Feel the Heat (Hot In the Kitchen) (22 page)

She liked him better when she thought he was a man whore. She liked herself better. Now she wanted to know more about the man lurking behind that PR-crafted façade. The man who didn’t seem all that at ease with his fame.

“After everything you went through in high school, I don’t want to see you getting hurt. By Jack or the haters. Just be careful, ’kay?” Cara smiled, putting the unpleasantness behind her.

That’s exactly what she would be. Careful. With her heart, and with Jack.

“Now to the important stuff,” her sister said, and Lili was ninety-nine percent positive she wasn’t talking about food. “What are you wearing for the taping?”

*  *  *

DeLuca’s was bustling, with the production crew going through their paces, setting up what Lili could only assume were harsh, unforgiving lights and boom microphones that picked up every traitorous whisper against the Dark Lord. Off in the direction of the kitchen, Cara’s strident voice barked unrecognizable orders. Not quite ready for that level of participation, Lili headed underground before the festivities really got going.

She wasn’t avoiding Jack. No, not at all.

DeLuca’s wine cellar was more of a basement than a proper cellar, but in the last couple of years, Tad had spent time building it up into something any top-notch dining establishment could be proud of. As Lili descended into the cool cavern, she took in the wall-to-wall racks, the temperature panel that looked like it could program a spaceship, and her cousin, now hunched over as he examined a bottle on the bottom shelf.

“Any chance we have something hidden in here that’s worth a fortune?” she asked, not entirely joking.

Tad looked up and gave that lopsided grin he used to great effect on the opposite sex. “If there was a bottle of 1787 Château Lafite knocking around here, I’d be lying on a beach with one of Kilroy’s lingerie models instead of trying to decide what wine recs we should have for the taping.”

Too much to hope for. She drew a heart inset with a
J
in the dusty film of the nearest bottle, then quickly swiped it clean.

“The show’s not going to help much, is it?”

Tad straightened to his full six feet two and rolled his shoulders until his spine cracked. “It won’t hurt, but we need a more long-term strategy. Tony cutting the menu would be a start.”

Having had this argument with her father over the size of the menu and how stock mountains inevitably led to waste, she knew it was a losing proposition. Dad’s kitchen was off-limits and he refused to listen to any suggestions that would interfere with his royal vision.

Tad shrugged in response to her silence. He knew it was a dead end. “But why are we focusing on imminent financial ruin when there’s scuttlebutt to be discussed? Saw something
molto interessante
when I was leaving work last night.”

Lili felt like a bird was trapped in her chest and she fought to keep her reaction light. “Oh?”

“Do I owe you a solo spin on the Harley?”

“I just took his photograph.”

“The old ‘come up to my studio to see my negatives’ trick? I haven’t tried that one since freshman year in college.” He laughed. “Even I could see that Cheshire grin of his from forty feet out. He is so warm for your form.”

That Jack was still smiling when he hit the street gave her an unreasonable burst of hope. Lili studied the racks taking up the entire west wall of the basement, then looked at her cousin squarely. “I know.”

“Why so sad? I thought that’s what you wanted.”

“He wants to date me.” Or he wanted to date her, past tense. “No nookie until I agree.”

“Weird strategy to bag chicks, but okay. And that’s a problem because…?”

“Have you not been paying attention to what’s gone down in the last twenty-four hours? I told him it wasn’t happening and he backed off.”

Tad snorted his disbelief. “So, you trot out a bunch of excuses and now you’re annoyed that he’s not down on bended knee still begging for the chance to be your arm candy?”

“No,” she said uneasily. Was she annoyed? When had she become that person?

“Women. You have no freaking clue what you want. Kilroy does, though.” Tad’s lips turned up in a shade of a smile. “I bet I could learn a thing or two from him.”

“So I should date him so you can have a bro-mentor?”

“You should date him because he likes you and you like him. Quit overthinking it.”

Quit overthinking it.
A hot prickle crept up her neck at the thought of how much Jack desired her, and how, unlike Marco, he had no problem showing it. His probing gaze touching every part of her. His dirty (she hoped) French talk. His large, manual labor hands on her, inside her, setting off fires in places that hadn’t seen that kind of heat since the Bronze Age.

Tad regarded her curiously. “I don’t even want to know why you’ve turned that very bright shade of red.”

Flustered, she forced her body to calm. She had very good excuses—reasons, dammit!—for not dating Jack Kilroy. If people were already wielding the bitch forks after one hot smooch, a relationship would whip up some sort of fan club bitchery frenzy. Setting herself up for online target practice in the cruel, unwinnable court of public opinion sounded like social suicide. She refused to become that girl again.

“It’s not as simple as liking someone. You’ve heard what people are saying. He’s the worst possible person for someone like me.”

Tad looked affectionately bored. “Remember when you used to come crying to me because Diana Matteo said your body was sixty percent pasta instead of water?”

She shut her eyes as images of Diana and her cronies squirting packets of ketchup in Lili’s hair streamed on the backs of her eyelids. Three years older than her, Tad was closer than a brother and had always been around to pick up the pieces. He knew it hurt then and that it still did.

“What did I tell you to do?”

“Ignore them. And stop taking third helpings of Mom’s lasagna.”

“Well, perhaps that wasn’t the best advice.”

“I know, I love lasagna.”

“I mean about ignoring them, wiseass.” He pulled out his phone. “Look at this.”

It was the “Jack’s Fat Chick Rules” Facebook page, and though the name made her cringe, secretly she was thrilled at how her family had rallied around to defend her.

“What about it?”

“It’s more popular than the ‘I hate’ one.”

“Okay,” she said slowly, trying to rotate her brain to apprehension.

“People are identifying with you, Lili. This page Gina created has almost nineteen thousand fans and it’s gaining every hour. Don’t shy away from this. You should be embracing how freaking gorgeous you are.” He turned on the DeLuca smile that looked ten times better on the males in the family. “Just sayin’. And anyone’s better than Marco Rossi.”

“You don’t like Marco because he’s fond of helping himself to your precious…” She waved around the space her ex considered his personal wine supply, much to Tad’s chagrin.

“I don’t like him because he never treated you the way you deserved. All that crap about how cuddly you were and how he loved having something to hold on to. Asshole.” Tad’s mouth was set in a grim slash. Always indefatigably good-humored, it was a shock to see him as anything else. Marco’s careless “compliments” had wounded, but Lili had always considered them the necessary trade-off in dating a hottie. Now she wondered if she’d been selling herself short all these years.

“He lives thousands of miles away,” she said, getting back to Jack.

“Two-hour flight. Phone sex.”

She’d be lying if she said it hadn’t occurred to her. Dirty weekends in the Big Apple. Delicious phone sex. And then a scandal when their spicy sexts got hacked—because knowing her luck, that was the most likely outcome.

“He’s kind of intense. It’s hot and all, but I don’t know if I can be what he wants.” Jack’s need couched as a command still haunted her.
Really be with me
. How could she keep a man that passionate satisfied and, above all, interested? He wanted a woman who could match his appetite and drive, not a sharp-talking mouse.

Tad heaved a long-suffering sigh. “I know what the real problem is.”

“Of course you do.”

He brushed her forehead with a kiss, and when she wiped it off dramatically, he grinned. It was a thing they did. “Listen to your favorite cousin. I’ve never steered you wrong. You’re afraid.”

“Stunning deduction. Absolutely stunning.”

“No, listen, not just about this online shit. You have it pretty cozy here. Sure, the business is headed to the crapper and Tony could give Genghis Khan a run for his rubles, but you’ve got a niche. You took over as mother hen when Frankie became ill. You’re the person everyone relies on, and that can be comforting as hell, but it can also be confining. Time to bust out of those chains, babe. Learn to fly.”

He flapped his hands like wings, and she slapped them away. Learn to fly, her ass.

First Cara, now Tad. Everyone was an armchair psychologist. “What do you think I was doing in O’Casey’s with Jack? I tried to bust out of my comfort zone and take a chance. He made promises”—she flapped her own hands now—“with his eyes! He promised me a one-night stand with all that hot-’n’-heavy smoldering and then he changed the rules. And I’m the one who ends up trending on Twitter.” With her comfort zone shattered and no longer showing up on any known maps.

Tad blinked at her outburst. “Jesus, you really need to get laid. So Jack challenges you. Very positive start.” He returned to dusting off a couple of bottles of a nice Super Tuscan she was rather partial to and set them on the bottom step.

“You’re such an ass,” she said, not unkindly. Jack Kilroy liked her and she liked him. It was silly to feel such hope, but strangely easy in this cool, darkened room insulated from the world above her head. But more than hope, she felt one step closer to the person she had dreamed of becoming back in those harrowing days. Cool, poised, forward-thinking Lili. Her blood surged like the first time she picked up a camera and realized there were myriad possibilities.

“Go make him an offer he can’t refuse,” Tad said with a straight face.

She groaned. “How long have you been waiting to use that one?”

“All my life, babe.”

Chapter Fourteen

Jack was officially in the ninth circle of hell. Not knowing how the original circles of Dante’s
Inferno
were actually populated, Jack invented his own occupants. The seventh circle was for guys who hadn’t got laid in months. The eighth was for idiots who were sex-starved and had a sizzling woman raring to go but still chose to wait it out in the hopes of getting a date. And the ninth was for the suckers who had the same problems as the ones in the seventh and eighth circles but had to suffer through it all while listening to opera.

Jack loathed opera.

But Tony’s kitchen meant Tony’s rules, so Pavarotti or whoever the hell was shredding Jack’s nerve endings while he prepped his
mise-en-place
would be the musical accompaniment for the day and probably the entire evening. Laurent had muttered something about how it lent a sorely needed gravitas after Jack’s seedier exploits.

He was running on a couple of hours of ragged sleep, his every cell consumed with Lili and his aching need for her. He could still feel her kiss on his mouth, the imprint of her nipples on his tongue, her slick warmth coating his fingers. Holding her last night while she shattered against his hand had been so arousing that even giving it a flickering thought made him hard enough to pound nails.

Calling her out on her bullshit had seemed like such a smart idea until his dramatic exit had been cut short by that disclosure about her high school suffering. His heart hurt that she would ever have to endure that pain. Then it thundered furiously that she would allow it to create this barrier between them. Wasn’t it enough that no other woman could hold a candle to her hotness, that he wanted her more than was truly good for him?

Right, because
his
opinion was all that mattered. Bighead.

He had always considered his life becoming public property the necessary saddlebags to his goal of taking his brand to the next level. Any woman in his life would need a thick skin to withstand the barbs of twenty-first-century fame. He couldn’t ask Lili to upend her existence for him, and the express train to his next conquest, network television, had already left the station.

Still, even if they had no chance, he wished she could see herself the way he saw her. Funny, loyal, beautiful, sexy. Christ, so sexy. He rubbed his lip, still marked with her passion. When she bit him, he had almost come in his pants for the first time since he was a pizza-faced teen. That’s how she made him feel. Like an infatuated teenager with perma-wood.

“What are you smiling about?” Cara’s brittle voice arrested his fantasies while her glacial eyes screened him carefully. He needed to stop grinning like a half-wit. It would not do.

“Nothing.” He snatched one of the menus she’d brought and scanned for errors. He had decided to open with a bruschetta trio—mini-helpings of three toppings served over his own toasted, rustic bread: tomato-basil-fresh mozz, the braised rabbit stew, and prosciutto and lobster crème fraîche. Working with the contest twist, Tony had chosen a risotto for Jack and gnocchi for his own menu. Not being able to serve pasta had immediately put Jack at a disadvantage—risotto could be tricky—but he had been more concerned about the choice of entrée. If Tony had picked something that needed to be slow-cooked for hours, Jack would have been screwed.

Thankfully, the host chef had gone easy on him with lamb chops, leaving Jack to choose a sauce. Jack had spent the entire morning creating something new, and he was pleased with the outcome, a salsa verde that brought out the meat’s flavors to perfection. The finishing touch was another mini trio, this time sweet—a Valrhona chocolate torte, salted caramel gelato, and zabaglione with fresh seasonal berries.

All good, but he’d be hard-pressed to beat last night’s feast and the sweet taste of Lili’s plump, luscious breasts. He bet she tasted amazing all over.

“Listen, we need to talk,” Cara cut in. Hands cupping slender hips, she balanced her slight weight on one precarious heel and eyed him like she’d caught him looking at smutty photos.

“Shoot.”

“I don’t know what you think your end game is.”

His brain stutter-stepped, baffled at her choice of words. “My end game?”

“I was watching you last night at dinner, how you couldn’t take your eyes off my sister. I won’t have you screwing Lili over. When I suggested she indulge in your services, I never expected you’d get all”—with an arc of her hand, she swiped the air near his face in a threatening manner—“smitten.”

“Back up a second,” he said, scooting uncomfortably over the “smitten” bit. “When you suggested she indulge in my what?”

She tapped her foot. “Jack, did you, for one second, think my very young, very inexperienced sister would go for you without a little encouragement? She’s had a bad year between my mom and Marco and slaving away at this place for my father. I promised her you’d be up for some fun and games.” She looked to the ceiling and shook her head in disbelief. “And you couldn’t even do that.”

Well, he was with her on the disbelief front. In fact, he was more surprised that he was surprised at all. Lili had made it clear from the beginning that she was interested in one thing, and it wasn’t what was going on between his ears, but last night, she had shared an important part of herself. Her fragility had blazed through his veins and clamped his heart in a vise.

Shit. Three days in and his heart had entered the equation.

Luckily, he didn’t have time to inspect that because Cara was bringing her rant home. “I don’t know what you expect to get out of this, but you are not good enough for my sister, Jack.”

Cold fury grabbed him by the throat. “But I’m good enough to service her?”

She blanched. “She’s not like us, Jack. If you hurt her—”

“Cara, mind your own business.” He and his producer had butted heads before, but it had never gotten personal. Hey, it still hadn’t. In her eyes, he was a meal ticket, a vessel she could pour her ambitions into, not a real person with, God forbid, feelings. Had it occurred to no one that
he
might be the one at risk of getting his supposedly bulletproof heart stomped flatter than a veal cutlet?

Again with the heart stuff. That needed to stop. Stat.

“You hurt her,” Cara repeated, the ice coming through clear, “and I’m going to cut off your
coglioni
and feed them to tree squirrels.” With that, she strode out of the kitchen in a tornado of indignation.

What. The. Fuck.

All he wanted was a date. Just a little quality time to get to know this woman. He shook his head, trying to clear the shock. Didn’t work.

He needed to forget about loco DeLuca women and nails-on-a-chalkboard arias and get his mind in the game. A run might clear his head. Or whacking said head against the Dumpster in the alley for an hour.

“I’m taking a break,” he snapped at Laurent, who had been too busy flirting with one of the scarier big-hairs to notice Cara’s flip off the rails. Crashing through the kitchen doors, he bumped into that other infuriating DeLuca. Lili.

He frowned, then frowned harder at the way his heart boosted at the sight of her. “What are you doing here?”

“I work here.” She tilted her head, taking in his fierce scowl. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” Of course she was killing him in hip-hugging jeans and a wispy excuse for a top that barely contained her everything. Killing him.

“Okay,” she dragged out. She peeked around his shoulder through the window panel into the kitchen. “Is Cara about?”

“No. I expect she’s off shouting at someone and making them feel very, very small.”

“I’ve always wondered what a food television producer does.”

He shoved his hands in his pockets for safety and his own sanity. “You sleep okay?”

“Fine. You?”

“Like a baby,” he lied.

“Wake up every two hours, wet?”

“How did you know?” That netted him a raspy laugh and went some way to defrosting his chill. It wasn’t far from the truth, either.

“Jack, about last night…”

He held his breath. Nothing good ever started with those words.

“I just wanted to say…well,
grazie
.”

That was a first and it eased a smile from him. “You liked my gelato?”

“Yeah, you give good gelato,” she said, her color rising while her eyelids dipped. He loved that. “How’s the prep?”

“Menu’s set. Your father breezed in for the beauty shots and then took off, so he must be feeling confident.”

“Beauty shots?”

“The final dishes, perfectly styled. They cut them in during editing.” A thought unfurled in his brain. A brilliant, sparkling thought. “I want to show you something.”

“Sounds promising.”

“You wish.” He took her slender-fingered hand into his.
Zing.
Every bloody time. Her nipples poked through the devilishly thin material of her top, all hard and pouty. And now his dick felt all hard and pouty. Wonderful. “Let’s get out of here for a while.”

A nose wrinkle preceded a furtive look over her shoulder. “I really should find Cara. I said I’d help.”

Farther along the hallway, a door banged open and out thundered Gina, closely followed by a bent-out-of-shape Cara. Both were far too involved in their drama to notice anyone else.

“Cara, I’m not taking it off,” Gina said, puffing out her ample chest. It strained against a sparkly pink T-shirt adorned with the words TEAM FAT CHICK.

“You cannot wear it,” Cara countered emphatically. “We need to show the restaurant in the most professional light possible. This is too important.”