All Fired Up (Kate Meader) (13 page)

“Now, why do you have to be like that? Let’s try a little small talk before we get into the less-than-charming back and forth.” He accessorized another dimple blast with a dirty wink. “Fine weather we’re having.”

She clenched her fists at her sides. The man was impossible.

“Gorgeous,” she ground out.

“How about that local sports team? Think they’ve got a chance this year?”

She sighed. “I’m sure they can go all the way.”

He leaned in and she almost folded in half as his warm, comforting scent washed over her. “How’ve you been sleeping, LT?”

Caught off guard by both his question and his knee-weakening closeness, she flashed her pearly whites and lied her excellently toned butt off through them. “Wonderfully well.”

“Oh.”

“What’s that mean?”

Eyebrow quirk ahoy. “You still have the spare key I gave you?”

“Yes, about that—”

“The next time you need to work off a little frustration, feel free to take your vacuum for a spin around my hardwood. It’ll relax the hell out of that lethal body of yours.”

Having waded through the dating sludge of New York, Cara was used to double entendres but most guys stuck around to enjoy the fruits of their innuendo. Not Shane. He brushed by her on his way to chat with Lili, leaving her to get her racing pulse under control.

Tad passed her a glass of the—Saints preserve us—Napa Valley Syrah she had insulted her lineage with.

“Are you guys doin’ it?”

“How old are you? Ten?” She chugged half a glass because apparently the mere mention of “doin’ it” with Shane was enough to drive her to drink.

“Ah, you’re not doin’ it,” Tad pointed out helpfully. “But you will be soon enough. I called it on Jack and Lili. I’m calling it here.”

“I overestimated your mental age. Make it six.”

Undeterred, Tad carried on with enthusiasm. “I’ve found a location for the wine bar and I could do with your help. Marketing, interior design, all that Cara know-how.”

“Tad, that’s awesome.” Her cousin had been boning up on his business smarts in preparation for opening his own wine bar, even going so far as to get certified as a sommelier. “Does Dad know?”

“Not yet, but I’m going for it. Can’t be a bartender all my life, got to take the bull by the horns.”

Cara smiled. She and Tad hadn’t always seen eye to eye—their relationship was best described as “quippy”—but he was family and she was happy to help him make his dream come true. She also knew exactly what he meant about striking out and making something happen. Her gaze fell on Jack, the key to her own lofty ambitions—she still hadn’t worked out how to approach him about Mason Napier’s eat-in kitchen needs—then slid predictably to Shane, the man who impeded her path to serenity.

She turned back to her cousin. “Give me a call tomorrow and we’ll talk.”

“Cara, come here.” Dad’s stern voice cut through the chatter. It didn’t usually bother her, but when he used it in the kitchen, it never boded well.

“I’m going in,” she muttered to Tad, who sent her off to battle with a smirk.

“Taste this,” Dad said, raising a wooden spoon coated in thick, bloodred marinara sauce.

Her laugh spilled out as a nervous rattle. “Can’t I enjoy my glass of vino first?”

“Tony, leave her be.” Her mother’s calm voice soothed behind her.

With a tut, Aunt Sylvia added, “She never eats. That’s how she keeps her girlish figure.”

Cue hollow laughter.

Her father arrowed in on her with his steel-blue gaze.

“Cara,” he warned, just as her eyes met Shane’s, curious and mocking.

Tony must be obeyed or she’d never hear the end of it. Inclining her head, she took the edge of the spoon in her mouth just enough to coat her lips. She sensed rather than tasted the sweet and pungent tang of tomatoes with the piney-woodsy overlay of rosemary.
Oh, thank God.
Relief flooded her chest and relaxed her wire-taut muscles. It was all good, and she didn’t want to run.

“
Bene?
” her father asked, but there was no missing that familiar flicker of disappointment in his eyes, the one she saw whenever they shared an awkward moment like this. In a family as crazy about food as the DeLucas, it was a capital offense not to enjoy every taste, every morsel, every meal. When his efforts to encourage her to cook as a girl were met with disinterest, he had transferred those aspirations to her younger sister. Tony and Lili had forged a bond over food that Cara could never replicate, and now her sister had found in Jack a man who understood how important food was to her and relished every one of her pasta-molded curves. The way to a man’s heart, or a woman’s as Lili demonstrated, might be through the stomach, but that road was riddled with construction and dead ends for Cara. Having a, shall we say, complicated relationship with food ensured complicated relationships all round, especially with men.

“It’s good,” she said, compelling her voice bright.

When she looked up, Shane had already returned to his conversation with Lili.

She often questioned why she was drawn to that thing that caused her so much heartache. First as a producer for Jack’s cooking show, now as his private-events manager, all the roads of her career—of her life, if her marital shackle to, of all things, a pastry chef, was any indicator—brought her back to food. In masochistic moments, she said it was her way of challenging herself. Surround yourself with temptation, with the thing you want, with the means to break you. Resist, reject, rise above.

But in her heart of hearts she knew that wasn’t it at all. It was for the same reason people gravitated to the kitchen: a pot of bubbling sauce was as magnetic as a warm fire in the hearth. It tapped into the limbic system, scattering troubles to the four corners. Bills to pay. Relationships to repair. Hearts to mend. All took a backseat to the security of the kitchen and the memories it invoked.

Because even though she dreaded those family mealtimes during her teen years and the obscene excess of platters of pasta and mountains of bread, she still sought out the comfort and camaraderie that only food could bring. Pleasure and pain at once.

How screwed up was that?

*  *  *

“Shane, have you met Tony?” Jack asked, nodding to the DeLuca paterfamilias who stood at the stove.

Tony, his father-in-law? That Tony?
“We met briefly at Gina’s wedding. Thanks for inviting me today.”

Even more imposing than his six-foot-two frame, the man wore that classic air of the well-lived, urbane Italian. The silver tips at the edges of his temples winged a face that couldn’t be older than fifty, which meant he had been barely out of his teens when Cara was born.

Leaving off stirring a fragrantly scented sauce, Tony applied a measuring stare. “Jack says you are to make the cake at my daughter’s wedding.” The cake that Shane had better not screw up, was the unspoken undertone.

“Yeah, I’m excited to be a part of it.” And he was, truly. Shane was coming round to the notion that Jack had entrusted him with a very special task.

“Of course, Jack’s confidence is so often misplaced,” Tony said, pulling Shane up short. The older man waited a long beat. “Anyone who would choose me as a collaborator for a cookbook cannot possibly have his head on straight.”

Ker-ist,
a joke.

Jack laughed, clearly used to Tony’s quirks. “Our opus on the synergy of French-Italian cuisine will be out in time for your Christmas gift buying. If Tony would stop arguing with everything I say.”

Tony lifted his shoulder in a lazy shrug and turned back to his pot like a warlock. They had been dismissed. With a nod to a platter of steaming gnocchi, Jack picked up a couple of colorful bowls of salad and headed out back. Shane scooped up the pasta and followed.

“Tony’s a bit—”

“Intimidating?” Jack finished over his shoulder.

“Uh, yeah. How’d you ever run that gauntlet?”

Jack set the bowls down on a large picnic table in the backyard, then nudged them a couple of inches to the right. Shane let him take the gnocchi, knowing Jack would just move it around to his liking anyway. Ever the perfectionist.

“It was touch and go for a while, especially with how public things were with Lili and me at first. Believe me, I got it from all sides with every DeLuca. Tony, Cara, Tad. Only Frankie was on board.” He shook his head. “Hooking up with an Italian woman definitely does a number on your balls. In more ways than one.”

Shane laughed, the sound falling flat. “You love it.”

His brother smiled and answered with a simple, “I do.”

As the rest of clan DeLuca piled around the table amidst good-natured joshing and laughter, something dark and hungry clawed at Shane’s chest. He hadn’t wanted to come here today, but Lili had already been so kind to him that it would have been rude to refuse. This wouldn’t have been the first family meal he had joined on his travels, only the most dangerous. Getting close to these people was dangerous because it was built on sand.

Curiosity to see how Jack fit in with his new family had played a part, but mostly he wanted to see how Cara acted in her natural habitat. From what he’d seen so far, it could be more aptly termed her unnatural habitat. He had already spied an interesting moment between father and eldest daughter when she tried her father’s marinara sauce. She had been panicked but then the tight knot of fear on her face had unfurled in relief, as if she had woken up from a nightmare where she’d forgotten the answers to the big test.

Now at the communal table, she seemed more relaxed while she smiled and joked with Lili. Hot damn, she was looking fine in a silky top and slim white pants that cut off before her ankles. Confirming his suspicions that she was a bit of a health nut, she stuck mostly to the tasty summer salad of arugula, golden beets, and goat cheese. No bread, no pasta, and just the half glass of wine.

Maybe she was worried she’d make a toast to the wrong happy couple.

Lost in his thoughts, it took him a moment to realize that Francesca was asking him a question.

“Do you have family back in Ireland, Shane?”

Shane’s heart jerked to a stop. “Not anymore.”

“County Clare or thereabouts, right?” Jack cut in. “You talk like my mother. I recognized the accent as soon as I met you.”

Another fluffy pillow of gnocchi made it into Shane’s mouth while he chewed himself to calm. These Italians sure knew their stuff.

“Yeah, Ennis.” It was the closest big town to where he had actually grown up in Quilty, a three-pub backwater battered by the Atlantic Ocean winds with a solitary general store and a rundown post office to keep it relevant. The town Jack’s mother had left in the salt-soaked mud.

He had always assumed that Jack had never visited Quilty and that he knew nothing about John Sullivan’s family. He was sure someone would have mentioned a visit from a famous native son. Panic that he had miscalculated tightened his skin. Luckily he didn’t have time to think too hard on that as Tony’s sister-in-law, Sylvia, took up the interrogation slack.

“Shane, are you Catholic?”

A collective groan went up around the table at Sylvia’s words, the aunt with the hair tower that looked like several birds’ nests interlaced with a complicated ribbon lattice. Up until now, most of her conversation had started with “so-and-so went to the deli to get a pound of Italian sausage” and ended with “and now he’s dead.”

“Welcome to the trenches, DeLuca style,” Tad said affably.

“It doesn’t hurt to ask. There are still plenty of nieces to go round and the Irish are more Catholic than the Italians, I’ll tell you.” Sylvia licked her lips, a gesture in oddly lascivious contrast to the topic.

“Don’t answer, Shane,” Lili called out. “You’ll be on her matchmaking spreadsheet before the end of the day if she thinks you might be eligible.”

“I’m not really in the market for a girlfriend,” he said, keeping his eyes focused on Sylvia, though they itched to gaze in another direction entirely.

“Why ever not? A healthy young man like you?” Sylvia leaned over, flashing a scary expanse of wrinkly bosom. “Is there something wrong with you? You’re not one of those homosexuals, are you?”

Mild protestations from the peanut gallery quickly lapsed into silence as everyone leaned forward. Typical behavior in families who pretended offense at their embarrassing relatives but were happy to let them ask the burning questions.

“It’s okay if you are, Shane,” Cara offered, her eyes glinting at him from across the table. “Lili and I have a lot of gay friends. We’d be happy to introduce you around.”

“That’s very kind of you, Cara, but I’m not gay. In fact, I’ve already got my eye on someone. She’s an awful lot of trouble but I’m confident I can persuade her to play ball.”

Cara flushed a golden pink that made her even more beautiful and then tried to counteract it with a late scowl that did nothing to minimize his attraction. Before that explosive kiss outside the church, he’d spent inordinate amounts of his time fantasizing about his neighbor-wife. Those long, tanned limbs wrapped around his hips, her herbal-scented hair falling into his face as she covered him with her body like a sex blanket, her tight heat enveloping and milking him to bone-shattering release.

None of his fantasies had involved nipple sucking.

Now he was living under the same roof as that batty bundle of woman and it was all he could do not to rip her door off its hinges and make her his. He should be staying away from her because of the whole FUBAR situation with Jack, not to mention the marital situation, but there was something about this woman that made him want to mess her up, ruffle her knife-straight hair, make every part of her curl. Even if the frost she was blowing his way might freeze his dick when he came into contact with her.

Sylvia plowed on with her efforts to pair him off with another DeLuca cousin. “Angela makes terrible choices in men. That last one was the worst. Never brought a bottle of wine or a box of cannoli to the house.”

All eyes fell to Shane’s blackberry cheesecake sitting in the middle of the table like a barometer of good manners and DeLuca mate potential. It also reminded Francesca that it was time for dessert. As the slices of creamy perfection were passed around, Cara’s refusal didn’t pass unnoticed by Shane.

“None for you, Cara?” he asked, a touch peeved because it was one of his favorites and if she wasn’t going to at least try his creations, they had a bigger problem than a wedding under the influence.

“Thanks, but no. I never put anything in my mouth I don’t know the full calorie count for.” She held his gaze and again, something flashed between them. His body hardened as he pondered exactly what he’d like to put in her mouth, calories be damned.

“What about Nicola? She just broke up with that boy who works for the Streets and Sanitation,” Sylvia continued, her focus unwavering.

“Cara’s not seeing anyone,” Tad said mischievously. “Are you, Cara?”

Sylvia waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, he’s much too young for Cara.” She shot a dagger of a glare at her niece. “You’re the oldest cousin. At thirty, you should be married and settled by now before you lose your looks or your eggs go stale.”

From the other end of the table, Tony growled his displeasure at the turn of the conversation. There’s only so much of this kind of chatter a man can take in his own home.
Hear, hear.

Francesca frowned at her sister-in-law. “Sylvia, Cara’s very happy with her life the way it is. Not everyone is interested in marriage and motherhood.”

Shane was sure the maternal smile she delivered to her daughter was intended to put her at ease, but that’s not how Cara took it. She blinked rapidly, her discomfort flitting like a dark-winged bird across her face. But then she recovered with a bright smile that almost made the grade.

“Stretch marks and a man’s stinky socks on the bedroom floor?” She smirked at her aunt. “Think I’ll give it a pass.”

*  *  *

“You know, Jack could afford better than this.” Cara fingered the silk organza sheath hanging on the rack at Ann Taylor. Better quality than she expected but still not really what she had in mind for Lili and Jack’s big day.

Lili expelled another world-weary sigh, only her fiftieth in the last hour. Whereas Cara had been born without the food-loving gene, Lili had missed out on the double-helix shopping DNA. Her younger sister liked funky, vintage outfits in keeping with her artistic leanings. Take her down Michigan Avenue to buy real clothes and she reverted to a bored ten-year-old being dragged from store to store by her mother.

“If I’m required by the wedding gods to have three bridesmaids, then we need to find something affordable. I know Jack’s offered to cover the cost of everything, but the bridesmaids should pay for their own. What about this one?” From the rack, she unhooked a full-skirted
Mad Men
–style taffeta affair. “Hides a multitude of sins.”

“I suppose. Hold it up.” Cara snapped a photo with her phone and made an annotation.
Hideous.
“About the three bridesmaids…”

Lili speared her with a look. “I’m not going to like this, am I?”

“Well, there’s me and Jules, of course. And you can’t pick Gina without picking her conjoined evil twin, Angela. We’d never hear the end of it.”

Lili returned to sighing. Fifty-one. Or was it fifty-two?

“Zander called me, too,” Cara said, referring to Lili’s studio stablemate and weirdo artist buddy. “He didn’t want to bother you.”

“Zander a bridesmaid? Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

“He’s one of your closest friends, Lili. He wouldn’t wear a dress—well, unless he really wants to—but he doesn’t know Jack well enough to be in his party. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of the gays.”

With great prejudice, her sister scrubbed a hand through her voluminous hair. “So, that’s five—that should be enough.”

“It’s bad luck to have an uneven number, so we’d need someone else but we can’t pick another cousin because it would open the floodgates.”

“
Madre di Dio
, Cara. I know it’s going to be big, but I’m kind of relying on you to rein in Jack’s wilder impulses.”

Cara schooled her expression to blank, praying it wasn’t obvious that the only impulses on display here were Cara’s to go as big as Aunt Sylvia’s skyscraper bouffant. “You mean you haven’t discussed it with him?”

“No, he’s working a lot these days and I’ve been focusing on my graduation portfolio. When we see each other, we’re not talking about cummerbunds and wedding favors.” Her eyebrow jumped. “If you know what I mean.”

“I’ve never met a couple who can’t keep their hands off each other like you two. Surely, it must have cooled off by now.”

Lili’s smile made it clear cooling didn’t even enter the picture. “I thought someone who wasn’t getting any would love to be living vicariously through the sister who’s getting schtupped on a regular basis. In very hot ways. In very interesting places. Only yesterday—”

“Sure, the old maid loves to hear about the endlessly fascinating sex lives of others. Should I be avoiding the kitchen at the restaurant now?”

“Oh, no. Jack won’t allow sex in the kitchen,” she said with a giggle that spoke to her having tried. “Something about health codes. But you might want to knock before you come into the office.” She angled Cara a look, somewhere between pity and bafflement. “I don’t know why you don’t date more. We’ve been out for only an hour and you’ve already had two guys trying to chat you up.”

“Right, while they wait for their wives to come out of the fitting rooms.”

“So you attract your fair share of losers, but they’re not all losers.” Lili had that wicked gleam in her eyes.

“He’s my neighbor.”

“I was talking about that cute guy over there.” She gestured to a hot nerdy type who was acting as a personal clothes rack for an elderly blue-hair. Maybe it was his mother, or maybe it was one of those
Harold and Maude
situations. Hard to tell. “But interesting how your smutty mind went straight to Shane.”

How could it not? A week ago, she had made a banquet out of his chest and every night since, she had fantasized about gobbling up every tasty inch of him.

Each word out of her mouth during her rejection had sounded ostensibly right.
You’re not my type. It should never have happened.
But now the words she had so emphatically spoken bounced around her skull like ghostly taunts. She should be rejoicing at the recovery of her singledom. In a couple of weeks, she would be free to see anyone she wanted. Scratch that. She was already free to see anyone she wanted. She and Shane Doyle were linked by nothing but a piece of paper, and tomorrow, she would pick up the annulment papers from her lawyer and hand deliver them to her neighbor. Her legal status might be a form of bondage, but her mental state proclaimed her independence.

There was a song in there, somewhere.

“Hey, where’d you go?” Lili said, waving a hand before Cara’s eyes. “Thinking about Irish Stew?”

“He’s my neighbor,” she repeated.

“Exactly. Maybe you should just be neighborly.” Lili licked her lips. “You have this smokin’ guy ten feet from your door and you’re telling me you haven’t devoted a smidgen of gray matter to what it might be like?”

Cara took a moment to savor the visual of a naked Shane. He looked wonderful.

“Actually, I know you have because there was, you know”—Lili grasped Cara’s hand dramatically—“dun, dun, dun. All that innocent hand holding in Vegas. What’s the problem here?”

“So you think I should go for it because it’s geographically convenient? Never mind that we work together. Good God, Lili, rule number one: you don’t make honey where you make money.”

Lili looked like she had her own opinion of that rule but thankfully her phone rang before she could voice it. While she chatted with Jules, Cara caught the smile of Cute Accountant. He seemed pliable, quiet, safe…and nothing like Shane.

Her sister finished her call on a sigh. “Poor Jules. She was so looking forward to going to this hot restaurant opening with us tonight but Mom’s got to work. Gina was supposed to be back from her honeymoon rampage-slash-George Clooney stalker tour around Lake Como, but her flight got delayed.”

Cara’s mind whirred at the possibilities. “I’m free. I’d be happy to babysit for Evan.”

“Are you sure?” Suspicious surprise lit up Lili’s eyes. “Thought kiddies weren’t your bag, baby.”