Just One Taste

by Louisa Edwards

  And when she raised her voice to reply, he could hear exactly what it was she was having none of.

  “Do not try to tell me I can’t bring my dog in here,” she said, loudly enough to cut through the quiet hum of the other diners’ conversations. “I’ve read countless primary-source accounts describing Manhattan’s famously canine-loving populace. You allow dogs everywhere! I’ve seen it with my own eyes; since I’ve been in the city, I’ve encountered a Pomeranian at the Museum of Television and Radio, a Dalmatian at the Met, and a Shih Tzu at the Natural History Museum.”

  “Those weren’t restaurants,” Jess pointed out, his voice louder than usual, too. Wes had to grin. Trust Rosemary to be able to fluster the best server in the joint. Of course, he remembered guiltily, he’d sort of softened Jess up beforehand, so maybe it wasn’t fair to award her full points for that.

  “I don’t care. I’ve seen Sex & the City, I know New Yorkers bring their pets into dining establishments. Just because I’m not, technically, a New Yorker, you want to discriminate against me? Or is it because this isn’t a Louis Vuitton handbag? Ms. Bradshaw and the others did mention that, but I didn’t imagine it was an essential variable.”

  “No! Not at all,” Jess replied, casting a helpless glare of mute appeal over his shoulder. He caught Wes’s eye and something flickered over his face. A moment of pause. Maybe … shit. Maybe recognition.

  Now Wes really wished he’d ducked. Or at least that he hadn’t told Jess quite so much about Rosemary. His friend definitely knew enough to be able to put two and two together.

  “What the hell?” Adam asked, sucked into the drama playing out across the restaurant.

  “Crazy, right?” Wes said brightly. “Okay, guess I’d better get back to work. We’ve got orders for three towers, yeah?”

  He backed away from the pass, unable to take his eyes off Rosemary until he absolutely had to. It was insane—he absolutely didn’t want to face her, and yet he couldn’t stop drinking in the sight of her, like a wino who’d been handed a full bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild.

  He’d almost made it when Jess’s voice rang out clear as crystal goblets ringing together in a toast.

  “Let me guess. You’re here to speak to Wes Murphy, aren’t you?”

  Adam whipped around in time to catch Wes’s wince. “Hold it right there, asshole. What’s this got to do with you?”

  “Well …”

  “And I’m not leaving until I see him,” Rosemary replied, just as loudly. Moses on toast, did they think it was a play and they had to perform for the cheap seats?

  Adam’s large, square hand descended on the scruff of Wes’s neck. “I don’t know what the hell is going on, but you’re going to go make nice, get the dog lady out of my restaurant before somebody calls the health inspector, and then hustle your skinny Irish ass back onto the line. I’ll fill in for you for a few minutes, but make it snappy.”

  “Yes, Chef,” Wes said weakly, feeling the way Lucille looked the few times he’d dared to rebuke her.

  Man, he’d missed that silly little dog.

  As Jess appeared at the kitchen door wearing an evil smile that promised payback, Wes tried to ignore how much more he’d missed Rosemary. Who he was about to talk to for the first time since he’d kissed her good night all those months ago.

  His feet felt like lead, but his blood was racing through his veins as if it were in a hurry to catch a train. He must have looked like yesterday’s soup, warmed over, because even Jess’s fully justifiable triumph faded a little when Wes reached him.

  “Come on, I’ll walk you out,” Jess said, with almost no trace of glee.

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” he said. God, just seeing her across a crowded restaurant had felt like having the heart yanked right out of him.

  “You owe her this,” Jess said bluntly. “You left her. She doesn’t know why. She’s pissed, probably hurt, and God only knows what scenario she’s concocted in her head to explain it all.”

  “I know that,” Wes growled back, but then a thought occurred to him. If she was here … did that mean she’d left the academy, and all its research opportunities, behind? If she’d already decided that, on her own, maybe he could explain what had happened. Maybe …

  Wes pressed his lips closed and tried to look calm and in control while his pulse thundered in his ears.

  Jess easily shattered any pretense at calm with his whispered parting comment as he deposited Wes in front of Rosemary’s table. “Here he is, ma’am, the one and only Wes Murphy.” Leaning in, Jess said, “You want my advice? Work it out.”

  And with that, the little shit was gone, leaving Wes twisting in the wind, staring down into the lovely storm-blue eyes he’d never thought he’d see again.

  She stared, silent and implacable in a T-shirt bearing the inexplicable slogan BROWNCOATS, while Lucille went bananas and started trying to claw her way through the leather side of the bag to get to him.

  What the hell was he supposed to say? Quick, he told himself. Pretend she’s a mark! Go into your patter! Say something, anything!

  “Um. Hi.”

  Oh yeah. Smooth like butter.

  Rosemary resisted the asinine urge to touch her hair, fix her clothing, or run her finger across her teeth to check for lipstick. Just because she’d put on a touch of light neutral beige-pink gloss this morning did not mean she was dressed up. Nor did she need to!

  This wasn’t a date. It wasn’t even a social call. It was purely business.

  Lucille, it appeared, had not gotten the memo. She’d managed to deduce that the handbag’s zipper was the only thing standing in the way of her joyous reunion with Wes, and was accordingly gnawing on it, growling low in her throat the whole while. It was distracting.

  That was the only reason Rosemary hadn’t gotten down to the business at hand yet, she told herself. It certainly had nothing to do with the way the sight of Wes Murphy, all one-point-eight-two-eight-eight meters of him, made her temperature skyrocket. Just because his wavy chestnut-brown hair curled around his ears and the nape of his neck, and his eyes were the color of nickel chloride hexahydrate, and his wide, mobile mouth had kissed her mouth and her other parts besides—none of that was any reason to lose focus.

  Pulling herself up and ignoring the gyrating handbag at her feet, Rosemary held out her hand for a cool, detached greeting.

  Except the moment his long, scarred fingers touched hers, she felt anything but cool and detached.

  Frak! She hadn’t accounted for the possibility that she might react as uncontrollably as ever to Wes Murphy. All the literature indicated that once the initial lust was sated, the chemical attraction was sure to fade!

  Stupid Sex & the City. Talk about an unreliable research source. First they were wrong about the acceptable code of conduct for taking pets into public areas, and now this?

  She met Wes’s changeable green eyes—fickle as the rest of him, damn it—and was surprised to see something flicker there that she didn’t expect. Was it an answering heat?

  He didn’t give her a chance to decipher it, kneeling instead to make a fuss over the wildly happy Lucille. The dog was, as usual, quite vocal about her feelings, and Rosemary felt the stares of the other diners like prickles along the back of her flushing neck.

  “God, I missed you, baby girl,” Wes was crooning as Lucille attempted to fit his entire nose into her mouth. His somewhat long nose was too much for her, so she settled for trying to lick it off his face.

  Rosemary ignored the curl of bitterness in her chest that wanted to hear those words, or something similar with perhaps less infantilization, from Wes about herself. “If you’re quite done fawning over the animal you abandoned,” she said acidly, “I have something important to speak to you about.”

  From his position on one knee beside her chair, they were almost eye to eye. Wes kept his hands moving soothingly over Lucille’s head while the dog shuddered in obvious transports of delight. Rosemary vehemently squashed any memo
ries of those same hands stroking her thighs, her sides, her … stop it!

  “I know,” Wes said, his voice heavy with emotion. “There’s some stuff I need to say to you, too. But I have to get back to work, and Lucille really can’t be in here. Lots of restaurants will let you have your dog at the table if you sit outside, if there’s sidewalk seating. But this ain’t Paris, and somebody really will call the health department. Or at least blog about it.”

  Caught between two burning needs—one, to settle her business with Wes so she could escape his still dangerously attractive presence for good, and two, to get away from the staring, whispering tables full of people around her—Rosemary gritted her teeth and said, “Fine. I’m staying at the Carlyle. There’s a bar off the lobby.”

  “Right, Bemelman’s. It’s kind of famous.” He paused. “That place is pretty swanky.”

  Rosemary shrugged, annoyed at the digression. “It’s where my parents always stay when they’re here on lecture tours. What difference does it make?”

  “Oh! None. I guess I would’ve thought they wouldn’t allow pets.”

  “For what I’m paying, they ought to allow me to bring in my own personal menagerie. Anyway, so you’ll meet me there when you get off work?”

  “Sure, okay. It’ll be late, though.”

  Rosemary waved that away as unimportant, gathered up her squirming purse and stood. Studying his handsome face intently, she said, “Based on empirical evidence, I really shouldn’t trust you out of my sight.”

  Ouch. But what could he say when it was nothing less than the truth? Maybe he’d had a good reason for walking out on her last time, but that didn’t make him an honorable man. Much as he wanted to be, it never seemed to work out well for him. Or anyone around him.

  He watched her leave, Lucille panting over her shoulder, and felt a fist squeeze around his heart.

  She was right not to trust him. He didn’t trust himself.

  Even telling her the truth about why he left wouldn’t change that.

  Chapter 14

  Wes did a discreet sniff check on the street outside the Carlyle Hotel. The doorman looked on, smirking a little in his gold-braided uniform.

  “Just got off work,” Wes felt compelled to explain. He’d stripped off his reeking whites in the locker room, keeping an eye on the door the whole time in case Jess or Frankie decided this was another opportune moment for revenge, but luckily he’d made it back into his normal-guy clothes without incident.

  “Sure,” said the doorman. “Lemme guess, adult video store?”

  Wes looked down at what he was wearing. Soft gray Levi’s and the battered leather motorcycle jacket Pops gave him when he turned twenty over an unzipped blue hoodie. Now that he wasn’t constrained to the academy’s prison-strict dress code, he’d ditched the leather clogs in favor of sneakers, which he was still wearing.

  Nothing about that said skeezy to Wes. He shrugged, and the motion shifted his jacket and sweatshirt just enough that he remembered what he had on underneath.

  Crap. He was wearing that shirt. It was white, although faded a little dingy over the years, and featured a large blue star in the center of his chest with the word PORN in red letters inside it.

  Okay, that was a little embarrassing. But jeez, it’s not like he knew he was going to be seeing Rosemary today!

  He zipped up his hoodie, covering the porn star and arched a brow at the doorman. “It’s just a shirt, dude. What, you gonna tell me there’s a dress code in the hotel lobby?”

  “Hey, if you’re okay with it, I’m okay with it,” the guy said.

  “Then step aside, man. I’m going in!” Wes waited for the doorman to open the door for him with a lavish, unnecessary flourish, then prowled through as if he owned the joint.

  He’d learned early on that the key to fitting in was total confidence. Look as if you belong there, and everyone will assume you do. Hell, if he swaggered hard enough, the chick working the reception desk would probably take a surreptitious cell phone photo of him so she could figure out what rock band he was a member of.

  Wes strode straight through the lobby to the almost-hidden door into Bemelmans Bar, a gorgeous, golden room filled with old-school heavy leather banquettes, dark wood tables, and a big, shiny baby grand piano. The far wall danced with a whimsical mural, and there, beneath a scene of two stylized rabbits in formal wear picnicking in Central Park, Rosemary sat with her nose stuck in a book.

  Her blond hair was loose, for once, shiny and a little mussed, as if she hadn’t bothered to brush it in a while. Her white button-down shirt had a round collar and puffy sleeves like a little girl’s dress, but she was wearing a black corduroy men’s vest over it, and the overall look was enticingly wacky in some way Wes couldn’t really define.

  She was so … herself. From the tips of her unmanicured nails to the top of her smooth, high forehead, Dr. Rosemary Wilkins was just there. Doing her thing. Not giving a shit what anyone else thought, and looking so goddamned adorable sitting there reading, that Wes had a hard time not pouncing on her.

  He wanted to unbutton every one of those buttons, slow and steady, revealing inches of creamy skin and the pretty curves that tended to dominate his dreams these days.

  Instead, seeing that she had a martini glass in front of her, he went to the bar to get a drink.

  When he set his glass of Guinness on the table, she blinked up at him, her wide blue eyes startled.

  “Oh! You’re here.”

  “I said I would be,” he reminded her. He hated that she was so surprised. Not that he didn’t understand why, but still. It sucked.

  “Good,” she said at the same time as Wes blurted out, “Listen—”

  They both stopped, flustered. “Look, why don’t you sit down,” she said finally. “And then I’ll start.”

  “Ladies first,” Wes said, sliding into the chair. The square table was small enough that their knees bumped, sending shocks up his legs.

  She shifted in her chair, a slight squirm that heated Wes all the way through. “I don’t want to talk about what happened at the academy,” she said abruptly, puncturing the cloud of sensual warmth surrounding Wes.

  “What?” he said stupidly.

  “I mean, I only want to talk about what we did in the lab—or wait, not what we did in the lab that last night. Not at all. Let’s just retcon that, pretend it never happened. Okay?”

  Cold shot through Wes’s chest. “No, hold up. Rosemary, I need to tell you—”

  “If it’s about that last night, I don’t want to hear it.” She cut him off with a chop of her hand and a firm tone, but it was the way her breath sped up, the pulse in her throat visibly spiking, that shut Wes’s mouth.

  He clenched his fists on the table and blew out a breath, unbelievably frustrated. This had to be the first time in his life he’d been ready to beg a woman to talk about what it meant that they’d had sex. “Rosemary.”

  “If you persist in bringing it up, I’ll have no compunction about getting up and sticking you with the bill,” she warned. “And cocktails here are not cheap.”

  Forcing his hands to relax, Wes grabbed his beer and took a deep drink. “Fine. We’ll play it your way, for now. But it’s not because I can’t afford to pay for your fifteen-dollar martini.”

  “Dirty martini, actually,” she informed him. “With extra olives, which I already ate.”

  “Your drink of choice is vodka mixed with olive juice?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, taking a thoughtful sip. “It’s okay, but it’s not the one. I’ll keep looking. I have a system.”

  He could only imagine her quest for a favorite cocktail. There were probably taste graphs and preference flow charts involved. Affection for her welled so suddenly and sharply that he had to take another drink to keep from leaning over and kissing the faraway look off her face.

  “Anyway, that’s not important right now. I wish you’d stop forcing me off topic. I’m trying to talk to you about our project!” />
  “Project?” Trying to follow a simple conversation with Rosemary was apt to leave a man feeling about as swift as a monkey trying to do calculus.

  “Yes!” Impatience was a cute look on her. “You know. The aphrodisiac project.”

  “Oh right. Well, you know, I officially withdrew from the ACA a week ago, so I’m not going to need to turn in a final project,” Wes said.

  “I know, that’s why I’m here.” She glanced down at her drink, her lowered lashes hiding her expression. “President Cornell mentioned to me that you wouldn’t be coming back.”

  “I’m sorry you had to find out that way,” he said. This sucked. Hugely. She said she didn’t want to talk about it, but he had to tell her anyway.

  She pressed her lips together into a firm line. “I don’t want any apologies from you,” she said.

  “Then why are you here?”

  She leaned forward, eyes glittering in the yellow light from the hand-painted lampshade on their table. “I want to continue the project.”

  “On your own?” He hated the idea of Rosemary checking out aphrodisiacs with some other eager assistant.

  “Of course. I always work alone.”

  “Not always,” Wes felt compelled to point out.

  “No,” she said, pursing her lips. “You’re right. And again, that’s why I’m here. To get your permission to continue the research on my own. Considering that it was technically your project to begin with, I felt it was only ethical to let you know what I’ve discovered since you left, and what it could mean.”

  “Wow, you’re really serious about this.” Wes felt like a moron for taking so long to see it, but he’d been distracted by their personal shit. And he remembered exactly how dismissive she was of the whole idea to begin with, so her current level of barely restrained enthusiasm was a shocker.