Feel the Heat (Hot In the Kitchen) (28 page)

“You’re here,” she said stupidly.

“Just finishing up,” he said without looking at her. He returned to his task of scrubbing something the kitchen crew could handle tomorrow.

“Can we talk?”

“I’m all talked out.” He looked up and met her gaze. His mossy eyes had turned to hunter green, dark buttons in his tired face. There was none of the heat and intensity she had come to love, only cold reproach and a hardness that shocked her. She wanted him to warm her with his gaze, soothe her with his touch. She wanted
her
Jack.

“Jack, I can’t thank you enough for what you did tonight. You have no idea how much it meant to me.”

No response, just the scratch-scrape of the steel wool against the pan. She took a wonky step, hoping that inching closer to him might help dissipate the animosity crackling through the air. Might help to ease him as it had done after Jules’s bombshell. He scrubbed harder.

“I can only imagine what you must think of us.”

He set the pan on the dish rack to be run through the next dishwasher cycle, then fixed her with a stare of such flat rage that she recoiled.

“I don’t think anything.”

She doubted that very much. “You have every right—”

“Because I’m not supposed to think, am I? I’m just supposed to shut up and play my part. At least, now I know why you didn’t want to date me. It was easier to string me along until I leave. Keep me sweet while you played me like a fiddle.”

“Jack, I haven’t been playing you. I wanted to date you. I want to date you.” Her words sounded too small for the moment, not urgent enough to repel his accusation.

“Oh, really? Have you finally worked out that being associated with me is good for your business? I’ve had people try to work me for a profit, but I never would have expected this from
you
.”

He said it like he knew her. She had felt as though he did. Hurt rolled off him in waves, lapping at her heart.

“I told you things, Lili. Things about my father, about Jules. Stuff I’ve never told another living soul.” He threw a dishtowel at the sink. It missed and sailed sadly to the floor. “Have you gathered enough information for when the gutter press come knocking? Should be quite the exclusive. You’ve got all the up-close-and-personal shots on your camera and now some juicy human interest gossip to round it out. His father’s not interested and his sister will only talk to him when she’s hit rock bottom. Shit writes itself. Jack Kilroy, good in the kitchen, good in the sack, not so good in real life.”

Realization warmed the glacial air and pricked her skin. This went so much deeper than the show. She wanted to curl her body around him and tell him he was mistaken. Tell him he could trust her just like she knew she could trust him.

“Jack, I haven’t been playing you. You’ve got to believe that. I know we got off on the wrong foot, that it looked like I wanted you for one thing, but it’s different now. I swear.”

But hours of simmering had stewed his anger into something sour. Fury sharpened his features to granite, and when he spoke, it was rougher and less cultured than usual.

“I felt sorry for you. I thought you were actually upset about that video. About all those mean things being said about you. You offered up your sob story and I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. But no, you had a completely different agenda and it doesn’t matter who gets hurt. I’m just a guy with hot hands and a hard-on, a narcissistic fame whore primed to lose his ever-loving mind when a sexy girl comes onto him in a bar. A bar filled with your friends and relatives and coworkers all ready to get the money shot.”

The cold dread chilling her veins hardened to ice. Back to that ridiculous accusation? “You’ve got this all wrong, Jack. I already told you my family wasn’t responsible for the video.” But even as the words slipped past her lips, doubt assailed her. She just didn’t know anymore.

“Tell me, was the video a spur-of-the-moment thing or were you and Marco in cahoots all along? And when that wasn’t enough to guarantee full houses, you thought having your father beat the famous chef might be better all around.”

Mind flailing, she battled to process this latest punch. Jack thought she planned that video—with Marco? He thought she purposefully made herself a laughing stock and invited a storm of torrential hate to rain down on her. And for what? A few extra bookings for her family’s restaurant.

That was wrong on so many levels she didn’t know where to start. She didn’t have to. Suddenly he appeared taller, larger; then she realized it was because he was closer. Looming over her with those green-gold eyes dark as burned caramel. The freckly smudges she had worshipped with her mouth, all thirteen of them, were practically transparent against the high color in his face.

Trying to parse gradations of the truth would be futile. She had stopped Gina—she had fired her—but the actions of her cheating family were down to her. The buck stopped here, she thought grimly, like she was the president or something.

“I had nothing to do with that video. My family made a mistake and I take full responsibility for it.”

In his fury-stoked eyes, she thought she saw a flash of the Jack she knew, but it vanished before she could grasp it.

“Which part, Lili? Which part was a mistake?” A couple more steps and he had sealed them together, his forearms trapping her against the countertop. All banked heat, his body vibrated raw power, a contrast to his unyielding mouth, cruel and unforgiving. Still beautiful, though. Always that.

He rubbed his thumb across her lip, soft, devastating, and she gasped at the tenderness, another electrifying difference from the hard, unbending lines of his face. It shamed her to admit it, but that simple touch was enough to rev her body up to all systems go in zero point zero seconds flat.

“Which part was a mistake, Lili? Kissing me senseless in that bar? Playing hot nurse at my hotel? Letting me stroke and tease you until you could barely stand it? Biting me when I wouldn’t fuck you fast enough? Was that a mistake?”

He pushed his thumb past her lips and the heat in her belly turned to want. And the want turned to need. And the need turned to heat again. She moaned.

At the sound, he dropped his hand from her face as if her touch made his skin crawl. His eyes dimmed, like all the lights in the city had blacked out in one fell swoop.

“I think the mistake was that you were found out. I’ve just been a pawn in your games. Promote the restaurant. Win back Marco. Take your pick. And if you get your rocks off along the way, that’s a bonus. Cara told me all about the plan. How I was brought in to show you a good time.”

Now her gasp was from shock instead of pleasure. She couldn’t get a full breath. Only useless little bursts of air made it to her lungs.

“We could have been so good together. So damn—” He raked his hair fast, but not so fast she missed the tremor in his hand. “I should have just screwed you when you threw yourself at me.”

A choked sob caught in her throat. Whoever said words could never hurt hadn’t the first idea what they were talking about. She felt hollowed out, her chest a large, empty cavity. No heartbeat, no breaths, nothing.

Then he was gone.

She wiped her eyes. No tears, but her hands shook and she slumped against the countertop. Her skin still burned from where his thumb had branded her.

A few hours ago, she had felt she could do anything because being with him had that effect. She could get the restaurant back on track and finally apply to grad school. She could fix things between Jack and his sister. She could give herself to the most exciting man she had ever met and revel in his naked desire for her. The thought of seeing more of him had scared her, but she could withstand a lot, even insults and jibes from people she had never met. But not from him. She was strong, but not that strong.

Because if she were stronger, she wouldn’t be feeling like her entire world had crashed around her ears and the one person who could make it better despised the floor she stood on.

Chapter Eighteen

T
his hotel suite is too bloody small,
Jack decided.

And there was nothing on TV. A
Kilroy’s Kitchen
episode sighting resulted in a resounding strike of the Off button on the remote. At the moment, he couldn’t stand his real self, never mind that impostor on the small screen.

Since stalking out of DeLuca’s a couple of hours ago, he’d fought an internal battle, trying to push from his memory Lili’s injured expression when he’d laid out his indictment of the DeLucas. Either she was good enough to give Meryl Streep a run for her Oscars or he’d got it so wrong he had destroyed everything.

But damn, he wasn’t wrong. A mistake, she’d said about her family’s cheatin’ ways. Sure was. One big mistake, yet somehow he was the one left feeling like shit. That kind of math made no sense. Not getting laid for months, that was the kind of math he understood because when you haven’t had sex for an eternity, it blocks up your brain. Lili was the first woman to spark his interest since he’d started this ludicrous sex fast, and he had let her burrow under his skin.

No.

More.

He should watch porn. That’d teach her. But even though he’d demanded the indiscreet, snap-happy employee who had uploaded photos of his breakfast banquet be gifted his pink slip, Jack still couldn’t be sure that tasty morsel wouldn’t get passed on to the press.
Jack Kilroy watched
Busty Babes of Baja Beach
. Twice!
Anyway, who needed porn when his brain was jam-packed with one gorgeous Italian girl wearing a come-hither smile that guaranteed a permanent hard-on? Oh, and he was clearly a masochist because the object of his obsession didn’t just despise him—she’d flat-out used him. Just like Ashley with her tell-all. Just like John Sullivan with his upturned palm. Those heart-crushing disappointments should have taught him to calibrate his hopes.

But she sacked Gina.

Big deal. She protected Marco. No doubt she was enjoying the comfort of his Armani-suited arms right this minute.

Arms you drove her into.

Didn’t have far to go, though, did she? She had run to that rat-tailed d-bag when her mother was ill and now…now he needed to drown his chatty conscience in a vat of scotch before he did something stupid like race to her apartment and sing to her. Maybe something from
Les Misérables
this time.

His skin felt like he’d peeled back three layers to the blood-saturated sinew underneath and scoured it with bleach. In his mind’s playback of the night, every word, gesture, and nuance stroked him raw. Had he screwed up? If he had, it wouldn’t be the first time. Jules leaped to the forefront of his guilt-ridden mind. Always Jules, with his mother’s eyes drowning in accusation.

Only one time had his stepfather brought him to visit her in that run-down hospital, the walls and people worn and sagging like something out of a Dickens novel, the stench of disinfectant doing a miserable job of masking the cloying smell of sickness. Angry with her for some childish reason he could no longer recall, he had refused her pleas to hug him. At twelve, he was too old for maternal affection, too self-absorbed to care for her needs. If he had known it was the last time he would see her, he’d have clasped her frail, cancer-ravaged body to his until they pried him away screaming.

Look after your sister, Jack,
she had said in her soft Irish burr to his retreating back. When his stepfather passed a couple of years later, Jack still had some fuzzy notion of becoming Jules’s guardian once he was of age, but he’d had things to do. Trouble to find and a life to plan when trouble found him. The new freedom he felt in the kitchen had trumped duty and a mother’s wish. Wasn’t he doing his sister a favor by putting her in a two-parent home with Pete and Daisy? His peripatetic lifestyle couldn’t be adapted to the needs of a kid.

Now Jules was here to cash in on all those broken promises and she’d come armed with a doozy. He had felt so useless until Lili stepped in. Calm, competent, no-fuss Lili with her sultry voice set to salve. A woman who knew the meaning of family and could help translate the code. With her, he felt like he could be a better chef, a better brother, a better man. Just better.

Yeah, she knew the meaning of family all right. She would cheat and lie and use for them. And his nitpicking conscience answered,
What about Gina, idiot?

Two a.m. in the middle of a vibrant, cosmopolitan city. There must be a bar open nearby, something seedy that might turn the boiling self-recrimination in his belly to a surly simmer. He dragged himself off the sofa, wrenched open the door, and got the surprise of his life.

Lili.

One hand clutched her scooter helmet beneath her heaving breasts like a talisman, the other paused in midknock. The forbidding set of her full, lush mouth signaled purpose, and combined with her cotton-cloud hair and orange flip-flops, it made her look like a fiery goddess. Her eyes blazed volcanic, sending trails of lava through him that blew hotter than the ninety-five-degree air outside.

Hungrily, he surveyed the rest of her. A turquoise bra strap drooped off her shoulder, a clashing contrast to the yellow sundress that hugged her curves and revealed about ten inches of glorious thigh. As usual, gazing on her legs inevitably led to how they were attached to her other luscious body parts, firing his body like a kiln from the inside out. But flip-flops? They seemed like the least appropriate footwear for riding a scooter. Maybe she should wear a sweater in case she caught a cold.