Hot and Bothered (Hot in the Kitchen) (33 page)

Except that was a pit she had been trying to climb out of. Denying her problems. Running away. Taking the easy way out.

But silent phones produced uninvited pop-ins. Now the girls were here to talk her off the ledge they assumed she was balancing on.

“You can put him in the cage, if you want,” Jules said, gesturing to the playpen in the living room of her flat. It always amazed her how someone as fastidious as Cara enjoyed her dirty little monkey. Cara tore her gaze away from Evan, who was making fists out of her no-longer-perfect hair while he climbed all over her.

“No, he’s fine,” Cara said, tightening her grip on the slippery bundle. “You’re fine, aren’t you, Evs?”

“Here, give him to me,” Lili said. “You’re going to overdo it. If I have to listen to your husband whine one more time about how you don’t know when to stop, I’ll punch something.” She plucked Evan out of her sister’s lap and got him settled in her own. “Has Simon been in touch?” she asked Jules, slicing to the heart of why they were here.

Jules shook her head. “He flounced out with his ultimatum and said he’d be in town until Friday. Not a peep.”

She didn’t need him to call because he’d already said enough.
Poor rich girl.
Always whining because Jack wouldn’t visit her, and that had been true. She had known Simon had an oddly competitive relationship with Jack, and that he admired and despised him in equal measure. He had listened to her complaining when Jack said he couldn’t make it back to London some weekend because he was too busy putting out fires at his restaurant in Miami or training his new commis chef in New York. He had played up the friction between she and Jack and she had played the part of Moaning Myrtle because Jack couldn’t read her mind.

But her brother had made up for his neglect in spades and their relationship had never been better. And now he wanted to make Simon pay for his sheer nerve at daring to touch the great Jack Kilroy’s sister.

Was she ready to do this? Was she ready to cut this man off at the knees? He had made her feel worse than the kitchen grease behind the burners at Vivi’s when he practically shoved her into the street.

But she hadn’t helped her case much. She could have stood up for herself. She could have demanded he treat her with respect and do the right thing by their child. Instead she took the coward’s way out. She scarpered like a mouse and took cover behind Jack.

“I’m more worried about how Jack’s going to adapt if I bring Simon into the fold.”

Lili sat up straighter, her eyes glinting. “Okay, you know I’m crazy about Jack but the best thing you ever did was move out of the house. And then the next best thing you did was announce your intention to find a man.”

“Testify,” said Cara.

“Of course, if you’d just told us that you were planning to do the dirty with my cousin, you could have saved us all a crap load of time.” She held up her hand to forestall Jules’s admittedly weak defense. “We’ll discuss Tad later over a bottle of something fruity and liquory. As for your brother, the ego management is practically a full-time job and he needs to be checked every now and then. I’m not saying Tad’s right, but he was right about you making this decision for yourself and for Evan. We’re never going to judge you and no one can say they wouldn’t have done the same in your situation, but Jack should not have any say in this.
Capische
?”

Jules was starting to realize that. She didn’t need Jack to make this decision for her. She didn’t need Tad to make it either. The decision about how Simon should figure in Evan’s life would be made by the people who mattered.

His parents.

Because the little monkey had two. Simon St. James was a prick but he was also the sperm that had contributed to the creation of her beautiful son, and for that she was grateful. He had given her a gift—an unintentional one, but a gift all the same. She needed to make it right.

“So how is my delightful brother these days?”

Lili sighed. “You know how he hates it when he’s not in control of a situation. Between this Simon business and us not being knocked up, he’s feeling sort of spinny.”

Jules caught Cara’s eye, both of them waiting for Lili to elaborate. She tended to keep her problems under wraps so pushing her to share was not an option.

“What’s that look for?” Lili asked.

“Nothing,” Cara and Jules said together.

“Jack and I are doing fine,” Lili said, not altogether convincingly.

“So the S-E-X hasn’t turned into a chore yet?” Cara asked. “Ovulation calendars and scheduled hook-ups can do that.”

“Like you’d know. What did it take? Three tries and you were picking out nursery colors.” Lili buried her pout in Evan’s hair. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be snarky.”

Cara did her best not to look smug. She could be such a pain in the arse, sometimes.

“The S-E-X is still smokin’ and I’m still hot for my husband,” Lili said. “End of story.”

That sent a shudder through Jules. “Ew, can we not talk about my brother in that way?”

“Right, let’s talk about Tad instead,” Lili said with a gleam in her eye. “Much better.”

Jules sent her a dark look. “Maybe we should make a rule not to talk about S-E-X with any male carrying the last name DeLuca or Kilroy.”

Cara leaned over to Lili and covered Evan’s ears. “So that leaves Shane. Who is still taking my hoo-ha to funky town.”

“Gah… shut up, would you?” Jules squeaked out. “Shane’s practically my brother and I really don’t want to hear about how magical his wang is.”

That sent them into a bout of bawdy laughter.

“So, our scorching hot sex lives—never thought I’d be saying that in plural—are off limits for now,” Lili said around a bite of toast with mango and mint chutney. “Uh, this is awesome. You need to can and sell this stuff.”

What she needed was to figure out her next move. She couldn’t work at Vivi’s anymore and she needed to get a plan in place.

“So have you talked to Tad—in a non-sexy way?” asked Cara in that mind-reading way she had. “I can’t believe you were able to keep that under wraps. Gym, my ass.”

Jules gusted a sigh. “We had that fight and now it’s like we can’t get back to how it was between us. He won’t answer my calls.”

“He probably could have handled it better but I think it was more about Jack,” Cara said. “There’s always been tension between them because of you and when Tad saw you caving to everything Jack said, it triggered something.”

Lili looked upset. Tad and she were close as siblings, and it hurt her that the two guys she loved most in the world didn’t see eye to eye.

“What are you making over there?” Lili asked, her hungry gaze falling on Jules’s work in a not-so-subtle change of subject.

Jules held up the recipe she had extracted carefully from Vivi’s book and placed in a protective plastic sheet. She felt a curious closeness to this woman she had never met and sadness that she would never get a chance to.

“It’s a recipe for
braciole
.” She had tried making it last week with disastrous results but today she would not be denied.

“It looks old. Did you get it from Dad?”

“It’s your Aunt Vivi’s. Frankie let me borrow her cookbook.” Her throat worked over a swallow. “What was she like?”

“Her name said it all,” Cara said wistfully. “She was the soul of the party, always laughing and joking with everyone. The room always felt more alive with her in it, like Prosecco bubbles fizzing away. When she left, there was a bit of deflation, you know?”

Jules nodded, surprised at Cara’s rather poetic gush, which was so not her. She understood what she was saying. She felt it whenever Tad left the room or if she hadn’t seen him for a while. She felt it now.

“I know Tad was close to her, but what about his dad?”

“You think Tony’s a hard ass,” Lili said with feeling. “Uncle Rafe was King of the Hard Asses.”

Cara nodded her agreement. “Rafe was a chef just like Dad. They ran DeLuca’s together and he wanted more for his kids. He wanted Tad to go to college, fulfill all that immigrant American dream crap. I mean there was nothing stopping him from being a chef but Tad has a huge respect for family. Blood means a lot to him and his father’s ambitions for him trumped everything.”

Jules understood that about him more and more. The thought that a man could be denied access to his son had upset him greatly, enough for him to swim upstream and fight the prevailing views of the DeLuca-Kilroy mob. She had never thought of the word “honorable” when it came to Tad but now she realized it described him perfectly.

“He spent all his afternoons at DeLuca’s. Tony encouraged Tad because he wanted someone to take over, but Rafe was adamant it wouldn’t be his son. Tad was going to make everyone proud and be something important. A lawyer or an architect. They used to fight about it all the time, but then Vivi stepped in and convinced Tad to at least get his degree. When he was done, he could decide what he wanted but at least he’d have the qualification. Then they had the accident and he…”

The space between Cara’s dark blond eyebrows knit into a frown.

“He what?” Jules looked at Lili, who had turned a curious gaze on Cara.

“He lost himself for a few years. We weren’t all that close back then but I remember he came to visit me in New York after he had been traveling for about a year and a half after they died. He had been in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, a ton of other places. I didn’t recognize him when he showed up at my dorm room at Columbia. Thin as a rail, with skin and a beard so dark it looked like he had escaped from a deserted island. Like Tom Hanks in that movie.”

Concern marred Lili’s face. “I didn’t know that. He used to call me every few months but I didn’t know he came to see you.”

“Yeah. I put him up for a couple of days and skipped classes to hang with him, but he didn’t want to talk much. He shaved, bought some clothes, and hopped a flight to Italy. He worked at a butcher’s in Tuscany, did seasonal work picking grapes. Learned all about wine.”

Jules could see him under that blameless blue sky, shielding his eyes from the sun while he stripped a vine of its fruit. Looking for a peace he still hadn’t found.

“He told me that he had a fight with his father the night of the accident. He said things and didn’t get a chance to take them back. They must have known he loved them, though. I wish he could believe that, no matter what he said to his dad.”

Cara looked uncomfortable. “There’s more to it.”

“What do you mean?”

Lili broke in. “He blamed himself.”

A cold gush crashed over Jules’s heart. “But why? He wasn’t even there.”

Cara’s swallow made her slender throat bulge. “They were on their way to pick him up. He’d been arrested for getting into a fight.”

Jules’s legs turned to water and she white-knuckled the edge of the sink. Realizing she needed a seat, she lowered her body to a chair at the kitchen table.

“What happened?”

“He was doing so well,” Cara continued. “Getting good grades and making honors’ rolls. You wouldn’t believe how sick I was at all the comparisons. Well, he finished the first year with flying colors and I guess he needed to let off steam. He got into a bar fight with some kid who was the son of a cop—knowing Tad it was probably over a girl—and before we knew it he was at a police station on the south side, and Vivi and Rafe were on their way to pick him up.”

Jules’s heart squeezed. She suspected that fight stemmed more from his soul-crushing argument with his father than the typical end-of-school-year cutting loose.

“And then it happened,” Jules finished.

“It was so random,” Lili said, her eyes glossy. “Some guy ran a red light. Vivi was killed instantly, Uncle Rafe was on life support for a few hours and Dad had to make the decision to let him go. Everyone was destroyed. Gina, Dad, everyone. But no one felt it more than Tad.”

Imagine loving someone so much your life stopped when their hearts did. If something happened to Evan or Jack, she would feel that way. Part of her would sink into the ground with them. She shoved that horrible thought away.

“But surely he knows it wasn’t his fault. I mean, everyone told him that, right?”

Cara opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked squirrely.

“Of course we did,” Lili chimed in a beat too late. “He knows. I mean, I’ve tried…”

“Yeah, but did anyone actually say that to him? Tell him that they loved him.” That no matter what happened, they loved him.

Lili chewed on her lip. “He had a big fight with Tony right after it happened. Things were said. There was almost a brawl at the funeral, but he came back to us eventually.” She shared a guilty glance with her sister. “He’s family, he knows what we think. How much we love him.”

“Jesus, you guys suck donkey balls at being Italian.”

Cara’s smile was brief. “I know. We’ve never been the most demonstrative types. It’s all about food and family and knowing that underneath it all, blood is all that matters. We don’t need to say it. It’s right here.” She touched two fingertips to her chest. A few inches higher than her heart but Jules got the gist.

But he didn’t cook anymore, and the light in his eyes dimmed whenever his mother’s name was mentioned. He was still stuck in a broke-down place where peace and acceptance was impossible.

He needed a friend, but more than that, he needed her heart.