Taste It
Authors: Sommer Marsden
Taste It by Sommer Marsden
by Xcite Books Ltd – 2012
Chapter One
‘IF YOU’LL OPEN YOUR grocery sacks you’ll see that the mystery ingredient is …’
Jill Calvert opened her bright green plastic sack to find a lone bottle sitting at the bottom.
‘Cardamom!’ Kat Stephens, the announcer for Best Chef, crowed cheerfully.
Cardamom. What the fuck am I supposed to do with cardamom?
Jill’s eyes shot to Cole who was grinning like an idiot. Like an idiot? He was an idiot … or so she wanted to think. She couldn’t like him. He was her only true competition in this cooking game. She’d known coming in that the only person she really had to focus on beating was Cole Roberts, the chef at Twisted Squid, a swanky restaurant a mere hour from her Baltimore based Lime.
He waggled his eyebrow at her and she fought the urge to throw her small glass bottle at him. He was roughly six foot six so it was doubtful such a small projectile would do any good, but still. It was an urge.
‘You have forty-five minutes, Chefs, to wow us with your dish. Your time begins now!’ Kat crowed.
Jill had to force herself not to focus on the damn cameras. They still freaked her out even though Best Chef was in its final week of competition. There were only four of them left, hence a super difficult secret ingredient. A spice. Nothing more, nothing less.
Freaking spice. And you just know Mr Fantastic Glasses over there is going to whip up something to wow the judges and …
Jill cut herself off in mid-thought and ran to the pantry. Immediately she grabbed rice and set a pot of water to boil. Thank God for industrial burners and the quick boil. Jill dropped her rice and raced back for milk and cinnamon, some beautiful peaches she peeled and macerated in sugar.
It was all a blur. Forty-five minutes was nothing at all and all along her own journey of cooking a killer sweet rice pudding with peaches and cardamom she had to worry about … him.
Jill glanced up at Cole and he had the nerve … the gall … the balls! to wink at her and smile.
Something in her stomach sizzled and dipped and it had very little to do with stress or food.
‘Don’t think about that … man. And his glasses. And his muscles …’ she whispered. Then remembering the mic pack on her back and the fact that it had possibly just picked up her ramble, she blushed hotly. The heat in her face had nothing to do with the insanely hot TV cameras.
‘Sorry, Jill, what was that?’ Kat Stephens cooed for the camera.
‘Nothing.’
‘But we didn’t hear –’
‘It was just me rattling off ingredients!’ she called, laughing a forced laugh just for whoever might be watching.
But Cole wasn’t fooled. He gave her another wink and put the finishing touches on whatever he was cooking. When he started plating, she felt that burn-sizzle-jolt of last minute anxiety and rushed to finish her (hopefully) killer rice pudding. Everyone had been doing tons of savoury dishes of late and Jill was hoping against hope that a sweet dish that showed off the mystery ingredient would woo the judges.
And lucky for the contenders, it only took a million years for judging. Oh sure, on TV when you were watching from home it was over in a flash, but in reality, they sat in that damn blue room for an eternity waiting for the panel of judges to argue and fight and duke it out.
Hours. In a room. With Cole.
She almost lost her rhythm and didn’t make it but at the very last moment she nestled her ripe sweet peach slices in her creamy rice pudding – rich with vanilla and cardamom and cinnamon – and threw her hands up in the air.
‘And time!’ Kat sang.
Jill let her head drop and as she passed by to file into line for the judges, Cole, that ass – that headstrong, cocky son of a gun – swatted her. On. The. Ass.
Jill gritted her teeth and stilled her expression.
Don’t focus on him. Don’t think of him. Don’t look at him … or his muscles.
She stood through the initial tasting. The comments from judges, one being Max Sheldon of Yellow Wall restaurant. He made her nervous, so Jill plastered a fierce grin on her face and tuned out everything that was said. It was hard for her not to react viscerally to criticism, so during week one, she had learned to focus her attention elsewhere and simply respond to tone and then throw out the occasional ‘yes, Chef’ when needed.
‘Thank you, Chefs,’ Kat Stephens said. ‘You can go to the pantry and wait for the final elimination.’
Her stomach clenched and her fingers twitched. Jill knew her stomach would be a ball of knots until the verdict was laid down. It wasn’t so much the 50,000 dollar prize she was interested in – it was the title of Best Chef. And that was because of the hoopla with her sous chef Tom, who was also the person who handled purchasing. She’d fired Tom when she found he’d been buying inferior ingredients than stated on the menu. And pocketing the difference.
It had been an embarrassment, one she’d like to get past even if everyone else in the world had gotten past it already.
‘Don’t sweat it, Calvert. It’ll only be four hours or so.’ Cole said it right into her hair as they all filed out. She even felt the tickle-tug of his lips catching on some of her pony-tailed strands.
There was a hot rush of moisture from her body and she tried her best to ignore it. It was nothing more than a chemical reaction. Stress and adrenaline and OK, so he wasn’t hard to look at, but still.
‘Yeah, yeah. You sweat it,’ she snapped and moved faster. But not before she felt the slight brush of his hand on the flare of her hip. Even her bulky chef’s coat couldn’t buffer her from that.
Inside the blue room they all took a seat in their folding chairs. You’d think they could give them something more comfortable. But that didn’t make for good TV, apparently.
‘I think it’s me,’ Ginger said from one of the middle seats. She was a black haired, gothesque, young thing with spreaders in her earlobes and a stud in her lip. But sweet as pie, Jill had found out.
‘Why you?’ she asked, softly. It was then that she realised her eyes were pinned to Cole’s biceps and the way they flexed gently as he rubbed a circle on his well worn jeans. A nervous tic of his she’d noticed right off the bat. Any time they had to wait he would sit and draw endless spirals on his pant leg. Now, it seemed her nervous tic had become watching his biceps and his forearms flex and dance as he did it.
That really wasn’t a nervous tic but it was a freaking unprofessional and mortifying pastime.
God.
‘I think I over spiced. And I did meat. He did a stew heavy on veg and lean protein and rice and flat bread and all that jazz.’ Ginger sighed after a sharp nod to Cole. ‘And you,’ she went on, ‘did a dessert. Brilliant! And Toby did that lamb and yogurt appetizer and …’ The young girl shrugged. ‘That’s all bullshit. I think it’s me because I feel like it is.’
‘Gut instinct,’ Toby said, brushing a bit of pepper off his pristine white coat. ‘You’re probably right.’
‘Toby!’ Jill said. She caught Cole watching her, head cocked, half smile on his nice lips. He wore black plastic framed glasses – the current nerd glasses as her niece called them – but she knew he’d been wearing them for ages. And they suited him. He was big and imposing and handsome in a little-boy way and something about those glasses just completed the whole hot package.
And she loathed him for it, and for the fact that three nights in a row she’d had dirty dreams about this man. And three times in a row she’d woken up to find her body shaking, her cunt desperate and her heart racing. Three times she’d had to masturbate to the image of him going down on her or fucking her or God, yes – rolling her in raw sugar and licking her clean.
It was just … shameful.
Cole Roberts was her competition. He was cocky and irreverent and downright spooky Zen sometimes. How in the world could she be lusting after him in all this turmoil?
‘… think, Jill?’
She blinked at Ginger and stammered, ‘Pardon?’
‘What do you think?’ Ginger repeated.
Jill threw up her hands and sighed mightily. ‘I think there’s no way to tell until they tell us. Excuse me.’
She rushed down the short hall to the rest room. Even the camera men didn’t follow them down here. So that was good.
Pressing the lock on the door handle, she rested her forehead to the cool metal door. ‘Calm down,’ she said to herself.
Jill couldn’t do her normal morning runs. Not with the shooting schedule for Best Chef. Plus when she did manage a few times, the cameras had followed her. Unsettling and annoying, to say the least.
She had stopped drinking on camera because they often had to wait hours for a verdict and most of them had ended up a bit tipsy the first time. But for calm Cole. So drinking was out. She’d stopped eating during deliberation because over the few weeks of shooting her jeans had started to get tight. So, basically no stress relief.
Well, not no stress relief.
‘Not here,’ Jill said to herself. But even as she said it she knew that there were no cameras in the bathroom. It’s why when any of them got super emotional or enraged they tended to head for the rest room.
She shook her head. ‘No.’ But even as she said no, Jill pressed her hand to the cool door and leaned against it, her forehead still touching the metal too. But her free hand slid under her chef’s coat and down into her jeans. Past the silly panties she wore for luck that were emblazoned with candy and cakes. Into the humid warmth that was the V of her thighs. When she pressed a fingertip – just one – to her thrumming clit, she let out a sigh that was like a drug addict taking their first hit of their vice of choice. Sheer relief. Bliss. Calm.
Jill added a second finger to the first, already slippery with the juices of her sex. It was the raw sugar dream that did that, she bet. It was imagining him licking that crystalline, diamond-like sweetness off her skin before burying his face between her legs and making her come.
A shuddery sigh slipped free of her parted lips and she slid two fingers deep inside her slick cunt. She pressed her G-spot almost violently and ground her plump, needy clit to her palm as she fucked herself with trembling fingers.
It was just when she skated that crisp clean line of impending orgasm, just when she was ready to tip that she heard him say through the door, ‘Whatcha doing in there, Calvert?’
She reared back a little but kept her hand flat to the door as if that were keeping it closed. She was so fucking close – too close to stop now – but her circles slowed. Somehow, in the stress and need, the slowing made the feel of it that much sweeter. A fresh rush of pleasure filled her pelvis as his voice filled her head.
‘Nothing,’ she said to the door.
His voice snaked through the crack where the door was set in its hinges. You couldn’t even slide a piece of paper in that crack but his voice drifted through just fine. Through that crack and into her brain.
‘I think you are. I think you’re doing something … dirty.’
‘No,’ she gasped. But his voice and the feel and the stress and all of it blended together to create one giant mélange of craving.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Go away.’
‘No,’ he said. She could hear him smile for God’s sake!
Jill shook her head and her tired mind readily supplied her very dirty dream of him putting his mouth to her. Eating her the way she’d seen him eat his competitor’s food. Rolling her on his tongue, licking her to savour each flavour, pressing his lips to her heat and her moisture and …
Her pussy started to flex around her fingers and Jill bit her lip none too gently to stifle any noises she might make. He would know. He. Would. Know. And that made it all better and all worse at the same time.
‘I think you’re touching yourself and I think you wish it was me doing the touching.’ His voice seeped through into the cavernous space to the bathroom.
Where were the cameras? Where were the cameras? Her mind chattered at her but there was no stopping it. So even if the cameras were there it wouldn’t stop her runaway orgasm. There would be no stopping it –
‘And I think I’d very much like to be the person doing the touching,’ he finished in his sultry-sinister voice.
And she came. Jill swallowed all her sound but one tiny Gnit! The sound that would happen if a hiccup, a sneeze and a sexual release got together and had a baby.
There was a single chuckle from behind the door and then his footsteps. She didn’t need the footsteps, though. She could feel that he was gone. And that was so unsettling Jill refused to even think about it.
Instead she washed her hands and her face, braided her hair, used the toilet and washed her hands yet again.
Now she could go and stew like everyone else. She felt a bit better. Even if her cheeks were hot with embarrassment when she walked out. Even if it got worse when he looked at her and grinned his half grin. Even if she nearly had a heart attack when Kat Stephens sauntered in and said: ‘They’re ready for you, Chefs.’