Just One Taste

by Louisa Edwards

  Except he had, hadn’t he? Right at the beginning? Guilt threatened to choke him as he stared at the pain tightening her sensual lips into a tight grimace and making her lungs work like a bellows, pushing air in and out past her desire to keep it together in front of him.

  All he wanted was to hold her and tell her to let go—but oh, the irony. If he reached for her, the only one screaming “Let go!” would be her.

  Even now, he could stop this. All he had to do was tell her the truth. Tell her who Pops was, what he wanted. Tell her about his childhood, and what had landed him at Heartway House. “Rosemary, listen—”

  “Stop right there.” Visibly getting a grip on her runaway emotions, Rosemary gritted out, “Please spare me another one of your lies. You know, the irony of this situation hasn’t escaped me. Here I spend my whole life searching for scientific truth, and then I fall for someone who wouldn’t recognize the truth if it bit him in the gluteus maximus. Come on, Lucille.”

  But the dog wouldn’t budge.

  Breath coming in harsh, humiliated gasps, Rosemary tugged on the leash. Wes felt his heart splinter right down the middle, spilling acid and pain out into his rib cage.

  Lucille plopped her furry white butt on the hallway floor and looked up at Wes, then back at Rosemary. She was clearly torn between the two humans who’d cared for her, cuddled her, fed her, played with her.

  “Go on,” he whispered to her, making a little shooing gesture. “It’s okay, L-dawg. Go with Rosemary.”

  Rosemary stopped pulling on the leash, her hand going slack at her side. She looked up at Wes, and the deep, real grief on her face stole his breath. “It figures,” she gasped. “The first real friend I ever have, my whole life, and even she doesn’t want to be with me.”

  “No, come on,” Wes said, his voice breaking. “She’s just confused. Go on, pretty girl. Rosemary needs you.”

  That ripped a choked sob out of Rosemary’s throat. She dropped the leash on the ground and backed away. “No I don’t. I don’t need her, I don’t need anyone.”

  Every word, every tear, every time he stared into those swimming blue eyes, Wes shuddered with paralyzing fear and self-hatred. He could barely manage to hold out his hand to Rosemary—this beautiful woman he wasn’t good enough to touch or even look at—but he had to try. “Wait, don’t—”

  “Leave me alone,” she shouted, the words sharp with misery. “I don’t want to hear anything else. You’re a liar. I never should’ve had anything to do with you.”

  Wes dropped his hand. What else could he say? She was right. And even if he swore never to lie to her again, it was only a matter of time before Pops had his hands all over her big, fat bank account.

  “I’m sorry.” He forced the words through lips gone numb and bloodless with pain.

  She blinked away the tears, wiping at her damp face with the back of her hand, and laughed. The harsh, dry sound scoured out Wes’s heart like a handful of rock salt in a cast-iron skillet.

  Backing away from them slowly, Rosemary said, “I went through my whole life without ever feeling much of anything—and I was just fine with that. Then you had to come along and make me notice how much I was missing.” She shook her head. “I could hate you for that alone.”

  Wes glanced down at himself, dazedly wondering when the bruises would start to show. He’d never felt so battered, not after the worst street fight or barroom brawl. But he said nothing. Just stood there and took it, because he deserved it, and he knew it.

  She shook her head, contempt twisting her mouth off center. “Some genius I turned out to be. I let myself get played by an uneducated thief with nothing but cheap charm and a mangy m-mutt dog to his name.”

  Her voice shook, but she kept her head up defiantly. In a distant, surreal way, Wes was proud of her.

  In the more immediate reality, of course, he felt each word like the rough edge of a serrated knife, but pride—his old standby—was enough to keep him on his feet when all he wanted was to go to his knees and beg her to forgive him.

  There was no point. She’d made her decision.

  And when she turned and walked through the hall door, through the bar, and out into the rain, Wes knew he’d never see her again.

  It was hard to imagine being hit by a bus could feel worse than this. Wes counted the seconds until the start of dinner service as he loaded up a tray with the accompaniments for the family meal he’d stayed up all night preparing.

  During service was the only time he felt alive—the rush of adrenaline and urgency might be a poor substitute for a true will to live, but they were all he had, so he clung to them.

  Rosemary had only been gone—what? Two days? And Wes was already falling apart, as if she’d been the glue that held his life together. Moronic, but there it was.

  He couldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep. Didn’t want to think.

  All he could do was cook, so he did that.

  Pushing the dining room door open with his hip, Wes was surprised to see Adam, Grant, and Frankie all gathered by the bar. The big shocker wasn’t that they were alone out there—Wes was pretty far ahead of schedule on getting family meal ready; even the perpetually starving line cooks hadn’t made a mad dash for the dining room yet—but that the three powers behind Market had their heads together, talking animatedly.

  It had been a tense few days around here, from what Wes could tell in the midst of his own problems.

  But evidently Adam had forgiven Grant’s lie, and everything was hunky-dory again.

  Wes started setting out bowls of chopped fresh cilantro, lemongrass, ginger, and mint, and tried not to be envious.

  “Just imagine,” Grant was saying. “The Market Bar. Or the Bar at Market! A more casual, no-reservations, walk-in kind of place.”

  “We could even do a prix-fixe,” Adam replied. “Like a sidewalk bistro in Paris—no menu, just a chalkboard with a three-course meal, different every day, based on what looks good at the Greenmarket.”

  “Like an even more focused, distilled version of what Market stands for,” Grant added eagerly.

  “But look, guys, we still don’t have the staff to run two kitchens. I can’t be two places at once, and unless Frankie’s willing to run his own kitchen for the first time …”

  “Maybe I would be, if I had the right wing man.”

  The unnatural stillness from Grant and Adam made even Wes stop what he was doing and glance up.

  “You’ve turned me down every time I’ve tried to promote you to chef de cuisine—” Adam said, waving his hands helplessly.

  “What wing man?” Grant demanded.

  Across the bar, Frankie’s gaze flicked to Wes. “Time for family meal, I think. What did you make for us this time, Wes?”

  “Vietnamese sandwiches called banh mi,” he replied tersely. “Excuse me, I’ve gotta get the rest of the stuff.”

  Numb, confused, and exhausted, Wes could barely muster the energy to think about what he’d just overheard. He concentrated on pulling together the rest of the build-your-own sandwich makings. The short, crusty loaves of French baguette, the bowls of pâté, spiced ground pork, and the platter of sliced terrine of pork and veal all went onto his tray.

  After a bad moment where he almost dropped the heavy tray, he managed to heft it onto his shoulder and get it out to the bar where the rest of the line cooks were finally assembling.

  “Holy hell,” Adam said. “You made all this from scratch? Even the terrine?”

  “Pork terrine is an essential part of the sandwich,” Wes said, aware that he sounded like a stubborn idiot but too tired to do anything about it.

  Adam and Frankie exhanged a glance that Grant could easily read as serious worry. “Something going on with you, mate?” Frankie asked. For Frankie, who approached most problems as if they were best solved with a wrecking ball, that was bordering on pussyfooting.

  “Nothing I can’t handle,” Wes said, setting the tray on the bar. “Dig in, before the pig gets cold.”

 
It would take more than worry for a fellow chef to keep the line cooks from falling on the food the instant it appeared. They were already cracking open the crusty loaves of bread and slathering the halves with the cold, lightly pink terrine, a cinnamon-inflected chicken liver pâté, and spoonfuls of fragrant ground pork. Fingers dipped into the prep bowls, layering fresh herbs, quick-pickled cucumbers and carrots, and other condiments onto the sandwiches.

  Even though the blend of hot spice, sour pickled vegetables, salty pork, and sweet ginger made him want to sing, dance, laugh, and wolf down about four more of the banh mi sandwiches, Wes could only pick at his.

  “Something is definitely off,” Frankie announced.

  Wes flinched, then forced himself still. “Don’t put so much Sriracha on it next time,” he said mildly.

  “Not with the banh mi—that’s bloody miraculous, that is, and you know it. I meant with you. What’s the matter? You get your girl up the duff or something?”

  Somebody gasped, probably Grant, and Wes stiffened while Frankie continued. “Gonna have a little baby Einstein of your very own?”

  “Shut your damn mouth,” Wes ground out.

  Triumph flashed across Frankie’s face. “Why? Sawing close to the bone, am I?”

  “Frankie,” Adam said, a warning clear in his voice, but Wes was already out of his seat and standing, everything that had happened in the past week crashing over his head in an avalanche of bad choices, stupid pride, and bitter regret.

  “No,” Wes said. “It’s over, she’s moved on. Left town two days ago. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  He really didn’t want to talk about it—talking led to feeling, which would probably lead to humiliating things like breaking down and sobbing in front of the two chefs he respected most in the world.

  As if Wes didn’t already have enough shit to deal with.

  But Frankie, as usual, did the opposite of what Wes was hoping for.

  He talked about it.

  Only, also as per usual, he didn’t do it quite the way Wes expected. There was no mocking or gloating or smirking—there was only the sincere, deep understanding buried in Frankie’s eyes, and the steadying grasp of his hand on Wes’s shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, mate. I am. I wish you’d said something sooner.”

  “Wow,” Adam said, wiping his fingers on a napkin. “For serious, man. You didn’t have to deal with this all alone.”

  “I didn’t?” Wes felt like an idiot, but he just wasn’t getting it. He looked back and forth between Adam and Frankie, then gazed around at the nodding heads and sympathetic grimaces of the crew standing at the bar.

  “No way, dude,” said Violet Porter, the words muffled around her mouthful of banh mi. “We got your back.”

  Just when Wes was starting to feel like shuffling his feet under all the empathetic stares, the cooks went back to eating and laughing with each other, as if everything were normal. Which left Wes standing there, trying to process what had just happened.

  It honestly never occurred to him.

  Maybe because the number one rule of his family was essentially the same as the number one rule of Fight Club: Don’t talk about it. Or maybe just because he was a guy, surrounded mainly by other guys, and it would’ve felt weird.

  Except, the way each and every person cuffed him on the shoulder or made an appreciative comment about the family meal as they finished up and headed back to the trenches made Wes feel like maybe he’d lucked into a new family. One that didn’t prize secrecy and the ability to tell a convincing lie above all else.

  One that might stick by him when the chips were down, instead of bailing at the first sign of trouble.

  Finally, everyone had filed back into the kitchen except Wes, Frankie, and Adam. Grant and Christian were restocking the bar from the wine cellar downstairs, and Adam and Frankie had their heads together in an apparently very serious conversation, so Wes tried to be as quiet as possible clearing up the mess from dinner.

  Still off balance from being dragged kicking and screaming back into the land of the living, Wes actually jumped about a foot in the air when Frankie appeared next to him.

  “Been meaning to thank you for the other day. For what you said about me and Jess—you made a lot of sense, and I’ve been trying to think what to do ever since.”

  “Oh! Well, if I helped at all, I’m glad.”

  “You did,” Frankie assured him. “And I think I’ve got a plan now, for maybe the first time in me life, but better late than never, innit? Anyway, I meant what I said before, as well. About you being one of us now. And we take care of our own.”

  And then, just when Wes thought he’d been astonished to the point where nothing else could ever throw him for a loop, Frankie threw an arm over his shoulder for a rough hug. He cast a glare at Adam and said, “Don’t cock this up!” then took off for the kitchen.

  Swaying in shock, Wes said, “Did that just happen?”

  “You’re in trouble now,” Adam said, laughing. “Once you’re in with Frankie, you can never get out again. He’s gotta be the most loyal son of a bitch I’ve ever met. I think that’s why he’s so hard on new people—he has to make sure they’re going to stick around before he gets in too deep.”

  Bemused, Wes shook his head. This day was taking on some definite dreamlike qualities. He almost wanted to pinch himself to make sure he was awake, but he’d never really understood that. It’s not like he couldn’t pinch himself in a dream.

  Adam put his head to one side, regarding Wes with those sharp brown eyes that seemed to pierce right through to the heart of him. “So,” Adam said, elaborately casual. “Are you planning to stick around, or what?”

  Wes thought of Rosemary, back in her lab at the Academy of Culinary Arts. Shit. She might as well be on the moon.

  “Yeah, I’m in.” After the kind of friends he’d found here, the crazy adoptive family he had a shot at? It would take a stick of dynamite to pry him loose. Except …

  “Assuming, you know, I can make my rent,” he had to add, since there’d been a recent drain on his finances that made that whole deal even dicier.

  Satisfaction gleamed in Adam’s broad smile. “I don’t want to get your hopes up, but I think we might have a solution for that. Let me tell you what we’re thinking …”

  As Adam outlined a possible long-term future for Wes with the crew at Market, Wes had to struggle to take it all in.

  He was being offered a chance at everything he’d ever wanted—a life, a real honest-to-God life that he could make something of, with people he respected who respected him right back, and maybe even liked him a little. It was heady, overwhelming, amazing—and he still felt as though he’d never laugh again.

  Wes listened to Adam, nodded in all the right places, and silently cursed that evil bitch, Karma, who’d come up with the perfect punishment for his many sins.

  It seemed he was doomed to always want what he could never have.

  Chapter 29

  An essential part of the process of getting over an ex you still had to work with, Jess had found, was living your night off to the fullest.

  Not that his forays into Manhattan’s club scene had done much beyond showing him that a fake ID and an even faker smile got you in anywhere, and yes, in fact, what he’d had with Frankie had been one-of-a-kind, not easily replaceable with a casual trick he picked up at a bar.

  Oh, and also that even considering sex with anyone other than Frankie made him feel like a low-down cheating man-ho.

  Which probably explained why Jess was spending his precious night off in the photography lab at NYU, working on a chiaroscuro project that wasn’t due for another month.

  He was such a freaking loser.

  When his phone beeped, he tried to fool himself that maybe one of the guys from his dorm was texting to invite him to an awesome party. Blowing out a breath, Jess rifled through his messenger bag for the phone, fully aware that it was probably his sister checking up on him.

  He hadn
’t called her or talked to her much since overhearing her conversation with Frankie; he didn’t know what to say or how to feel about it. So he was using the patented Frankie Boyd method of dealing: avoidance.

  Real mature, Jess. And also, could you stop thinking about Frankie for thirty seconds?

  Sighing, he thumbed his phone on and froze at the message that appeared on the screen.

  Meet me @ 422 Columbus. Smthg 2 show you

  It was from Frankie.

  Jess’s legs shook; he had to catch himself against the pan of chemical developer. It occurred to him to wish he could play it cool, but as he raced around the photo lab packing up his things, he knew there was no chance he wasn’t going over there.

  To hell with being cool and mature. If Frankie wanted to see him, even just to mess with his head—or his body, a hopeful voice in the back of his mind put in—Jess was there.

  He missed the dickhead way too much.

  The subway ride uptown felt endless. When the conductor’s voice crackled in over the intercom to announce the train was making all express stops up to Seventy-second Street, Jess nearly cheered.

  Finally, he was there. He gazed up at the awning of the building next to Market. 422 Columbus Avenue.

  Trying to ignore the rampaging butterflies currently forming a mosh pit in his stomach, Jess tried the door. It was open.

  “Hello?” he called. “Is anybody here? Frankie?”

  “Back here, Bit.” The voice came from another room at the rear of the empty space. Jess wanted to believe it was the creepiness of the deserted restaurant that sent chills down his back, but he wasn’t that good at lying to himself.

  That damn nickname got him every time.

  He wrapped his arms around himself, glad he’d remembered his jacket, and picked his careful way through the dusty space, still littered with detritus from its failed incarnation as a Cajun hot spot.

  No big surprise, Frankie was in the mostly stripped kitchen, setting up a table in the empty slot that looked like it used to house a prep station.