Some Like It Hot Page 5

  Somehow, the knowledge that she wasn’t quite so nonchalant as she wanted him to think made it easy to breathe again, and to stride down the hall at her side.

  He let them get to the huge double doors that marked the entrance to the hotel kitchen before he stopped and said, “I’m a pastry chef. I’m good at rules—good at figuring them out, and figuring out ways around them, ways to bend them, ways to break them.”

  She hesitated, one hand on the door, and for the first time a note of uncertainty crept into her confident gaze.

  “Just a friendly warning,” Danny said, reaching past her to push the door open. “In case you thought you were the one setting up the game. I’m here to win, sweetheart. And I don’t mess around.”

  Chapter 5

  It was only October. How was Chicago already a bleak frozen wasteland ripped by icy winds? Kane Slater zipped his black hoodie up all the way to his chin and wished he’d been smart enough to bring a real coat.

  But damn, it never got this ball-shriveling cold back home in Austin, not even in the dead of winter. And in fucking LA, where he lived now, people wigged out and started wearing those ugly-ass furry boots if it dropped below seventy-two.

  Still. He should’ve known it would be chilly up here. He hummed a snatch of the new, half-formed melody he couldn’t get out of his head and huddled down into the worn fleece of his sweatshirt, making sure his thick black sunglasses were perched firmly on his nose, hiding his distinctive blue eyes. His hood was up and pulled tight, too, and he’d pretty much found that if people couldn’t see his blond hair and blue eyes, they didn’t know who he was.

  At the very least, no one on the streets of Chicago seemed to recognize him, and Kane sent up a hymn of thanks to whatever gods looked out for rock stars who’d slipped the leashes of their handlers for an afternoon.

  It was stupid, maybe, but after the rocket-ship launch of his last two years of Grammys and music video awards and world tours and screaming girls throwing their panties onto the stage, Kane needed a break every now and then. He accepted the restrictions, the bodyguards, the eyes watching his every move as part of the whole fame package, and usually it was a decent trade-off. He knew he’d make the same deal with the devil a thousand times over if it meant he got to live and breathe music every day.

  But the huge, smothering, never-receding wave of attention made it hard to get a minute alone to think.

  And Kane had some shit to work through.

  Okay, he told himself as his rubber-soled Converse All Stars pounded the sidewalk, the thin canvas doing nothing to block the slushy leftovers of last week’s snow. Man up. You made a commitment to the RSC, to Eva, and to yourself. Don’t let the fact that you’re all whipped and mopey over a fellow judge stop you from doing your job.

  Also, he decided as a gust of frigid air whipped down the canyon formed by the tall buildings and neatly sheared off the top layer of Kane’s skin, maybe don’t be such an emo loser that you stalk around in the ice cold contracting pneumonia or something.

  Conceding his defeat to Chicago’s famous blustery weather, Kane wrapped his arms around his torso and shouldered his way into the first coffee shop he saw.

  Warmth hit him like a feather pillow to the face, so soft and welcome his bones actually ached with it. The abrupt transition stole his breath for a long instant, but the jingle of the door behind him and the press of another caffeine-deprived customer jostling into him got Kane moving again.

  The place looked nothing like the bright, airy cafés of LA, all big panes of glass and clean, modern lines and self-consciously designer furniture. And it wasn’t much like the well-used, well-loved downtown shabby-cool hipster coffee bars back in Austin.

  And it couldn’t have been more different from that one place on the Upper East Side of Manhattan—the Parisian-style coffee shop where he’d first told Claire Durand he didn’t care how much older she was, or what people would think. Where he told her exactly how much he wanted her.

  Forcing the memory from his mind, Kane looked around at the cracked plaster walls covered in aging yellow posters for things like Vienna beef hot dogs and chocolate-covered Twinkies. It was a small place, narrow and long, with a bank of red vinyl booths running along the left side. Customers lined up to the right, giving their orders to a smiling young woman with colorful tattoos climbing both bare arms.

  Kane was willing to bet she didn’t call herself a “barista,” and that the cups of coffee came in small, medium, and large. He grinned.

  More than anything else, it reminded him of the diner back home in the Texas Hill Country town where he grew up.

  Feeling calmer and more at ease than he had in months, Kane risked pushing his sunglasses up onto the top of his head so he could read the menu. Sure enough, his options were limited to drip coffee, espresso, or latte, and none was offered in Italian sizes.

  He thought the girl working the counter might have recognized him—behind her cat-eye glasses, she went a little wide and shocky—but she handed over his beautifully boring plain coffee-flavored coffee without any hassle. Grateful, Kane stuffed a twenty in the tip jar and went in search of cream.

  What he found was the one woman he’d been doing his best to figure out.

  There, sitting at the booth in the corner behind an open laptop and a mug topped with snowy white frothed milk, was Claire Durand.

  She’d been on his mind so much, Kane had to pause for a moment and blink furiously to clear his vision and make sure she was really real, really there.

  But it seemed she was, elegant and classy in her dark red sweater set, with a gorgeous patterned scarf knotted carelessly at her neck. She was like something out of those magazines Kane’s mom used to get, the ones that had articles like “Where to Summer This Year” and “At Home with Princess Grace.”

  And it had to really be her, he reasoned, edging closer to her table, because if it were all in his head, surely he’d picture her the way she’d looked stretched across the sheets in his hotel room back in New York, her slim, toned thighs and slender arms reaching for him, her mouth deeply pink because he couldn’t stop biting at her lips, her gorgeous hair spread over the pillow like a blanket of fallen autumn leaves.

  Feeling a little dazed, Kane raised his mug to his lips. The bitter burn of unadulterated coffee jolted him awake. He never did find the cream, did he?

  But now that he’d seen Claire, he was locked into her magnetic gravitational pull like a satellite orbiting a small planet. Drifting closer, he stood right over her. She glanced up from her work with a frown of concentration still knotting her auburn brows.

  The frown smoothed into a look of pure surprise. Kane savored it for a bare moment before setting his coffee down on her table and sliding onto the bench seat across from her.

  “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” he said, as easy and breezy as you please.

  The memory of that day, weeks ago, in a small café on the Upper East Side flickered across her beautiful face briefly, then was gone.

  She hesitated before she replied, and Kane experienced a quick, silent panic that she’d call him Mr. Slater. Which would mean he’d have to do something drastic to remind her that since they’d seen each other naked, last names were just creepy, but then she said, “Kane. How nice to see you.”

  Not the most enthusiastic greeting he’d ever received, but the leap of heat in her eyes told a different story.

  “I like your office.” He gestured to the scuffed tin poster hanging above her head covered in a stamped advertisement for Jolly Good Doughnuts.

  “What? Oh. Yes, well, the room I’ve been given at the Gold Coast is sufficient for sleeping, but it doesn’t provide a large enough desk, or a steady supply of hot coffee. We featured Blue Smoke Coffee in the magazine earlier this year in an article about the new trend in scaled-down coffee bars.”

  “Hey, I read that article—I think I even tore it out of the magazine and pinned it to the wall of the tour bus. I had every intention of visitin
g all the places y’all listed. What are the odds I’d stumble over this one completely at random?”

  “I couldn’t say.” Claire narrowed her eyes at him, clearly a bit on the disbelieving side of incredible coincidence.

  “My mama always says I was born under a lucky star.” He gave her his best disarming smile and leaned back in the booth, locking his arms behind his head to stop them from reaching for her.

  She was just so perfect and whole within herself, with an inner stillness born of knowing exactly who she was and what she wanted. Claire Durand sometimes seemed more like a monument or a statue made of marble and steel than a flesh-and-blood woman.

  But Kane knew she was made of silky smooth flesh, and that she was hot-blooded through and through. He’d had that firm, creamy skin of hers under his hands, his mouth. He’d tasted it.

  The contrast between the Claire in his head, how she’d been that night, and the Claire sitting straight-shouldered and distant across from him made Kane’s head spin harder than a shot of espresso on an empty stomach.

  “Anyway,” Kane barreled ahead. “I would’ve thought you’d be a-okay with running into me here … off the competition site, away from everyone who knows us.” He spread his arms along the back of the booth. “There’s no one here to care if I get inappropriate.”

  He waggled his eyebrows to take the edge off his words, but the unhappy curve of Claire’s mouth told him he’d failed. “Kane … all I asked was that you be a bit more … circumspect. More aware of our surroundings. This is not a vacation from my real job—this is an enormous and highly visible part of my real job. I can’t be seen as one of your … what is the word? Groupies.”

  Stung, Kane dropped his elbows to the table and leaned in. “Okay, A? You’re not a groupie. Nobody in their right mind would mistake you for one. And two, that’s not totally accurate.”

  She closed her eyes briefly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that you don’t take your duties as a judge of the RSC seriously. But it is not your career, Kane.”

  He winced. “Uh, no … actually, that part was pretty accurate. And I see your point. I do. But you didn’t just ask me to be circumspect. You asked for time. Apart. And that’s hard for me.”

  The raw honesty in his voice must have gotten through to her, because everything about her softened, from the line of her shoulders to the look in her eyes.

  Reaching a slim hand across the table, Claire let her fingertips rest gently on his rigid wrist. “It’s hard for me, too. I have missed you.”

  Kane could relate. After that first night together in New York, followed by weeks of banter, flirting, kissing, and making love across the country as the judges traveled to the other regional finals to pick the teams from the Midwest, South, Southwest, and West Coast, Claire’s request to cool things down once the actual competition began had come as a shock.

  Although, looking back, he could sort of see where there had been clues … the way she always wanted to meet after hours, away from the rest of the RSC crew, the way she stiffened when he forgot and touched her in public.

  But they could figure that stuff out, he thought. It didn’t have to be the end of everything.

  Giving her his best cocky grin, he flipped the wrist she’d touched and grabbed her fingers. “So if you miss me, and I sure as hell miss you, then hot damn! I’ve got just the solution.”

  Claire blew out a breath that stirred the wave of auburn hair over her high forehead.

  “You aren’t listening. Or perhaps you simply do not wish to hear. Fine. Let me be plain. Kane, what we have between us, it is … how do you say? De trop. Too much, of everything except common sense and rationality.”

  Kane’s foolishly hopeful heart perked up. “I make you feel too much. That doesn’t exactly sound like a catastrophe to me.”

  Her mouth quivered as if it wanted to laugh. “For you? I would imagine no. You are one of those men who lives at a faster pace than the rest of the world, always searching for the new thrill, the new sensation.”

  He had to admit, she had his number there. “So I skydive and eat blowfish.” He shrugged. “I like to feel alive. Don’t you?”

  Her eyes sharpened like arrows on his face. “Ah, but I don’t need to risk my life and sanity in order to feel alive. And in affairs of the heart, it is the same. You chase the big risk, the big emotion. For me…” It was her turn to shrug, and he watched with a stirring of desire in his gut as she made a much more elegant job of it.

  “For you?” he prompted he when she fell silent.

  A shadow moved across her face, like a curtain dropping over a well-lit stage, and she said, “You Americans. You suppress the body and its desires, and treat the heart as if it is a wild animal to be tamed, so that when those things are awakened in you, they have the strength of ravenous lions, too long imprisoned.”

  Caught by the imagery, Kane felt a line of lyrics unspool in his head, perfectly shaped to fit the melody that had been rattling around in there for a day and a half.

  Burning with it, he snatched the pencil he always carried in his back pocket and leaned across the table to steal Claire’s unused white paper napkin.

  Scribbling furiously, he fought to get the words out of his brain and onto the paper before they vanished into the air. “Go on,” he said tensely, hand cramping from how tight he was holding the pencil. “I’m still listening. Lions. Go.”

  Amusement colored her voice the same red as her cashmere sweater. “You see? Nothing is simple for you. But I learned, when I was younger than you are now, the way to happiness is balance and moderation—the needs of the body are important, yes, but they do not rule the entire self. Take your pleasures where you find them, enjoy them, then leave them there so they do not overtake you. I believe in this, Kane, the way some people believe in heaven and hell.”

  God, that voice of hers. The way she used words. If he hadn’t already known she started out at Délicieux as their star feature food writer before being promoted to editor in chief, he would’ve been able to guess on the strength of this conversation.

  Everything she said, every single image, slid between his ribs and pierced his heart. He didn’t want this to be the end of everything between them, but if it turned out to be, then he’d have one last reason to remember Claire Durand, because she’d made even this moment beautiful, and if there was anything Kane believed in as strongly as heaven and hell, it was the idea of beauty.

  “So you took your pleasure with me.” His voice was more of a strangled gasp than his usual strong baritenor, but he forgave himself, this once. “And now you’re ready to move on. Just like that.”

  Claire shifted in her seat, the leather creaking under her hips. After a moment of visible internal struggle she said, “No, not just like that. And not for the reason you’re thinking.”

  Kane’s brain had gone to a very visceral place at the sound of her moving against the leather.

  Yeah, this was a make-or-break conversation in which he was seriously emotionally invested, but he was still a guy.

  “I promise, you have no idea what I’m thinking,” he told her.

  Something in his voice, some hint of the X-rated memories playing out in his mind’s eye like the best-ever porn, made her dark brown gaze snap to molten hot chocolate in an instant.

  “I need to pull away from this”—she gestured between them languidly—“because when I’m with you, I lose my balance. I don’t feel calm and happy.”

  She leaned forward, and Kane swallowed down his immediate urge to leap across the table and crush her thin lips under his.

  “When I’m with you,” Claire said, her accent rolling through the words like distant thunder, “I am a starving lion, raging at my captivity.”

  And as she sat back, the fires in her eyes banked again while she gathered up her laptop and left, Kane realized two things.

  He’d never wanted to be eaten up so badly in his life.

  And if Claire could still look at him like that, then
nothing—nothing—was over.

  Chapter 6

  Eva was supremely grateful she spent a good portion of her life strapped into ridiculously high heels. If these Louboutins were out of the norm for her, there was no way she’d be able to keep upright after that knee-weakening, eyebrow-singeing, no-holds-barred kiss back there.

  The kiss itself had thrown her off balance with its intensity, the immediacy of the connection between them. It felt … real, in a way she wasn’t used to, and wasn’t a hundred percent sure she liked.

  But if the kiss had her wobbling, it was his parting shot that nearly knocked her flat. The idea that Daniel Lunden might make new rules for the game they’d just started, a game she hoped, more than ever, would continue—it gave her chills.

  Maybe good, maybe bad. Who could say at this point? All Eva knew was that she felt something, something interesting and unusual and worth exploring.

  Although not right at the moment, maybe, because holy crap, what did I just walk into?

  She’d taken a moment, no more than thirty seconds, truly, to untwist her metaphorical panties and de-wobble her knees. Half a minute after Lunden went on through to the kitchen, Eva stepped in after him.

  And plunged directly into the middle of a fistfight.

  That tall, heavily muscled chef from the East Coast Team crouched in the middle of a knot of kicking, punching Limestone chefs. The Limestone executive chef, and head of the Rising Star Chef competition’s Midwest Team, lay on the rubber mats at Muscle Man’s feet, clutching his jaw and spitting curses. The other East Coast chef, the cute black kid with the freckles and green eyes, had a bruise coming up along one cheekbone, but was valiantly engaged in a struggle with the Limestone saucier on the edge of the fight.

  Beside her, Daniel Lunden yelled, “Break it up, guys. Come on.” Which, of course, accomplished nothing other than to add to the din of crashing bodies, loud insults, and heavy breathing. He must’ve known they were past the point when talking could solve things, because before the words were out of his mouth, he was pushing up his sleeve and grabbing hold of the nearest combatant.