Feel the Heat (Hot In the Kitchen) (23 page)

“Oh no,” Lili murmured. She took a step forward, with the clear intention of doing what she did best—smooth and fix. His hand tightened around hers and willed her still.

Gina jutted her chin to match her chest. “Oh my God, Cara, you’re such a spoilsport. Even when we were kids, you always had to be the queen freaking bee. We just want everyone to know they can’t mess with the DeLucas.” She flounced off to the front of the house to Cara barking her name.

Taking it as a sign that the gods were finally working in his favor, Jack nodded toward the kitchen and whispered, “How about the great escape, alley-style?”

Ten minutes later, he parked his rental outside a nondescript building on Fulton Market, the West Loop street that hosted many of Chicago’s finest dining establishments, art galleries, and high-end lofts. He’d made sure the car’s air-conditioning was on full blast because apparently it wasn’t sufficient that he couldn’t have her—he needed to torture himself with the sight of those beautiful, erect nipples.

His jeans were not loose enough for this.

Her face lifted as they approached the entrance to the building. “Is this your new place?”

He smiled back, feeling unaccountably proud at her enthusiasm. “Yep. I’ve got six weeks to get it into shape, but I can do it.” The mostly Polish crew was working on the electrics today, and every ripped-up wall was awash in a spaghetti wiring explosion. Lili stepped forward and he body-checked her back into the foyer.

“Best not to go any farther. It’s easy to step on something you shouldn’t and get hurt.”

Smaller than his usual restaurant footprint, the space’s eighty-year-old ornate tin ceiling and the warm firehouse brick lent it an intimacy not usually found in a Jack Kilroy outpost. As she peered in, he spent a few minutes pointing out the planned locations of the kitchen and the dining room. It was still unformed but he itched to know what she thought.

“Nice, but what about the food?” Of course his girl would focus on the essentials.

“It’ll be new American with country French influences. Lots of small plates, no entrées over fifteen dollars.”

“Will you have that chicken liver crostini dish?”

“With the fig marmalade? You liked that?” he asked, knowing damn well that she did but needing the boost only her validation could give.

“Hmm.” Her eyes glazed over.

He spoke at length about his ideas, upping the ante with each subsequent dish, and watched carefully for her reaction while trying to control his own. Each description produced a sexy hum of approval or a flash of her tongue that aroused him intolerably. Why did his food sound so much better with her breathy endorsement? Cooking for her, then taking her while he tasted his flavors on her lips was about as good a date as he could imagine.

He snapped back to reality. His real life where dating this woman was no longer an option.

Somewhere along the way, her expression had faded to solemn. “Why do you do it?”

“What? Cook incredible food?”

“TV. The celebrity industrial complex.” She stared at him with such intent that his body tightened like he was being grill-pressed against the wall. “You said you’d rather be cooking in your restaurant. That you miss it. Except for all those annoying
quinceñeras
.”

The twinge in his belly acknowledged the truth of that. He did miss it but it wasn’t as if he could stop moving. Success addiction was about the sweetest feeling, almost as good as sex, and the way his sex life was panning out lately, it was his only reliable high.

“I do it because it’s never enough and I’m greedy.”

Her tongue darted and licked her lips. Pink, wet, making him hard. He stared, telegraphing exactly how greedy he was.

She didn’t back down, just hitched that skeptical eyebrow. “I thought you were going to say you owe it to the masses to share your genius.”

“That too.” He shrugged and the moment passed, as they always do. “I’m also providing significant employment. Publishing, television, tabloids. Cara’s coming with me to NBN, you know.”

“Good to know one of the DeLucas will still be employed by year’s end.”

Alarm pinged him. “What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing.” She knuckled the corner of her eye and turned toward the exit. “We should go.”

Not so fast.
He snugged her close and breathed her in while he still could. “Sweetheart, tell me.”

She didn’t speak, so he rubbed her back. Holding her felt comfortable and right, like the first bite of a warm bread pudding. They stayed like that for a few minutes until she murmured against his chest, “We’re in trouble. DeLuca’s is in trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“My mother’s medical bills left us pretty strapped. And you saw it on Saturday night. We’re not exactly raking it in.” She peeked up, her eyes shining. “But the show should help, right?”

The show might generate some interest, but he doubted it would solve anything over the long-term. Jack had enough experience to know that brief spurts of publicity were exactly that. Brief.

“What about Maximo?”

That made her smile. “Marco.”

“Whatever.”

She shook her head. “He’s practically broke himself. He spends a lot of time in Vegas and he has the worst poker face. My eight-year-old cousin, Freddie, could run rings around him.”

Huh, just one more reason why Marco needed to be high-fived in the face. Taking her hand in his, he rubbed his thumb along her palm. “Do you mind me asking how much?”

“Marco loaned my father fifty grand for my mother, but we’re bleeding money every week and the lines of credit are drying up.”

His mind whirred. That was doable but, throwing money at it was just a Band-Aid. Her eyes, as big as blue headlights, found his again and it felt like minutes passed in her gaze. He released her because it was starting to feel a little too good.

“You’ve got something to say,” she said, reading something altogether different into the fact that he had practically shoved her from his embrace.

“It’s not really my place.” A chef’s kitchen was sacrosanct, which is why Jack despised those makeover shows where some mouthy big shot overhauled another chef’s menus.

“No, go on. I’d like to hear your opinion.”

He thought about diplomacy, then figured she was a big girl. “You’re overstaffed, overpriced, overstocked, and your menu’s too big. You have at least one line cook too many, maybe two, and your father would probably be better off running the kitchen instead of ambushing poor, unsuspecting, brain-injured chefs at the bar.” He tried to soften it with a smile. “But I think you know all that.”

“My father is old school. There are so many changes we could make to economize and draw in new customers but he won’t hear of it. And he likes to keep his hand in everywhere.”

Iron fist, more like,
but Jack held his tongue and sucked in a speech-countering breath. Besides, he understood that instinct to control your environment. The position was called head chef for a reason.

She smiled. “At least you don’t have to work with your family. As much as I love them, it can be trying as all get-out.” The words were hardly on the air before discomfort marred her features. “I’m sorry, that was insensitive.”

“It was?”

A flush of red crept up her chest. “Yesterday, you mentioned trouble with your sister and something about your biological father. About how he wasn’t interested.”

He’d forgotten he told her that. Next time he had a concussion, he needed to refrain from the vino while knocking back the narcotics. Despite being a chatterbox, as Jules was fond of telling him, Jack didn’t usually lay out his life story on the first date. But hey, this wasn’t a date and the likelihood of it developing into one was slim to crapola because after the taping—in, oh, three hours—he was never going to see this woman again. Why, then, was his mouth itching to spill? Maybe because she had cracked open that steadfast façade of hers and he knew that had been difficult for her. More likely, he wanted to make the moment last and ride this wave of intimacy until he wiped out.

He must be starting to enjoy the hospitality in the ninth circle of hell.

“Until I was ten and my mother married my stepfather, it was just the two of us. She was Irish and she emigrated to England when her family threw her out at sixteen for getting pregnant. She went into labor with me on the Liverpool dock.”

Her eyes enlarged in surprise. “A dramatic beginning. How apt.”

He smiled, appreciating her effort to make it easier. “She never talked about him. Maybe she thought she’d have more time. She was only twenty-eight years old when she died.” A brief, painful memory of her brassy personality deadened by a faded hospital gown and an ill-fitting wig flashed across his mind. He blinked it away. “When I started getting spots on British morning TV about nine years ago, he came out of the woodwork looking for money.”

“Oh.” She rubbed her neck. “What did you do?”

“I paid up. Then I told him I never wanted to see him again.”

The low whine of a drill made the perfect soundtrack to the maudlin atmosphere. She stepped close and slotted her hand into his. “What happened, exactly?”

“Exactly?” He squeezed, taking strength from her warmth. “I’d hoped to show him my new restaurant in Covent Garden, but he had a same-day return ticket to Dublin and didn’t have time. Instead, we met in a bar at London Paddington.” The clarity of that day struck him anew. The bustle of the station, the departure announcements ringing reedy over the PA system. Jack had arrived a half hour early and knocked back a double scotch, then shredded countless napkins while he waited for the express train from Heathrow. A flying visit, his father called it, flashing that smile, a funhouse mirror image of Jack’s. No time to tour his pride and joy. No time to talk about his mother or why the man whose genetic material he shared had been absent all these years. Only a few rushed moments to clink whiskey glasses (both rounds on Jack—
sláinte
) and cut to the meat course.

“He led with ‘Jack, son, I’ve had a run of bad luck…’ He called me son. It was a nice touch, I suppose.” Learning his father’s true intentions had crushed him, but better he know than hold on to childhood fantasies of star-crossed youth ripped apart by their censorious families.

“He’s rung a few times since but I never call him back.” The most recent time six months ago. His assertion of illness hadn’t moved Jack in the slightest. He met Lili’s glossy blue gaze, challenging her to judge him. “I know that must sound harsh to someone for whom family is everything.”

Her hand tightened in his. “You did what you had to do, Jack. Sometimes you have to cut out the toxic elements. For your own sanity.”

He couldn’t help but read doom into that. It’s what Lili had been trying to do since that video came out. Weed him out before he poisoned her life any further.

Telling her should have made him feel better, especially as it opened up the possibility of sinking into that soft womanly body for a sympathy hug. There would be no more of that nonsense. He broke their connection and returned his gaze to the restaurant’s embryonic interior.

“There I go again, making it all about me.”

“I could listen to you talk all day,” she said, her voice thrillingly compassionate.

His chest tightened and he cleared his throat like he could dislodge the annoying constriction. “I’ll probably need art for these walls. Interested in picking up a commission?”

At his abrupt halt to the intimacy, her mouth quirked but she didn’t question it. “I’m not sure my work would be suitable. It’s—”

“Porny?” he cut in, aiming to lighten the mood.

That got him a cuff in the arm and they were back to the playful vibe between them. Not entirely, but he faked it. He’d learned a few tricks since climbing the ladder of fame.

“No!” she said. “I was going to say far too sophisticated for new American with country French influences. Though I suppose you could get some nice pics of farm girls doing chores.”

“Virginal milkmaids with big buckets?”

“The farmer’s wife with her husband’s huge…knife,” she said with a naughty laugh that did wonderful things to his brain, and surprisingly, not the one in his trousers. The tension of last night and the previous few moments had faded only to be replaced with a sweet ache somewhere in the vicinity of his lungs. A ground-rumbling sound started up at the back of the site.

“We should make a move,” he said, resolved to keep a cool head where Lili was concerned from here on out. Just a few hours to go.

“We have some time, don’t we?”

“Depends on what you have in mind.”

She brushed by him toward the exit. On purpose, the little minx.

“Well, I figured you showed me yours, so now it’s time I showed you mine.” Those pool-deep blues gaped wide, an innocent coda to her flirty words.

Not. Buying. It.

Heat burned a molten trail down his spine. So much for keeping it chill. He followed her out to the street.

Chapter Fifteen

There was no respite from the heat inside the fourth-floor studio of the Flatiron Arts Building in Wicker Park. Not that it would have made a blind bit of difference. The studio Lili shared with Zander was small and stuffy, but still large enough that she should have been able to keep a sane, chilled distance from Jack.