Just One Taste

by Louisa Edwards

  For a moment, the outer room looked like unrelieved pitch-black after the warm glow of candlelight in the kitchen, but when Jess’s eyes adjusted, he made out a figure standing next to the front door. The figure was joined by another, and another.

  Triple crap.

  “Oi,” Frankie shouted into the silence, scaring a year off Jess’s life. “Who’s there?”

  “Frankie? That you?”

  It was Adam. The man who made Frankie feel safe.

  Jess tried not to scowl—obviously, it was better that the intruder was Adam, not a policeman or a criminal, but still.

  Straining his eyes as the figures came closer, Jess picked out the bright red fall of his sister’s hair, and … was that Wes? Great. It was a party.

  “Whoops,” Adam said, catching Miranda when she stumbled against an overturned chair. “Shoulda brought a flashlight.”

  “Tell me again why this can’t wait until tomorrow?” Miranda huffed. She looked up and Jess saw her eyes widen. “Jess! Did Adam ask you to meet us here?” Her gaze shifted to Frankie, though, and Jess was pretty sure he saw her wink.

  He thought seriously about strangling her, but there were too many witnesses, at least one of whom could and would break his arm, so he clenched his jaw and said, “Nope. Just having a chat with Frankie.”

  “Oh, I hope we’re not intruding,” Miranda exclaimed, even as Adam grabbed her hand and tugged her forward impatiently, Wes trailing along behind as if he barely registered his surroundings.

  “Not at all,” Jess said. He glanced at Frankie, who was watching him with shuttered eyes. The moment was gone, cracked like a mirror dropped on the floor, and Jess could only curse his bad luck. And run off to lick his wounds. “I need to be going, anyhow.”

  Frankie squeezed his eyes shut, but when he opened them, all Jess saw was acceptance. “Thanks for coming, Bit. It was good to see you.”

  “Don’t leave on our account,” Adam said, coming up beside them and throwing one arm around Frankie’s neck. “I assume we’re all here for the same thing.”

  Adam wanted to tell Miranda … and Wes … about Frankie’s past as a drug-addicted runaway?

  The chef beamed at Jess, keeping his much taller best friend in an affectionate strangle-hold. “Did he show you?”

  Jess blinked. That was actually what Frankie’s text said—he had something to show Jess. He’d assumed that meant the sangria, but maybe not.

  “We hadn’t quite got to that bit,” Frankie said quietly, ducking out of Adam’s rough one-armed hug and walking away, over to the table.

  Jess stood there like a lump, hovering half in and half out, while the other three brushed past him and into the kitchen. The sight of Frankie’s whipcord-lean back gave him a pang, and kicked his brain back into gear.

  “Why did you ask me to come here tonight?” he said, watching Frankie.

  Miranda, sensitive as always to Jess’s feelings, stopped beside him and pulled him to her side. The wordless comfort of her embrace bolstered Jess’s courage, and he sent her a grateful look.

  Adam spread his arms and smiled widely. “To show you his new domain,” he crowed. “S’why I brought Wes over—wanted him to see what he’ll be in charge of when Frankie’s got the day off.”

  With a sudden disorienting jerk, Jess was back on that carousel in the park, only this time it was spinning faster and faster, his head whirling, hope like a twister spiraling up his chest and into his throat.

  “You’re leaving Market?”

  Frankie shrugged. “Not really. Just going next door, like. Hardly a life-changing move.”

  Except it was, and they both knew it.

  Five long strides brought Jess back to Frankie’s side. “Look at me,” he said, tuning everyone else out. “You brought me here to tell me you’re going to be the head chef at the second Market restaurant?”

  “Yeah.” Frankie kept his eyes on Jess’s face, apparently fascinated by whatever he saw there. Jess couldn’t even imagine what he must look like right now—the freakiest mishmash of emotions were all swirling in his chest, but the strongest one seemed to be joy.

  He was smiling so big it made his cheeks ache, but they had to see this through all the way. “Any particular reason you wanted me to know that?”

  Slowly, carefully, as if he were touching fine china, Frankie lifted his hands to Jess’s shoulders. They were a heavy, comforting weight, anchoring Jess to the earth when he felt like he might actually float away.

  Breaking their staring contest for only a moment to glance over at Miranda and Wes, who were standing by the doorway, Frankie rasped, “I wanted you to know that I’m done playing at being the punk-rock Peter Pan. I’m ready to grow up.”

  He stroked the sides of Jess’s neck with his thumbs, making Jess shiver, and that open, naked expression stole back over the sharp planes of Frankie’s face as he looked down at Jess. “I wanted you to know that I don’t need my whole life to stay the same anymore, so long as my one constant is you. I love you, Jess Wake.”

  And then Jess was crying, and he didn’t care who saw, and no one could see anyway because he was stretching up on his toes and kissing the life out of Frankie Boyd, the man he loved. Who loved him back.

  Wes had never been that into watching. Most con men were voyeurs, he’d always thought—at least a little. You had to have a fascination with watching people if you wanted to pick up their tells, figure out what made them tick so you could break them down and get inside their heads.

  If he’d ever needed proof that he wasn’t cut out for that kind of work? This was it.

  He’d averted his eyes from Frankie and Jess way before they locked lips—and it really wasn’t the guy-on-guy thing. Just the way they looked at each other was so intimate, so private, it had Wes squirming and feeling like the worst kind of Peeping Tom.

  His eyes had landed on Miranda at first, but she was no help because her hands were clasped under her chin, and tears were dripping down her pretty face, making her beatific smile all damp and trembly, and Wes had had enough of watching women cry to last him a lifetime.

  He shifted his uncomfortable gaze to Adam, but the big, bad chef looked like a proud papa, watching his best friend finally pull his shit together, and really—the whole situation was, like, tailor-made to point out what a fucking interloper Wes was.

  What the hell was he doing here with these people? The minute they woke up and realized he’d been here the whole time, all awkward and unwanted, they were gonna be pissed.

  Deciding the better part of valor was probably getting the hell out of Dodge, Wes started inching toward the door.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Frankie said.

  Wes glanced back. The sous chef—well, soon-to-be executive chef—appeared to have surfaced from the kiss of the ages, which was just as well. Maybe it made him a horrible person—big news flash there—but Wes wasn’t sure he could bear to watch another couple so obviously happy and in love right now.

  Not that they looked any less in love when they weren’t sucking face, he noticed. Frankie had both arms around the much shorter Jess, the younger man’s back to his chest, and Jess was leaning into the circle of his arms as if there were no place on earth he’d rather be. Despite the difference in their heights, they looked like two puzzle pieces who’d just slotted into place.

  “Hey,” Wes said, going for light and easy and ignoring the knot in his throat. “I was promised a tour of our new digs, not a show. Didn’t figure you’d want me around when the curtain came down.”

  “Why not?” Frankie said. “You helped make it happen.”

  “What do you mean?” Jess asked.

  “Your mate, Wes there, was one of several people to give yours truly a good talking-to in the last few days.”

  “Oh really?” Jess gave Wes a look that made him squirm.

  “Too right. Bloody hell, was like a revolving door—everyone wanted a shot at telling me what a prize idiot I was being.”

  �
�It’s true,” Wes said, pasting on a grin. “I did enjoy calling him an idiot.”

  “Oh me, too!” Miranda said, raising her hand like a kid in class.

  Adam crossed his arms over his broad chest, looking disgruntled. “Damn it, I missed out on the fun. Why didn’t you tell me we were having a Bash Sense into Frankie Party? I would’ve made Tshirts.”

  Jess laughed, but Frankie was watching Wes. His big grin wasn’t fooling Frankie, he had a feeling, and Frankie confirmed it a second later by saying, “Seriously, mate. Thanks for what you said. It … made a difference.”

  Jess turned in his arms, casting a curious look up at Frankie. “What did he say?”

  Frankie made a thoughtful clicking noise with his tongue. “Essentially, it boiled down to trust. I needed to trust you—and give you reason to trust me—by telling you the truth. And let the chips fall where they may.”

  “Hmm,” Jess hummed. “Lucky for you, I fell right in your lap.”

  Frankie grinned wickedly and leaned down to whisper his response in Jess’s ear, but Wes was no longer paying any attention.

  Hearing his own advice echoed back to him, and seeing the glow shining off those two without the dark cloud of lies and evasions hovering over them—it was like a kick to the head, rearranging everything inside as if someone had upended a drawer and shaken all the contents out onto the floor.

  “I have to go,” Wes said. “And I don’t know when, or if, I’ll be back.”

  Four pairs of eyes looked at him with varying degrees of curiosity and disbelief, but Wes held firm.

  He’d never been so sure of anything in his life.

  Chapter 31

  Most people seemed to find science, chemistry especially, to be cold and hard. Rosemary didn’t understand that. How did they not see the serene beauty, the soothing rightness, of a world where logic ruled supreme, where there were correct answers to difficult questions and all you had to do was test until you found them?

  She’d all but moved into her lab when she first got back to the Academy of Culinary Arts campus. There was a lumpy, overstuffed sofa in the corner, which she occasionally napped on; she’d bribed one of the culinary students she knew from her class into dropping off food once a day.

  Sustenance, shelter, and a place to lay her head—what else did she need? Besides her research, of course.

  She was lucky, she told herself firmly, as she extracted a tiny portion of pulpy red strawberry matter to examine under a microscope, lucky that her mind was so stimulated and full, her work so challenging and all-encompassing that it left no room for anything else.

  Certainly no thoughts of anyone she might have met in that class, or had intercourse with in this very lab. Nope. Nuh-uh. Not ever again.

  Humming a snatch of “Suffragette City” to herself, Rosemary bent over the lab table and set her eye to the scope’s lens, fiddling the focus knob with her right hand.

  Warm satisfaction suffused her as the molecules came into sharp relief. This confirmed it.

  She was a genius.

  “Woot!” she shouted, pumping her fist in the air. Her woot echoed strangely in the empty lab, which she tried to ignore so she could hold on to the euphoria of being proved totally and incontrovertibly right.

  A knock on the door punctured her jubilation like a pin in a balloon. She frowned down at her watch. It was too early for Sloane to be stopping by with whatever leftovers she’d cobbled together from her daily stint at the academy’s on-campus restaurant.

  Shrugging, Rosemary stripped off her latex gloves, wrinkling her nose at the harsh, antiseptic smell of the powdery residue left on her hands, and went to open the door.

  There, in the hall, were three of the things there was no room for in Rosemary’s brain—Wes Murphy, faithless lying liar who lied to her, looking just as unconscionably handsome as ever, his tall, athletic frame nearly filling the doorway.

  He was holding Lucille, the best friend who’d turned her back when Rosemary needed her the most. And … Rosemary blinked. Okay, that had to be a result of the fumes, or something.

  But when she opened her eyes, there he still was. Standing behind and a little to the left of Wes was the dapper gray-haired gentleman, Wes’s contact from the pharmaceutical company.

  Her head swiveled back to Wes, this new betrayal cutting like a scalpel through the scar tissue she’d painstakingly grown around her heart. She wanted to gasp “How could you!” like some swoony, melodramatic soap character, but her hand moved faster than her brain, for once, and swung hard on the door, attempting to slam it shut in their faces.

  Wes, damn him, blocked the door with his arm.

  “Rosemary,” he said. That was all, but it stopped her. She hated herself for noticing that he looked thinner, as if he hadn’t been eating, and that there were gray, smudgy circles under his eyes.

  And the expression in those dull golden-brown eyes—she shuddered, battling a wave of recognition. He looked exactly the way she felt first thing in the morning, before she had a chance to wall the bad things back up in their secret hiding place in her head.

  She didn’t want to see that. She didn’t care if he was hurting, damn it! She sucked at empathy, and it was a loser’s game, anyway. What good could possibly come from opening herself up to someone else’s emotions? It was bad enough having to deal with emotions of her own.

  “Get out,” she said, wrestling halfheartedly with the door. She knew she couldn’t wrench it out of Wes’s grip, but she tried. “I mean it, I don’t want you here, and I certainly don’t want him”—she jerked her head at the older man— “coming into my lab and snooping around my research!”

  “I’m not from a pharmaceutical company,” the man said, his calm, amused smile making Rosemary feel like a red-faced idiot for tussling with Wes over the door.

  She let go and stepped back, breathing hard. Physical struggle was the refuge of an underdeveloped mind, anyway.

  “Like I’m going to believe you,” she said.

  “It’s true,” Wes insisted, taking immediate advantage and pushing the door wider. “Come on, please let us in. I swear I’ll tell you everything.”

  He and Lucille were giving her matching Big Eyes expressions, but luckily Rosemary had replaced her blood with ice water in the last few days, so she no longer got melty at the sight.

  “I’ve sworn off fiction,” she told him. “Science journals only for me, from now on.” She frowned. “Not counting Jim Butcher, obviously. But the Dresden Files transcend petty mortal issues of truth and lie.”

  Wes leaned on the doorframe and huffed out a laugh, then looked shocked at himself. “God, I missed you.”

  Rosemary stiffened. That poked dangerously close to a tender, raw wound. Unacceptable.

  Retreating quickly, she said, “Come in or get out, but whatever you do, do it quickly. I’m on a strict schedule and I don’t have time for nonsense.”

  Another laugh, rustier than Wes’s but still somehow familiar, sounded behind her as she hurried to throw the cashmere blanket from the couch over her lab table. She wasn’t taking any chances.

  “I like your girl,” the older man said. “She’s got more spunk than I expected.”

  “She’s smarter than ten of you put together, so watch out, Pops.”

  Rosemary turned away from her safely hidden lab table and narrowed her eyes on the two men.

  “Pops,” she repeated. “Do you mean that as a colloquial term used to signify an elderly man? Or—”

  “Hey,” the man in question protested, honest affront clear on his face. “Watch who you’re calling elderly.”

  “Shut up, Pops,” Wes interjected fiercely. To Rosemary he said, “Yes. That’s what I wanted to tell you. I just didn’t … well, I didn’t have the guts before. But Rosie, meet Thomas Murphy. My father.”

  Rosemary sucked in a breath. He couldn’t have surprised her more if he’d introduced her to Thomas Murphy, a fully lifelike T-1000 Terminator.

  “Charmed to meet you,�
� Thomas Murphy said, instantly donning a bright, sparkling smile that reminded Rosemary so strongly of Wes, it made her dizzy. Like the effect of blurred double vision, she thought, shaking her head quickly to dispel it.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” Wes’s father continued.

  Scrambling around for the pieces of brain that had just exploded all over the floor, Rosemary said, “Well, I’ve heard next to nothing about you. So I’m sure neither of you would object if I wanted to do a quick DNA test, to confirm your blood relationship?”

  She didn’t really think she needed the test—now that she knew to look for it, there were certain obvious familial similarities between the two men. The clean-cut shape of their mouths, the high cheekbones and strong jaw, the changeable color of their eyes. Although Thomas Murphy’s hazel eyes were more on the twinkling green side today, while Wes’s were darker, the green leaching away to tawny brown.

  Wes winced, tightening his arms on Lucille enough that she squeaked in protest, but Thomas laughed, a big, hearty, booming laugh for such a smallish man, and clapped his son on the back. “Oh, my Weston. This one is a definite keeper.”

  “Your logic is faulty,” Rosemary said with frozen composure. She could not afford to lose her cool. “Your son doesn’t have me, therefore he cannot keep me.”

  Lucille squeaked again, louder this time, and Wes bent over to set her on the ground, ducking his head so Rosemary couldn’t see his face. Thomas, however, was quick to pounce on her choice of words.

  “Ah! So you do believe that he’s my son.”

  Rosemary sniffed, her eyes on Wes’s crouched form as he unhooked Lucille’s leash and ruffled her silky ears. “I suppose. Although I’m not sure what, if anything, that should mean to me now. It’s not as if this lie erases the one I thought he’d told—a lie is a lie is a lie.”

  Thomas shook out his arms, straightening his cuffs where they peeked out from his jacket. “What a simplistic worldview you people of science have. In my world—the world Wes grew up in—there are as many shades of gray as there are stars in the sky.”

  “Enough with the bullshit, Pops,” Wes growled, standing up and leveling a glare at his father. “Shades of gray, my ass. The only color you care about is dollar-bill green. And she doesn’t want to hear about that.”