Some Like It Hot (23 page)

“No,” Claire said, a little too quickly. Kane frowned as she continued, “If Eva works tonight, so do I. But I am not as young and spry as she, so I will need a serious injection of caffeine. Meet me at Blue Smoke?”

Ah yes. Time for their traditional coffee shop heart-to-heart. It simultaneously warmed Kane’s heart and freaked him right the fuck out that this non-relationship already had traditions.

He’d never been comfortable with predictability before.

Of course, Claire wasn’t exactly predictable.

Kane arrived at the twenty-four-hour coffee shop expecting to have to argue, yet again, for the merits of their non-relationship thing—this time, in front of the off-duty cops and college kids pulling all-nighters who were the only other customers at Blue Smoke around midnight on a Tuesday.

Claire was already there, seated at the same table where he’d first found her—God, was it only two weeks ago? It seemed longer. Sleepless nights full of hot monkey sex would do that to a guy—with her hands wrapped around a mug of the same order of café au lait, heavy on the foamed milk.

But the look on her face when he slid into the booth across from her. Kane paused and widened his eyes, needing to absorb every detail, make a mental snapshot to take out later for inspiration. Her hair tumbled over her shoulders, soft and sensual. He wanted to run his fingers through it, feel again how slippery and silky it was, smell its clean rosemary and mint fragrance. She was wearing that sweater he liked, the one that looked fuzzy and warm, with the deep chocolate color that made her eyes glow and her skin take on a golden hue.

Claire was beautiful—but then, she was always beautiful. Something was different tonight.

“You wanted to see me?” Kane didn’t bother to hide the thickness of his voice, the desire pulsing through his body. She deserved to know how much he wanted her.

“To talk to you,” she said, the slight flush that rose to her cheeks telling him she knew what he was thinking.

Kane grinned, feeling the fighting spirit spark in his blood. “Okay, so talk. What is it this time? I’m too young? You’re too world-weary and wise? That old guy, Theo Jansen, put the moves on you? What?”

Her hands jerked, sloshing hot coffee over the sides of her mug. “
Merde!
Oh, what a mess.” Pinned to the booth by the weight of his own assumptions, Kane couldn’t even muster the brain cells to grab a paper napkin and help her mop up.

“Wait. Jansen put the moves on you?”

“Theo Jansen expressed his desire to renew our romantic relationship, yes.” She had her head down, eyes on the pile of napkins slowly staining brown in blotches, so he couldn’t read her expression. He didn’t need to.

Kane hunched forward in an instinctive defensive move, but it was too late. His soft underbelly was already exposed, just waiting for the knife. “Wow. I guess I should congratulate you on finally finding the perfect excuse to ditch me.”

Her head came up, something flashing through her eyes too quickly for him to understand it. Not that he could see much through the haze of disappointment clutching at his chest and making it hard to breathe.

Suck it up, Slater,
he told himself.
This is no worse than the time you got clocked in the head by an empty beer bottle at that crazy outdoor music festival, and passed out, and had to finish your set with a concussion.

It felt similar, though, as he pushed blindly out of the booth and went to stand up. Kind of wobbly and sick-making.

Until he felt the warm clasp of Claire’s slender fingers around his wrist.

He stared down at their hands for a long moment before looking back at her.

There was that expression again, that face he couldn’t read, and all he could do was try not to whimper. “What now? Want to get in a few parting shots about how I’m too young to know my own mind, and I’ll get over it, and it’s for the best?”

“No,” she said. “Because I don’t want you to get over it. I want to believe that you know your own mind, and that what’s best for both of us is to stop fighting this … whatever it is we have between us. And see where it leads.”

All of a sudden, that look on her face made more sense. It was the same look he saw in the mirror every morning since he’d met her three months ago in New York.

It was hope.

And fear, too, with a little bit of impatience thrown in, because it was Claire, but still. Mostly hope.

Kane’s chest burned and he felt as wired as if he’d inhaled two double espressos in a row. He sat back down, but Claire didn’t let go of his wrist.

“You mean it?” Kane was wincing before the words were out of his mouth. How much more of a dipshit could he be?

But Claire’s voice was soft when she said, “I do. A very dear friend reminded me of a promise I once made myself not to settle for anything less than everything I want and deserve in life.”

Choking on emotion, Kane forced a laugh. “What kind of naughty shit did you do in your last life to deserve me in this one?”

Throwing her head back, Claire laughed, that wide-mouthed, open laugh that Kane loved being the cause of. In this case, he could tell it was least partly relief, the tension and fear of the last few moments leaping out of her.

Helplessly, he grinned back. He wanted to point out that her fear was totally wasted. He’d been hers for a long time, maybe even since before they met. But he didn’t want to rock the precarious balance they’d managed to finally, finally reach, so he kept his mouth shut and started writing lyrics in his head while the whole world turned to music around him.

Danny couldn’t sleep.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t tired—the constant state of excitement and nervous anticipation at being out of his normal routine took its toll. He’d been sleeping more deeply, more soundly, for longer hours since he got to Chicago than he had since he was a teenager.

Even now, sleep tugged at his limbs, weighting them down to the sheets as he tossed and turned, but his mind would not get with the program.

Pulling his pillow over his face, Danny groaned in frustration. It wasn’t any louder than the protesting squeak and creak of the pull-out cot’s springs every time he moved, but it still seemed to disturb Winslow.

Lowering the pillow, Danny squinted through the darkness of the hotel room over to Win’s bed. There was some snuffling followed by a sigh as Winslow flopped over onto his stomach and went back to sleep.

Lucky son of a bitch.

All Danny could seem to do was lie awake on his thin mattress, all lumpy where the coils of the hideaway poked up, and stew about Eva Jansen.

He still wasn’t a hundred percent on what part of their conversation had pushed her buttons, but one thing Danny knew for sure—being compared to all the men in Eva’s past who’d disappointed her? Not one of his favorite things.

It wasn’t fair, though, that she got to ding him for disagreeing with her, then never offer any sort of counterargument, herself. He still thought he was right, damn it! The same thing happened with televised cooking as when they started broadcasting football games, timing them for commercials and yukking it up with the sponsors—all the heart and soul and immediacy was lost.

When TV got involved, chefs started caring more about their ratings than their food, and that sucked.

The words trembled on his tongue, practically burning his mouth with the need to get out there and be in Eva’s face, proving her wrong. He wished he’d had the chance to say all that to her, and hear her sputter and try to come up with some reasonably non-horseshit response.

Danny glanced at the green numbers glowing from the alarm clock on the nightstand between Win and Beck’s beds.

Three in the morning.

Everyone involved in the competition was probably fast asleep. Which was exactly what Danny should be, except for this loop of an argument running through his stupid chatterbox of a brain.

Fifteen minutes later, he was stalking through the empty lobby of the Gold Coast Hotel in sweats and a threadbare T-shirt with the cracked, faded appliqué face of the Swedish Chef from the Muppets grinning from his chest.

“Excuse me?” Danny hesitated only for a second before tapping the silver bell at the reception desk.

A young girl with horn-rimmed glasses, dressed in Gold Coast livery, popped her head out of the room behind the desk. “Sorry, sir! Just taking care of some filing. What can I do for you?”

She yawned halfway through and Danny held back a smile. He had a feeling that
filing
was synonymous with
sleeping
here on the graveyard shift.

“It’s no problem,” he assured her. “I’m just hoping you can help me find someone.”

Her face went wary. “If you have the guest’s room number, I can put a call through for you, sir.”

“That’s okay, I’ve already checked her room. No answer.”

“Perhaps the guest is asleep.”

Leaning on the desk, Danny pretended he didn’t hear the broad hint in the little receptionist’s tone. “I don’t think so. See, this particular guest is in charge of the Rising Star Chef competition, and I’ll just bet she’s around here somewhere, still working.”

Eyes dropping down to the cartoon emblazoned on Danny’s shirt, the receptionist said, “Oh! You’re one of the chefs. Are you looking for Ms. Jansen? She told me to always come get her if any of the RSC contestants needed something.”

Danny smiled at her. “Perfect! Do you know where she is?”

The receptionist, whose name tag read cindy, looked torn. “I’m not supposed to leave the desk. I guess … you probably know where the kitchen is, don’t you?”

The kitchen. Of course.

Giving Cindy another reassuring smile, he said, “Don’t worry about it. I’m just going to go check on her, see if she needs any help with anything. I can find my own way downstairs.”

He got a grateful smile and a little wave to send him on his way to the elevators. Cindy seemed like a good kid—he wondered if it was common practice for hotels to schedule young women to work the night desk alone. It didn’t seem safe. Maybe he should talk to someone about it.

Contemplating whether Eva, with her VIP connections, might know the right person took Danny out of the elevator and into the competition kitchen, which was lit up as brightly as if it were a television soundstage.

He glanced toward the front of the room, and indeed, there were already four or five cameras bristling from that corner, lenses down and black, like sleeping snakes waiting to strike.

Shaking his head, feeling the annoyance and righteous indignation that had kept him awake for hours come rushing back, Danny put his hands on his hips and surveyed the kitchen.

It was completely empty.

An extra table had been set up at the front of the room, and was covered in a white cloth. It had to have something to do with the next challenge, and Danny resisted the urge to peek.

Deliberately averting his gaze, he wandered farther into the kitchen, poking his head into the walk-in cooler—they had fail-safe latches so no one could be locked inside by accident, but you know, just in case—and called out, “Hello? Eva?”

Maybe she’d gone to bed after all; maybe she was asleep in her room like a normal person. Or maybe she’d been awake in her suite, but had spied him through the peephole and decided not to open the door. Maybe—

A rustling noise drew Danny’s footsteps around the corner toward the dry-goods pantry. He pushed the door ajar with the side of his palm and peered inside, his heart going soft and sticky like brioche dough at what he saw.

He’d found Eva. She was asleep—her delectable little bottom propped on an overturned plastic tub, the top half of her body reclining awkwardly against the tall tiered wire racks holding containers of sugar, salt, and different types of flour. A clipboard was wedged into her lap, but her pen had fallen to the floor.

She was paler than the box of sugar behind her head, and there were purple bruise-like shadows under her eyes, stark and dramatic against her white skin.

Danny hesitated. Should he let her sleep? If he woke her now, she’d probably just try to go back to work, and she clearly needed her rest.

But that couldn’t be comfortable, that position she’d gotten herself into. She wouldn’t be able to sleep long, curled up like that, anyway. And when she woke, she’d have a monster crick in her neck.

Decision made, Danny stepped into the pantry and crouched down beside her.

“Eva?” He kept his voice soft, hoping not to startle her too badly, but she jarred awake as if he’d pinched her.

“What?” She blinked slowly, squinting against the light and smacking her lips in an innocently bewildered way that made Danny wonder what she’d been like as a little girl.

“You fell asleep in the kitchen,” he told her, glancing down at the clipboard still clutched in one of her hands. “Doing inventory? Geez, Eva. Don’t you have people to do that for you?”

What was the point of being rich and powerful if you still did the shit work yourself?

Shaking her head as if to clear the sleep from her brain, she said, “I do. But I made a last-minute change to the challenge, and I’d already sent everyone else to bed. Just had to check a few things.” Frowning down at herself and smoothing a palm over her wrinkled skirt, crumpled from the way she’d been sitting, she said, “I only sat for down for a second. I can’t believe I fell asleep.”

Danny manfully held back a really rude noise, the kind that would’ve earned him a smack to the back of the head from his mom. “Eva. Come on, you’ve been running on fumes for the last three days. You need to sleep.”

Scrunching up her face in denial, she said, “I need to finish this! The next challenge is, what?” She checked her watch and moaned. “God. Four hours away.”

“And everything’s ready,” Danny said. “I saw the table out front. Your plans are made, your pieces are in place. Whatever this checklist is, just let it go.”

“So if there’s not enough Maldon Sea Salt for everyone tomorrow, I’ll just shrug and say, Oh well, sucks to be you, but I needed a nap? No.”

“Any chef who can’t figure out a substitute for sea salt deserves whatever he gets,” Danny said firmly. “Part of the competition is about thinking on your feet, right?”

“Right,” Eva said, drawing the word out unhappily. “I am pretty tired, and it’s kind of ridiculously late. Which … hey, what are you doing down here? You should be getting a good night’s rest before the next challenge! It’s a big one, you know. The one that’ll decide which three teams make it to the final round in San Francisco.”

“I came down here to pick a fight with you, actually,” Danny said, laughing. Whatever lingering resentment and anger had been boiling under his skin evaporated the minute he saw her. “Or, more accurately, to pick up where we left off.”

“The television thing again? I guess you saw the cameras out there.” She looked momentarily guilty, her eyes shifting away from his face.

“Yep. All set up and ready to capture every nuance of our facial expressions while we cook.”

Relatively mild mockery, Danny thought—hardly the scathing commentary he’d mapped out in his head while tossing around on that torture device also known as a pull-out bed, but Eva’s expression tightened into one of defiance.

“That’s not what it’s about. And if you weren’t so ludicrously old-fashioned and conservative and ignorant, like you think the camera’s going to steal your soul or something, you’d be able to see that.”

Danny stood up and held out a hand to help her to her feet. “You mock, but that’s pretty much exactly what I think. Having those cameras in the room, it changes things. It changes the focus from the food to the chefs.”

“But that’s what I want!” Eva batted his hand away and wobbled to her feet on her own. “This whole competition is about highlighting young, up and coming chefs and their talent. Bringing them recognition and increasing the public’s respect for the culinary arts. How can I do that if no one even knows about the competition except for people who are already entrenched in the restaurant world?”

That … actually made sense.

“Okay, but it’s going to be on the Cooking Channel. The people who watch that, aren’t they already riding the chefs-are-awesome train?”

“Some of them,” Eva conceded, bending to grab her fancy fountain pen off the floor. “But a lot are just people who happen to enjoy food as entertainment.”

“Foodies,” Danny said, unable to keep the disgust out of his voice. “Food should not be a spectator sport.”

“Why not?” Eva argued, color flooding into her cheeks and replacing the worrisome pallor of a few minutes before. “Not everyone can be a great cook, Danny. But everyone likes to eat.”

“First of all, that’s bull. If you can read a recipe, you can cook. Second of all, stop fighting with me!”

“You came down here to fight with me! I’m just giving you what you want.”

He looked at her, flushed and panting, gray eyes bright as stars with the fervor of what she was saying.

“A fight is not what I want from you,” he said. He barely recognized his own voice, pitched so low, but he couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

She swayed on her feet, maybe partly from exhaustion, but at least half of it was the same desire to get closer that Danny felt. This wasn’t fair. Their resistance was down, it was the middle of the night, they were both working with no sleep and days of frustrated, unsatisfied desire. If something happened between them right now … would it even count?

Yeah. It would.

Cursing everyone from his parents for instilling such an inflexible moral code to himself for being unable to just stay the hell away from Eva Jansen, Danny turned and marched out of the pantry.

Leaving her there was the hardest thing he’d ever done.

But when she followed him out of the pantry a few seconds later, the magnetic connection had been broken, at least for the moment, and Danny could breathe again without searching every inhalation for a trace of her scent.

“So, you want the foodies of the world to know about the RSC. I get it. I mean, I don’t get it, get it, but…”

“No, you don’t.” The slow, halting weariness of her words made Danny pause. “Foodies aren’t the only people who watch the Cooking Channel. Big sponsors watch it, too, and they pay attention to what viewers like. Major appliance companies, brand-name makers of pots and pans, even travel-related companies like airlines and hotel chains—they all have money to spend on sponsorships, hoping to link their brand to whatever’s the coolest, most popular thing.”

“It’s all about money?” Danny sneered. “That hardly makes me more excited about it.”

“That’s because you work for your family in a business passed down through generations, with a huge support system already in place,” Eva replied, passion still heating her cheeks. “There are restaurants out there where chefs are doing amazing work, experimenting and playing and creating new techniques—but their places are small, just starting out, and the chefs don’t have the money to close down for the duration of the RSC. Do you know how much talent we lose out on, simply because the chefs can’t afford to even throw their hat in the ring?”

“I never thought of it that way.”

“Why should you? It’s not your job to see the big picture. It’s mine. The bigger and better-funded the competition is, the more chefs we can help to try out. The RSC shouldn’t be a contest between the top fifteen percent of restaurants, the solvent ones that have large enough staffs to cover the absence of their competing chefs. It should be for everyone.”

Danny breathed quietly and felt the entire world rearrange itself around him. Everything looked different, from the cameras to the cloth-covered table, to Eva standing straight and tall in front of him. Even wobbly and tired, she took his breath away.

And it wasn’t just her exotically tilted gray eyes or the pert Cupid’s bow of her pink lips or the diabolically distracting curves of her lithe, slender body.

It was her unexpectedly generous heart that took him by surprise and left him speechless with an emotion he couldn’t put a name to if he tried.

Eva shifted her weight from one aching foot to the other. “What?” she demanded.

He just stood there, staring at her.

“You’re a really nice person,” he said, as if it were some major revelation.

Annoyed, Eva tucked her hair behind her ear and went to gather her things up from the table she’d dumped them on when she got back from The Blind Tiger. “Don’t get carried away. It’s good business to include as many talented chefs as possible.”

His face got all knowing and smug. “Sure it is. And I guess it’s also good business to run yourself into the ground trying to do six different jobs, instead of letting anyone help you.”

Eva ground her molars together to keep from spitting out something about not needing any help, like a hysterical toddler.

My do it, my do it!
two-year-old Eva used to scream, according to her father, whenever anyone tried to tie her shoes for her.

Hopefully she’d grown up a little since then. “I have plenty of help,” she said carefully. “But this competition is a large, unwieldy event with a lot of moving pieces and parts.”

“So delegate some to that assistant of yours.”

“Drew has his own tasks,” she managed to say without blurting out that one of them was keeping tabs on the gossip about the chef contestants.

“Eva.” Danny sighed, running a hand over his stubbled jaw and back around to the nape of his neck. Eva tried not to imagine the way the short, silky hairs there prickled against his fingertips, tried not to wish her hand were there in its place, running through his hair and kneading the tension from his neck.

“I can’t believe you came down here,” she said, “all righteously indignant and ready to read me the riot act about food TV, and then when I manage to finally explain my position on that, you start picking another fight about my work habits! What is it with you? We can’t be together, so you’re going to nag me to death in revenge?”

“I am not nagging,” Danny protested, looking honestly insulted. “And you might have a point about the TV thing, but I’ve got a point about you working too hard. At least admit that.”

Eva hid a smile. It was way too fun to ruffle his feathers. She held up her thumb and forefinger, pinched together about an inch apart. “Maybe a small point. But Danny, seriously. There’s nothing else I can do.”

“There has to be someone…”

Eva slung her purse strap over her shoulder and worked to keep the green envy out of her voice. “I know you’ve got people you can lean on, and your team has you. It’s not like that for me, Danny. There’s no one.”

“That sucks,” he said baldly.

“I guess. But that’s the life I chose. I’m not afraid of hard work, and I have goals.” She shrugged, the motion setting off a riot of pain in her tired, overworked muscles. Danny’s sharp inhalation said he’d caught her involuntary flinch. She closed her eyes against the anger darkening his face.

“There’s a difference between hard work and work that’s slowly killing you,” he said intensely, his voice suddenly coming from right beside her. He put his hands on her shoulders and hissed as his strong fingers probed the tight knots there.

Eva whimpered, nearly staggering under the pressure of his hands as he kneaded her muscles like bread dough. “It’s only for a few more weeks,” she gasped. “I can make it.”

“Not without help,” Danny said, his breath so warm and soft against her hair. His hands burned through the thin, clingy material of her dress, the heat sinking into her muscles and relaxing her better than a bubble bath and a glass of wine.

Almost moaning, Eva tipped her head forward to rest against his broad chest, just for a moment. Her eyes drifted shut. “No help,” she slurred, her mind spinning back to that conversation with Claire. Choices. What she deserved. “I want to do it all, so I can have it all.”

“Okay. You’re not making a lot of sense. I think it’s time for bed.”

Eva snuggled in closer, wrapping one arm around his hard, lean waist. “Mmmm, yeah. Take me to bed.”

Danny’s laugh sounded painful, his chest vibrating against her. “God. You’re not making it easy to be good, you know that?”

“But you will be, anyway,” she muttered, half disappointed and half pleased. There was something solid and steadying about the fact that she knew him so well. Trusted him not to take advantage of this moment of weakness.

“Yeah,” he grunted unhappily. “I guess I will. Come on, sweetcakes, let’s get you upstairs.”

As Danny hooked an arm around her shoulder and half led, half carried her up to the penthouse, Eva tucked her face against his warm neck and breathed deeply, happier than she’d been in days.

Everything was working out. She was so close, mere inches away from everything she’d ever wanted—and with Danny’s arms around her, she had to wonder.

Would any of it matter, if she didn’t have him?

Before she could reconsider, before her nerves could flutter to life and choke her into silence, Eva blurted, “After the competition. Once the RSC is all over, can we…?”

He paused, glancing down at her with obvious shock.

Plucking up her courage, Eva firmed her mouth and lifted her chin. “I want to find out where this can go.”

A slow smile spread across his face, lighting those eyes up like fireworks. “Yeah? So do I.”

And that was it. He held her close, kept her safe at his side all the way up to her suite, and Eva felt as if she were floating through the hotel.

It wasn’t much of a commitment, she knew—it was vague, unspecified, leaving plenty of wiggle room. But it was more of a commitment than she’d ever managed to offer anyone before, and the fact that Danny seemed to feel the same way?

Well. That was more than the icing on the cake. That was the icing, and the creamy filling, and the cake, and the plate it was sitting on.

It was everything.