Feel the Heat (Hot In the Kitchen) (5 page)

She lowered her voice to bedroom level. “Between you and me, I hate fish. And calling it by its Italian name doesn’t make it taste any better.” She chuckled and Laurent joined in, probably thinking he was onto a good thing. Clearly he hadn’t noticed the Jupiter-sized rock weighing down her left hand. Jack kept his testiness in check. It irked him to no end when servers inserted their unsolicited opinions into the proceedings.

Although, given the size of the menu—the pages upon pages of every Italian specialty prepared since the fall of Rome that just screamed “waste” and “where the hell do I start?”—he supposed an opinion or two wasn’t such a bad thing. Rather than wade through the tome before him, he made an executive decision. “Just bring us one each of the specials and a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino. And make the steak medium rare.”

Once the server had bounced off, Laurent cleared his throat. “I thought after Ashley you had sworn off women.”

Sworn off? Nah, he’d just encased his dick in concrete, that’s all. Ashley had left Jack feeling contaminated and in need of a full-scale mind and body bleach. He had thought they had a connection, but in reality, he was just another tool in her quest for celebrity dominance. And once Jack became better known for his sex life than his kitchen expertise, he realized he had a problem. Casual hookups were no longer on the menu.

“You mean the busty munchkin? No chance.” His traitorous eyes sought out Lili, who was busy showing a statuesque redhead and her plainly undeserving oaf of a date to a table. Finally, some diners under the age of forty.

“I’m talking about
ma chérie
, Lili.”

Jack snapped his head back so sharply he winced. “Oh, she’s your
chérie
now? She’s far too young. She must be the same age as my sister.”

“But she’s not your sister,” Laurent countered quickly, because no one wanted to dwell on a friend’s sister when the potential of a mind-blowing lay was on the table. Jack silently agreed, not wanting to think about his sister either. Where Jules, ten years his junior, was scatter-brained and likely to lose her job at the drop of a hat, Lili projected a calm responsibility beyond her years. He had been watching her closely ever since he arrived, enjoying the ease with which she managed everyone, customers and staff alike.

Laurent coughed again. It was really annoying. “So if you are truly not interested, you won’t mind if I take a shot?”

“You’re asking permission? You never ask permission.” A muscle clenched in Jack’s midsection, but he chose to ignore it. Not trusting his instincts seemed to be the safest option these days.

Laurent smiled and, not for the first time in their fifteen-year friendship, Jack wanted to pummel him. “You saw her first.”

Jack laughed off his discomfort, forcing his fists to cooperate. “That’s awfully gallant of you. Have at it. Maybe you can bag the chatty cousin too.”

A few minutes later, Cara was back and Gina was struggling with the bottle of Brunello as if it were an enemy combatant. Following a quick sniff, Jack put the glass down on the table. The smell was akin to wet dog, indicating that the cork, and by extension, the wine, had been contaminated by a chemical compound.

“It’s corked.”

Her eyes grew wide in clear confusion.

“Bad. Appalling. Wretched.” He tried not to sound too irritated, but come on.

Gina stole a peek at the bar before turning back to face them. “Are you sure you don’t want to taste it first?”

Now it was Jack’s turn for the wide eyes. If a guest—an expert—said the wine was undrinkable, then his word should be accepted without question. Laurent smirked, probably anticipating the reaming that inevitably followed when some sassy piece challenged the boss’s authority, but before Jack could reply, Cara chimed in.

“Gina, you know that saying ‘the customer is always right’? Well, it’s a load of crap. But you know who is right? The chef with several fine dining establishments in three countries and six Michelin stars.”

“Seven,” Jack corrected instinctively. It should have been eight; that two-star rating for New York still rankled. And no matter how many times he told Cara that the restaurants received the ratings, not the chef, she always got it wrong.

Cara continued her defense of his superior nose. “And if Jack says the wine is corked, then it’s corked. So toddle off and bring us another one.” With a mutinous glare, Gina stormed to the bar.

Jack’s fingers instinctively went to the throbbing bump on his head. It was going to be a long night.

*  *  *

“You need to do something,” Lili’s cousin Tad murmured from behind the bar. He nodded at the estrogen flock near the water station.

Yeah, yeah, didn’t she know it. She hauled in a fortifying breath and strode over to the ringleader. Her second cousin, Angela, was fronting the charge, licking her lips and bombarding Jack’s table with lustful gazes.

“If I have to tell you one more time to get back to work, tonight’s tips will be dropped in St. Jude’s collection plate at eight o’clock Mass tomorrow.” Not that she’d be stepping across the church threshold herself—she might turn to ash—but her pious aunt Sylvia would be happy to make a donation on behalf of the servers at DeLuca’s. Angela scowled while the rest of the girls separated in a flurry of giggles, throwing longing glances in Jack’s direction.

Lili seated Mr. and Mrs. Castillo, here for their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, and returned to gossip with Tad.

“So, Wonder Woman, huh?” her cousin said, giving the bar a quick swipe with a damp cloth while he shot a glittering smile at a bouncy redhead on her way to the restroom. Ever the multitasker, her cousin. The poor girl’s perk faltered as she wobbled on her heels, helpless in the face of Tad’s blue-eyed, square-jawed, hint-of-scruff charm.

“Hey, I didn’t look half bad in that costume,” Lili protested.

“Yeah, I heard Kilroy thought so, too,” Tad said. “And judging by the heat he’s packing tonight, I’d lay good odds he spent his day thinking about peeling you
out
of that costume.”

“Oh, hush.”

But Tad was right. The air was thick with sex pheromones, and while ninety-five percent of it was one-way traffic from every female in the room to Jack’s table, the remaining five percent was swimming upstream from the man himself to her spot at the hostess podium. With the scorching looks he was sending her way, she half expected the smoke alarms to go off any minute.

“What are you going to do about it?” Tad asked.

“What? Kilroy?”

Tad threw her a well-duh look. “Cara seems to think you’ve got an in. I thought she was talking out of her bony ass as usual, but now that I’ve witnessed the man in action, I’m inclined to agree.”

“I’m not his type. You’ve seen the women he dates.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t throw that Ashley out of bed for eating breadsticks. And then there was that lingerie model and one of those bikini babes from
Survivor
.” Her cousin had clearly found a kindred penis in Jack Kilroy. “Yeah, you’re probably right. How could you possibly stack up against those chicks?”

She knew he was being his usual sarcastic self, but it didn’t stop a sigh escaping her lips.

“Babe, I jest,” he added, his expression resolving to sympathy. “Trust me.
All
men like ’em curvy. It’s like, programmed into our DNA.”

Maybe, but Lili’s DNA still screamed,
Danger!
An afternoon of Google-Fu had thrown up all she needed to know about the lives and lusts of Cara’s star. Last summer, he’d been a minor-league TV chef on a fledgling network with fewer viewers than DeLuca’s Tuesday night covers. Then along came Ashley van Patten, star of struggling soap opera
Tomorrow’s Hope
. His people must have lunched with her people, angling to manufacture the next celebrity couple juggernaut. Jashley. Or Ashlack. Not as catchy as Brangelina, but it did the trick to reverse the slide of their respective ratings. Hers doubled. His tripled.

While their relationship ups-and-downs were entertaining, their train wreck breakup had been even more so: a public fight at one of those Hollywood mogul’s shindigs that ended with Jack wearing a martini and Ashley coughing up a gallon of chlorinated water after she fell into the kidney-shaped pool. Not long after, he had punched a photographer who got all up in his grill on a London street. Lili obviously didn’t have the dramatic flair to go toe-to-toe with Jack Kilroy.

“Ah, but still he stares.” Tad grinned, interpreting her apprehensive expression correctly. “Worried your lady bits might go into shock, babe? I know it’s been a looong while.”

“Maybe he’s not
my
type,” she said, shooting for haughty.

“Liar,” he said, then more casually, “We could make it interesting.”

“How interesting?”

“Fifty bucks says you can’t close the deal before he leaves town.”

She shot him an impatient look. “How about twenty minutes on your hog?”

Tad answered with the family stare-down, a skill learned by all DeLucas while still in the cradle. “I’ve told you before, Lili. I don’t think you can handle that much power.” Her cousin had a Harley but refused to let her ride it. It was much more fun to take potshots at what he called her “tin cup runabout.”

“Forget it,” she said, turning away.

“Okay, ten minutes. But it doesn’t matter because you’re such a chicken. You won’t go for it even if it’s offered up on a platter.” He sloped off to attend to a couple of cougars who had just stalked up and dug their claws into the bar.

Chicken
. More like Little Miss Do Nothing, and though she knew Tad was only teasing, it still stung. Now that her mom was better, Lili should have been back on the life train, next stop grad school. Two years ago, she had plans to blow this Popsicle stand and finally transform into the person she had dreamed of as a tortured fat girl. Future Lili would be poised, self-assured, successful. Achieving an acceptable comfort level with her body should have instilled a similar confidence in her mind, but there were always those lingering doubts—about her artistic talent, her self-worth, her place in the world.

Until she got her restaurant back in the black, her place was at DeLuca’s, doing everything in her power to ensure the family’s future. Even if that meant enduring her father’s viselike grip on the business and her dreams. She sighed. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was a new life.

Minutes later, Lili spotted a teed-off Gina approaching the bar with a bottle of wine in one hand, a corkscrew in the other, and a face that even her extremely patient fiancé might have reservations about. While her cousin shook and gesticulated her way through an explanation to her brother, Tad, Lili ambled over to see how her meddling services might be best employed.

She placed a protective arm around Gina’s shoulders as the girl spluttered, “They…they shouldn’t talk like that to people. I know he’s a freaking genius chef, but that wine costs a lot of money. Telling me to toddle off. There’s no need to be rude, you know?”

Lili’s hackles rose as she contemplated tearing Jack Kilroy a new one. If that big shot big mouth with his behemoth restaurants and über-sensitive wine palate thought he could waltz in here and look down his British nose at everyone, he had chosen the wrong night to do it—and the wrong family to mess with. She pivoted quickly, only to bump chest-first into the object of her next tongue-lashing, who was doing a wonderful impersonation of a Stonehenge monolith.

He stepped back just as she placed a hand on his chest to…well, to stop him, she supposed. Mercy, if he wasn’t incredibly solid and warm and undeniably male. He was definitely going to hear it. Once her brain unwarped and she could think straight.

She raised her eyes using his shirt buttons as her road map and blinked when she reached his face. He really was the most handsome man she had ever seen in person—movie-star gorgeous—and briefly her resolve wavered. But that shit-eating grin was enough to straighten her spine and snap her back to mountain pose. Yay, yoga.

“The next time you want to act like a card-carrying jackass with one of my staff, you should ask to see the manager.” Her cheeks burned. He opened his mouth—
that crooked, sexy mouth
—and she put up a hand to stop him.

“You had better be a good tipper, Kilroy, because money’s the only way you’re getting out of this intact.”

“Lili—” Gina tried to cut in.

Lili waved a hand. She had this.

His feet didn’t move, but his upper body leaned in so close she caught the scent of his skin, woodsy and citrus, reminiscent of a Sorrentine lemon grove. New man smell, nothing like it. He combed his fingers through his thick—and more lustrous than it had a right to be—hair.

“I actually came to apologize to Gina. Cara was bang out of order and shouldn’t have said what she did.”

Gulp.

So maybe she didn’t have it after all.

She shot a death glare at her cousin, who offered a wobbly smile in return.

“I’m sorry. I misunderstood the situation,” Lili muttered before snapping in Italian, “Gina, take another bottle of Brunello to Mr. Kilroy’s table. Then it’s your turn to check the restrooms.” Her cousin slunk off.

Lili turned back to the Duke of Hunk, who had crossed his arms over that barrel chest and appeared to be waiting for a more groveling apology than the one she’d just given.

“You’re still here,” she said.