Some Like It Hot (26 page)

Danny scowled. “She’s lost weight over the last week. She was perfect already!”

“I’d say you worry too much, but you’ve heard that before and never paid any damn attention,” Winslow said. “So why bother? Hey, at least you know she’ll be sitting down and eating something today at the judges’ table.”

Eva finished up her quiet discussion with Cheney, who turned back to the three new cameramen and had them huddle around while Eva put on her biggest smile.

“Good morning, Chefs!”

Everyone chorused the greeting back to her, with varying degrees of positivity. The West Coast Team looked sleepy, as if they hadn’t managed to acclimate themselves to the time difference yet.

Ryan Larousse and his gang looked, as usual, like they’d rather be wielding guns than knives, primed and ready for action.

Danny struggled to get his head back in the game after the morning’s drama. This was the moment they’d been waiting for—the last challenge before the finals. Nothing was more important than coming through today and being chosen as one of the three teams to continue in the competition.

His pep talk high lasted him until Eva started to describe what they were about to face.

“Maybe you’ve noticed, we’ve got a few extra cameras for the challenge today!” She dimpled at them, pleased as punch. “And with the heightened involvement of the Cooking Channel, we’re taking on a couple of other changes. The structure of the judging will be a little different—I’ll explain that in a minute. For now, all you need to do is ignore the cameras. Just forget they’re there, and cook your best! This is the big one, guys. Good luck to each of you.” Over her shoulder, she said, “Are we set, Mr. Cheney?”

“Rolling,” he replied, aiming his camera at her.

Flashing the chefs another brilliant, almost manic smile, Eva walked over to the table Danny had seen last night, the long one covered in a white tablecloth.

“Remember what I said at the start of the competition about the importance of teamwork? Well, today, I’m going to divide you up into two teams.”

Tension shot through the contestants like a bullet. Danny stared at her, stunned. Team challenges were the worst—being forced to work with your competition added a layer of stress and strategy to an already fraught situation.

Ignoring the murmurs from the chefs, Eva said, “Midwest, you’ll be teaming up with the South.” Danny had only a second to breathe a sigh of relief that they wouldn’t have to deal with that ticking time bomb, Ryan Larousse, on their team before Eva continued, “That means, West Coast? You’ll be cooking with the East Coast.”

Beside him, Winslow went still, and Danny realized exactly what this meant.

Beck and Skye Gladwell—an estranged married couple—on the same team. Danny felt his pulse leap and his breath start to come short. Was it time to start panicking yet?

“Today’s challenge is something a lot of chefs have to face at some point in their careers.” With a theatrical flourish, Eva whipped the cloth off the table, revealing a water tank filled with live lobsters, a platter of salmon, steaks, and whole, plucked chickens piled in the back.

But the part that made Danny’s blood run cold was the centerpiece—a giant, three-tiered replica of a cake made out of white roses and topped with a tiny plastic couple in black tie and flowing ivory dress.

“You’ll be designing and preparing a menu for a wedding tasting!”

Beside him, Winslow stiffened. His gasp was audible.

“Are you okay?” Danny put a hand on the kid’s arm, alarmed.

“It can’t be a coincidence,” Win whispered, eyes round and so wide, the whites were showing. “It just can’t. Oh my God. What have I done?”

Eva was still talking, outlining the challenge, something about the traditional things people expected to find at weddings, rubber chicken and over-cooked steak, yadda yadda. Danny already knew what he’d be working on—a fucking wedding cake, the bane of every pastry chef’s existence—so he turned all his focus on Winslow.

Who was totally freaking. Win wasn’t a silent sufferer; he tended to flip out in tense moments, but Danny had never seen him like this. He looked like he was about to keel over on his cutting board.

“What are you talking about? What did you do?”

Winslow gripped the edge of the stainless-steel counter so hard, the knuckles of his hands stood out white. “I got down with the wrong person, that’s what.”

Danny followed his gaze to Drew, Eva’s assistant, who was standing off to the side of the room, chatting with Theo Jansen.

“I talked to him about Beck and Skye Gladwell,” Winslow moaned. “I’m the reason he started looking into it. It was like a game, like playing detectives! Only he found out all that stuff I told you this morning about them being still married, and he swore he wouldn’t tell anyone, but God. He must’ve told his boss, because this challenge is too messed up to be a damn coincidence.”

As if feeling two pairs of eyes on him, Drew glanced over at them. When he saw Win’s betrayed, accusing glare, he blanched, his whole face crumpling up like parchment paper. Muttering something to Jansen, Drew hurried out of the room, which was all the confirmation Danny needed that Winslow was right. Everything inside Danny sank straight into the ground.

It was a setup.

Eva had used Winslow’s relationship with her assistant for information, then she’d coldly, callously designed the challenge that was most likely to lead to fireworks and excitement for her precious Cooking Channel viewers.

One glance at Beck’s stony, stoic face, his eyes pools of mute pain burning through the granite of his expression, was enough to send Danny’s temper into the stratosphere.

She wasn’t going to get away with this.

“That isn’t fair.”

The furious voice raised the hairs on the back of Eva’s neck. She whirled to face Danny, muscular arms crossed over his white-jacketed chest, eyes snapping with anger.

Eva’s heart stopped. He knew.

The instincts she’d inherited from her father sent her smoothly into crisis control mode, even as her heart lurched back to life with a painful thump against her breastbone.

“I’m sorry if you’re unhappy with your team’s assignment, Chef Lunden,” Eva said, her voice coming out cool and blank. “But surely part of the point of this competition is to prove your team can overcome distractions and challenges to produce winning dishes.”

“Culinary challenges, sure,” Danny ground out. “The distractions of a professional kitchen? No problem. But this is something else.”

“What is he talking about, Eva?” Concern drew her father’s silvery brows together in to a frown.

“Nothing,” Eva assured him distractedly, unable to look away from Danny’s cold rage.

“I’m talking about you, using unethically gained information about our personal lives against us.” Danny’s mouth tightened in a spasm that looked like pain, before flattening out to a hard line once more. “You’ve gone too far, Eva.”

Panic skittered down Eva’s spine and up into her throat, a hundred thoughts circling and diving like a swarm of hornets in her chest. Finally managing to drag her eyes off Danny, Eva hissed at Cheney to shut the cameras down.

Cheney scowled at her, clearly unwilling to miss out on the best action they’d seen so far. Beside Eva, her father raised an imperious hand and circled it in the air at Cheney, signaling him to keep going.

“That’s right,” Danny said, mockery giving his deep, smooth voice a rough edge. “Keep ’em rolling. You’ll want to catch all of this good drama to entice the housewives of America to watch your show.” His lip curled in disgust. “I mean, what the actual fuck are we doing here? Because it’s not about the food, not anymore.”

“Danny, stop.” Winslow, the one who’d given Drew the good gossip, tugged on his teammate’s sleeve, green eyes huge and bruised looking.

“No.” Danny’s fists clenched, his knuckles standing out white. “It isn’t right, what she’s trying to do.”

“I must agree.”

Every head in the kitchen swiveled at Claire’s grave pronouncement. Eva stared, unable to believe how quickly everything was spinning out of control.

“Claire,” Theo barked, but the narrow look her friend shot over quelled him.

“If this young man is telling the truth, that you somehow set this challenge up to exploit the chefs’ personal lives for the sake of creating drama, I must agree with him. You’ve gone too far.”

Eva was intensely aware of that bank of cameras to her right, their unblinking gaze drinking in and recording every beat of this horrible moment.

Hearing the two people whose opinion mattered most denounce her publicly, Eva had no choice but to confront the reality of what she’d done.

Sick with the beginnings of a regret she knew would only grow over time, Eva tried to brazen it out.

The only thing she could do was contain the damage. Keep the competition moving forward, and sort it all out later.

She breathed in deeply and slowly, consciously wiping all expression from her face and voice. Calm. She had to be calm. Defuse the situation. Knowing that it would be exponentially harder if she looked Danny in the eye, Eva faced her oldest friend. She could practically hear her father’s voice inside her head, warning her not to back down, not to show weakness…

“Thank you for your input, Claire. But as the rulebook states, challenges are entirely up to the discretion of the competition coordinator. Namely, me. And at this point, as unfair as Chef Lunden seems to think it is, it would be equally unfair to the other teams if I were to trade things around based solely on his complaints.”

But even as she said it, she could hear how thin it sounded. Swallowing hard against the knot of tension in her throat, Eva glanced back at Danny without really meaning to.

Immediately ensnared in the intensity of his stare, she lost track of what she was saying. Silence beat through the kitchen for the space of one heartbeat. Two. Three.

“Fine,” she said, breaking the moment with a gasp of relief, like breaking the surface of a cold pool. “We’ll form the teams by random selection. Can we agree on that?”

Without waiting for an answer, she strode over to the supply table and grabbed a wooden knife block and four knives with identical black handles. She stuck the two eight-inch chef’s knives and two ten-inch knives into the block’s empty slots and studied it. Impossible to tell which knives were which.

Lugging the heavy block back to the center of the kitchen, Eva plunked the thing down on the table directly in front of Danny.

This is the best I can do,
she tried to telegraph silently.

Out loud, she said, “Each team send up one chef to draw a knife.”

Danny reached out and pulled one of the long knives free of the block with a hiss of metal on wood.

Skye Gladwell came over, the bangles and charms around her ankles tinkling softly. She drew one of the shorter blades and stared at it for a moment. Her expression gave nothing away, but Eva could see the relief on Beck’s face. Guilt burrowed its fingers into her chest, but she didn’t have time for that now. She beckoned the last two chefs over.

Ike Bryar pulled the other ten-incher, putting his Southern Team with the East Coast. Which left Ryan Larousse’s boys working with Skye Gladwell.

Out of the corner of her eye, Eva saw Beck tense up again. She didn’t blame him—that combo seemed dangerous to her, too, but hey. Maybe it meant Cheney would get some good footage after all.

Somehow, that didn’t seem as important right this minute as it had before.

“The teams are set,” Eva declared, stepping back. “Get cooking. I’ll be back to check on you in a few hours.”

The chefs took off like racehorses hearing the starting gun, and Eva hustled herself out of their way. Only Danny paused for a moment, his gaze heavy on Eva’s face. Still angry, despite the team swap. Still condemning her with every flicker of his blue-gray eyes. Still … was that hurt? Eva’s chest constricted, strangling the breath from her lungs, and when he turned away, she fumbled blindly for the door.

She’d lost him.

The knowledge lodged in her throat like a stone, rough and unyielding. Whatever they’d said last night, whatever he’d felt or wanted then—he clearly didn’t want anything to do with her now.

Out in the hall, the air was cooler but next to impossible to draw into her lungs. She needed a minute, just a minute by herself, to process what had happened, the way she’d screwed up everything, the ruin she’d made of her own barely realized hopes. She needed to breathe.

Instead, she found her assistant camped out in a chair by the elevators, his pale face tense and miserable.

“Drew.” Concern sharpened her voice. “Are you okay? Have you been crying? Tell me what’s wrong.”

Ducking his head to hide his swollen, puffy eyes, Drew sniffled. “He’s never going to forgive me.”

“Who?”

“Win! Winslow Jones.” Drew’s anguished cry bounced around the tiny space. “He knows I was passing on details and information about them to you, and I’m sure he thinks I was only hanging out with him to get dirt on his friends, but it’s not true. I really liked him.”

Eva’s throat clogged up, her eyes burning as if she were staring directly into a hot oven. The devastation on his young face cut into Eva’s heart. She’d justified her actions by weighing the needs of the many—those unnamed, unsung talented chefs who couldn’t afford to compete—against the right to privacy of the few, and she’d thought she was comfortable with her choice. Secure in her decision to play the Cooking Channel’s game, just enough to get what she wanted.

But she’d never wanted this.

“God, Drew. I’m so sorry. I never meant for you to get hurt.”

“I know,” he said, still not looking at her. “I’ll get over it. I mean, I don’t think Winslow was serious about me, anyway. Not the way I was about him.”

His voice cracked, and Eva had to hug him again, because hanging heavy and real in the air between them was the unspoken fact that now, Drew would never get a chance to know how Winslow Jones felt about him.

Drew was stiff under her arm for half a second before he sighed and laid his spiky head on her shoulder. Hugging his skinny frame to her, Eva stared straight ahead at the blank hallway wall, and thought about the fact that Drew wasn’t the only one who’d lost any chance at finding out where things could go with the man he … loved.

Oh, God. What have I done?

Winslow was, as he would put it, a hot mess. After the morning uproar, his concentration was shot, as full of holes as microplane grater, and his nerves appeared to be about as raw as if someone had taken that grater to his bare skin.

Danny propped him up as best he could, but for a team challenge, this was turning out to be very much down to individual dishes. The team with the most dishes chosen by the judges would win … and continue on to the finals.

The team with the fewest would lose. And half of that team would be up for elimination.

A quicker challenge than the last, the chefs had been given access to all the ingredients they needed right there in the Limestone kitchen, so they’d avoided the time-consuming trip to Fresh Foods. And as a test of their ability to think and work quickly, they’d had the four hours until lunchtime to prep, and now faced the rest of the afternoon, the final sprint to cook and be ready to present their dishes to the judges by five o’clock.

The biggest switch would kick in when it came time for the actual judging. In ten rounds, the chefs from the two teams would go head-to-head.

There were certain ingredients both teams had to use—lobster, salmon, and so on. Familiar wedding fare, usually boring and uninspired. The contestants’ job was to take it from familiar to fabulous.

There were five courses, and each team had to present two options for each course. Two soups, two salads, two entrée choices, and two desserts. By which they meant, of course, wedding cake—something Danny had only attempted in class, never in a real-life setting.

And he was majorly distracted by the implosion that appeared to be shattering his team from the inside.

Calmest of all of them, surprisingly enough, was Beck. When Winslow’s knife slipped for the twentieth time, nicking his thumbnail, Beck was the one who left his lobster shells on the table and hustled him over to the sink to patch him up, his huge, silent presence forming a solid protective wall.

Max had taken the bird, and he was off at the end of the table doing weird and interesting experiments with fried chicken skin. Beside him, Jules bent over the endive she was chiffonading to make into a salad to go with her tournedos of beef, one eye worriedly on Winslow and Beck.

Catching his glance, she and Danny exchanged mutual wide eyes and raised eyebrows of concern, but what could they do? They had to push forward.

Jules, at least, had the luxury of not understanding exactly what it meant when Skye Gladwell’s whisk leaped from her hand and clattered to the floor in front of Beck as he jogged by on his way back to their table. Jules was oblivious to the deep undercurrents running between the two chefs as Beck picked up the whisk and handed it back to Skye, clean handle pointing toward her, so that his hand got sticky with cake batter and he had to go back to the sink and wash up all over again.

But Danny saw that stuff, and he saw the way Beck’s gaze lingered over Skye’s hands, bare of any rings or other adornment. He even noticed the wooden, blank emotional withdrawal on Skye’s pretty face, so different from the easy sunshine they’d become accustomed to from her.

Danny saw everything, and it filled his chest with blistering rage.

How could Eva have ever thought it would be okay to put Beck and Skye on the same team? Planning a wedding, no less. The fact that they were working with the southern guys now, instead, hadn’t cooled Danny’s temper very much.

He ignored Eva when she came back to the kitchen to check on them after lunch, and gave them the full rundown on how the judging would go. He also resolutely did not notice her worried glances at her rat bastard of an assistant, or the way she kept a solicitous hand on the kid’s shoulder and spoke quietly into his ear.

Probably asking for some more personal, private, intimate, none-of-your-damn-business secrets,
Danny thought, turning the stand mixer on high with a vicious flick of his finger. The blades churned to life, spattering melted marshmallow and powdered sugar in a cloudburst.

Danny couldn’t resist another quick glare. His narrowed gaze took in Eva’s pale skin, the shakiness of her movements, and instinctive worry stirred in his chest before he could crush it.

She patted her assistant, Rat Boy, on the back and pushed him gently toward the door, then paused to scan the kitchen.

Her shadowed eyes found his, and for a long, numb moment, Danny’s mind went completely blank. She was just so heartbreakingly lovely, even with unhappiness trembling at the corners of her mouth.

The thought jarred Danny out of his ridiculous mooning. Sneering, at himself more than her, he shook his head and went back to his stupid, temperamental fondant.

If he couldn’t get the temperature right, it wouldn’t have the right consistency. He’d opted to do poured fondant because it tasted better, but it was trickier to roll out than the kind made with gelatin and food-grade glycerine.

With a ferocious frown, Danny immersed himself in the chemical details and attempted to block everything else out of his consciousness. It worked until Beck loomed beside him, out of the blue, a deep furrow creasing his forehead.

“I know you know about me and Skye,” he said without preamble. “Win told me. Everything.”

Danny’s heart was getting tired of the constant clench and release. Coronary problems ran in his family! He just hoped the RSC competition was going to be willing to pay for his eventual breakdown.