Hot Under Pressure (10 page)

She needed, with every fiber of her being, to hear what he would say next.

“No.” Kane huffed out another, unamused laugh. “I resented the implication that I didn’t care about you, but I don’t think Theo had it all wrong—didn’t, even then. And I probably wouldn’t have let him goad me into a fight, except that all of a sudden, there was someone in front of me I
could
fight. And it felt good.”

Claire was completely lost. This conversation wasn’t going at all the way she’d anticipated. “What do you mean?”

He looked her right in the eye. “I mean, when I told Theo I’d fight to keep you, I was really talking to you.”

She’d never seen him so intent, his steely determination naked and exposed, with all his usual mask of lazy amusement and carefree joie de vivre ripped away. Claire wanted to retreat from the sense of purpose in his direct gaze, but there was nowhere to go.

“You didn’t know I was there,” she sputtered.

“But you were there in my head.” Nailing her with a glance, he said, “You’d been pushing me away for days … hell, for weeks, since before we even got together. You let me have your body, but you never let me get closer than skin deep, and for a long time I let you get away with it. I played it your way, even though it sucked and it didn’t make either one of us happy, but it didn’t help. You still kept me at arm’s length.”

Claire wanted to protest, to deny it, but that would mean admitting that he’d gotten under her skin from the very start. Raw fear stopped up her throat like a cork in a bottle, and all she could do was stare at him.

Clearly taking her silence for agreement, Kane smiled grimly and went on. “So when Theo pushed me, I snapped. I said to him what I should’ve said to you—that I’m ready to fight to keep you.”

Heart battering at her ribs, Claire could scarcely hear over the rush of her blood in her ears.

Kane fell quiet, gaze locked with hers. Everything Claire wanted to say collided in her throat, clogging her vocal cords with emotion. Silence stretched between them, thick with expectation and unspoken promises.

There was so much she wanted to tell him, but the very idea of exposing herself that way made her soul shrivel like a grape left out in the sun. She stared at him, mute with misery, wishing there were a way to communicate her feelings telepathically, straight into his brain, so she wouldn’t have to lay herself open.

And as she stood there, struggling to overcome decades of clean, simple, balanced, emotionless living, the light died out of Kane’s eyes, and he turned away.

“But it’s no good if you won’t fight for us, too,” he said quietly, jamming his hands into the front pockets of his tight jeans. The muscles in his wiry, tanned forearms stood out, stark and tense. “So I guess that’s it. Theo’s leaving, I’m backing off … you’re safe now.”

With that, he turned and walked out.

And Claire let him go.

Her heart turned to lead, weighty and solid in her chest. She had to work to breathe around it, almost as hard as she was working to convince herself that this was the way it had to be. That it was better to make a clean break now than to invest more time and emotion in a relationship that couldn’t—just
couldn’t
—last.

She stood alone in the empty kitchen and stared down at her clipboard on the floor, every beat of her heavy heart whispering that she’d lived up to one of her countrymen’s ugly stereotypes.

Instead of standing her ground and fighting for what she wanted … she’d surrendered to her own fear.

Chapter 9

“What do you mean, he wants to play you for it?”

Skye did a quick over-the-shoulder to make sure no one was close enough to overhear before elbowing Fiona and hissing, “Shh! Would you keep it down? I’d rather the rest of the contestants weren’t privy to any more details of my private life, thanks very much.”

Fiona waved one slim, pale hand in an airy circle before going back to shelling fava beans into a stainless steel bowl. “Paranoid much? Everyone’s too busy prepping to pay any attention to us. So chill, babe, and spill the details on hubba hubba hubby!”

“Don’t call him that.” Skye pointed her whisk at her best friend with a narrow-eyed glare. “He’s not my husband. At least, not in the way you’re suggesting.”

Fiona gave a neutral
hmm
that buzzed across Skye’s skin like a pesky mosquito.

“I mean it,” she insisted, frustration driving her right arm to beat the egg whites in her ceramic bowl so vigorously she’d have meringue in half the usual time. “Beck is the past. Jeremiah is my future.”

Perfect Jeremiah, with his perfect dark blond hair and perfect cheekbones, perfectly tanned from all the time he spent outdoors, working to build schoolhouses and clinics in developing countries.

Ignoring the twinge of inadequacy was easy; Skye had been shoving that feeling down since she was a little kid. It felt familiar. Safe.

“Wait, don’t tell me—Hunky Hubby doesn’t know about Mr. Perfect.” Fiona ripped open the green pod in her hands so violently the uncooked beans exploded against the side of bowl with a clatter.

Resisting the urge to call more attention to this conversation by shushing Fiona again, Skye cut her eyes left, to where Beck and his team were set up.

No matter what kind of chaos was going on in the competition kitchen—and with only a few hours to cook today, the chaos factor was huge—Skye seemed to always know, instinctively, where Beck was. It was like she had some kind of internal radar set for Tall, Taciturn, Crazy-making Ex.

Better than thinking of it as the response of furry, helpless prey in the presence of a scary, toothy predator.

“There’s no reason to tell Beck about Jeremiah,” she said, aware of how prim she sounded, but unable to do anything about it. “It’s not any of his business.”

“Not his business!” Fiona widened her pale blue eyes comically. With her ultra-fair skin and wispy platinum hair, she didn’t look like she’d seen a ghost—she looked like she
was
the ghost. “Well, I declare. He is your lawfully wedded husband.”

“Whatever relationship existed between Beck and me ended years ago. All that’s left is a stupid piece of paper—and pretty soon, even that will be history.” Skye peered into her friend’s bowl, her own meringue forgotten for the moment. “Here, don’t shell those—they’re small and tender enough to roast and eat whole. That’ll be a nice contrast to the blanched favas in the salad.”

“Ah, yes. And now we come to it.” Fiona grinned, a crafty look coming over her elfin face. “Handsome Hubby agreed to the quiet quickie divorce in exchange for … what?”

“It’s more like a bet than a straight transaction.” Skye went for lofty and unconcerned, and she almost pulled it off. “But it’s a win-win for me, because I get the divorce either way.”

“Yeah,” Fiona drawled. “And you’ve also now got built-in motivation to lose the RSC competition—because if you lose, you’ve got an awesome excuse for one last whirl with your ex before you move on to Mr. Perfect. Who probably only knows the missionary position.”

“Stop it.” Skye couldn’t help it, though. She had to laugh. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to try to fail, just to get to experience Beck one last time. That’s not even an issue.”

“Oh, come on! You’re going to give up that—” They both turned and glanced at Beck, standing over his station with a dark, forbidding look on his hard-edged face. Skye had to work to contain the shiver that tightened her chest.
Prey response
, she told herself.
That’s all.

“Damn,” Fiona breathed before skewering Skye with a skeptical glare. “Seriously. You’re giving up Mr. Sex on a Stick for a guy who doesn’t believe in staying exclusive when he’s out of the country?”

“Jeremiah doesn’t think it’s practical to expect fidelity of each other when we’re apart so much,” Skye said, the primness returning to her voice. “And I agree with him.”

“Practical. Jesus, be still my heart. Did he at least throw you a little slap and tickle before taking off for Malaysia, or wherever the Peace Corps sent him this time?”

The barb sank home, but Skye covered her wince with an exaggerated scowl. “He’s in Burkina Faso. And I am never drinking with you again. You know too much—I’m afraid I’m going to have to kill you.”

“Okay, fine. But if I get one final deathbed request, it’s that you tell me the truth—while Jeremiah’s off doing who knows what with every pretty do-gooder he can find, have you ever once availed yourself of his ‘What Happens When We’re On Separate Continents Stays on Separate Continents’ clause?”

No. Of course not. Because, as Jeremiah said fondly, she had the lowest sex drive on the planet.

“Look, sex just isn’t that important to me,” she tried to explain, but of course Fiona wasn’t having any of that.

Giving her a raised brow sharp enough to leave a scar, Fiona said, “Sugar. Sex is important to everyone. It just doesn’t mean the same thing to all of us.”

This was starting to sound like one of the discussions at Skye’s parents’ parties—the kind of conversational dilemma that could only be solved through the discreet application of mind-altering substances.

“All right, enough,” she said firmly. “We need to concentrate on our menu, not my sex life.”

“Or lack thereof.”

“Or lack thereof,” Skye agreed through gritted teeth. “Get back to work!”

Fiona saluted smartly and clicked her heels together, her wooden chef’s clogs making a loud clacking sound. “
Oui
, Chef!”

Skye caught her friend’s elbow as Fiona headed over to claim an oven to roast the smallest of the whole fava bean pods.

“Seriously, Fee. Keep this bet thing with Beck just between us, okay? I don’t want the rest of the team worrying about it.”

The perpetual twinkle in Fiona’s eyes softened for a moment. “You know it, babe. Your secrets are always safe with me.”

“I do know that.” Skye gave her a grateful smile and went back to her egg whites. Fiona was the only one who knew the whole story—everything that had gone down with Beck. And she’d had a front row seat for the years of dating limbo, when Skye felt torn between anger at and loyalty to her absent husband, and allowed the patently ridiculous hope that he might come back one day to keep her at home every Friday night.

Or, as Fiona had put it when she staged her mini-intervention, the years when Skye had hidden behind the specter of Henry Beck to keep from having to put herself out there again.

Faced with Fiona’s indomitable will and her own mounting loneliness, Skye had tentatively started dating. And then, after several blind dates so awful she still had nightmares about them, she’d met Jeremiah Raleigh at one of her parents’ deadly dull parties full of intellectuals smoking pot and talking about the situation in Africa.

Jeremiah had been invited as someone who’d actually been to Africa, and his genuine passion as he spoke about what he’d seen there captivated Skye.

So different from Beck, she’d thought, helpless against the comparison, and when Jeremiah turned his radiant smile on her, the warmth of knowing exactly how interested he was fed something inside her that had gone hungry for years.

Realizing she had a soft, goopy smile on her face, Skye pressed her lips together and went back to beating her egg whites. She could’ve used a mixer, sure, but an electric mixer meant she lost the connection between the force of her arm and the pressure of her hand around the whisk—it was too easy to overdo things when modern technology made them so simple and effortless.

She remembered the first time she’d cooked for Jeremiah; she’d said something like that to explain why she didn’t own a microwave, and he’d given her that look. That shining, expectant look, the one that lit him up from inside.

That was the first time he’d invited her to come along with him on one of his overseas trips.

But it wasn’t the last.

Shaking her head to rid herself of any thoughts that weren’t kitchen related, Skye set her ceramic bowl down on the cutting board at her station and gently dipped her whisk into the egg whites to check them.

Holding her breath and praying she hadn’t overworked the egg whites while her mind was flying off on the Jeremiah tangent, she lifted the whisk. The stuff clung to the end of it, drooping off the tip of the wire balloon like a glossy, white parrot’s beak.

Perfect medium stiff peaks.

She’d already blended in the cream of tartar and the tiny amount of sugar she needed in order to hold out any hope of the meringues keeping their shape in the oven.

Normally with meringues, the sugar in the mix would do all the work of helping to keep the sweet little cookies puffed and crispy on the outside before they crumbled and melted in the mouth.

But Skye had taken the judges’ comments about innovation at the relay challenge to heart, and she was attempting something a little crazy—a savory meringue.

Which meant less sugar, less structural integrity, less of an idea of how the heck this was going to turn out … and approximately six thousand times the amount of stress.

How’s this for taking a risk
, she mused as she set her jaw and reached for the knobbly chunk of parmagiano reggiano cheese.

Her hand closed on empty air, and she frowned down at her
mise en place
in confusion. The rest of her
mise
was perfect, all her ingredients set out close to hand and easily accessible: fresh green chives, cayenne pepper, salt. But no cheese.

Oh come on. Had she really been so wacked out and worried about flying by the seat of her pants on this recipe that she’d forgotten to grab the main flavoring ingredient from the walk-in cooler?

Flicking a quick glance at the wall clock counting down the minutes to the end of their prep time today, Skye bit back a curse. She’d wasted an entire hour of prep time on that conversation with Fiona and the mushy-headed daydreaming afterward. There were only three hours left on the clock, and she still had to grate the cheese, finish mixing up the meringues, pipe them out on baking sheets, and dry them in the oven for at least two hours.

Maybe more.