All Fired Up (Kate Meader) (43 page)

His phone buzzed and he checked it discreetly, unable to hide his frown at the sight of the last person in the world he wanted to talk to. When he looked back at Jules, there was no missing the blatant curiosity on her face. Usually there was a more engaging proposition on the other end of the line and Jules liked to tease him about his flavor of the month. Sometimes, they lasted two.

She tilted her head and he waited for her to get warmed up. Rarely took long. “How’s the washed-up ballerina?”

“Retired Olympic gymnast,” he corrected, referring to the gamine hottie he had been seeing the week before and who had now been relegated to Tad’s past tense.

“Still pulling out all the stops on the floor exercise?”

That drew a laugh from deep in his gut. Jules had quite the cheeky mouth, and he enjoyed immensely their back-and-forth.

“It didn’t work out,” he said sadly.

“Oh, the poor thing. Marked down by the Italian judge.” A slender finger touched her lips. “Or maybe not as flexible in her old age. What was she? Eighteen, fifteen?”

“Twenty-two. They just look very young.”

“Taddeo DeLuca, when are you going to settle down with a nice-ah, plump girl and make-ah da bambinos?” she sang in a terrible stage Italian accent. For good measure, she pinched his cheek, an unapologetic nod to his Aunt Sylvia, who devoted her non-Mass time to matchmaking for her unattached nieces and nephews.

In his head, the answer to the rhetorical question rang clear as the Liberty Bell. Give him freedom or give him death. Drag him to hell before he hitched his ass to a woman for the long haul.

On his lips, something more flippant hovered. Maybe a joke about how his Facebook fan base would never stand for it or how no one compared to the fair, green-eyed beauty standing before him, but she had already redirected her good humor.

At Oven Guy, who had pulled himself to a lumbering stand and was writing up his chit of can’t-help-you-a-damn.

“Hi, there.” Her bright grin became impossibly wider.

Visibly startled, the repairman ran thick fingers through his hair.

“Uh, hello,” he offered cautiously.

“Looks like hard work,” Jules said, her eyelashes fluttering. That’s right, fluttering.

Juliet Kilroy did not have a flirty bone in her body. Not once had he seen her even talk to a guy with any intention beyond ordering a diet Coke with lime in a bar. Of course, as long as he’d known her, she was either pregnant or mom to an obstreperous kid, so flirting was fairly low on her list.

But it sure looked like she was flirting now.

With Oven Guy.

“So two weeks to get that part?” She loosed a breathy sigh and chewed on her bottom lip. Oven Guy’s cheeks flushed and he stood up a little straighter, and damn if Tad didn’t blame him. That lip snag thing was very cute. And very sexy.

Defenseless in the face of Jules’s charm assault, the man’s hands fell into a distinct caress of his tool belt.

Jules looked down at the belt with wide-eyed innocence as if the notion of belt stroking and all it implied had only just occurred to her. Slowly, she returned her gaze with a slide up Oven Guy’s body.

“What are you doing?” Tad asked her and then wished he hadn’t because his voice registered more peevish than curious.

“Practicing,” she said without taking her eyes of the nonrepair guy. “You don’t know how much we’d appreciate it if you could get that part sooner. The pizza needs of the masses must be appeased.” Was it Tad’s imagination or did her accent sound a little posher than usual?

“Practicing what?” Tad asked, no longer caring how put out he sounded.

Ignoring him, she kept her green-gold gaze trained on her target.

“I could probably put in a special order,” Oven Guy said, his blush now saturating his hairline. “Have it in a couple days.”

“Lovely man,” she said with a fire-bright smile.

Lovely Man returned a shy grin and backed out of the kitchen, muttering something about calling with an update the next day.

“Sorted,” Jules said, rubbing her hands together in satisfaction.

“What in the hell was that?” Tad asked.

“It’s a well-known fact that honey gets the bee. Do you want your special part or not?”

If it meant he had to witness that display again, that would probably be a whopping great negative. There was no good reason why Jules fake-flirting with some guy should have bothered him, except that it had and that was reason enough.

“Thanks,” he said, trying not to sound like a curmudgeon and failing.

“You’re welcome.” She folded her arms beneath her breasts, an action that molded the shapeless material to her figure in a way he should not be noticing. “Where’s Long Face?”

That was the nickname she had given to Jordie the chef, who usually wore the lugubrious expression of a man with the weight of Krypton on his reedy shoulders. The bastard hadn’t sounded all that sad when he called to quit this morning. Tad filled her in on his tale of woe, glad for the distraction and gratified when she made sympathetic noises in all the right places.

Moving her gaze around the room, she rocked that look where she wanted to say something, usually some criticism about how he was mistreating his latest woman or the fact that he drove too damn fast on his Harley. As well as being one of his closest friends, she was unafraid of playing annoying sister and nagging mother hen.

“Out with it,” he said, eager to hear what she had to say. Her smart mouth take on his occasionally imperfect decision making was often the highlight of his day.

“No working pizza oven, no vittles, and a dining room about to be filled with the harshest critics known to man. You’re in deep doo-doo, mate.”

Shit. In all the excitement, he had forgotten to cancel the trial tasting of his now nonexistent small plates menu. Luckily, the impatient herd about to descend on his fledgling bar was his family and not Chicago’s rapacious food cognoscenti.

He had planned trendy accompaniments to go with the extensive wine list. Duck rillettes. Porcini and shallot flat bread. The expected selection of artisanal cheese and charcuterie. Items that didn’t require too much effort and absorbed healthy markups. He might expand the menu later but he didn’t want to overextend himself starting out. For now, it was all about the wine—especially today when there was no hot food on offer.

At least there were cold cuts. He strode over to the prep station and uncovered a couple of platters.

“Here, make yourself useful, wench,” he said to Jules. “Take this out to the horde.”

*  *  *

“What do you mean he quit?”

Jules lifted her head at her brother’s sharp tone. Jack was going with the dark and disapproving thing he used to great effect, and giving it an extra twist because he also happened to be an investor in Tad’s business. Tad would have preferred to go it alone but it was either bring Jack on board or wait another three years to accumulate enough seed money. Sometimes dreams involved compromises. Didn’t she know it.

Her brother, aka Jack Kilroy, was one of those incredibly successful restaurateurs with a household name even Pygmy tribes in New Guinea had heard of. In the last couple of years, he’d scaled back his multinational food empire and eliminated his TV commitments to focus on his grand passions: his Chicago restaurant, Sarriette, the go-to foodie destination in the West Loop and his wife, Lili, who was also Tad’s cousin.

“He was offered a job on a cruise ship,” Tad was saying about Long Face, the AWOL chef. “The
idiota
wants to see the world. I hoped you could spare Derry for a few weeks while I work on getting someone else in.”

Jack’s forehead crimped. Lending Sarriette’s sous-chef to Tad for a month was not trivial, and but for the fact Jack knew a good investment when he saw it, Jules suspected her brother wouldn’t even cross the street to piss on her friend if he were on fire. There had always been an unpleasant tension between them.

“We’ll sort something out,” Jack said after a long beat. “So we’re not eating, but what are we drinking?”

Tad twisted the bottle in his hand to face the rest of his audience—Lili, her sister, Cara, and Cara’s Irish husband, Shane Doyle, who was also Jack’s half brother on their father’s side. Long story.

“Doggie!” Evan squirmed in Jules’s arms, reaching for the bottle with a picture of a friendly overgrown terrier on the label. Her toddler was a touch obsessed with dogs lately. The label’s letters leapfrogged over each other, making little sense to Jules’s literacy-challenged brain. Dyslexia could be a real pain in the arse.

Tad launched into his wine spiel. “This is a Chilean Pinot. Plummy, lashings of fruit, full-bodied. Goes well with zin-braised short rib flatbread.” He met Jack’s pointed stare. “Or it will when we have someone to cook it.”

Tad poured tasting samples of the purple-red wine into stemware and passed them around. A little smile shaded his lips as he took a seat on the plush, chocolate-brown velvet couch, just one of three sofas ringing a low-to-the-ground stone table near the entrance. He had been planning this place for so long that Jules knew he couldn’t help himself. His pride at how the bar had turned out was clear. It was beautiful.

The flickering votive lights sitting on the window ledges bathed the room in an ethereal glow, casting a shine over the cherry wood furniture. On the exposed brick walls, Lili’s beautifully tasteful nude photos with nods to wine culture—models holding bunches of grapes in provocative poses, others with slashes of terracotta mud on their skin—were like a love letter from Mother Nature. Sun, earth, life. The kicker was the glass-walled wine cellar, which brooded behind the bar, a window onto the world of wine. Or at least that was the sales shtick the guy who built it had given Tad when trying to convince him to go with that design. Jules was glad he did. The shock of floor-to-ceiling glass staved off that air of pretension that often shrouded these types of places. There was an accessibility about being able to see right into the cellar from out here.

He caught her looking around and shared the secret smile with her. It was his dream, but he had talked about it for so long that she felt a small measure of ownership over it as well. He was unafraid of seeking her opinion and she was unafraid of giving it. Usually about the skank supermodel he was dating and how she didn’t much like that (lilac) shirt he was wearing and
damn it, Tad, could you not walk into every room like a herd of African elephants?
I’ve got a kid trying to sleep here!

Underneath the sarcastic quips and snarky comments, the deep affection was undeniable. Simpatico, that’s what they were. It had been like that from the beginning.

Cara leaned in and sniffed Shane’s glass, her hand falling naturally to her swollen belly. Five months gone with twins and already as big as a house. She should have looked tired and worn, but this was Cara, who always managed to project disgustingly radiant.

“God, I miss this,” Cara said, burying her nose below the lip of the glass.

Shane snatched it away and took a healthy slurp.

“Sadist,” Cara muttered, drawing Shane’s generous kiss and Jules’s mental sigh.

“Don’t say I never do anything for you, Mrs. DeLuca-Doyle,” he murmured against his wife’s lips, the pleasure and satisfaction in his voice impossible to disguise. Cara had organized their dream wedding in a record-setting four months, their second nuptials in the last year. Another long story.

Jules turned Evan in her arms and lay his fussy head against her shoulder so she could take a sip of the wine. Yes, she was a terrible mother.

“What do you think, Jules?” Tad asked as the aroma of berries filled her nostrils.

“Warm, a bit spicy.”
Like your lips.

No, no, no.
Where the hell had that come from? She had been getting along just dandy this last year, planting her head in her life as a busy mom, and trying not to dwell on that horrible night she had almost destroyed her friendship with Tad. One kiss, three seconds of horror, a year of regret. She had harbored illicit hopes fueled by a lack of sleep and new-mom hormones, but he shot her down. The right decision, she acknowledged now. Thankfully, they had recovered and got back on the friendship track, but every now and then a stray, wanton thought popped in to say hello courtesy of her inner bad girl trying to front a saucy charge.

Now, now,
Good Girl Jules admonished.

Bad Girl Jules giggled naughtily.

Within seconds, she felt the telltale signs of baby drool on her shoulder. Excellent. There was nothing like a cut to the reality of motherhood to remind her of her obvious unsexiness.

She had left the house in a hurry. Nothing new there. People had told her that once she had a child, getting out the door would be the biggest challenge, between the need to remember everything and the last-minute tantrums of your kidlet. There was no time to take a shower or put on any makeup. People had told her that, too. Forget about running a comb through your hair. All that is secondary to the needs of your child.

Usually, she didn’t mind but since she had moved out to her own place, the burdens of motherhood had started to weigh more heavily. For the last two years, she had been living a blessed existence in her brother’s town house with all the human and financial support she needed. Early on, Jack had shared the child care duties, getting up in the middle of the night no matter how late he trailed in from the restaurant, and feeding Evan from the milk supply she had pumped earlier. When the blues came to visit, her sister-in-law Lili was there for her, listening to her griping and moaning. She had the best extended family in the DeLucas that any girl could ask for. She knew she was lucky.