Some Like It Hot (11 page)

The throb of pleasure still thrummed through Kane’s body like the backbeat rhythm of a song—something slow and intense, pulsing with meaning and joy. Heavy on the high hat.

He’d collapsed to the side in an effort not to crush Claire’s trim, small frame—Kane wasn’t tall, but he was compact, with more lean muscle mass than it maybe seemed like. Or so that
Cosmo
interview had said.

Anyway, Claire was safe and uncrushed next to him, the sheen of sweat still drying on her skin. Every shallow, panting breath brushed her high, perfect breasts against Kane’s arm where he’d curled it around her rib cage to keep her close.

“
Mon dieu
,” she breathed. “What are we doing?”

They were the first words either of them had spoken since Kane knocked on the door of her suite and Claire hauled him inside, pressed him back against the wall, and kissed him.

They weren’t exactly the words Kane had been hoping for, either.

“Whatever feels good,” he said firmly. “Wait. It felt better than good to me, but did you not, um…”

She opened her eyes to stare up at the ceiling. “My God. How young you are. Yes, Kane. I ummed. Thank you for that.”

In a single instant Kane went from totally irresistible stud to knock-kneed virgin fumbling after his prom date.

Confusion and hurt curdled together in his stomach, leaching the warmth of his orgasm from his skin. Kane shivered and pulled his arm away from Claire’s body.

So much for afterglow.

“You’re welcome,” he said shortly. “I guess this means you’re kicking me out, now that the lion’s been fed, huh?”

He moved to get off the bed, maybe find his pants so he didn’t have to finish this conversation with his bare ass hanging out in the breeze. Some part of him hoped for Claire to clasp a hand to his forearm and tug him back down beside her, but she didn’t.

“And now you’re angry. Should I not mention your age? But you are young.”

“In years, maybe,” Kane allowed, stretching to pluck his jeans from the top of the dresser where they’d been tossed. “But not in experience.”

Back when he was seeing that double-jointed fashion model, he’d done the entire Kama Sutra. Twice! Somehow, though, that memory didn’t give him the good, wicked tickle of satisfaction it usually did.

This thing with Claire—it was as if it overshadowed everything, made him rewrite every song he’d ever sung to try and make sense of the new things she showed him about himself. It wasn’t an altogether comfortable sensation, but then, if Kane wanted comfortable, he would’ve stayed put in Austin, playing gigs in dive bars for free beer and barbecue.

If Kane wanted comfortable, he wouldn’t have gone on that skydiving trip last year, or bar-hopping with that crazy coked-up socialite in San Sebastian, or on his most recent, intensely grueling international tour, and he certainly wouldn’t give his mother his new cell number every time he changed it.

Comfort was overrated.

“Put those pants down and come back to bed.”

Claire’s slow, exquisitely accented voice jolted Kane back into his body—which, he realized, was standing motionless and naked in the middle of her hotel suite, with a sock in one hand and a pair of inside-out jeans in the other.

Dropping both, Kane turned to face her. The quick flare of desire in her deep brown eyes reminded him of the power of the human form, of how strong it felt to stand there in front of her, bare and unashamed, secure and present in his compact, muscular body.

Kane looked damn good with no clothes on, and he knew it.

But if desire were all he saw on Claire’s flushed, dewy face, he would’ve snatched up his pants and gotten the hell out of Dodge, because Kane Slater was nobody’s blow-up doll.

Sex symbol of an entire generation? Sure. But to Claire, he was beginning to realize, he wanted to be more.

And that indefinable more was exactly what he saw in the trembling of her kiss-swollen mouth and the flicker of uncertainty in the downward sweep of her long, coppery lashes.

Even still, Kane had to force his seized-up lungs and vocal cords to do his bidding.

“I came up here today, even though I knew you wanted us to cool things off. And I’m not sorry. I want to be with you—and I’m pretty sure you want to be with me, too. So … how about it? You positive you want me to stay?”

He tilted his head to one side and held his breath.

Her soft, French-accented tones were as perfect, pure, as the opening notes of his favorite piano solo.

“Yes. Stay. But, Kane, this doesn’t mean I’m prepared to be completely open about our … thing, as you call it.”

All he heard was
yes
.

Warmth bloomed under Kane’s breastbone as if he’d swallowed a star. Or a shot of good tequila.

The sheets were cold against his skin as he slid between them, but they heated up fast once he rolled to his back and pulled Claire over him.

“Mmm, better than any blanket,” he said, relishing the way the soft, slight weight of her pressed his legs apart, pushing their hips together.

She squirmed against him and smiled. Kane loved that every one of her rare, reluctant smiles felt like an accomplishment, like winning a prize.

“You understand, yes?” she murmured, running one slim thigh between his. Her voice was slightly muffled where her mouth nuzzled into the curve of his neck. “The idea of people talking about my intimate, private business, what should be only between you and me…”

“I totally get it.” Kane petted at the silky fall of her hair and smothered the jaw-cracking yawn that took him by surprise as all his muscles seemed to melt into the mattress. “No worries.”

The last thing he was conscious of before sleep dragged him under was the quiet sigh of Claire’s breath against his shoulder.

There was something energizing about the frantic bustle of a competition kitchen, Eva mused, even if you weren’t one of the chefs cooking your heart out and cursing the temperamental stovetops and slipping in spilled olive oil.

She mostly tried to stay out of the way, of both the chefs and the range of Bernard Cheney and his camera in the front left corner of the kitchen, while her heart performed an aggressive series of kickboxing moves against her rib cage.

It was hard to breathe, although that could’ve been the heat. When her father designed the Limestone kitchen for the Gold Coast hotel, he must’ve skimped on the ventilation.

Really, though, Eva had never been in a fully functioning professional kitchen that didn’t feel like the inside of an active volcano an hour into dinner service.

The combination of roasting ovens, salamander broilers blasting heat, fryolators spitting hot oil, grills throwing flames at the ceiling, and a lot of intense, stressed-out chefs made for a toasty working environment.

She’d already done the rounds of the different groups of chefs, trailed by the surly cameraman, to find out what each team planned to serve the judges.

The Southwest Team was stuffing sausages for their spin on hot dogs; the Southern Team was playing with soul food. Danny’s guys—the East Coast Team, she corrected herself; it wouldn’t be good to start slipping up and referring to them as “Danny’s guys” on camera—had a whole riff on the Chicagoans’ love of brunch that sounded like fun. If they managed to pull it off, it would probably be a stunner.

Good food made for good TV, and that was all she was hoping to serve up today. But Eva’s hopes for a clean, classy challenge appeared to be in some danger when it came to the teams from the Midwest and the West Coast.

Biting her lip, she watched as Skye Gladwell and Ryan Larousse collided in front of the walk-in pantry for about the fifth time, both having run there in search of ingredients for pizza dough.

Both teams planned to present pizzas—and the sparks were already flying.

“Out of my way,” Ryan snarled, scrambling to catch his balance and haul himself into the pantry with one hand on the doorjamb.

“I’m pretty sure there’s enough yeast for everyone,” Skye retorted, hurrying in after him. “Or don’t you keep this place well stocked?”

That was rough stuff, coming from her. At the beginning of the prep period, every time Ryan challenged her for an ingredient or shoved her out of his path, she’d smiled a tense little smile and let it go.

By this point in the afternoon, however, three hours and counting down, even hippie-crunchy-granola Skye had clearly reached some sort of limit with Ryan’s behavior.

If Eva had to guess, she’d bet it was the malicious gleam of frustrated anger in Ryan’s eyes that had started to get to his competitor. The guy was infamous for being able to hold a grudge—people still told stories about the lengths he’d gone to in order to revenge himself on his first boss, an old-school chef who dished out a lot of abuse in the kitchen.

And after suffering such ignominious defeat at the hands of the East Coast Team yesterday, Ryan was out for blood.

However, he also wasn’t an idiot. Which made him more dangerous, because as she’d been warned when she’d hired him to run Limestone, Ryan Larousse could be subtle and sly when he was after something. He wasn’t always a hot-tempered brawler.

No, Ryan was a schemer. A planner. And today, his plans seemed to include driving Beck crazy by tormenting Skye Gladwell.

As a special bonus, the storm clouds gathering around Beck’s head appeared to be driving Danny to distraction, as well. His concerned gaze darted from Beck to Skye, and back to Ryan, even as his hands swiftly and methodically peeled the dusky purple skin from a pile of damson plums.

Beside Eva, Bernard Cheney stuck his pencil behind his ear and leaned over his camera to get a shot of Danny’s jaw clenching down tight, his furious glance in Ryan’s direction.

“Now, that’s good television,” the producer muttered, rocking back on his heels.

Eva pressed her lips together for a moment, then said, “Look. I know it’s your job to wring as much drama out of this situation as you can, and that’s how you get audiences and ratings and publicity—I know all of that.” She paused, not even sure what she wanted to say, but knowing that it had to be said or she’d go nuts.

“I just … is it necessary to focus so much on the personal lives of the chefs? I’d think the food would be enough.”

Cheney snorted. Disgusting man. “You’d be dead wrong. The food’s just a prop. It’s stage business. The real meat of the show—ha ha—is always going to be the personal shit. The laughter, the tears, the fights, the jealousy, the sex. That’s what sells.”

“Sex sells? How original.”

Cheney turned one squinted eye on her, bushy brows lowered. “It’s a cliché because it’s true. And without the extra juice from a good scandal or a fierce rivalry, there ain’t no way my bosses are going to be interested in airing your little cooking contest.”

Eva’s gut clenched, her breath choking in her lungs.

She’d sworn she could bring the RSC into the public eye and capture the imaginations of the Cooking Channel generation. Filming the competition—and the competitors—was key. Her father had made that very clear.

So maybe she didn’t like the idea of delving into the contestants’ backgrounds … maybe it was cheap and crass.

Okay, there was no maybe about it. But she didn’t have any choice.

“Film what you need to,” she ordered Cheney, ignoring his satisfied grunt.

Desperate for a distraction from the sinking sensation in her chest—
so this is what selling out feels like? Ugh
—Eva scanned the kitchen for her other major gambit in the battle for the hearts and minds of the masses.

Kane Slater, Eva’s glittering supernova of a celebrity judge, waltzed into the kitchen looking disheveled and tired and very pleased about it.

Claire was close behind him. She was slightly better put together—at least her hair had been brushed and her buttons were all done up correctly—but a similar aura of satiation haloed her head. Interesting.

“Are we late?” she asked, her heels clicking quickly across the floor. “No, I see Devon has yet to arrive.
Bon
.”

The judges were scheduled to film a quick tour of the kitchen before the contestants finished for the night. Eva couldn’t remember whose idea that had been. Whoever came up with it hadn’t taken into account that acute ratcheting up of tension that occurred whenever the judges were in the same room as the contestants.

As if this kitchen needed any more tension.

The clanging of pots slamming down on the stovetop and whirring buzz of food processors seemed deafening, suddenly, the chefs shouting back and forth to one another with instructions and status reports, frantically trying to reach the end of their prep lists before Eva called time.

Ryan Larousse was at the grill station stoking up the fire to fantastic heights in preparation for searing off some meat. Even he’d reached the point of desperation, finally, focusing more on the task at hand than on his gamesmanship. Relief at being able to stop watching out for the guy made Danny light-headed.

Pastry chefs didn’t usually spend a lot of time in the thick of dinner service. Most professional restaurants called their pastry guy in early, like seven in the morning, and had him or her out of there by five.

But with his family owning the restaurant where he worked, and his father counting on him more every year, Danny’s hours had never been quite that cut and dried. He was used to working through the rush, keeping tabs on everyone in the kitchen with one corner of his mind while the rest concentrated on executing meticulously perfect crème brûlées.

No dinner service at Lunden’s Tavern could have prepared him for this balls-to-the-wall insanity.

If he trusted every cook here, that would be one thing. He was used to cooking with guys who had his back, who respected the hell out of each other and worked hard not to let each other down. And even in those circumstances, putting out a perfect menu in this compressed amount of time would’ve been a bitch. Add in the fact that they were competing against a whole slew of talented fuckers who were also sharing their kitchen space, and Danny’s orderly, control-loving mind spun off into orbit.