by Layla Reyne
He would’ve dropped the cupcakes too if Miller hadn’t saved them. “Chin off the floor, Doc,” he said, slipping the box from Clancy’s hands.
“Sorry, it’s just...” He flapped his hands, trying and failing to summon an adequate word for the upper level. Tuscan tile flooring ran the length of the open space, from the gourmet kitchen at one end, with its massive cooktop, butcher-block island, and hanging pot rack, to the farm table in the middle dining area, to the living room with its leather sectional facing a huge stone hearth. And across the back wall, floor-to-ceiling windows and doors offered stunning vineyard views. There was a hallway on the other side of the kitchen wall and Clancy peeked down it—a bathroom and bedroom, a plaid blanket over the end of the bed. It was homey, same as the living room. Lived in. The pots weren’t shiny, the leather couch had creases, and the farm table had more than a few dings. It was comfortable; it was a home. And Miller was selling it?
“We were barely here anymore,” Miller said, as if reading his mind. He began unloading their haul onto the island. “Someone else will get to enjoy it, more than we were able to lately. The Realtor will be showing it while I’m gone. I’d cook—” he pointed to the pots overhead “—but I don’t want to mess too much up. Picnic is relatively contained.”
“You call this contained?” Clancy said, as Miller covered the island from one end to the other with meat, cheese, and bread.
“You haven’t seen me cook.” He snagged a colander from the overhead rack and tossed in the vegetables. “Go pick a room downstairs, in case we have to sleep here. I’ll get these washed and cut, then we’ll be ready to eat.” He turned toward the sink, washing with one hand, grabbing a cutting board and knife with the other. Totally focused, even just for a picnic.
Clancy let him be, wanting to explore more himself. He read all the menus on the way down the stairs and snapped a few pictures. He texted them to his dad and was unsurprised when his phone rang less than a minute later, Alan’s face lighting up the screen.
“Hey, Dad.”
“You think any of those places are where you’re going?”
“You tell me.”
His dad laughed. “Nice try. Now tell me everything about The French Laundry. What’d you eat, what’d you drink, what was it like?”
“You do know where I’m going!” Clancy said, as he poked around in the first of the downstairs bedrooms.
“Never denied that.” A desk chair squeaked in the background. Loud and familiar.
“Are you in the office?” Sunday was usually his dad’s day off.
“Just trying to get caught up on case notes. No time during the week with the influx of patients. You’ll see soon enough. It’s hard to keep up.”
Clancy leaned back against one of the bed’s four wooden posters. He missed his case files. They’d been his life for almost a decade—each a story, each a puzzle, each a chance to make a difference in someone’s life. It was weird not having them to dig into, not having that sense of purpose. It would come again, soon enough. Wouldn’t it? Would he still feel that spark of interest digging into the case files of the patients at his dad’s practice? His reconstruction cases, sure, but the others? He didn’t have an answer, so he stared out at the vineyards instead.
“Son?”
“Right, so it started with this amazing soup...” Clancy distracted them both with descriptions of each course—the food, wine, and service. As he talked, Clancy checked out the other downstairs bedrooms. This one, like the other bedroom on this level, held no clues. Closets were empty, pictures were gone, and it appeared staged by the Realtor. Or maybe Miller had been renting out the bottom floor? Or maybe these rooms where for guests? Visiting chefs? The hot tub out on the patio would no doubt draw rave reviews.
“Where do you think you’re going next?” his father asked, bringing Clancy back to the tour, not the man.
“Someplace with high altitude and a lot of snow. That’s all I’ve got.”
“You’re gonna love it.” The smile in his dad’s voice rang as loudly as the squeaking chair.
“Dad!”
“Doc!”
Clancy lowered the phone and glanced at the call time. Shit, they’d been chatting for twenty minutes.
“Doc, you get lost down there?” Miller called again.
“Dad, sorry—”
“You gotta go. Keep me posted. I want to see menus.”
“You got it.”
Hanging up, Clancy pocketed the phone and rolled his suitcase out of the downstairs foyer into the first bedroom. He bypassed the internal staircase and exited onto the patio. He wanted to get a better look at the hot tub. Maybe take a dip after their picnic, if the rain stayed away. Would Miller join him? Just to chat, that was all. He ignored Miranda snickering in his head and climbed the outside steps to the living room, tapping against the glass doors.
Miller loped over, corkscrew in hand. “How’d you get out there?”
“There’s a hot tub.”
“It’s a house in Napa. There’s a hot tub.” He laughed and closed the door behind him. “Come on. I was just about to open the wine.”
“We didn’t buy any wine.”
“Because I had it here already.”
Wines, as in plural. A bottle of white and a bottle of red set in the middle of their spread, which had been moved from the island to the table. No way it would’ve all fit on the island. “I think our eyes were bigger than our stomachs.”
“This is nothing,” Miller said, as he uncorked the wines. “This was our go-to meal after long weeks or a tough day. I remember this one time Sloan had been prepping a case for months, and it unexpectedly settled, very much in her client’s favor. I told her I’d take the night off, come in to San Francisco, and we’d go out to celebrate. She just wanted to come up here and veg. I left work early and came home to find the entire table covered and two bottles of champagne in the bucket. We had a hell of a night, in our sweats.”
“That sounds wonderful.”
Miller’s smile was genuine, and wistful. “It was.”
Why always the past tense? Clancy wanted to ask, but he asked about their meal instead. The wine—Arbe Garbe, a white blend of Italian grapes grown and harvested locally, and Lieu Dit, a bright red gamay from the Santa Maria Valley. The meats—a local wild boar sausage, a French dry sausage, imported prosciutto, and half a dozen other meats and pates. The cheeses—O’Banon, Époisses, and several others from local creameries, Andante Dairy and Bellwether Farms. The bread—sweet and sour baguettes, a brioche loaf, and pretzel buns. And all the fixings—chopped peppers, endive leaves, quince paste, honey, and almonds.
They dove in, Miller’s stories about working with the various local purveyors carrying them through the first bottle. The white wine was fresh and delightfully different, nothing like Clancy had ever tasted before. As they moved on to the red and continued to whittle down the foodstuffs, Clancy proposed a round of twenty questions. Miller conceded to five, and Clancy had to answer them too.
“I can live with that,” Clancy said, while considering his approach. Keep it light, try not to pry, but he wanted to learn more about the person he’d spend the next two weeks with. “Favorite color?”
“Plaid.”
Clancy rolled his eyes. “You don’t say.” Two days and he’d figured that much out already. “Also not a color.”
Miller flipped him the bird. “Your answer?”
“Dodger Blue, baby.”
“Ugh.” Miller threw an arm over his face. “If I’d known that, I would’ve disqualified you on the spot.”
“Too late now,” Clancy mumbled around a sourdough round slathered in Époisses and honey. “Favorite wine?”
“Ridge, Monte Bello, from the Santa Cruz Mountains.”
“Not a Napa Cab, or something French?”
“I love a big, bold Napa
Cab as much as the next Valley chef, and the French reds, especially the Grand Crus, are sublimely balanced. I love the Monte Bello most because it comes in right between those two. It’s not so balanced that it doesn’t pack a flavor punch, but the punch isn’t so big as to overpower whatever you’re eating. It’s perfect.”
Clancy swirled the wine in his glass. “Maybe we’ll see the Monte Bello on the tour?”
Miller narrowed his eyes, the crinkles around the corners almost as attractive as when he smiled. “I see what you did there. Your answer?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t met my favorite yet.”
Almost when narrowed, because the crinkling with the smile now was divine. “Good answer.” He munched through a pretzel round with mustard, Manchego and prosciutto. “And that’s four questions.”
“Two were related to the wine question!” Clancy objected.
“Still, that’s four total. One more, make it count.”
Clancy huffed and nudged up his glasses, contemplating. Favorite vacation spot? Favorite food? Nah, those were questions he’d get answered on the tour. He wanted to know something more basic, more elemental. “Favorite flavor? Sweet, sour, bitter, salty or umami?” He figured the answer would be umami.
Miller didn’t hesitate to answer, “Salt. It’s the most useful and one of the hardest to master. Did you see salt on the table last night?”
Clancy thought back through the meal. “Not once.”
“Exactly, if a chef is good—confident—there won’t be salt on the table. It only comes out at TFL with the foie gras, which we didn’t have. Otherwise, everything was seasoned so you didn’t need to add it.”
There wasn’t salt on the table here either.
“Let me guess yours...” Miller stood from the table and fetched the pink box of cupcakes.
Clancy groaned.
“Am I wrong?”
“You’re not wrong. I just don’t know where I’m going to put that.”
“Oh, come on,” Miller teased. “Don’t surrender now.”
“I’m used to meager medical round snacks. Day after day of this good stuff, how do you do it?”
“Balance.” Miller cut several of the cupcakes in half, splitting them to share. “Which admittedly, I was not always good at. Much like you, I was more often grabbing the easy stuff between services.”
“So, maybe not just me struggling on this trip?”
“I think you’ll find the rest of the stops not so daunting.”
“Oh, like this ‘picnic’?”
“My definitions might be a little skewed.”
Clancy held up his thumb and forefinger, an inch apart. “A wee bit.”
Miller balled up a sheet of wax paper and tossed it at him. “Eat your cupcakes, Doc.”
“Then a dip in the hot tub?” Clancy hadn’t meant to ask that, even though the idea had continued to play at the back of his mind through dinner. With it out there, though, Clancy went with it, cocking a brow.
Miller laughed. “You look like Dr. Evil’s son.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“You ran out of them,” Miller reminded him. The lines around his eyes reappeared, together with a mischievous glint in the blue-gold gaze. “But I think we could do that.”
Mischievous or flirtatious? Either way, the same rush of warmth and tangle of confusion that’d first struck last night fluttered in Clancy’s belly. He still wasn’t sure what was going on with Miller and Sloan. Clancy needed to answer that before he put a toe into that hot tub. He opened his mouth to ask, and Miller’s phone rang.
Several rings they stared at each other, until Miller broke the connection and leaned back, lifting the phone to his ear. “This is Miller.” Intensity morphed into surprise, into happiness, a trace of relief, as a smile stretched across his face. “That’s good to hear. We’ll be ready to go when the car gets here. Thanks, Toby.” He lowered the phone and glanced back up at Clancy. “We’re cleared to fly out tonight. It’ll be worth it to have the whole day tomorrow, promise.”
Hot tub fantasies died, but Clancy couldn’t lie. He felt a bit of relief too. And excitement at seeing the same on Miller’s face. He was looking forward to the next stop. Clancy couldn’t wait to find out why.
“As long as I can take the cupcakes with me.”
* * *
“Fuck” was the only word Miller could mutter as he stepped onto the plane that’d fly them across the country the next two weeks. Other words came to mind but getting them out past the shock and awe was problematic. Sleek, with light interior walls, herringbone patterned carpet, and gleaming mahogany tables. Comfortable, not usually associated with the first, but the bench seat looked long enough for his six-foot-three frame and the chairs were the cushy kind of leather you could get lost in. Rich blinked like a neon bar sign, brightest of all.
He could only imagine what his family back home would think if they could see him now, aboard a private plane. He’d flown them out for the restaurant opening—in commercial business class—and they’d thought that had been the ultimate in high class. This was a whole new level, and Miller wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. It made him both comfortable—at the prospect of traveling well on this trip—and uncomfortable—at the thought of living, even for two weeks, and even on someone else’s dime, way outside his means.
Clancy, by contrast, didn’t seem the least bit fazed. He’d said before he didn’t travel on his mother’s planes much, but it was often enough he knew where to stash their overcoats and where to find the bottles of water. He handed one to Miller and gestured to the set of chairs mid-cabin, a table between them. He moved his box of cupcakes onto the table and sank into his seat. “Mom’s letting us use her best bird.”
Miller’s head was still on a swivel, taking it all in, as he lowered himself across from Clancy. “She didn’t need it around the holidays?”
“She’s got two more.”
He swung his gaze back to Clancy. “Three total?”
“For now. She’s thinking about expanding.” He seemed to debate the cupcakes for a moment before choosing two different halves—a lemon one and a red velvet.
Apparently Clancy’s stomach had expanding powers too. “So much for not being hungry.”
“Moving around made room.”
He had one half eaten when Toby appeared from the front of the plane. “Dr. Rhodes, Mr. Sykes, we’ve been cleared for takeoff. If you’d please buckle your seat belts, we’ll be up in the air soon.”
True to his word, they were airborne in less than ten minutes, another advantage of flying private. Leaning back in his seat, Miller nursed his bottle of water and stared out the window, watching the place he’d grown to love as home disappear. The San Francisco Bay that stretched farther north than tourists realized. The clash of fall colors he hadn’t expected and that never ceased to amaze him, the greens coming back to life and the vines dotting wine country bursting with reds, oranges, and yellows. And though he couldn’t smell it way up here, the sense memory of fermenting wines, the fragrance so strong at the intersection of Whitehall Lane and Highway 29. It hadn’t worked out like he’d wanted here, but it’d been home for ten years. A good one where he, and Sloan, had been safe. That much he’d done right. He had no reason to think he wouldn’t be back here—the doctors had given him six months to a year—but he couldn’t say that with absolute certainty. There was something in his body he couldn’t control. A variable he couldn’t predict or plan for, other than knowing its eventual result. So he’d decided to let it play out as it would. He hadn’t been very good with variables lately anyway.
A series of bumps shimmied the plane, and he clutched the armrests. More variables he couldn’t control. Why the fuck had he thought this was a good idea? He usually had Sloan on flights with him to talk his ear off and distract him from the turbulence.
Clancy was game to try. “Can we play twenty questions again? See if I can guess where we’re going?” He shoved another cupcake half into his mouth.
“All right, but same conditions as before.” Miller shrugged out of his jacket, tossed it onto the bench seat, and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He didn’t miss how Clancy’s eyes strayed to his tattooed forearms, but Miller wouldn’t let his own mind stray to what that might mean. Food and destinations, that was all Miller could offer and afford. That’s all this trip was supposed to be about. “Five, not twenty, and for each question you ask, I get to ask a different one this time,” he proposed. “And you can’t ask point blank where we’re going. I made you a promise.”
Clancy pouted, his kissable lower lip thrust out. Miller’s mind and body gave him the middle finger, straying as they pleased after an evening and afternoon full of temptation. Stirrings he couldn’t acknowledge and couldn’t reciprocate. He wrenched back control, telling Clancy, “That’s the offer, take it or leave it.”
“Fine, so we’re going somewhere with high altitude?”
“I already told you that. Wasted question.” He kicked his shin under the table. “You’re terrible at this game.”
Clancy threw a balled-up napkin at him in return.
Chuckling, Miller snatched it out of the air before it collided with his nose. “How long have you been flying around on these fancy planes?”
“And you made fun of my questions.”
“Answer it, smart ass.”
Clancy curled his legs up under him, getting comfy. “Mom bought her first one with the divorce settlement, right after my freshman year of college. She bought the second and third a few years back. Like I said before, she’s very good at what she does.”
“That’s what Sloan said.”
“We should watch out for those two. Trouble together.”
Miller kicked his shoes off and propped his feet on the bracing bar beneath the table. “I got the same impression.”
“They seem a lot alike.”