On Lavender Lane (32 page)

Her seductive smile reminded him that food had been used as temptation ever since Eve had polished up that shiny red apple. “If you ever saw it, you’d never look at an egg the same way again.”

“Now you realize I’m going to have to go looking for it.” He reached across the table, took her hand, and pressed his mouth to the center of her palm, then folded her fingers over the flesh he’d warmed. “Our second date could be dinner and a movie.”

She laughed, as he’d meant her to, even though, holding her wrist as he was, he felt her pulse pick up.

“I’ll think about it.”

She stood up. Since she’d insisted on taking the time to stop by the house long enough for her to shower and change, she was wearing a pair of light blue jeans and a sunshine yellow pullover sweater. Although he’d really liked that sexy dress, Lucas found her just as appealing in the casual clothes.

“While you’re at it, think about this,” he suggested.

As they left the restaurant, his hand on her back, he bent
down and murmured just a few of the things he’d spent a sleepless night imagining doing to her. With her.

“Sorry,” she said. Although she’d kept her tone brisk and matter-of-fact, he knew his suggestions had gotten to her by the color that had risen in her cheeks. “I’m busy tonight. It’s Gram’s night to host her book club. She roped me into joining the group.”

“Who said anything about night? As it happens, I’m free this afternoon.”

“No, you’re not.” She moved away from him as they reached the truck, but he beat her to the door. “You’re working on Gram’s restaurant.”

“You’re the boss.”

“Yes.” She smiled at that idea. “It appears I am.”

She smelled like spring. And temptation.

A temptation he found impossible to resist.

He cupped her chin in his fingers. Moved closer.

“Lucas,” she warned.

He lowered his head. “Just one minute.”

Then leaned down.

And did what he’d been wanting to do since he stood in the doorway that morning, watching her sleep, forcing himself to resist the urge to join her in his bed.

40

His mouth was softer than it had been when she’d attacked him after killing off nearly an entire bottle of champagne. Rather than plundering, as they had in her too-hot dreams last night, his lips gently touched hers. Lightly, tantalizingly, retreating before she could respond. Or reject.

Then, when she didn’t reject, he took the kiss deeper, savoring, enticing.

Madeline had never been one for public displays of affection. She found them embarrassing to watch, and even more so to participate in.

But as she clung to his shoulders, the reality of being parked in front of the restaurant faded, time gradually ebbed, and she imagined the asphalt beneath her feet giving way, like sands under a retreating tide.

When her mouth opened in a soft sigh of acceptance and wonder, Lucas slipped his tongue between her lips, kissing her with the slow and easy confidence of a man who’d kissed more women than he could count.

Don’t think about that. Not now.

His lips continued to linger, tasting at their leisure in a lengthy exploration that had her trapped in misty layers of sensation.

When she linked her fingers behind his tanned neck, arched against him, and clung, he murmured something against her mouth—it could have been her name, a curse,
or a prayer—then pulled her even closer, allowing her to feel his heart beat against hers.

His teeth nipped at her lower lip. On a throaty moan, she poured herself into a kiss that went on and on, going deeper. Darker.

His wonderfully wicked hands grabbed her hips, pressing her back against the truck as he moved between her thighs. He was rock hard. Solid. And huge.

And then he was gone.

He’d dropped his hands and pulled away.

“Damn.” He was winded, his chest heaving as if he’d just run a marathon. “I apologize.” He sucked in a breath. “I lost control.”

Madeline drew in her gulp of air and licked her bottom lip. “You weren’t the only one.”

“Yeah, but I
never
lose control. Not ever.”

“Well, that makes two of us. So it appears you’re human, too. Deal with it.” She threw his own words back at him.

“Bull’s-eye,” he said. He gave her a long look that made her heart—which had just started settling back down—stutter. “So, what do you want to do about it?”

“Forget it happened?”

“Not a chance. We could go to the cottage. I’ll take you up on that rain check.”

She couldn’t remember any promise of a rain check. Then again, much of that champagne-fueled night was foggy. Madeline didn’t even want to consider how many brain cells that pricey bubbly had killed.

“It’s not raining.”

“Not now.” He winked, then opened the door, giving her a boost up into the high seat. “But this is the Oregon coast. I figure I won’t have to wait that long.”

She bucked her seat belt. “Arrogant.”

He grinned, his momentary annoyance about having lost control disintegrating like morning fog. “Patient.”

*  *  *

An idea had sparked while Madeline had been talking with Van about having Jimmy teach the students at the new school how to cook his sweet potato hash. An idea that the more she thought about it, the more she thought it would not only work, but it would also help fund the school and restaurant, as well as spreading her message of sustainable, healthy, good-tasting food.

And keep everyone, including herself, happy. But she needed to come up with a more concrete plan. Then make a few phone calls.

“How long,” she asked Lucas as they drove back to the farmhouse, “will it take build the addition?”

“That depends on how much you want done,” he said. “Obviously longer than just taking a sledgehammer, gutting Sofia’s kitchen, and putting in new appliances, countertops, cabinets, and floor, like we would if it were a straightforward residential remodel. The house has good bones.”

“It does,” she agreed. Like so many of the homes in Shelter Bay, it had been built to last.

“If everything falls into place, we could probably get it done in four months. If we have permit or weather delays, etcetera, six months.”

“That’s doable. Especially since the garden goes into fall and winter root vegetables that can be used in the recipes.”

“You’ve given this some thought.”

“I’ve fantasized having my own restaurant since I was a little girl.”

“I remember you talking about that. Which you sort of have done. Since the Frenchman’s built a bunch of them.”

“Those are his restaurants. Not mine.”

Yet she’d funded them. Could she have been any more foolish? Somehow she’d fallen into that male chef/female chef trap. The one that often had women in a kitchen prepping vegetables while the guys were on the hot line sautéing the salmon. One of the things that irked her most about her chosen profession was how many male chefs expected
to be king. And how many women, such as she’d done, surrendered power so easily.

“And every single one of those restaurants reinforced my belief that I wanted something far more simple,” she said.

She’d always found the indoor waterfalls in Miami over the top. And when one of Maxime’s top competitors in Las Vegas had his designer create a four-story-high wall of all the wine bottles, with “wine angels” lifted on high wires for patrons to watch as they retrieved those bottles for their meals, Maxime had gone all out, creating a replica of the Palace of Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors. She’d tried to suggest that all those glass and gilt, enormous chandeliers, and frescos painted on the massive domed ceiling were the height of ostentation, and it wasn’t as if her husband had the treasury that had been available to France’s Sun King. Even in the current culinary Gomorrah Vegas had become, it distracted from his food.

Despite what that complaining diner in the taxi line had told her about those dry scallops at his Miami restaurant, when he actually lowered himself to prepare a meal himself, his food was admittedly exquisite.

“Then that’s what you should do,” Lucas said. “Create your vision. Your way. You tell me what you want, and somehow we’ll make it happen.”

We.
How strange to think of the two of them being a team. Especially factoring in their past. But it seemed that’s what they were becoming. And, oddly, it was feeling more and more right.

“There was a time when I probably would’ve gone with something more Italian themed, in an attempt to replicate my parents’ restaurant,” she confessed.

“Stone walls, murals on the wall, grapevines on trellises.”

She smiled at the memory. “It worked in its place,” she said. “But move it to Shelter Bay, and it could come off looking like Italy at Epcot.”

“Dad accidentally took all the fun out of Disneyland for me forever by pointing out that Walt Disney ruined Ludwig the Second’s crazy operatic castle at Neuschwanstein by turning it into Sleeping Beauty’s castle. One thing I learned growing up with him was that all good architecture belongs to its place. That buildings are always part of a context.

“The same way your parents’ restaurant undoubtedly was a part of the fabric of Umbria, the iron grill work of New Orleans, which is perfect for there, would look foolish in New England because if you situate a building in different surroundings, its character changes.

“Another example, although they’re both on oceans, are those stark white Mediterranean houses from your father’s native Greek Islands. Originally whitewashed to reflect the heat of the sun, they’d stick out like sore thumbs here in the cloudy Pacific Northwest.

“Exactly.” Madeline was pleased he so quickly understood something that Maxime either could not or, more likely, would not grasp. She could also tell that while Lucas might not have wanted to follow his father into architecture, he was as passionate about what he’d chosen as a second career as she was about her own.

“What I want is to accentuate the farm-to-table profile of the restaurant,” she said. “To make diners part of the experience by highlighting the agricultural ambience of the place.”

“That was always part of the draw for me. Growing up in the city, just visiting a farm was cool. Eating in a farmhouse kitchen made everything taste better. Not that your grandmother isn’t a great cook. But the country ambience in her kitchen added as much as the fresh herbs and spices she used in the food.”

“I know. It’s like I can’t think of Italy without thinking of eating spaghetti in my mother’s kitchen.”

“I’m glad you brought that up,” Lucas said. “Because I’ve been thinking that going with recycled stuff wouldn’t
just be cheaper, but it works with your eco-green theme of sustainable food.”

“Okay.” She reached across the console and squeezed his thigh. Not in a sexual way, but because he had her so excited about the prospect. “Although, quite honestly, I wouldn’t have believed it possible, we’re totally on the same page and you now have me officially excited. I really do want to discuss this with you before we talk with your dad’s former partner, but if you don’t mind, I need a few hours to make some business calls and talk with my agent. I have a seed of an idea on how to make the cooking school irresistible to the Cooking Network executives.”

“No problem,” he said as he pulled up in front of the farmhouse. “As it turns out, the stockbroker-turned–wood guy is coming to town today and wanted to walk through the cannery with me this afternoon, anyway.”

“Terrific. Maybe we can talk with him about reclaimed wood while he’s in town. How about I give you a call when I’m done and we can meet there?”

“Works for me.”

Her smile lit up her face as she grabbed his hair and pulled him toward her.

It was a damn-the-torpedoes, full-steam-ahead kiss that jolted through him like a cruise missile. He heard the roar. It could’ve been gunfire or thunder or the Pacific surf in full tsunami mode.

Whatever, it had him grabbing to hold her there, but then she’d pulled out of his reach and was out the car door before his brain caught up with the rest of him.

“I guess that means I’m forgiven?”

She gave a half laugh. “Let’s just say I’m working on it.” And when he was considering following her up to that porch and returning the favor by kissing her blind and deaf, she shut the car door. “And,” she said through the open passenger’s window, “you just happen to be getting a lot closer to redemption.”

41

Although she’d been raised Methodist, Phoebe wasn’t sure she believed in God or the concepts of heaven and hell anymore. But one thing she was certain of: If there actually was a heaven, it would look like Blue Heron farm.

She drew in a breath at the rolling acres of meadows, plowed brown fields, and green pastures nestled among willow trees and ponds.

“Oh,” she breathed, as Ethan Concannon’s truck drove through the paradise. “It’s not at all what I was picturing.” As much as she’d loved growing up in Arizona mountain country, her family ranch had looked nothing like this.

“I like it,” he said. “It’s peaceful, after…”

His voice dropped off. She was afraid to ask, but since he’d already mentioned being a widower, she decided that it wouldn’t really be prying. “After your wife died?”

“No. The ironic thing is, she was still alive when we put the money down on it. But she and our little boy, Max, were killed in a car accident before we could get moved up here from Oregon. Max was a year old when I got home from Down Range. I talked to him on the computer from Afghanistan, but it wasn’t the same thing. He’d just begun to feel comfortable around me, when a guy in an SUV took a curve too fast and hit them head-on.”

“Oh.” Tears burned at the back of her lids. She pressed
her hand against her stomach, unable to imagine the pain he must have suffered. “That’s terrible. I’m so sorry.”

“So was I. I’d been gone a lot of our marriage.” His voice was rough, as if he didn’t use it a lot. “Two deployments in Iraq, then two more in Afghanistan. Sometimes I think it’s amazing she managed to get pregnant in the first place, since we spent so many years apart, but I guess we made up for lost time whenever I was home.”