Hot Under Pressure (9 page)

Right?

As he wandered to the rear of what looked like a high-end grocery store, he found Ferry Plaza Seafood tucked away in the back. It looked like a casual restaurant, but up by the counter was a glass display case full of gorgeous seafood, and Beck found his gaze lingering on the pile of fresh, unopened clams mounded over the crushed ice.

Next to the gleaming fillets of deeply orange, wild-caught Alaskan salmon, the clams looked small and dirty, dull and unassuming and in no way impressive.

But when the young girl with the septum piercing and hot pink hair came over to take his order, Beck couldn’t keep himself from adding a few pounds of clams to the side of salmon.

Opening the floodgates to the past wasn’t as simple as it seemed, he realized, as he tried to stem the tide of memories.

Well, fine. Maybe the memories would be inspiring. He sure hoped so, because as of right now, he had no clue what he was going to prepare for the judges tomorrow.

Chapter 8

The thin light of early dawn filtered into the competition kitchen from a set of narrow windows set high in the white tiled wall.

Claire gripped her clipboard and wished fervently that she’d brought along an underling to send out for coffee.

But no. The magazine ran close to the bone on deadlines and staffers, the way all print media seemed to these days, and there was no one to spare for a frivolous job like following the editor in chief around and making sure she didn’t work herself into a nervous breakdown.

Not that Claire was close to that. All she had to do before the chef contestants arrived at nine o’clock was to survey the kitchen, double-check the checklist of produce, proteins, and other product, and ensure that each team’s station was fully stocked with all the tools necessary for the challenge.

None of that was difficult in any way, but somehow,
sans
coffee, it felt like a daunting task.

Perhaps because she’d barely slept the night before.

Taking in a fortifying breath of still and quiet—the calm before the chaos of cooking that would erupt in this room in a few short hours—Claire mentally hiked up her slim, fitted heather gray trousers and wished the matching jacket had sleeves all the way down to the wrist. The bracelet sleeves might be stylish and becoming, but in the hyper-air-conditioned chill of the pre-competition kitchen, she could feel her teeth about to start chattering.

The bang of the door opening reverberated through her caffeine-deprived head for one flinching instant before she registered who stood in the entryway, blinking dazedly.

Kane Slater.

Immediately, Claire felt a flush of heat warm her entire body. Whether it was sexual awareness (likely) or frustrated anger (even more likely), she couldn’t say. All she knew was that she was no longer shivering with cold.

“I didn’t know anyone would be down here,” he said, shoving awkward hands into the front pockets of his tight, dark blue jeans.

“I didn’t know you ever rose from your bed before the crack of noon,” Claire retorted without thinking. And then, of course, all she could think of was the vision of him in his bed, the gorgeous, lanky, somehow elegant sprawl of him as he took up every available inch of mattress real estate and tangled the sheets around his strong young limbs.

“Yeah, well. Believe me, I wish I were still in bed.”

Snapping herself back into the moment, Claire pursed her lips and turned away from the all-too-tempting vision of him as he stood before her, rumpled and sleepy eyed. He looked, as usual, as if he’d rolled from his bed and yanked whatever clothes were nearest onto his body—this morning, scuffed jeans and a white V-neck undershirt so soft and thin from washing as to be indecent—and yet, he made the ensemble appear timeless. Classic. Sexy, in the most unstudied, natural way possible.

But the part of her that had held this man in her arms and soothed a tender hand down his trembling back after an explosive hour of lovemaking couldn’t help but notice that he did appear to be exhausted. Even the thick rims of his fashionably chunky black glasses, which he only wore when he was hungover or trying to go incognito, couldn’t hide the deep purple shadows like bruises under his blue eyes.

The largest part of Claire felt a vicious sort of satisfaction about this. If she couldn’t sleep, why should he be able to?

But the small, tender part—the part that didn’t care that Kane had betrayed her trust and reduced her to an outward expression of his male ego—somehow had control of her tongue.

“What is the matter? Can you not sleep?”

His wiry shoulders, always a little slouchy in that casual American way, straightened as if someone had pulled a string attached to the top of his scruffy, dark blond head.

“No, no. I’m fine. Just … working on a new album concept. When inspiration strikes, I have to go with it. You know how it is.”

Claire did know. More than once, she’d woken up to the soft scratch of pencil and the flutter of discarded pages of composition paper layering the bed.

Steeling herself against the memory, she said, “Tell inspiration to wait until the RSC is over. For the next few weeks, you will need your rest, and I—we, I mean, will need your full attention.”

Cheeks burning at her slip of the tongue, Claire walked briskly away from him, aiming blindly for the walk-in cooler. “So you may as well go back to your room,” she said over her shoulder.

“Noted. But there’s no way I can get back to sleep now. And since I’m up and everything, I’d like to help with whatever it is you’re doing.”

Merde.

Kane kept pace with her, his casual, ambling walk somehow eating up as much ground as Claire’s staccato march. Damn her vanity for demanding she wear these ridiculously high Yves Saint Laurent pumps.

“I’m taking stock of the provisions for the challenge,” she told him, but before she could explain that it was really a one-person job and she didn’t need any help,
merci beaucoup
, Kane frowned and said, “Isn’t that Eva’s job?”

Derailed, Claire paused with her hand on the commercial refrigerator door handle and glanced back at him. “Yes, technically. Eva or one of her minions usually handles this. But with all the extra work of settling Devon Sparks back into his role and dealing with the fallout of canceling the television contract, I said I’d help.”

The softness in his eyes was echoed in his voice. “You’re a good friend to her, Claire.”

Uncomfortable with the sentiment, Claire frowned and went back to trying to open the cooler. What in the name of heaven was wrong with this door? “That has nothing to do with anything. I am a professional—my publication’s name is on this competition, so there you go. It’s my job to make sure it runs smoothly.”

“Don’t give me that crap. Your job means a lot to you, I know—but it doesn’t mean everything.” He sounded unaccountably fierce, but there was a note of uncertainty, a need for confirmation, that had her ready to turn and face him when Kane’s warm, nimble-fingered hand covered hers on the door handle, holding her in place.

I’d know this hand anywhere
, Claire found herself thinking nonsensically,
in the dark, in my sleep. Anywhere.

Kane’s fingers were long and tapered, interestingly callused from hours of plucking guitar strings, tapping at piano keys, and handling drumsticks. The way they’d felt running up the backs of her thighs, pressing gently at the insides of her knees, tickling down the slope of her neck …

Claire shuddered, heat soaking through her.

The action somehow managed to jiggle the walk-in cooler’s handle exactly right, and with a pop of unsealing rubber lining, the door swung open, forcing her back a step.

Directly into the circle of Kane’s tanned, muscular arms.

“Oops,” he said, dropping his hands from their immediate, steadying grip on her shoulders.

“What?” Claire shook her head and scrabbled for her composure, which was somewhere on the floor with her balance and her ability to string words together.

“Nothing. I didn’t mean to startle you.” He stepped around her to inspect the door, which was smooth on the inside, an older model with no emergency-release mechanism. “Wow, guess we’d better make a note to keep this door propped during the challenge, or we’ll end up with someone getting stuck in there.”

For once in her life, Claire didn’t want to talk about business. Dropping her clipboard to the floor with a clatter, she put her hands on her hips and faced down the most confusing man she’d ever slept with.

“We need to clear the air.”

“Oh? I thought you felt you’d been perfectly clear.” Those sleek golden brows winged up in what appeared to be genuine surprise.

It had been one week since she’d walked up to the competition kitchen in the basement of a Chicago hotel to hear her current lover and her ex-lover fighting over her like two junkyard dogs snarling over a bone, and in that time, she’d barely slept more than four hours at a stretch.

One week ago, she’d decided that if Kane and Theo were going to treat her like a commodity to be traded, then she wouldn’t be with either man, and she’d made her position perfectly clear.

One week ago, she’d shut the door on her relationship with Kane Slater … but he’d stuck his foot in the opening and stubbornly refused to let it close completely.

And for seven long days, and longer nights, Claire had been left to pretend that no part of her was furtively, intensely glad of his persistence.

Not that any part of his persistence had included an apology.

She threw her hands up in the air, vaguely aware that she was behaving like a Marseillaise fishwife, but unable to stop herself. “Fine. You’re right. There is nothing more to say.”

“Wait. I do have something to say to you.” Determination throbbed through Kane’s rich, musical voice, adding a rough gravel that rubbed down Claire’s spine like a touch.

Kane cocked his head to one side as he regarded her with the intense interest that always made Claire want to squirm away from him and check her hair for new threads of gray.

Letting the cooler door swing shut—they obviously weren’t going to be getting to the inventory any time soon—Kane leaned his narrow hips against the stainless steel and tucked his hands back into his front pockets. He looked like some pop artist’s depiction of young masculine Americana, the immortal cool of a James Dean or a Bruce Springsteen.

And yet, he was so emphatically himself; no comparison could really do him justice.

God, how she wanted him.

“I know you want me to say I’m sorry, Claire. But I’m not.”

She stiffened, every muscle going rigid. “No. I inferred that you regretted nothing from the way you continue to bait Theo, engaged in some ludicrous battle of machismo and ego that has, at this point, nothing to do with me.”

He laughed softly, but there was no mirth in it. “Don’t kid yourself, Claire. It has everything to do with you.”

Once, many years ago, Claire had allowed teenage Eva Jansen to tease her into accompanying the young girl to Coney Island Amusement Park in New York. It wasn’t as vile as Claire had anticipated—in fact, the memory of her first Coney Island hot dog had inspired an award-winning
Délicieux
feature on frankfurters—but the entire experience had been marred by one ride.

The Tilt-a-Whirl.

As the name suggested, it had consisted of otherwise sane, rational people strapping themselves into a creaky metal contraption that then tilted at an alarming angle and whirled them through the air. The world had become a blur of nausea, vertigo, and anger at the entire universe for inventing such a ridiculous pastime.

Claire could close her eyes right now and imagine she felt the hard iron bar of the ride’s restraint cutting into her midsection. The emotions she was currently flooded with were identical.

“You’re wrong about something else, too.”

The challenging tilt of Kane’s chin jolted her out of her musings. “What?”

“There is something I regret.”

Claire snorted, brought back to the point of this conversation with an unpleasant lurch. “Of course. The fact that I overheard your conversation at all.”

“Nope. I regret that you only heard half of it.”

“I heard enough,” Claire told him, but even she could hear the confusion in her voice. Firming her tone, she said, “It was enough the moment I heard you and Theo discussing my affection, my self, as if I were a prize to be won.”

But Kane shook his head. “Yeah, but you missed all the buildup. I promise, I didn’t go from zero to macho-mode in seconds. You want to know what I said when Theo first brought it up, when he first told me I should give you up, for your own sake?”

“Wait, that’s how the conversation began?”

“Yep. And I told him to go take a flying leap, because neither one of us could make a better choice for you than you could make for yourself.”

Claire felt her knees wobble precariously. As if reading the shock on her face, Kane spread his hands and shrugged in a self-deprecating gesture.

“Hey,” Kane said, smiling a little. “It’s no accident I’ve got more female fans than male. And it’s not just ’cause I’m so stinking cute. I’ve got sisters at home; I know how women think, and I know what’s going to piss y’all off beyond belief.”

Claire shook her head to try to clear it. “Wait. So you knew it was wrong and disrespectful … yet you allowed Theo to bait you, anyway? Because the way I remember the end of that conversation, you did not sound quite so enlightened.”

“I’ve asked myself that same question over the last few days.”

She swallowed hard. “And how have you answered yourself?”

Kane blew out a frustrated breath. “When Theo challenged me for you, when he tried to convince me that you’d be better off without me, and if I cared about you, I’d step aside … it made me so mad, Claire. Not because he was saying anything new—God knows, I’ve had those same thoughts, wondered if it was fair to ask someone like you, with your professional reputation, to step into the crazy, glaring fishbowl that is my life.”

He paused, a far-off look in his eyes, and Claire had to close her fingers into a tight fist to keep from reaching for him.