“So am I. What are those guys, sprouts?”
“Microgreens. Damon uses them on all of his dishes. A lot of chefs do, apparently, but they’re not easy to get. He seems to think that there might be a local market for them.” She took a breath. “What do you think about putting them out here and seeing if anybody buys them? If they do, I’ll give you a piece of the take.”
He considered. “I can’t see people getting too wild over grass but they eat alfalfa sprouts, so what do I know? And Damon was right about those ramps,” he added. “I can’t see the harm in trying. How much do you want for them?”
When she told him, he whistled. “You really think they’ll pay that?”
“Believe it or not, that’s less than the going rate. And they’re local.”
He shrugged. “Well, set ’em down there. We’ll see what happens.”
There was little Damon disliked as much as a photo shoot. Over the course of his career, he’d come to regard it as a necessary evil but one only tolerated, at best. Sure, he’d spent years on camera during his Cooking Channel tenure, but that had always been in the context of doing. Either he was joking and chatting up the live audience of his show or he was in competition, focusing on his cuisine.
With the photo shoots, it was just him and the camera. He wasn’t sure which he liked least, posing or going about the business of cooking while pretending that he wasn’t aware of the lens following his every move.
And Francesca watching him from across the room.
Finally, though, it was done. The photographer moved to shoot the restaurant and he and Francesca moved to the dining room.
“All right,” she said, “now feed me.”
They sat at a table covered with tasting plates and he watched her sample her way through the menu with concentration but surprisingly little enjoyment. He couldn’t help remembering the pleasure on Cady’s face the day he’d fed her the croustillant. For Francesca, it was an intellectual exercise; for Cady, it was a journey of the senses.
With her fork, Francesca prodded the bread of an appetizer. “You’re doing lobster rolls now?”
“When in Maine,” he said.
She picked out a miniscule bite and nibbled. “Lobster, parsley, aioli,” she said thoughtfully, “and…”
“Lobster.”
“That’s all?” She frowned. “What was all this about re-imagining the classics?”
“You’ve been eating it.” He nodded at the other dishes.
“I’m not eating it right now.”
“Some things don’t need to be reimagined. Some things are good just as they are.”
She flicked a glance at the ceiling. “You’re not on that tiresome ‘less is more’ rant again, are you?”
She was a food editor. Food was supposed to matter. “I’m not on any rant,” he said. “I’m just cooking.”
“I see. Well, you cooked, I ate, I’m stuffed. Why don’t we go outside and walk so I can work off some of it?” She rose.
“You won’t have to walk far.” Damon glanced at the nearly untouched plates. “I can’t say I saw you take a full bite of anything.”
“You chefs are always so sensitive. If I really ate everywhere I went, I’d be enormous.”
“Now who’s talking about less is more?”
She patted her flat stomach. “You men have it easy with your metabolisms. Some of us have to work at it.”
Why, he wondered, would a person choose a job in food if they didn’t like eating? He followed her out the door, but it was Cady he thought of. Whether it was a burger or the Dover sole he’d made her a few days before, she always ate the way she made love, with pleasure and abandon.
“How wonderfully picturesque,” Francesca pronounced as they walked toward the water. “Not just boats but a gazebo, too. It’s so quaint, I can’t stand it.”
He couldn’t have said why her comment annoyed him. “It’s just Grace Harbor.”
“Someplace has to be, I suppose. So?” She flicked him an expectant glance. “Talk to me.”
“About what?”
“Anything.” She stepped into the gazebo, her heels thunking on the wood floor. “Competing chefs, your take on the current state of American cuisine, what the enfant terrible of American cuisine is doing next.”
Damon looked pained. “Can we stop already with the enfant terrible bit? I haven’t been an enfant for a few decades now.”
“Oh, but it makes such good copy, darling. Otherwise, what else will I write about?”
“It’s a food magazine. You could write about the food.”
She settled herself on the gazebo’s bench. “There’s only so much I can gush about your cooking, as exquisite as it is. And it is exquisite. Much as it pains me to admit it, that tenderloin was nothing short of divine.”
“Watch out, Francesca, you’re going to turn my head.” Folding his arms, he leaned against a nearby pillar.
“At least tell me about being a tortured genius and clawing your way back from obscurity. Because this cover story will put you back on top, you know. You’ll owe me.”
She said it lightly but something told him it wasn’t a joke to her. There was nothing Francesca liked better than being in control.
“Have you at least kicked a customer out lately?” she continued. “It’s rather like a christening for you, isn’t it? Instead of breaking champagne on the doorway of a new restaurant, you toss a customer in the parking lot.”
“I’ve been learning restraint in my old age.”
“I hope you haven’t gotten too restrained. That can be terribly boring, you know.” She draped an arm over the railing. “You were always one of the ones I relied on for a bit of entertainment.”
“I was one of the ones you relied on for a punch line.”
“Not to mention other things,” she said, eyeing him appraisingly. “Country life seems to agree with you. It must be the air around here. Everyone is so marvelously robust.” She glanced over to where Cady stood on a ladder, trimming dead flowers off the rhododendrons.
Damon gave a faint frown. He would have used many words to describe Cady, but robust wouldn’t have been among them.
“Speaking of robust, I’m staying overnight before I drive home. I’ll be depending on you to keep the evening from becoming a total loss.”
“Francesca, we’ll be doing a hundred and twelve covers tonight. At least. You’re welcome to have dinner but I’ll be in the kitchen.”
She looked at him from under her lashes. “I was talking about after service, darling.”
“This is a small town. They roll up the streets at midnight.”
She put a hand on his arm. “Then I guess we’ll have to make our own fun.”
It was about this time of year that the warm weather didn’t seem quite so pleasant. Cady stood on the ladder and swiped her hair back off her forehead. Hot, sticky, tiring. And of course seeing Damon with his glamorous magazine editor somehow made it all worse.
She’d watched them walk out to the gazebo together, the woman in a white blouse with the sleeves rolled up and a narrow leather skirt with some sort of wide, pewter-colored belt. She had wavy blond hair put up in one of those tousled, effortlessly sexy knots that probably took hours to get right. Her chunky jewelry somehow only made her look more feminine.
Cady felt her T-shirt sticking to her back.
It was a different life, she thought, clipping a faded bloom from the rhodie. And even though she despised herself for it, she couldn’t help wondering if Damon found the reporter woman attractive. Cady hoped to God not, because if that truly was the kind of look he went for, he was with the wrong woman.
Or she was the wrong woman for him.
He’d called her beautiful, Cady reminded herself. Of course, that had been when she’d been dressed up within an inch of her life. It wasn’t the day-to-day her. But it was the day-to-day her that he kept coming back to. That was something to hold on to, wasn’t it?
She climbed back down the l
adder to gather the dead heads she’d discarded into a waste bag. From over at the gazebo, she heard a low, throaty laugh. An intimate laugh. None of her business, she told herself, folding up the ladder. It was just Damon doing his job, as she was doing hers. But she couldn’t help glancing over before she walked away.
They were in the gazebo, Damon at the entrance, the woman just inside. She gave that laugh again and touched his forearm and suddenly Cady knew.
He’d slept with her.
She could feel the rush of blood to her face. Paranoia, she told herself as she hurried away toward the toolshed. There was no way she could look at them and know. But there was something in the lines of their bodies, something in the way the woman looked up at him. And for all that Cady tried to tell herself she was crazy, down in her bones she knew—it may not have been recent, it may not have been often, but they’d made love.
And now she was back, just like his old life was back.
Why the hell hadn’t he seen it coming? Damon wondered in frustration. He knew how Francesca worked, he should have been paying more attention. Instead, he’d let himself get distracted by Cady. If he’d been concentrating, he could have turned the discussion, packed Francesca off to her hotel with a wave and a smile. Of course, it was too late for that now—the offer was out on the table.
Subtlety had never been Francesca’s strong suit. Their only liaison had happened after a charity dinner at which he’d been one of the celebrity chefs. They’d fallen into bed for a bout of gymnastic sex that had exhausted his interest long before it had exhausted her. He’d never felt any urge for a rematch.
Apparently, that made one of them.
“I’m in guesthouse two, on the top floor,” she said now, the invitation ripe in her eyes and in her voice.
And he damned well needed to find a diplomatic way to turn it down.
He shook his head. “I’ve got a long day in the kitchen, Francesca. I don’t do the all-night party thing anymore. I like to be awake when I’m using sharp knives.”
“What are you doing working lunch and dinner? Don’t you have line cooks for that?”
“Yes, and I’m one of them.”
She raised a brow. “This isn’t the Damon Hurst we all know and love.”
“Right. Look, we should finish up. I’ve got to get back in to start lunch service.” And he hoped to God she’d take the face-saving out.
Instead, she smiled and stroked his forearm with her finger. “You know what they say about all work and no play. I think we need to do something about that.”
He jerked his arm away. “No, all right?”
She stared. “Excuse me?”
“Francesca.” He let out a breath. “Look, I appreciate you coming up, I appreciate the story. It was good to see you, but let’s leave it at that.”
For an instant, the look in her eyes was absolutely murderous. An instant later, it was masked so completely that he couldn’t be sure he’d seen it. “You always take things so seriously.” Her voice was chill. “I was only joking. We’re leaving tomorrow at an ungodly hour.”
“I’ll walk you to your guesthouse.”
“Don’t bother.” Just for an instant, the anger flashed, then it was gone. “After all, you’ve got lunch service.”
Perfect, Damon thought as she stalked away. Now she was ticked at him and it was anybody’s guess what would happen to his cover story. Probably a nice little visit to the round file. There had to have been a better way to handle it.
It didn’t make him any less irritated with himself to realize that none of it would have happened if he’d never been stupid enough to sleep with her in the first place. Of course, he could as easily kick himself for playing the field or for deciding to become a chef in the first place.
He sighed. What was done was done. With luck, Francesca would cool down and find the humor in it and everything would be okay. And he went back to the restaurant, trying to ignore the little knot of uneasiness in his gut.
It wound up being easier than he’d expected, courtesy of a couple of runners who collided during the lunch rush, sending food flying into the lane between stoves and counter. There wasn’t time in the middle of firing orders to clear the line, so they let Denny mop around them, a mistake Damon recognized only after Rosalie slipped on a missed bit of sautéed pearl onion and fell to sprain her wrist.
He’d never expected to see the day when he was sorry that the restaurant was now packed the better part of the time. They always had to work fast. Being minus a cook, though, meant working at the speed of light, without letup until close. Even if he had planned a liaison with Francesca at the end of the night, Damon reflected sardonically, he wouldn’t have had the energy for it. He barely had time to look up, let alone stop.
Or find any time to see Cady. But he couldn’t keep himself from stealing a couple of minutes during a lag in dinner service to give her a quick call.
“Hello?”
Just hearing her voice gave him more energy. “Hey,” he said as the nearby printer chattered. “I hope your day’s going better than mine.”
“It’s been all right.” She sounded remote, tired.
“Sorry I didn’t get over to say hello today. We kind of had a disaster here. Rosalie got hurt and we’ve been in the weeds ever since.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” She paused. “How did your interview go?”
He thought a minute. He’d probably be smart to tell her about Francesca but not while he was standing in the kitchen with an audience. “It was…interesting, I guess you could say.”
“Interesting?”
“In a manner of speaking. I’ll give you the scoop later. Maybe tonight after I get off? Although I can’t guarantee I’ll be of much use.”
“Why don’t you just stay at your place? You’ll get more sleep that way.”
It made sense on the face of it, but somehow it felt like being pushed away. “All right.” He frowned. “Hey, are you feeling all right? You sound a little off.”
“Rough afternoon, same as you. I left early.”
“Well, get some sleep. You can tell me about it tomorrow. We’ll definitely make some time to get together.”
“Sure,” she said, “we’ll do that.”
And he disconnected, feeling distant from her in some indefinable way.
The snatch of music from his cell phone dragged him up out of sleep at dawn. He woke sprawled out across the bed. A bed he’d been in too short a time. Blinking groggily, he fumbled for his handset as it rang again.
“’Lo,” he mumbled.
“We’ve got a problem.”
Damon rubbed his eyes. “Jack?”
“Yeah, it’s Jack. What the hell did you say to Francesca?”
“Huh?” He fought to get some of the cobwebs out of his brain. “Francesca? What are you talking about?”
“What did you tell her?”
“Let me wake up here, for chrissakes.”
There was a pause. “You haven’t seen, then.”
“No, whatever it is, I haven’t. We got slammed last night. I didn’t get home until late.” His alarm started to chirp and he jabbed it. Six o’clock, he saw. Joy. “All right, what’s the deal?”
“Her blog.”
The back of Damon’s neck began to prickle. He vaguely remembered hearing something about a blog six or eight months before, but by then he’d been too far into his own free fall to care. “What does it say?”
“Start up your computer and read it for yourself.”
He rose to go into his home office. It gave him time to become fully awake. At the Web site, he watched a photo of Francesca unfurl on the page. And was it just his imagination or was there something subtly predatory about her smile?
Her blog was a combination of industry gossip, reviews and sneak peeks of what was ahead in the magazine.
The problem was, one of those peeks was him.
…Meanwhile, Damon Hurst is up to his old tricks. When Dining Well visited him at his
new Maine restaurant, the food was, as always, exquisite. But then, the food never was Hurst’s problem, at least when he could be bothered to stop by the kitchen. Here, he does a splendid job of reinventing New England favorites. Too bad he’s not so good at reinventing himself. Both service and execution at the actual restaurant were reminiscent of the bad old days at the end of his Pommes de Terre tenure. It appears that Damon Hurst may have finally won the crown as this generation’s chef who failed to live up to his promise. Look for more details in our upcoming issue of Dining Well.
“Well?” Jack said.
“Jesus.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“I told you we were slammed last night. We were minus a cook. Maybe she got a bad meal.” That wasn’t what it was about, though, and he knew it.
“What does she know that I don’t know, Damon? What have you been up to?”
“Nothing. It wasn’t about what I did.” Damon rubbed his temples. “It was about what I didn’t do. After service.”
There was a short silence. “Ah.”
“Yeah, ah.”
“The lady doesn’t take rejection well.”
“Who does?”
“In this case, she can do a lot of damage.” Jack blew out a breath. “You’re lucky I know Francesca. Plenty of people don’t, people in a position to make decisions.”
“Like your friend Stephanopolous?”
“Like him. He’s not going to follow a food blog, but I guarantee you he’s got a clipping service or a couple of bright boys who keep an eye on the press. She’s going to try to bury you with that article. It could be a problem.”
“Weren’t you telling me you had complete control?”
“The man believes in delegating, not giving the store away. The minute he hears that you’re a discipline problem, you’ll be history. If you want in on this deal, you need to have a track record with him before Francesca’s little hatchet job sees the light of day. Are you in or out?”
In or out. “I can’t just give you an answer, Jack. I’ve got to at least see the place.”
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