Some Like It Hot (19 page)

In the break before the last team presented, while the hotel staff quickly and efficiently cleared away the dishes, Kane leaned over to Claire and said, “So, aren’t each of the teams supposed to represent a whole restaurant? I’d think that would mean having at least one guy who can whip up an in-your-face dessert in a pinch.”

Pushing a hand through her loose hair—she’d given up on the bun half an hour ago, and the curling waves of auburn were driving Kane bonkers—Claire said, “It’s always this way. They think, to win, they must put forward only their strongest chefs. And many chefs are contemptuous of pastry. They do not understand the delicacy of it, the way it is more science than art, but also still creative. They think it’s so simple, but they’re wrong. As we have seen.”

“A few of the teams do have pastry chefs,” Eva put in quietly, with a darted glance in her father’s direction. “For instance, this next group.”

The next team knocked and entered, and under the table Eva’s leg started bouncing up and down as if her stiletto heel had suddenly been rubberized.

Kane tilted his head and studied the last team of the day. His schedule said they were from the East Coast, which was the first team they’d chosen, however many weeks and a zillion hopeful chef competitors ago. Now that he thought about it, he remembered them from the finals in New York.

This was the team that Claire had jumped all over him for what she perceived as him helping out the pretty lady chef, who’d choked a little during the trivia contest.

What was her name? Jules Something, he thought, giving the athletic, leggy blonde a smile. She grinned back at him, then sobered up to address the judges’ panel.

“What we have for you today is a tribute to one of Chicago diners’ favorite things: brunch. All over the trendy neighborhoods like Bucktown and Wicker Park, brunch places are popping up and drawing crowds—and let’s face it. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” She winked, and Kane heard Theo Jansen chuckle.

“What do you have for us?” Claire said briskly.

“We’re starting you out with a little appetizer that packs a lot of punch,” said the chef with the buzz cut, light brown hair and a possessive gleam in his eye whenever he glanced at Jules. “Jules and I wanted to play with Chicago’s famous steak, but we didn’t want to do something too familiar, like from the Lunden’s menu. So we got one of the cheap, stringy cuts and braised it in wine and some herbs until it’s falling apart. Then we fried a farm egg in brown butter and laid it over the top.”

He stepped forward, carefully placing a tiny oval dish in front of each of them. A single perfect egg quivered gently in Kane’s dish, dotted with droplets of golden butter and flecks of green herbs.

A film covered the yolk like a white veil over the brilliant orangey yellow, and when Kane dipped his spoon into the center, the yolk broke and ran out over the white like a river down a mountain. He peeked under the egg to see the shredded beef. It didn’t look like much on its own, but when Kane lifted the spoon to his mouth, he had to work hard not to moan like a kid discovering what his dick was for.

The first taste was creamy perfection, the warm yolk and brown butter a wonderfully rich contrast with the tender, wine-soaked shards of meat. And as he went on eating, the egg mixed in with the beef even more, creating a sort of sauce that was nutty with brown butter and satisfying with the egg yolk and just generally one of the best things he’d ever had.

Thank God he didn’t need to worry about pacing himself anymore, Kane mused as he stared sadly at his empty plate. He only wished he had some bread to sop up the streaks of egg and red wine left in the dish.

And there was something surprising in there, too—what was it? Capers?

“I’ve never thought of red wine as a breakfast thing before,” he said. “Champagne, sure. But a nice, full-bodied red?”

“If you ask me, red wine is always the right answer,” the chef said, grinning at him.

Kane smirked. Apparently, he was forgiven for ever looking or smiling at Jules. “You know what’s always the right answer? A play on steak and eggs. Nom.”

“Interesting,” said Theo from the other side of the table. His voice matched the rest of him, modulated, refined, and a little amused. “With the Cabernet notes, the dish reminded me more of
oeufs en meurette
.”

“What the hell is that?” Kane whispered to Eva, even as Claire turned to Theo with a rare light of approval glinting in her eyes.

“Eggs poached in red wine, with a demi-glace sauce,” Eva whispered back.

Okay, that made sense. Made Kane feel like an idiot, too, but that was incidental.

“What’s next?” Claire said, setting her spoon down beside her half-full dish. Kane eyed it, wondering if anyone would notice him doing a quick switch, swapping out his empty plate for Claire’s.

But then he forgot about it, because the tall chef with the chin-length brown hair tied back from his hard-jawed face came forward with a new dish. This one was more clearly entrée-size, small round slices of a whitish sausage, browned and crackling at the edges, stacked in a tower over a bed of something green. Smears of red slashed the plate like a painter’s brushstrokes.

“Seafood sausage,” the guy said. “On sautéed escarole with walnuts and red wine vinaigrette. Red wine gastrique on the plate.”

“Ah, sausage. One of my favorite Chicago specialties. Did you make it yourself?” demanded Jansen.

Tall Guy nodded, hands behind his back, face as serious as if he were being interrogated by a police detective, but Kane had already moved on to the food.

Wow, okay. That was kind of amazing
.

Kane stared at his empty fork as if it might provide some answers about what was going on in his mouth. The sausage was meaty and substantial, yet delicate and briny with the taste of the ocean. He’d never had anything quite like it. The kale had a bite to it, a toothsomeness he enjoyed, and there was something sweet-tart that jumped out at him every couple of bites—currants? raisins?—to contrast with the buttery richness of the toasted walnuts.

Spearing another round of sausage and smearing it through the red wine gastrique, Kane marveled at the way the red wine had reduced to a thick, almost vinegary syrup that shocked the tongue and brought out the flavors of the sea.

Across the table, Eva pushed her plate away nearly untouched, which made Kane frown. He guessed since she didn’t get an actual vote in who won the challenge, and who went home, it didn’t technically matter if she tasted everything.

But no one should waste food like this. It was almost a sin.

The other judges were nearly finished with their sausage plates, so Kane tucked back in. He didn’t want to be left behind just because this dish was threatening to put him into a happy food coma.

Forcing himself to stop with a few bites left on his plate, Kane looked up at the East Coast Team with undiluted anticipation for what they might serve next.

These guys were good—but the West Coast and Midwest Teams had both been pretty stellar, right up to the dessert course.

The last pair of chefs stepped up, a slim young black man with shocking green eyes and a smattering of freckles, and a guy who looked like he might be related to the first chef. Same blue-gray eyes, same light brown hair, same dimple.

Unlike the first chef, however, this one didn’t smile. He was as serious as Tall Guy, but there was a flash of an expression, just a flicker like a snapshot, when he looked at the judges across the table from him.

Beside Kane, Eva’s bouncing knee suddenly stilled as if someone had hit her off button.

This must be the pastry chef she’d mentioned, Kane thought, sizing the guy up. He had a couple of tough acts to follow. Kane really hoped he lived up to the promise of the rest of his team.

The way the guy swallowed and squared his shoulders as if he were facing a firing squad, Kane thought the guy probably knew. This was the pastry chef’s challenge to lose.

It all came down to this last dish.

Eva had never had such a difficult time choking down gourmet food in her life—and she’d been eating at five-star restaurants since she was old enough to digest solids.

Her throat was so tight, her stomach so knotted, she’d barely been able to taste a thing, but she had to keep going.

At least her Limestone boys hadn’t disgraced themselves, which was both good and bad—it was nice that the only Jansen Hospitality restaurant in the RSC would probably move on to the next round, but a little dangerous, given Ryan Larousse’s penchant for provoking the other teams into kitchen battles that had nothing to do with food.

Eva’s mind was a whirl of confusion, arguments against selling out and turning the RSC into the lowest form of television, worries about convincing Cheney to stick around and film it … how much she wanted to tell Danny she was sorry.

Not that she owed him anything. Not that he probably cared, now that their night of fun—their good time—was over. They probably would’ve just gone their separate ways anyway. So why should she feel guilty about cutting off any chance of seeing him again?

When the New York team made their entrance, Eva went on high alert, darting a wary glance at her father, who, after all, had seen one member of the team already, half naked and sporting the most adorable case of bed-head known to man. But other than a slight widening of the eyes when he saw Danny, Theo showed no more reaction to the Lunden’s crew than he had to any of the other teams.

No, Theo kept his gaze as level and solemn as a priest’s, his roving eye—which Eva had half expected to see land on the sweet-faced, natural beauty of Skye Gladwell, and wouldn’t that create some fun “drama” for Cheney’s viewers—unusually tethered.

Never one to let the chance at a kitchen dalliance slip past, Theo appeared to be focused more on catching up with Claire—and, incidentally, driving poor Kane bananas—than on his usual pursuits.

But Eva made a mental note to worry about this bizarre little love triangle later. Right now, she had no room in her stress box—aka brain—for anything other than the final course of this round of the competition.

“Hi, I’m Danny Lunden,” he said, striding forward with his head held high. You’d never know he’d started off the day skulking from Eva’s hotel suite the way her first boyfriend, Steve Janovic, used to sneak out of her dad’s house when Theo came home early from a night out on the town.

With graceful turns of his strong, tanned wrists, Danny set a plate down in front of each of them.

Eva wanted to catch his eye, somehow telegraph something—she didn’t even know what—but he didn’t linger over her place setting, just turned away to step back to the front of the table.

Desperate to hide the sudden burning behind her eyes, Eva blinked down at the dessert he’d prepared. The round china plate held a small, perfect oval of a cake, unadorned save for two dainty branches of thyme crossed and laid on top.

The cake itself had a staggering number of layers, each one so thin it almost disappeared between bands of vibrant red and creamy pale yellow filling.

“Ah,” breathed Claire, sounding pleased. “
Gâteau de mille crêpes
?”

Eva looked up quickly, just in time for her heart to lift at the fleeting hint of a smile quirking Danny’s handsome lips.

“I call it my French Pancake Stack.” He looked right at her, and Eva’s breath caught in her chest. “I was inspired by the power of memory,” he said, never taking his eyes from hers. “And the beauty of taking something good from the past, and making a new memory out of it. I hope you enjoy it.”

Fingertips tingling, Eva fumbled her fork, its clatter against her plate shockingly loud in the vivid, hushed silence of a room full of people taking a first bite of something wonderful.

He made this for me,
was all she could think, and it meant … what did it mean, exactly?

She didn’t know, couldn’t parse it out, and then, when her fork sank through the soft layers of cake and brought the sweet to her mouth, she couldn’t think of anything beyond the shock to her senses.

The flavors of fall exploded over her tongue. She tasted plums, their deep sweetness developed and layered with the dark, caramel bite of brown sugar. The smooth custard played against the fruit like a duet in perfect harmony, and running through it all was a third note she couldn’t place, something fresh and herbal, but also a little playful and complex.

Going back to her plate for another bite, she moved the thyme garnish to the side, and realized—oh. That was the third melody weaving through the dessert. And the French pancakes themselves … Eva sighed, entranced by the light, eggy crêpes giving body and substance to the heavenly filling.

Her father was a good cook, when he bothered to get in front of a stove, and she cherished the memory of those mornings together. But he’d never made anything as addictive and soul satisfying as this cake.

Apparently unnerved by the hush that had fallen over the room, Winslow spoke up, bouncing on the toes of his sneakers. “Silence is usually a good thing around a table. Mouths too busy to talk? Point for us!”

The judges looked at him, and the excitement on his face vanished faster than Danny’s dessert. “I mean,” he backpedaled, “I’m not trying to tell you how to score us! Maybe we got a point, maybe we didn’t. Maybe…”

“Maybe shut up,” Danny suggested, clamping a hand over Win’s mouth and dragging his teammate back into line.

“That’s all we’ve got for you,” he said to the bemused group at the table, but his gaze landed on Eva, and his eyes softened to something vulnerable that made her curl her ankles around the legs of the chair to stop herself from jumping up and, well, jumping
him
.

“I hope you liked it,” Danny said, and she knew that one was just for her. Eva couldn’t seem to stop smiling as the East Coast Team filed out of the judges’ room.

Danny Lunden was … like no one she’d ever met. He was almost too good to be true. Hotter than sin, with a body made for pleasure, and he could cook? And listened when a woman talked, and did something to make her feel better?

“That last dish was dynamite,” her father said, more enthusiastic than he’d been all day. “I happen to love crêpes, of course—one of my favorite things to make. Remember, Eva? Even the smell of the batter makes me nostalgic.”

He sighed happily, and Eva’s heart plummeted into her stomach like a brick dropped from the top of the Empire State Building.

Yes, Danny had listened when Eva talked. And then he’d turned right around and used an intimate personal memory to manipulate the emotions of one of the three people who would decide the fate of his team.

She set her fork down, careful to keep her shaking fingers from knocking the silver tines against the dessert plate.

No. He wouldn’t. Would he?

Well, why the hell not?
her inner realist snapped.
It’s a competition. He’s not here to make friends—isn’t that what people always say on those awful reality shows? He’s here to win. And he just happens to know that you and your father—the new judge—share a deep and abiding love of French pancakes.