Too Darn Hot (10 page)

He called her again, and she realized he was following her. She walked faster, nearly jogging now. All she wanted was to get to her car and get the hell away from Eric Reid.

“Lina! Wait up.”

She took off at a run across the sand. There were a lot more sun worshipers on the main stretch of beach than there had been earlier, and every one of them was staring at her. The parking lot was still a long way off. Rapid footfalls drummed behind her. He was chasing her.

She turned on the juice, making a beeline for her car. Every broken seashell she’d managed to avoid earlier now found a tender spot on the soles of her feet. Over the hammering of her heart and the rasp of her breaths she heard Eric huffing, swearing, and pounding the sand. Too loud. Too near.

A bark of outrage burst from her when a long, strong arm whipped around her waist, yanking her off balance. Her eyes closed automatically as the ground rushed upward. But it never made contact. Eric lithely rolled with her, buffering her fall. All she felt was his steel-cable arms encircling her, and the warm, hard expanse of his body behind hers.

She tried to scramble out of his hold, but couldn’t gain purchase as her feet thrashed around in the sand.

“Let go of me!”

“Lina, honey, calm down.” He sat up with her, his arms still locked around her.

She struggled in vain. Sand clung to her sweat-dampened skin. “Calm down? I said get your paws off me, you...caveman!”

Eric snickered. “Caveman?”

“I think you better let the lady go, pal.”

Her head snapped up. Good heavens. Here was the caveman. Six and a half feet of bulging, gleaming brawn, every striation of muscle clearly defined. Above snug black swim trunks a Day-Glo pink tank top showed off massive, twitching pecs. Long blond hair hung below his shoulders. He couldn’t have been more than twenty.

A phrase from a pirate romance she’d once read flashed through her mind. Here, in the flesh, was Tremayne “Black Snake” Whitburn, dispossessed Earl of Walford, standing with “eyes ablaze and arms akimbo.” Though she couldn’t be certain about the “eyes ablaze” part. The earl wore reflective aviator sunglasses and a whistle around his neck.

Eric had become very still, though his arms never slackened their hold. “This is none of your business, pal,” he snarled. “The lady’s just fine.”

Oh brother. Og and Ug were obviously gearing up for some vigorous club swinging.

The lifeguard took a step closer, his bulging quadriceps dominating her field of vision. He smelled of coconut oil and raw menace. “Maybe I’m makin’ it my business.”

Eric released Lina, but her relief was short-lived as he stood, pulled her to her feet, and gave her a little shove toward the parking lot. His eyes never left the other man’s mirrored shades.

“Wait for me at my car.” Ugga bugga.

She held her ground. “No. What are you, crazy?” She gestured emphatically. “Look at this guy.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence. Go to my car.”

Black Snake yanked off his mirrored shades with a theatrical flourish and crossed his beefy arms over his chest. Lina suspected he was eager to show off his riveting ice blue eyes. Now he looked less like a pirate and more like a Viking with a glandular disorder.

“Big man—pushin’ around a woman,” he taunted. “You’re not such a big man now, huh?”

“Where do you get a line like that?” Eric asked. “Old ‘Starsky and Hutch’ reruns?”

The lifeguard took a step closer, as did Eric, the two combatants glaring for all they were worth. Now they were practically nose to nose. Or nose to chin—this guy dwarfed even Eric. She expected at any moment they’d start snorting and pawing the ground.

She gave up trying to talk sense to Eric. “Don’t worry,” she told him. “When I break the news to the kids, I’ll tell them their dad died with dignity.” She bestowed a grunt of derision.

Black Snake’s baby blues clouded with the strain of intense cogitation. “You guys’re married?”

Eric blinked. She could see the gears spinning furiously behind his dark eyes. “Uhh...”

His adversary backed off a step, palms raised. “Listen, man, I don’t wanna get involved in a domestic thing, ya know?”

Her jaw dropped.
Domestic thing?

Some of the stiffness left Eric’s shoulders as he, too, took a step back. “Yeah. Well.”

Lina shook her head, trying to clear it. She stared at the blond behemoth. “Did I hear you correctly?”

“Honey,” Eric said soothingly, “it’s getting late. We better—”

“Did you say you wouldn’t get involved if we’re married?”

Black Snake looked from Lina to Eric as if to say,
What’s her problem?

She stalked up to the lifeguard. Her voice climbed an octave. “A minute ago you were all set to protect me from—from—” She gestured toward Eric. “But as long as we’re married—as long as I
belong
to him—he can do whatever he wants to me, is that right?”

Black Snake backed up a bit, chuckling nervously. He looked at Eric and shrugged. Eric shrugged back.
Women.

She peered up into the man’s befuddled face, and screeched, “That is so antediluvian!”

Eric’s fingers closed around her upper arm. “Come on, honey. Time to get home. The baby’s gotta be fed.”

She dug in her heels, to no avail, as he hauled her toward the parking lot. “You!” she shrieked at the lifeguard. “We need feminist rehabilitation camps for throwbacks like you.” She gesticulated with the sneakers that still dangled from her fingers. “A few months in one of those’d straighten you out, buddy.”

She felt hot blacktop on the soles of her bare feet. Eric pulled open the passenger-side door of the blue Volvo and pushed her onto the sun-warmed seat. Grasping the top of the doorframe, he leaned over her and said, “Now, tell me. Why did you take off that way?”

He really didn’t know! “Let’s just say I didn’t take kindly to your offer,” she said through clenched teeth.

He frowned. “My offer? You mean the meals? I didn’t mean to—”

“Pretty paltry as bribes go. Obviously you have no clue what a Caroline Holland review is worth,” she sneered. “I’d have thought you could come up with something more original than a few free meals.”

He straightened abruptly, his expression frigid, his Kahlua eyes having turned to watered-down decaf. She sprang out of his car, elbowed her way past him, and marched to her car. Throwing open the passenger door, she lifted the bakery box from the floor and hurled it at him, Frisbee style. He ducked and deflected the missile with his arm. The box opened, splattering piecrust and pecan filling on the asphalt.

Lina hopped in behind the wheel, started the engine, and burned rubber out of the parking lot.

Chapter Nine

“I want to know her exact words,” Cookie demanded.

“I told you. Something like, a Caroline Holland review is worth a lot more than a few free meals, and I should try to come up with a more imaginative bribe—something more original, that’s what she said.” Eric was stuffing dozens of boneless chicken breasts with a pecan and Granny Smith apple mixture, for a wedding he was catering that evening.

She said, “But your offer wasn’t a bribe—was it?”

He leveled a flat stare at her. “What do you think?”

“I think if you wanted to bribe the New York restaurant reviewer for
Bon Vivant
magazine, you’d come up with something more—”

“Original? Would you cover these for me?” He slid a large pan of stuffed chicken breasts across the steel counter and started to fill another. Cookie hopped off the stool she was sitting on and pulled a length of plastic wrap off an industrial-size dispenser box.

A week had passed since the debacle at the beach, a week during which Eric had grappled with his principles—and the pragmatic issues involved in keeping The Cookhouse running.

He’d known when he went into the restaurant business that he’d have to face some less-than-palatable realities. He’d heard of greedy reviewers on the take, but he’d always assumed, naively, that none of that applied to him. In the back of his mind had been the conviction that his restaurant was deserving of a spectacular review and would stand on its own merits. His restaurant would blow away any reviewer who set foot in it.

And it had blown away Lina. He knew that.

But still she had her hand out, greedy and grasping.

Cookie stretched the plastic film over the pan. “She didn’t seem like the type to take a payoff.”

“What type did she seem like? You didn’t even know she was a reviewer. Neither did I, for that matter.”

She slid the pan into a refrigerator. “Well, I still can’t believe it.”

“Believe it.” Eric placed a gob of stuffing on a flattened chicken breast and expertly tucked the meat around it. Either I come up with an offering that suits Her Highness’s taste in graft or I can kiss The Cookhouse good-bye.”

“It can’t be that bad.”

“It’s worse. You know that, Cookie, you’re not blind. We’re hanging on by the skin of our teeth.”

“Damn! What happened to ethics? To honor?”

What happened to the exciting, sensual woman he’d thought he was beginning to know?

What a naive idiot he was.

Cookie sighed heavily and leaned against the counter where he was working. He sensed her trying to make eye contact, and kept his attention on his work.

Finally she said quietly, “I don’t think you have much choice.”

He placed a stuffed cutlet in the pan, trying to ignore that nagging twitch in his jaw. “I sort of figured that one out on my own.”

“The Cookhouse could do a land-office business if word got out, if people just realized this place existed.”

“Yep.” His casual tone belied the hurt and anger bubbling inside him. “Any suggestions?”

“Cash? Not too original, but a crowd pleaser.”

“Something tells me that’s not what she’s after.”

“So it’s a guessing game. What’s her favorite Cookhouse dish?”

“Bourbon pecan tart.”

An image leaped into his consciousness, of Lina Holland groaning in rapture with each bite of tart that passed her lovely full pink lips. And like some lovesick fool, what had he done but leave one of the things on her doorstep. He’d been giddy with infatuation, playing out his part in a pathetic—and doomed—mating ritual.

Little had he known that his offering was destined to be strewn across the parking lot at Rocky Bay Beach. The seagulls must have been ecstatic.

Cookie said, “Send her a dozen of the damn things. No, two dozen. Let her worry about freezer space.”

*

“With Chef Reid’s compliments. He, like, said to say that.”

Standing in the doorway of her apartment, Lina stared at the young man leaning on a hand truck on which were perched two large cartons. He wore a wavy black ponytail and wire-rimmed eyeglasses. “What’s in these?” she asked.

He shrugged and started to heft the top box. “Where do you want ‘em?”

“I want them to stay right here until you show me the contents.”

The youth produced a penknife, slit the packing tape, and opened the carton. Bakery boxes filled it. Lina’s eyes bulged when she lifted the lid on one.

“I don’t believe this.” The slimeball was still at it—still trying to bribe her! Had he no shame?

“So where do you want ’em?”

“I don’t,” she gritted.

“Huh?”

“I won’t accept them. Take them back.”

“I can’t do that. He’ll, like, totally go off the wall if I bring these things back.”

“Not my problem. Tell Chef Reid I’ve never been so insulted.” She slammed the door in the kid’s bewildered face.

*

“Any more brilliant ideas?” Eric asked. He and Cookie stood staring at the twenty-four bakery boxes that Lina Holland had thumbed her nose at.

“This offering was too paltry, you think?” she asked.

“Insultingly paltry, according to her nibs.”

She pursed her lips in deep cogitation. “Okay. Here’s what you do.”

*

“You gotta take it!” the youth with the hand truck wailed. “He made that, like, totally clear. I’m dog meat if I come back with this stuff, man. Uh, ma’am.”

“What’s your name?” Lina asked.

“Jason.”

“Do you work for Mr. Reid, Jason?”

“Yeah, I, like, wash the pots and stuff. And I make deliveries. I’m new.”

Obviously the replacement for the dishwasher who’d had a fondness for, as Cookie had put it, tee many martoonis.

“Jason. Listen carefully. Are you listening?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“I refuse to accept this delivery.”

“Take a look before you say that. Just take a look. This is, like, totally outrageous stuff.” He cut open a carton—one of ten that he’d hauled up to her apartment hallway before ringing her bell. “This caviar? It costs, like, I don’t know, a hundred bucks an ounce or something. It’s the good stuff, the little bitty black kind, see?”

He displayed a tiny jar of beluga caviar. She could almost taste it. Add a little chopped onion and egg, a shot of frozen Gray Goose...

Peeking into the carton, she counted eleven more jars of the pricey delicacy. She restrained a groan of frustration and tore her gaze away. “Put it back.”

He opened another box before she could stop him. It was packed with bundles wrapped in white paper. “You like chopped liver? I mean, whachacallit, pâté? There’s some of that in here. Chef Reid makes it himself out of duck livers. Sounds gross, but it’s, like, totally fine. And there’s all different kinds of outrageous cheeses and stuff.”

She couldn’t speak, her mouth was watering like a faucet.

He slit another box. The ambrosial aroma of fine coffee wafted from it. “There’s, like, a whole assortment in here, regular and decaf,” he said, pulling out sacks of coffee beans and tins of gourmet teas. He peered at a label. “Raspberry hazelnut creme. All right! Hot-date java!”

She couldn’t help herself. “What else did he send?”

“Well, there’s all these cakes and desserts and fancy breads Mr. Reid makes, some kind of flavored oils with, like, I don’t know, leaves or something in them. Let’s see...there’s a whole smoked salmon, some fruit stuff—compote, he calls it—these fancy syrups, nuts, sauces, salad dressings, his special way-hot salsa and guacamole, a case of these humongous kick-ass red grapefruit, and, like—” he spread his hands “—a ton of chocolates.”