Just One Taste

by Louisa Edwards

  Thomas blinked, the picture of innocent surprise. “No? And here I thought we traveled all this way through the wilds of upstate New York to tell her exactly that.”

  Wes flushed, setting his grim mouth in a mutinous line. Rosemary’s neck was starting to hurt from following their verbal sparring match as if it were a game of table tennis.

  A cool, wet nose snuffled at her ankles, and she moved without thinking, retreating behind her lab table and hitching herself up onto one of the tall stools.

  “Did you have to bring her?” she asked tightly.

  “Ah well.” Wes tried to smile, but she stared him down. “I was going to take her over to Frankie and Jess’s place and let them watch her, but she gave me the Look. You know the one I mean? Where she’s all astonished at your stupidity in not realizing what she wants and giving it to her immediately. I caved.”

  Ignoring the fact that she undoubtedly would’ve caved, too, Rosemary pushed forward.

  “Why are you here?” She drummed her fingers on the tabletop. They needed to get to the point and then get out. Every minute they lingered was another crack in the foundation cementing her memories and emotions away.

  Wes rocked back and forth on his heels, clearly debating what to say. Rosemary watched the struggle play out on his face with detached interest. She’d given up her study of human facial cues—that same issue she had with the empathy thing, why bother?—but he wasn’t even trying to mask what he was feeling.

  An unwelcome chill lifted the hairs at the back of her neck and all down her arms. For Buffy’s sake, what else could Wes have to tell her that would make him project so much guilt and anguish?

  “My dad’s right,” he finally said, his voice hitching with a hesitance she’d never associated with him before. “I came up here to tell you the truth. About my past—but also about the present. The reason I kept it from you when my dad blew into town and you saw us arguing that night; it’s all bound up together. Shit, I don’t know where to start.”

  “Start with me,” Thomas suggested, preening a little. “That’s always a good place.”

  Shooting his father an exasperated look, Wes peeled off his coat, cracked his neck a couple of times like a wrestler getting ready for a match, and blew out a breath. He stared at the ground for a moment, suddenly seeming to shrink into a lost little boy, his entire body clenched against the cruel pain inflicted by a harsh adult world.

  Rosemary hooked her ankles around the rungs of the stool and dug her fingers into the rim of the seat under her until the metal threatened to cut her skin. She would not go to him. She would not be moved. At all.

  “Okay,” Wes said, looking up and meeting her gaze. “Here goes.”

  This truth-telling thing sucked. No wonder his dad never did it.

  There was something especially soul-killing about it when he was ninety-nine percent sure Rosemary wasn’t going to forgive him.

  A lie is a lie is a lie.

  Wes swallowed hard, trying to work around the aching swell of emotion that had tightened his throat ever since she said those words.

  He hated to agree with his father, on any level, but yeah—things were very black-and-white for Rosemary. He should’ve remembered that, he should’ve expected it. That Thomas Murphy wasn’t, in fact, a pharmaceutical rep out to pilfer her precious research did not mitigate the fact that Wes had certainly lied about his identity.

  And about so many other things. If you counted lies of omission, which he was pretty certain she did.

  It was hopeless. Why was he doing this again?

  He opened his mouth to tell her he’d changed his mind, he’d quit bugging her, and wish her a happy life—but the minute he met her direct stare, those blue eyes of hers so deeply banked with pain and disillusionment, he couldn’t do it.

  She deserved the truth. She deserved the chance to make her own choice based on that truth.

  He was through deciding for her. He’d done a totally shittastic job of it so far, anyway.

  Deciding to get the torture over with, Wes led with, “My father is a con artist.”

  Rosemary’s gaze flew to Pops, who sketched a quick, graceful bow as if acknowledging the highest of compliments.

  Deep, bracing breath … “And he raised me to be one, too.”

  Shock widened her eyes and she teetered dangerously. Wes was afraid for an instant she was about to fall off her perch, but she steadied herself before he could take the opportunity to rush to her side and touch her one last time.

  Damn it.

  “You asked me once how I got interested in cooking, and I danced around the question,” he went on, forcing himself to stand tall under her laser stare.

  She nodded. “I remember.”

  “Well, when I was a kid, Pops and I got caught running a con on a lady who … well, it doesn’t really matter what con we were pulling.”

  “I don’t even remember that woman’s name,” Pops said, laughing as if they were going through the family photo album and reminiscing about birthday parties or something.

  “I bet you don’t,” Wes said, the old, familiar bitterness sour as a bite of green apple in the back of his throat. “I know you remember how it ended, though. With you in the wind, leaving me to take the fall.”

  Turning his back on his father, he fastened his gaze on Rosemary as if she were the one stable point in the universe. Which was kind of what it felt like, sometimes, but Wes didn’t want to think about that.

  She made a hurt little noise, quickly muffled, but it was enough to kindle a weak flame of hope in Wes’s chest. Maybe she wasn’t as ready to write him off as he’d feared.

  Pressing onward, he said, “I was still a minor, thank Christ, and clearly not the mastermind behind the scam, so instead of jail or a detention center, they stuck me in a halfway house for juvenile offenders. Heartway House.”

  “And what happened to you there?” Rosemary asked, a thread of fear making her voice thin and reedy. That little flame of hope flared brighter—she was devouring every word as if it were oxygen.

  “Nothing bad,” he hastened to assure her. He didn’t like that look in her eyes, that scared, skittish look as if she were bracing herself for a horror story. “In fact, they were great to me. The couple who ran the house, they kept us boys busy from sunup to sundown, but it wasn’t like chores. Or classes in school, which always bored me. I mean, we did stuff around the house, yeah, but the way they did it … They took us through hands-on stuff, in areas where we could learn a craft or a skill that would give us a chance at a different kind of future. My favorite part of the day was kitchen prep. I hadn’t been in the house a month before I was in charge of all the meals.”

  He remembered those first days in the kitchen, standing next to Deirdre Nickoloff at the stove, watching her stir and baste and simmer and taste, confident and capable, her kind eyes hinting at a wealth of knowledge she was happy to share with a skinny, sullen kid who didn’t even know his mother’s name.

  “Those Nickoloff people,” Pops groused. “Ruined my boy, they did.”

  Rage rushed through Wes like wind down a subway tunnel. “Stop it,” he growled, making Rosemary jump. But he couldn’t stop, the words welling up like an oil slick, black and foul and oddly cleansing. “I’m sick of hearing that, sick of you talking about them—you don’t know anything. Deirdre Nickoloff gave me a life. She listened to me, she cared about what mattered to me—and she for goddamn sure didn’t figure out what mattered to me just so she could hose me for thousands of dollars.”

  Crap. That was not how he’d intended to spill all that. Rosemary gasped and slid off the stool, her face white with shock.

  “You blackmailed your own son?” Rosemary cried.

  Thomas Murphy clucked his tongue reprovingly. “I did no such thing. When I expressed my desire to meet the young lady my son is so wild about, Weston here generously offered to finance a little trip I’ve been wanting to take to Florida. How could I say no?”

  “I paid him
five thousand dollars to get him to leave,” Wes said. “And that was after I talked him down from his original asking price of ten grand.”

  Rosemary shook her head in dazed disbelief. “That’s why you pulled away,” she murmured. “You were working, like you said—but at Chapel, serving drinks, after a full shift at Market.”

  Wes nodded, feeling exhausted just thinking about it.

  Rosemary turned on Pops, her eyes snapping blue fire. “How could you?” she demanded.

  “Oh, piffle,” Thom said. “I wouldn’t have tried to break you up or hurt your relationship in any way—but if Wes was offering to send me off for a little fun in the sun with deep-pocketed retirees and lonely widows, I wouldn’t be much of a con man if I didn’t take it, now would I?”

  And there it was. The real, underlying truth, unvarnished and ugly and squatting there in the middle of the room like some horrible squatting thing—all this pain, everything Wes went through to get the money to pay his father off so he wouldn’t tell Rosemary who he was or make her vulnerable to his schemes—all of it could have been so easily avoided if Wes had only told her the truth about himself in the beginning.

  Wes watched Rosemary think it through, and he saw the exact moment she realized it, too.

  The tiny, sputtering flame of hope flickered and went out.

  Chapter 32

  “And I believe that’s my cue to skedaddle,” Thomas Murphy said, rubbing his hands together cheerily. “Fort Lauderdale awaits!”

  Rosemary barely heard him over the roaring of blood in her ears.

  The lengths Wes had gone to, the hours of backbreaking work, the stress of dealing with his clearly unresolved father issues on his own—letting her believe the absolute worst of him. He’d borne all of that merely to avoid sharing his past with Rosemary.

  It was an extraordinary feeling, to know that she was simultaneously important enough to him that he would endure so much to keep her, and yet so disregarded by him that he would lose her rather than tell the simple truth. A truth Rosemary found objectionable, certainly, but didn’t blame Wes for in the least.

  Children were at the mercy of their parents; she understood that better than most.

  “Yeah, go,” Wes said, never taking his eyes off Rosemary’s face. He looked tired, defeated, but a trace of anger lingered around his mouth when he said to his father, “You’ve done enough here, I think.”

  “I’m off, then,” Wes’s father said, pulling on a pair of cognac leather gloves as he strolled to the door. “It was lovely to meet you, my dear. And now that I’ve been paid in full, I’ll just be on my way. Ta very much, my Weston, and don’t worry! You’ve seen the last of me. I won’t be interfering in your life again.”

  The quiet snick of the closing door echoed like a gunshot between them.

  “Don’t believe him,” Wes said, smiling faintly. “Once a con man, always a con man.”

  “I suppose that means I shouldn’t believe you, either,” Rosemary pointed out, unable to refrain from following the line of logic to its reasonable conclusion.

  He sighed, shrugged his hands into his pockets. “Probably not,” he agreed.

  Silence stretched between them for a long moment, broken only by the clack of Lucille’s claws over the hardwood floor as she prowled around the lab, presumably on the trail of spilled crumbs.

  Rosemary felt adrift, as if the anchor that tethered her to her safe world of questions, answers, and rationality had been ripped away.

  “What did he mean by ‘paid in full’?” she asked suddenly.

  A spark of animation returned to Wes’s resigned face. “Oh! That was amazing, actually. When I finally decided I had to tell you everything, I was kind of in the middle of something where, well, I had to tell the guys at Market what was going down.”

  Rosemary tried very hard not to care that some New York chef knew about Wes’s past before she did. “Chef Temple, you mean?”

  “Yeah, Adam and Frankie. They’d just offered me a job, you see—they’re planning to expand Market into the space next door. Frankie’s taking over that kitchen, and he picked me as his sous chef, his right-hand man.”

  A wealth of pride shone from Wes’s eyes and pulled his shoulders straight, but then he looked away and down, his mouth curving into an unhappy line, and Rosemary got an awful feeling.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  He started, eyes wide. “What? Nothing! I mean, when I told them I had to go, and I explained why—they actually took up a collection and pulled together the rest of the money Pops wanted, so I could pay him off. It was the only way I could get him to come up here with me.” He sounded stunned, as if he still couldn’t believe his friends had done that for him.

  Momentarily distracted, Rosemary frowned. “Wait, why did you think it was so important that he come along?”

  Wes scrubbed a hand through his hair, the curve of his mouth turning rueful. “You’re gonna laugh, but I actually anticipated that crack about the DNA test. Only I thought you might really insist on it, so I figured, might as well bring the proof with me.”

  Rosemary couldn’t remember ever feeling less like laughing in her entire life. Wes didn’t look too happy, either, his mouth flattening out again almost at once. “I also wanted you to see what kind of man my father really is. Because he already suspects you have money, and when he finds out how much, he’ll try every trick in the book to get his hands on it.”

  “As if I’d let him.”

  He shrugged. “I’ve seen him swindle people who were—well, not as smart as you but still pretty smart and discerning. Not the type of people you’d expect to lose their savings to a petty thief like him. Heck, I know exactly what my father is, and even I fell for one of his schemes.”

  “I’m confident in my ability to protect my assets,” Rosemary said coolly.

  “You know,” Wes said, rubbing a hand over his face, “I think I believe you. God knows, Pops has never come up against anyone like you. Really, I should’ve had more faith in you from the beginning.”

  “When you left, did they hold that job for you?” Rosemary asked suddenly, not at all sure she wanted the answer.

  He shrugged, but his eyes went shifty again, and Rosemary knew she was right. He’d left everything he’d worked toward at Market behind, not knowing what her reaction was going to be.

  It was overwhelming. Rosemary felt as if she’d been in a space shuttle simulator for days, her body spun around and around and around, pinned and battered by g-forces far beyond the capability of mortal woman to endure for any length of time.

  I can’t do this, she thought desperately, panic stealing her breath. I am not equipped to handle this.

  Wes lifted his head, a genuine smile trembling on his lips. “Listen,” he said, then had to stop and clear his throat. “I came to tell you the truth, so here’s the rest of it. I love you. I want to be with you, more than I want anything else in the world. All the dreams I’ve been living on for years—well, I care about them. But next to you? God, it’s like trying to compare chocolate to bread.”

  “What?” Rosemary shook her head, wondering if her ears were shorting out along with her brain and heart.

  “Chocolate and bread,” Wes explained. “You know, chocolate is great—delicious, naughty … and an aphrodisiac, right? Who doesn’t love chocolate. But you can’t eat tons of it without getting sick. It’s not that great for you. It’s not the staff of life. Bread is … it’s basic. A primal need. Essential.” His voice cracked a little, and he looked down, red scorching his cheeks. “That’s what you are, to me.”

  Circuit overload. Everything inside Rosemary went into lockdown. She couldn’t breathe, swallow, blink … there was too much going on for her brain to process even normal involuntary impulses, and she couldn’t move, and she’d never been more terrified in her entire life.

  She stood there, silent and still, and watched the light of passion die away in his beautiful golden eyes.

  It was too much
. Way, way too much, and when Wes closed his eyes briefly, and nodded his head once as if agreeing with some decision she wasn’t even aware of making, Rosemary still couldn’t force her body to move.

  “Right,” he said. “Well, I wanted you to be able to choose for yourself, knowing everything. And I guess … you just did.”

  Choose? she wanted to shriek. I choose nothing. I don’t even know what’s happening!

  She followed him helplessly with her gaze as he searched the room for Lucille, eventually finding her behind the trash can by the sink, and carried her back over to Rosemary.

  Twisting his mouth into a smile that didn’t reach his eyes, Wes held the terrier up. “She missed you a lot,” he said. “I think you should keep her. She’d be happier up here in the mountains than in the city with me, anyway.”

  Breathing too quickly and shallowly, Rosemary reached out her arms automatically to receive the warm bundle of happy dog.

  She looked down at Lucille, cuddled into her shoulder and snuffling at her neck, her weight deeply and undeniably comforting against Rosemary’s chest, and when she looked back up, Wes was already slipping out the door.

  Frak. He’s gone.

  She stared at the door leading out of her lab, that haven of reason and science, where emotions were things to be analyzed and tested for external root causes. She knew everything about this world—had known it, almost instinctively, ever since she could remember. It had been her best escape and her surest sanctuary from her overbearing, demanding parents. In here, no one cared how she dressed, what TV shows she watched or thought were moronic, or that she didn’t know how to make friends.

  In here, she was safe.

  Lucille barked, sharp and loud, right in Rosemary’s ear, startling her so badly she almost dropped the furball on the floor, but it lifted the weird paralysis.

  “What?” Rosemary said. “You have something you want to add?”

  Lucille planted her paws on Rosemary’s chest and reared back. She blinked once, growled low in her throat, and then there it was. The Look.