Hot Under Pressure (4 page)

“No, I mean it,” the guy insisted, scooting closer until Skye’s hopeful heart picked up its pace again. “I’ve never seen eyes that change colors. And your mouth…”

His stare dropped to her lips, which parted on a startled gasp. This was new! No one ever talked about her mouth. Or looked at it like that.

Was she about to get her very first kiss?

Chapter 3

A stack of dirty pans toppled to the counter with a crash, jarring Skye out of that moment of infinite possibility and back into the present.

The shitty, depressing present that tasted of nothing so much as bitter failure.

She’d finally confronted Henry Beck.

This was supposed to be an empowering moment. Skye had always imagined it that way. She’d expected to feel strong, independent, even righteous. Instead, all she felt was a clutch of nausea and the burn of bitter tears behind her eyes.

Beck’s face, of course, showed nothing. No reaction, other than a slight widening of his unreadable dark eyes. She could hate him for that alone, if it weren’t against Skye’s life philosophy to hate anyone, ever.

Even the husband who’d abandoned her when she needed him most.

The hardest part is over
, she told herself, slipping a hand into the pocket of her chef’s coat.
And there’s plenty of time.

Paper crinkled between her fingers, the printed-out email already creased and worn from her nervous fidgeting and rereading. At this point, Skye had it memorized.

Keeping it short because internet is spotty out here, but I miss you so much, Sunshine. I think about you all the time. I’m going to try to make it back stateside to watch you compete, and when I get home, there’s a question I want to ask you …

All my love,

Jeremiah

Mustering up a smile for the judges was easier when she thought about Jeremiah’s email. He always made her feel good—and this particular email, with him dropping that hint about a question, made her heart thump hard against her ribcage.

Was he going to ask her to marry him?

The question rolled around her brain like a ball of bread dough in a mixing bowl, sticky and thick with potential. Potential joy, sure—but also potential problems.

Since Skye was already married. And had never quite gotten around to telling Jeremiah about her not-quite-ex.

That sucked the smile right off her face, so Skye had to work extra hard to get it back and make it convincing; somehow, the sight of Beck’s sternly impassive features reminded her that she’d never really learned to fake … well, anything. But especially emotion.

Feeling uncomfortably like a liar, Skye plastered on a bright grin and hoped her overheated cheeks would be attributed to the warmth of the kitchen and the excitement of the timed challenge.

“Hello, Chef Gladwell,” Claire Durand said, in her cultured French way. “It’s lovely to see you again. What do you have for us today?”

Skye swallowed down the messy wad of adrenaline, bitterness, and grief clogging her throat. It took her a moment to even remember what they’d just cooked, but finally she managed. “My team and I did pan-roasted quail with a carpaccio of baby zucchini, strawberries, and avocado.”

“Very pretty,” observed the distinguished older gentleman who’d temporarily joined the judging team just before the finals, when celebrity chef Devon Sparks had to leave. Theo Jansen was a legend in culinary circles, although more so in New York than on the West Coast, since that’s where his restaurant empire was based.

But every chef in the nation recognized him as the founder of the Rising Star Chef competition. The fact that he’d complimented anything about her food gave Skye a thrill that chased some of the gut-wrenching negativity out of her system—even if he might not be a judge for much longer. There was a rumor floating around that Eva Jansen was looking for someone to replace her father on the judging panel.

Until then? Skye was going to take the compliment and enjoy it. “Thank you,” she said. “I hope you enjoy the flavors.”

The third judge, Kane Slater, had been silent until now, but he was the first to grab a fork and dig in.

“Nice color on the bird,” he said as he cut through the crispy, brown skin of the quail with a satisfying crackle. “Wow. The strawberry! I wasn’t expecting that.”

A trickle of sweat tickled its way down Skye’s spine. She cast a nervous glance at the rest of her teammates. The strawberry had been her addition.

“I thought the dish needed a little more color and juice,” she offered, twisting her fingers into a knot behind her back. “And fruit is traditional with game birds.”

“Yes. Usually the fruit is cooked, however.” Claire leaned over to cut a small bite. Skye noticed how meticulous she was about getting a tiny sliver of every single element of the dish onto her fork. “Hmmm.”

Theo Jansen tried it, too, and gave Skye a smile before thanking her and moving down the table toward Beck.

Before she could freak out too much that she couldn’t tell what Ms. Durand and Mr. Jansen thought of her dish, Kane Slater gave her a quick wink and a surreptitious thumbs up. It wasn’t enough to totally melt the tension in her shoulders, but it helped. Skye smiled at him gratefully, mentally promising to go out and buy every single one of his albums, even though she was more of a jazz girl herself.

Now that the judges had moved on, Skye’s teammates crowded closer, reaching for spoons to snatch bites of the dish they’d collectively created.

Skye’s best friend, Fiona Whealey, licked the bowl of her spoon and scowled. “It’s good. No thanks to me. Damn it, what am I doing here?”

Fiona was the resident baker at the Queenie Pie Café. Baker, not pastry chef, and God help you if you called her by the wrong job title. Fiona was proudly self-taught, and no one made bread like Fee’s, but her talents were wasted on these short, timed challenges.

Before Skye could move in for a comforting pep talk, her grill man stepped up. Hugging Fiona close with an arm around her narrow shoulders, Rex Roswell said, “Shut it, Fee-wee, you know we couldn’t get anywhere without our flour-puff girl.”

It was an old joke, but a reliable one. Fiona laughed and ducked away from Rex to smooth down her perfectly straight, extremely non-puffy hair. The platinum-blonde locks were as baby fine and soft as ever, Skye observed, glad of the long years of practice at denying her own envy.

She didn’t even want to think about what her crazy red hair had been doing while she talked to Beck.

“I still think we woulda won if we’d gone vegan.” Their resident hippie health nut poked morosely at the perfectly crisped skin stretched golden and tantalizing across the quail’s breast. Nathan Yamaoka, the only Asian Rastafarian Skye had ever seen, was on a perpetual, if lackadaisical, campaign to turn the Queenie Pie Café into a vegetarian restaurant.

“I had you all set up for a nice little veggie dish,” he went on.

“Who added the quail?” Skye interrupted, looking around at her team.

Oscar Puentes raised his hand, totally unconcerned by the scowling of his shorter, much skinnier, dreadlocked teammate. “That would be me.”

Skye waited until Nathan had turned away, muttering something about dead baby birds, before she gave Oscar a discreet thumbs up and a grin.

Nathan was a genius with vegetables, and they had a huge number of vegetarian customers who were kept extremely satisfied and enthralled by his many innovative uses for kale, but her team was in the RSC to win it.

And glancing around at her competitors’ dishes, Skye knew a salad wasn’t going to cut it.

The judges walked back to the front of the kitchen, snapping Skye out of her unhappy thoughts and prompting her to make a grab for Rex, who was deeply involved in the second half of the flour-puff girl routine, which consisted of him trying to get his hands into Fiona’s hair and rub her head until he’d generated enough static electricity to power a small city while she squawked a protest but secretly loved it.

“Guys! Quit it! The judges are about to announce the winner.”

Get a room
was what she wanted to say, but Skye restrained herself.

Eva Jansen swiveled her slinky hips to the front of the judges’ group, her shiny brunette bob swinging smoothly against her chin. Why was it Skye’s fate to be surrounded by gorgeous size-two women with perfect, glossy straight hair? This wasn’t exactly how she’d pictured the restaurant business.

“Thank you, chefs, for some lovely small plates. Midwest team, the judges loved your gnocchi—I actually heard the phrase ‘light as a feather,’ which is not something I often associate with tiny balls of potato dough. But they’re getting a little tired of the foam, and felt it should’ve had more shiitake flavor to really add something to the dish.”

“Oooh, somebody’s mad,” Fiona muttered out of the side of her mouth, her pale blue eyes avid as she watched Ryan Larousse’s reaction to the critique.

Skye bit the inside of her lip. Yeah, the Midwest team had made some mistakes, but it was down to the final three now. The small stuff was where it would all play out, and perfect dishes were rare.

“Chef Beck,” Eva Jansen said, moving on. “Your local crab with tarragon champagne sauce seems to have been a favorite with the judges. According to my notes, it was the quick pickled cucumbers and shallots that tipped it over the edge from a nice, if uninspired, French-inflected dish to something new and uniquely yours. Good job.”

Sneaking a glance at Beck, Skye wasn’t surprised to find him looking entirely unmoved by the whole thing. Of freaking course. She wondered, as she had so often during their brief, tumultuous year of marriage, what it would take to truly move Henry Beck.

She’d certainly never cracked the code.

And if there was a part of her that thrilled with quiet pride for Beck at hearing such positive feedback from the judges, Skye squashed it just in time for Eva Jansen to turn to her with that feline smile curling up the corners of her too-red mouth.

Skye bit her lip again, never more aware of the fact that her all-natural tinted lip balm, while cruelty free and completely organic, didn’t have as much staying power as whatever industrial-strength lipstick slicked Eva’s scarlet mouth.

“And last but not least, we have the West Coast team. The team with home-field advantage here in San Francisco.”

When Skye reflexively stretched her mouth into a smile, she had to hide a wince as the expression pulled against the sore worry spot inside her bottom lip. For the millionth time, she vowed to stop biting her lip at the first sign of stress.

Tension coiled through her ribs and slithered down into her stomach, making it hard to catch a breath.

“Want to know what the judges thought of your pan-roasted quail? They enjoyed it very much. But even more than that, they enjoyed the inventive use of fresh fruits and vegetables, and the way you helped those simple ingredients to sing through the dish.”

Relief flooded Skye, even as the wildly triumphant look on Nathan’s tan face made her want to groan. He was never going to let them hear the end of this.

The rest of her team was smiling and hugging, patting each other on the back, and Skye had to grind her molars together to keep from shaking them.
It’s not over yet
, she wanted to scream.
They haven’t announced the winner!

Or the prize, come to think of it.

“You all put up wonderful dishes, but the dish all three judges agreed they’d go back to again and again—”

“I wanted to lick the plate,” Kane Slater put in, with his usual infectious enthusiasm.

“Is that a euphemism?” Eva shot back, a mischievous twinkle in her eye. “Anyway, as I was saying, the judges ranked one team’s dish the highest out of all three, and that team was…”

Skye had been holding her breath so long, her lungs burned.

“The East Coast team, from Lunden’s Tavern!”

Beck’s teammates whooped and shouted, all but tackling him to the ground, while Skye stood there feeling like a punctured helium balloon.

“Settle down, chefs. There’s more. The last two teams—it was neck and neck, and we couldn’t get a unanimous decision. But the majority vote went to the Midwest team for second place.”

Now Skye was a helium balloon that had been punctured, deflated, and run over by a streetcar.

Last place. Her team was in last place.

Eva’s pointy features softened a bit as she looked at the Queenie Pie gang. “You had strong support,” she said. “But in the end, the judges felt that the Midwest team was more inventive, pushed a little harder, took more risks.”

That’s not true
, Skye wanted to argue.
We took the risk of not actually cooking our accompaniment. We took the chance that you’d see that food doesn’t have to be a science project to be delicious and exciting.

What the hell was risky about doing a foam, when practically every chef in the nation was experimenting with liquid nitrogen and agar-agar?

But she clenched her jaw and smiled through the frustration. Arguing wouldn’t solve anything, and would only serve to make her look like a sore loser.

Which, okay. Maybe she was, a little bit.

This day was so not turning out the way she’d hoped.

*   *   *

It had been a few years since basic training, but Beck still knew how to stand tall with a hundred-and-sixty-pound weight on his back.

And a good thing, too, since Winslow Jones was clinging to him piggy-back style and showed no signs of wanting to come down.

“You the man,” he crowed directly into Beck’s ear.

“All right, boys … and girl,” Eva Jansen said with an amused glint in her eyes. “Settle down. Don’t you want to find out what you’ve won?”

All of Beck’s senses went on alert. A valuable advantage in the upcoming challenge, she’d said when first explaining the relay. With a roll of his shoulders and a quick torso twist Beck managed to dislodge Winslow and set the kid back on his sneakers on the solid ground. He needed to focus for this.

“Thank you.” Eva was being as carefully bland and polite as Beck had ever seen her, obviously conscious of the fact that she was addressing a group of chefs who all knew she was dating one of the men in their ranks.