Feel the Heat (Hot In the Kitchen)

Feel the Heat

Kate Meader

New York    Boston

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For Jimmie, who makes me laugh like no one else

Acknowledgments

No writer is an island, though it certainly feels lonely at times. It’s such a comfort knowing there are amazing people in my life cheering me to the finish—and then shoving me over the start line for the next book.

Thanks to Nicole Resciniti at the Seymour Agency whose faith in me and all her authors knows no bounds. She saw potential (and a sexy chef hero) and pushed me to be better.

To Lauren Plude, my wonderful editor, and the team at Grand Central Publishing, thanks for carving out something great from the word lump I sent you. I will also be forever in debt to the lovely folks in the art department for my ab-tastic cover.

My promiscuity on the chapter contest circuit earned fantastic feedback and enough wins to encourage me to stay the course. Thanks to all the judges: I learned something from each and every one of you.

So many people helped with critiques and beta reads, and I extend a warm, fuzzy blanket of gratitude to envelop you all: Gina Blechman, Jessica Briones, Michelle Frisque, Anna Geletka, Rebecca Lynn, Erin McCarthy, Angela Quarles, and Shannyn Schroeder. A special thank you goes to Amber Lin, whose keen insight and dirty mind has made me a better writer.

And finally to my writer girls in Chicago 4D, your dishing, drinking, and divaesque behavior has kept me informed, tipsy, and laughing throughout this past year. Cheers, ladies!

Chapter One

She should have been safely ensconced in the apartment above her family’s restaurant, scarfing down leftover pasta and catching up on the reality show glut bursting her DVR. Instead, Lili DeLuca was considering a 3:00 a.m. stealth mission down a dark alley, wearing shiny blue Lycra hot pants and a star-spangled bustier. As ideas went, this one was as smart as bait.

Peeling off her Vespa helmet, she sent a longing look up to her bedroom window, then peered once more into the alley leading to the kitchen entrance of DeLuca’s Ristorante. The door was still propped open. Light streamed out into the night. Brightness had never looked so wrong.

A busy Damen Avenue could usually be relied upon to assure an unaccompanied woman that she was not alone. Wicker Park, formerly a low-income haven for underfed artists and actors-slash-baristas, had grown into a dense jungle of expensive lofts, chic eateries, and shi-shi wine bars. Between those, O’Casey’s Tap on the corner, and the regular influx of suburbanite good-timers, the streets were always full and safe.

But not tonight.

The bars had dribbled out their last drunks an hour ago, and by now, the 708ers were snoring soundly on their Sleep Number beds back in the burbs. Despite the stifling ninety-degree June heat, her neighborhood had never appeared so stark and cold. Living so close to work might have its perks, such as a thirty-second commute and the best Italian food in Chicago, but it was hard to see the upside in the face of that damn kitchen door, open like a gaping maw.

Maybe it was Marco. Her ex liked to use her family’s business as his playpen, adamant that his investment accorded him certain privileges. A bottle of expensive Brunello here. A venue for an after-hours poker game there. Even a chance to impress, with his miserable culinary skills, the latest lithe blonde he was wearing. He’d cooked for Lili once. His linguine had been as limp as his…

Sloughing off those memories, she refocused on her current problem. Six hours ago, the Annual Superhero Extravaganza had seemed like a harmless way to rehabilitate her social life and get out there (oh, how she hated
there
). Guilting her into living was a favorite pastime of Gina’s, and her cousin had persuaded her to attend with honeyed words.

Time to get back in the game, Lili. No, your thighs don’t look like sides of beef in those shorts. The Batman with the wandering digits? He’s not fat—he’s just husky.

A husky Batman might come in handy right about now.

Leaving behind the safe hum of traffic, she crept toward the door. The garbage stench stung her nostrils. Something furry scurried behind one of the Dumpsters. A raucous riff from the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar” swelled and filled the space around her. Insanity had its own soundtrack.

You might be dressed like Wonder Woman, but that doesn’t mean you should play the hero. Just take a look, then call someone.

She sneaked a peek around the door. Expensive kitchen equipment—
her
equipment—lay strewn with serving dishes, pots, and pans on the countertops. Renewed alarm streaked through her. This didn’t look like the handiwork of Marco, who thought a
bain-marie
was the name of a girl he’d like to date.

So much for the plausible explanation. Some shithead was burglarizing her restaurant to the strains of Jagger and Richards.

The next move should have been obvious, but her cinder-block feet and racing brain warred all the same. Call someone.
Anyone.
Her father. Her cousin. That cute chocolate-eyed cop who stopped in for takeout on Fridays and insisted she give him a buzz at the first scent of trouble. She swallowed hard, desperate to stop her heart from escaping through her throat. It settled for careening around her chest like a pinball.

A cautious sniff caught an astringent blast of bleach that competed with the lingering basil aroma of Friday night’s dinner service. Trembling, she nestled her camera, an eight-hundred-dollar Leica, inside her Vespa helmet, then squeezed her phone out of the tight pouch at the side of her shorts. She started to dial.
Nine. One…

Her twitchy finger paused on hearing something more eerie than heart-stopping. From inside the walk-in fridge, a voice bounced off the stainless-steel interior. High-pitched. Indeterminate gender. Singing at the top of its lungs. It was also completely out of tune.

She repocketed her phone, pulled open the screen door, and quietly stepped inside. Damn feet had never known what was good for them.

Frantically, she searched for a weapon, and her gaze fell gratefully on the cast-iron frying pan resting on the butcher’s block. She swapped it out for her helmet, appreciating how the new heft almost worked to stop her hand from shaking. Almost. Her blurred and frankly ridiculous reflection in the fridge’s stainless steel should have given her pause; instead it emboldened her. She was dressed for action. She could do this.

Rounding the walk-in’s door, she took stock of the enemy in a millisecond. Built like a tank, he had his back turned to her as he reached up to the top shelf for a container of her father’s
ragù
. For the briefest of seconds, the incongruity gnawed at her gut. A tone-deaf,
ragù
-stealing brigand? So it didn’t exactly gel, but he was in her restaurant.

In the middle of the night.

Any hesitancy to act was wiped away by his stutter-step backward and the corresponding spike in her adrenaline. She hurled the pan and allowed herself a gratifying instant to confirm his head got the full brunt. Wolfish howl, check. Then she slammed the door shut on his thieving ass.

It had been quite a nice ass, too.

Good grief, where had that come from? It must be relief because a drooling appreciation of criminal hot stuff was so not appropriate. She loosed a nervous giggle, then covered her mouth, trying to smother that wicked thought along with her chuckle. Naughty, naughty.

Now what, Shiny Shorts?
Time to call in the cavalry, but as she pulled out her phone again, another thought pierced her veil of giddy triumph. By now, Fridge Bandit should have been making a fuss or bargaining for his freedom, yet a full minute had passed with not a peep.

Confident that the broken safety release on the walk-in’s interior would keep him at bay, she laid her head and hands flush to the cool fridge door. Somewhere behind her, the music’s
boom-boom
bass meshed with the walk-in’s mechanical hum. Both now vibrated through her body while the
thump-thump
of her heart tripped out a ragged beat.

Still nothing from within that cold prison. New horror descended over her.

She had killed him.

Fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately—the panic of that dread conclusion was dislodged by the fridge door’s sudden jerk outward, sending Lili into a rather graceless meet-cute with the kitchen floor. Butt first, of course.

So someone had fixed that safety lock, then.

Her former comrade, the frying pan, emerged like a mutant hand puppet, soon followed by a wrist and a hairy arm before the whole package materialized. Vaguely, something big, bad, and dangerous registered in her mind. He held the pan aloft to ward off an imminent attack, but he needn’t have worried. Still grounded, superpowers severely diminished, she blinked and focused. Then she wished she hadn’t bothered, as the tight knot of fear unraveled to a cold flood of embarrassment.

“Jesus Christ, you could have bloody killed—” Fridge Bandit said. His mouth dropped open. Scantily clad superheroes flat on their butts often have that effect.

Thick black hair, green eyes flecked with gold, and a face straight out of a Renaissance painting were his most obvious assets. Lili postponed the full-body browse because she knew she was in trouble. Big trouble.

It was
him
.

He touched the back of his head, a not-so-subtle reminder of her transgression, and placed the pan down with all the care of someone disposing of a loaded weapon. His casual wave at the countertop behind her cut the music abruptly. Probably a skill he had acquired during an apprenticeship with the dark side of the Force.

“You all right, sweetheart?” he asked in the casual tone of one who doesn’t really care about the answer. He pocketed an iPod remote and made a halfhearted move toward her. She held up the okay-hand.
Too late, buster.

Lowering her eyes to check the girls, she exhaled in relief. No nip slips. She jumped to her feet, surreptitiously rubbed her sore rump, then cast a glance down to her red knee-high Sandro boots for inspiration. Nothing doing.

You’re wearing a Wonder Woman costume and you just went all-out ninja on one of the most famous guys in the Western Hemisphere.

At last, she raised her eyes to his face, now creased in a frown.

“I’m Jack.”

“I know who you are.”

Lili figured anyone sporting a painted-on outfit like she was probably had, oh, a ten-second ogle coming her way. Her ego might have taken a shot along with her behind, but she knew she had started the evening looking pretty darn good. Hell, four out of the five flabby-muscled Supermen at the party had thought so. With her overweight teens firmly in the past, she’d since embraced her size 14 figure, and on the days she felt less than attractive—for every woman suffered days like those—she had enough friends telling her to own it, girl, revel in those curves.

So here she stood, owning and reveling, while simultaneously forging a somewhat unorthodox path for feminism with her own leering appraisal.

Jack Kilroy’s extraordinarily handsome mug was already branded into her brain. Not because she was a fan, heaven forbid, but because her sister, Cara, was constantly babbling about its perfection, usually while nagging everyone she knew to watch the cooking show she produced for him,
Kilroy’s Kitchen
.
(Monday nights at seven on the Cooking Channel—don’t forget, Lili!)
A hot-as-a-griddle Brit, he had risen to stardom in the last year, first with his TV show, then with his bestseller,
French Cooking for the Rest of Us
. And when not assailing the public with his chiseled good looks on food and lifestyle magazines, he could invariably be found plying his particular brand of brash foodie charm on the daytime talk-show circuit. He wasn’t just smokin’ in the kitchen, either. Recently, a contentious breakup with a soap star and a paparazzi punch-up had provided delicious fodder for the tabloids and cable news outlets alike.

The camera might add ten pounds, but in the flesh, Jack Kilroy was packing the sexy into a lean six-and-change frame. The matching set of broad shoulders didn’t surprise her, but apparently the tribal tattoo on his right bicep did, judging by the shiver dancing a jig down her spine. It seemed so not British and just a little bit dangerous. Her gaze was drawn to his Black Sabbath T-shirt, which strained to contain what looked like extremely hard, and eminently touchable, chest muscles. Sculpted by years of lugging heavy-duty stockpots, no doubt. Long legs, wrapped in a pair of blue jeans that looked like an old friend, completed the very pleasant image.