?”

“All of us great women have needs.” She wrapped her lips around the opening of her longneck beer and he stifled that groan he’d been fighting all fucking night. His dick twitched in commiseration.

Just to complete the circle of torture, he grabbed his beer from the bar and snuck a stealthy glance into the shadowy valley of her cleavage. White cotton bra, none too exciting, but those breasts…yes. They plumped up over the edges like succulent, golden peaches. His lips skimmed close to her ear, and he paused to breathe in her hair’s scent as if he could store it for another day. Rosemary and mint.

“What kind of needs do you have, Lili?” he whispered.

“Oh, a guy with all his own teeth who’s good at foot rubs and can give earth-shattering orgasms. Nothing special.”

Ask a stupid question…
Drawing back, he responded to her salvo with his most penetrating gaze. She held it for a moment, but then a shiver of doubt crossed her face. Ducking her head, she took a long draught of her beer.