by Julia London
He would be calling Dinner Magic first thing in the morning about this chef business.
“Okay, I’m going to stop talking now.” She dragged her fingers over the crown of her head to pull her hair back. “Do you maybe have a crowbar I could use to pry my foot out of my mouth?”
Jack felt himself smile a little, which surprised him. Generally, at this point in a conversation, he felt so nervous he couldn’t speak. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m not offended at being lumped in with monkeys.” Did that sound strange? It sounded strange. Like he was often lumped in with monkeys.
Whitney cocked her head to one side, and he wondered whether she was putting it all together. Doesn’t cook, isn’t disfigured, apparently never leaves his apartment, doesn’t know how to shake hands anymore, is frequently lumped in with monkeys…
“So! You’re a baker,” he blurted, fending off any conversation into his habits before any questions were asked.
“Yep!” She brightened again. “I’m actually working on opening my own bakery and coffee shop.” She looked proud enough to bust a button or two off her blouse.
“Ah. The cupcakes,” he said. It all made sense now.
“Not just cupcakes. Breads, pies, croissants, cakes—if you can bake it, I will make it.”
Was that another cultural reference?
“Okay! Dinner,” she said. “I’ll get right on that.” She dipped down to get a pan from his cabinet and stood. She suddenly laughed. “It’s funny—all my clients like to talk. I mean talk. I don’t invite it, I swear—they just start talking. Like, I have this one couple, and one day, she wasn’t home, and he just offered up that he thinks she is having an affair!” She threw her arms wide. The pan she was holding narrowly missed colliding with his stainless-steel fridge. “What are you supposed to say to that, I ask you?” She stepped over Buster, who had assumed his position as kitchen floor mat. “Turns out, you don’t have to say anything. I didn’t say anything but ‘oh wow’ or something like that, and he just unleashed.”
She put the pan on the stove and picked up a container of vegetables, then reached into his cabinet for olive oil, which she poured into the pan, and turned on the burner. “And then I have a client with these two awful kids—” She paused here to glance at him over her shoulder. “Not that there is anything wrong with that—don’t get me wrong. I love kids. I hope to have a few someday.” She turned back to her work and tossed the vegetables into the pan. “But those two? They will not leave me alone. They are punching or pulling on me the whole time I’m there, and talking, my God, those two little kids talk. And you know what Mom is doing while I slave away, making her family a casserole?”
Jack understood he was not supposed to answer. Maybe because Whitney didn’t take a breath before she continued.
“She’s pouring a giant glass of white wine, walking over to the couch, and planting her feet on the coffee table like those kids don’t even exist. She treats me like a babysitter who brings food.” She glanced back at him, her gaze flicking over him. “But I have to say, you’ve been the biggest mystery. I thought I’d probably never even meet you.”
Jack’s gut clenched. He forced a thin smile.
“You must have an important job.” She began to sauté the vegetables. “What do you do?”
“Ah…I’m a writer.”
“Writer!” She cast a look at him. “That’s cool. Thrillers?”
“Thrillers?”
“You have a lot of them on your shelves.”
He stared at her.
She suddenly blushed and made a serious study of the contents of the pan. “I know, I shouldn’t have looked at your bookshelves,” she said quickly. “Sorry. It’s just that I’m a big reader myself, and I was curious what sort of books you had. You’ve got a nice library here, by the way. So am I right? Thrillers?”
She was cute. More than cute. She was sexy in the tights and short skirt she wore. And she made killer cupcakes. But he hadn’t counted on her being quite so…chatty. He eased onto a stool. “Articles, mostly—I’m a journalist.”
“Oh! I had a friend once who—”
“Mind if I ask what’s on the menu?” he interjected.
Her eyes widened. She stopped stirring. “You’re kidding, right? It’s Monday.” She flashed a smile of amusement at him and Jack forgot what he’d asked. “You get the same thing every week! If it’s Monday, it must be turkey sausage and vegetables in a creole sauce.”
Her smile was like a light shining so brightly in his eyes that he had to look away. He glanced over the bar at Buster, whose ears pooled into brown puddles on either side of his head. “I just click on the pictures,” he muttered.
“Well, the picture looks pretty good, I will admit.” She picked up the recipe card and held it up, over the bar.
Jack didn’t know whether he was supposed to take it or not. He hesitated, his stomach doing a little seesaw thing, as if this were a life-or-death decision. It seemed as if every day he discovered something else to be anxious about.
But the dinner girl put the recipe card down before he was forced to decide and turned back to the stove.
He was being weird, he knew. He was trying, but today had been an especially bad day. Jack had lost touch with his calendar. He hadn’t remembered until after the dinner girl had banged into his house and sent him into paroxysms of fear that today was the day she came to cook.
Jack should have said something then, should have called out to her like he always did, but it had startled him so badly that he didn’t speak. Couldn’t speak. Instead, he’d ended up on the floor in the corner of the master bedroom, his legs crossed like a swami, his fingertips pressed hard together while he concentrated on his breathing. That’s one of the things Dr. Pratt, his psychiatrist, advised him to do when he felt a panic attack coming on. Dr. Pratt had advised a lot of things, but so far, that was all Jack had managed to master. And for the record, it didn’t help.
The thing was, Jack had been feeling pretty good. He’d had a long Skype session with Dr. Pratt on Friday. This morning, he’d actually gone out for a coffee and hadn’t had any troubles. Yes, it was pre-dawn, five o’clock, and no, there was no one on the street. But he hadn’t been out for a coffee in many days—okay, weeks—and he’d considered it a small victory. He’d walked right up to the counter of Coffee Corner, ordered the biggest Americano they had, and had walked right back out onto the street without so much as breaking a sweat.
It had been so easy that Jack had even toyed with the idea that maybe he was cured. Maybe the panic attacks and the fear of dying had all been a fluke. But then, Rain had come for Buster, because although Jack could still take his dog to the building’s inner courtyard to do his business, he couldn’t take him to the park across that street. Jack had met Rain at the VA hospital a year or so ago—a good guy, a vet like him. Rain was one of the lucky ones—he’d come back with a functioning brain.
Anyway, Jack had happened to look out his window after Rain and Buster had left and had seen the mob outside his apartment building, blocking traffic. A mob. An inexplicable, moving mob of people.
Jack’s heart had begun to pound as though it were trying to break free of his chest and flee. He’d clutched at his chest, certain that this was the heart attack that would finally kill him, that this terror that gripped his throat in its jaws would suffocate him. In the midst of that, the dinner girl had come in, banging through the door and calling out a yoo-hoo or something like it. His thoughts had instantly gone to defense. Protect, defend, protect, defend …
Thank God, he didn’t have a gun. Thank God that some sane part of him—the part that was not the head case the rest of him had mysteriously become—knew that he shouldn’t have a gun in his apartment, knew that this wasn’t really an attack. It was just the girl who had come to cook his dinner.
Jack had heard the dinner girl moving around as he’d struggled to calm himself. And then he’d known another moment of sheer terror when he’d realized she was mo
ving toward the hallway that led to the bedrooms. He could imagine nothing worse than being discovered huddling in the corner of his room, quivering like a fawn, his shirt drenched with sweat. Then came the crash of something being dropped and a lot of muttering, but his breathing was so shallow and quick that he couldn’t exactly hear what was being said.
It wasn’t until he heard Rain returned with Buster—his totally amateur, didn’t-know-he-was-a-therapy-dog therapy dog. But that was beside the point. Somehow, Buster knew just what to do when Jack had one of his episodes. He knew to stick his snout under Jack’s hand, to lick his leg, to press his body hard against Jack’s until his breathing returned to normal.
Unfortunately, Buster had misguided priorities. As long as the dinner girl was here to cook up something delicious, he wasn’t going to come and check on his master and help Jack get his bearings. As long as Jack hid every time she came, he wasn’t going to know what was going on in his kitchen. Dr. Pratt had suggested that Jack ought to meet the dinner girl. She’d suggested that Jack would know what sort of threat she posed if he actually met her and looked her in the eyes. Jack said he was too busy, because Dr. Pratt didn’t get what it was like living in Jack’s head. Dr. Pratt had reminded Jack that he’d met lots of women and there had never been a threat.
That was true.
Dr. Pratt said he had to face his panic.
His brain had slowly returned to normal operations as he’d thought it through, and he could now truly believe that all that nattering in the kitchen meant things were proceeding as normal. He’d managed to get off the floor and walk into the bathroom to splash water on his face and pull a T-shirt over his head. He’d managed to walk out to meet the dinner girl and retrieve his dog. And now, here he was, sitting at the kitchen bar while she cooked his meal.
Stop staring at her ass.
He couldn’t help it. Jack hadn’t been around women in two years, which, granted, was a very long stretch for a guy who used to juggle one or two at a time. “You’re a lothario,” Christie, his sister, once accused him after he’d dated her friend, Teri, and things had gotten hot and heavy between them.
“What’s a lothario?”
“A guy with a zipper problem,” she’d said, and had punched him in the arm.
“That’s not very nice.”
“I didn’t say it to be nice,” she’d said, and had huffed away.
Face your panic. Was he panicking? No, he wasn’t panicking, he was just…worrying. He was worrying that he was making an ass of himself right now. He’d lost his panache. Dropped it in a parking lot, left it on a plane, shot it up in Afghanistan.
“A bakery,” he blurted. It was neither a statement nor a question.
She glanced over her shoulder. “Yep,” she said confidently.
“Where?”
“Well, I’m new to town, so I’m scoping things out. Do you have any suggestions for trendy neighborhoods?” she asked, circling a spatula in the air.
Jack felt flush under his shirt. He scratched his face, realized he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. “Umm…not really.”
“No? That’s okay. I’m meeting my realtor friend in a bit. She’s got a couple of places near Pioneer Square to show me.”
Jack hadn’t been through Pioneer Square in a very long time. He hadn’t had sex in a very long time, either. Although he didn’t consider himself a pig, he couldn’t stop looking at her perfect, heart-shaped derriere and thinking about just how long it had been.
“Good?” she asked.
He glanced up.
“Pioneer Square. I need a great location. I’m scared she’s going to convince me to lease some place that won’t work.” She dropped the sausage in the pan, added a container of sauce and a package of seasoning. “And rent is expensive.”
He wondered why someone would move to a new city to open a bakery. Did Seattle have the highest pastry eaters per capita or something?
“These recipe cards say fifteen to twenty minutes to make this dish, but trust me, it is consistently more like forty-five.” She covered the pan, then pulled a head of kale out of the box. Buster lifted his head, and as deftly as a professional baseball player, she tossed a bit of crumb of sausage to the dog without looking at him. As deftly as a professional baseball player, Buster caught it.
She chopped up the kale and stirred it into the mix. “Ohmigod, look at the time,” she said suddenly. “That’s what I get for talking instead of working, and I’m going to have to get through that street march.”
“Street march?” Jack’s heart leapt to attention.
“A march, a party, some Labor Day thing.”
Jack blinked. It was Labor Day? When he lost touch with his calendar, he really lost touch. So, not a mob after all—Labor Day. Something inside him relaxed. “I…could finish up if you need to go,” he offered.
She laughed, and stirred the mixture harder. “I can’t let you do that! You’re paying me to cook it, and plate it, and box up half and store it in your fridge, and then clean the kitchen. Why else would you pay thirty bucks for this? You could go down to the deli and get the same thing.” She paused and considered the wall for a moment. “I guess I shouldn’t say things like that.”
Unfortunately, the corner deli was not an option for him. “Seriously, I can do it,” he said. Actually, he’d prefer it. He didn’t know how to slink back to his room while she was here and he didn’t know how to stop looking at her body and imagining things that were doing him no favors.
“I appreciate the offer, but I’m pretty sure you won’t plate it right.” She smiled playfully.
That smile was like fat sizzling on a hot griddle, and he felt himself relax a little more. “Are you dissing my plate game? I can spoon sausage and vegetables into a bowl as well as anyone.”
“See, that’s where you’re misjudging this.” She pointed with her spatula. “You don’t just spoon it. You have to present it. You would not believe the amount of training we get on presentation. And anyway, it’s almost done.”
She put a lid on the pan and turned back to the sink. She picked up a piece of bell pepper from the cutting board and tossed it high in the air. Buster’s squat legs had to rev to lift him up and wheel him about in time to catch it.
“What do you think about downtown?” She leaned over to open the cabinet under the sink, which gave him a glimpse into her shirt and the very perky breasts there.
Breasts.
Damn it. It had been a very long time since he’d touched one.
She glanced up, caught him looking, and Jack’s face flooded with warmth. He wanted to escape. Could he leave the room now? Maybe the building? At least go down to the basement and wait by the trash dump until the coast was clear? How far would he have to go before he would stop thinking about having sex with her?
“Downtown,” she said.
Downtown! Was that sexual innuendo? His pulse quickened, other parts thickened.
“For my bakery?”
“Oh, ah…” He almost sighed with relief. “I don’t really…I’m not into, ah…bakeries.” And now he was speaking English as though it were his third language. Fantastic.
“Well.” She smiled. “Maybe I can change your mind about that.” She nudged the cupcake closer to him.
She turned back to the stove, turned off the heat, found a plate in his cabinet and slid half the dish onto a plate, nudging the sausage to one side. She placed the plate on the bar, took out the recyclable container and spooned the second half into it, taking a moment to arrange it. From her pocket, she whipped out a marker and jotted down the contents and date on the lid, then put the container in his fridge. In five minutes, she’d cleaned the kitchen and given Buster a good belly rub.
“Okay!” she said brightly, and popped up, gathered up her things and her tote bag. “It was really nice meeting you, Jack Carter. See you Wednesday?”
“Sure.” He awkwardly stuck out his hand. The only problem was that her hands were full. So, he quickly raised his
in a half salute with a nerdy flair, as if that’s what he’d intended all along. “Thanks.”
“My pleasure. Bye, Buster!” she said cheerily, and hurried out the door.
Jack looked at his plate. Then at Buster, who had moved around the bar to take up a position where Jack couldn’t miss his woeful stare. “What just happened?” Jack asked.
Buster swished his tail.
What had just happened was that he’d had the first full-on chat with a woman besides his sister in more than two years. And for the first time in a very long time, he’d had some very robust thoughts about sex.
He wondered what Dr. Pratt would have to say about that.
Four
Whitney liked to think that she was an enlightened person who could admit her mistakes, contrary to the advice of one of her law school professors, who had warned his budding attorneys against such behavior. “To admit error is to admit weakness,” he’d said gravely.
Which was one of the many reasons Whitney didn’t want to be a lawyer. First, it meant practicing law. Ugh. Second, people—generally lawyers in her experience, and her experience was vast, given half her family was lawyers—said bullshit like that all the time and actually believed it. Case in point: she’d mentioned that ridiculous piece of advice to her father during one of their many heated conversations about her unwillingness to take the bar and join the family law firm. “You would be wise to listen to your professors instead of your gut,” he’d spat.
Oh, and third, cupcakes.
For the record, there was nothing wrong with her gut instincts, and her gut was telling her to take back every mean thought she’d ever had about Jack Carter.
She was ridiculous—she’d pictured some sort of monster hiding his hunched back and missing eye in the back room, and she could not have been more wrong. Jack Carter had turned out to be a bona fide hunk. A tall, muscular, well-built man, with dark-brown hair and coffee-brown eyes, a slight limp, and a sexy shadow of a beard.