“Wait.”
Carly’s traitorous legs halted her movement, and the box of pasta made a maraca-like noise in her basket as she jerked to a stop.
“The restaurant’s closed, right? For the night?”
She nodded. “Well, yeah. It’s a holiday. Plus, I guess everyone around here watches the fireworks over the lake, so even if we were open, we wouldn’t do any business. But we’re open for brunch and dinner tomorrow, if you wanted to eat out.”
Jackson’s laugh echoed through the empty aisle. “No, no. I was just thinking that if you don’t have to work, I could take you to a place where you can have one hell of a food experience. Since you’re into that kind of thing.”
Carly’s curiosity perked to life and fired on all cylinders. “But all the restaurants around here are closed.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t get great food,” he pointed out.
Carly’s mind jumped to all the private parties that took place in New York when certain hot spots were technically closed. It made sense that that kind of thing happened in other places, she supposed. But Pine Mountain? It barely made the map.
“Okay.” Her curiosity guided the word right past the brain-to-mouth filter that would’ve surely censored it, and she sent a couple of surprised blinks in its wake. She swung her gaze down to her basket, fervently looking for an excuse hidden between the pasta and the cans of tomato paste. Damn it, there wasn’t even anything perishable to blame a getaway on! She really shouldn’t let herself get distracted like this. She needed to go home to the comfort of her kitchen and surround herself with the soothing familiarity of food.
Jackson smiled, revealing teeth as perfect and white as pieces of peppermint gum, and as her knees turned to liquid, her mouth refused to do anything other than smile right back.
“Great. Just let me grab a couple of things and we can go. I’ll meet you at the checkout.”
Chapter Eight
Jackson wheeled his cart full of five bags of ice and just as many gallons of vanilla ice cream to the front of the store, where Carly stood twisting the handle of her paper bag in one hand. She looked like she might be daydreaming, just staring down at the red flip flops barely poking out from beneath the faded cuffs of her jeans. Man, she had cute feet, with no obnoxious hot pink nail polish or funky toe rings to mess them up. Just smooth, tanned skin and bare, pretty toes. Nice.
The ping pong match between hell yes and are you out of your goddamn mind volleyed for round two in his head, but he stuffed it down. Just because he’d asked her to swing by the party with him and he was a little enamored with her toes didn’t mean anything. There were probably seventy-five people in his mother’s backyard. Adding Carly as one more was really no big deal, flip flops notwithstanding.
Except that the whisper was back, the weird one that told him to feed her. Which he knew was ridiculous, except that for some stupid reason, he wanted to feed her.
Weird.
“Wow. That looks . . . interesting.” Carly’s velvety voice knocked him loose from his thoughts, and she eyed the items in his cart as if she thought he’d grabbed the wrong stuff.
“You like that? I’m going for maximum intrigue,” he replied, working up a lazy half-smile.
“Either that or you’re really hot,” she said, immediately turning pink.
That blush was going to ruin him. Not that it would be such a bad way to go. Jackson reached into the cart to load the ice cream on the conveyor belt and decided to let Carly off the hook for the hot comment. For now, anyway.
“So have you eaten dinner yet?”
“Ice cream for dinner is a little unorthodox,” Carly said as she followed him down the line. Joe bagged up the ice cream, and if Jackson didn’t know any better, he’d swear the guy’s smile seemed a little bigger than usual.
“Hey, don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it.” Jackson paid for the groceries and murmured a goodnight to Joe, guiding the cart away from the line so Carly could make her way through behind him.
“Jackson, I’m a chef. I’ve had just about everything you can think of for dinner, including ice cream. It goes with the whole food-experience territory.”
“If eating ice cream for dinner is part of your job description, I might be up for a career change,” Jackson mused, stopping to pop the tailgate on his truck.
Carly lifted a brow. “Don’t be too quick to sign on. Not everything tastes as good as ice cream.”
Oh, come on. This was food they were talking about here. “Like?”
“Let’s just say I’m not exactly a big fan of tripe. Or ostrich. But trying everything, even the things you don’t necessarily like, is part of the deal.”
Jackson stopped, midswing with the last bag of ice. “First of all, I’m not quite sure what tripe is, but the sound of it kind of scares me. Secondly, are you talking ostrich, like huge bird, doesn’t fly, ostrich? Is that even legal?”
Carly laughed, her whole face softening with the gesture. “Yeah, unfortunately. I’m told it’s an acquired taste.” She paused, glancing at his truck. “So, I’ll just follow you, then?” Carly nodded at the only other car in the parking lot, a Honda Civic Jackson assumed was hers.
“You’re probably better off riding with me and I can bring you back here later. It’s a little crowded where we’re headed, and parking is definitely an issue.”
He thought of the grassy off-roading he’d had to do in order to get here in the first place. It would be tough going for Carly’s Honda to make it over all of that, especially since there were still people pulling up when Jackson had left. He’d have to maneuver around a bunch of cars just to get within half a mile of the house again.
“I’ve got to admit, you’ve piqued my curiosity.” She stood unmoving by the back of his truck, and pinned him with a calculating look. “Where is it exactly that we’re headed?”
“Isn’t part of the food experience anticipating the unexpected?” Jackson slammed the tailgate, one corner of his mouth ticking up into a smile that was quickly becoming involuntary when Carly was around. Plus, teasing her was better than admitting out loud that he’d just invited her to a celebration of impending wedded bliss.
But as much as he enjoyed messing with her, he still didn’t want to put her on the spot. “If you’d feel more comfortable following me, that’s okay. We can figure something out once we get there.”
“Wow. You really weren’t kidding about that maximum intrigue thing,” she murmured, tipping her head. “You’re not going to give me any hints at all?”
“Where’s the fun in that?” Jackson could practically hear the gears turning in her brain. Man, she was so serious!
Finally, Carly nodded. “Okay, then. I guess I’ll just have to trust you. But you should probably know that I have three older brothers who would happily avenge me for so much as a broken nail.”
“Something tells me you’d be just fine on your own, but you don’t have to worry. Your manicure is safe with me.”
A few minutes later, she was perched next to him in the passenger seat of the truck and The Pennsylvania Building Code had been summarily pushed aside. Golden sunlight shafted through the leaves, flickering through the truck in rushed, sparkly patterns as they moved over the main road.
“Do you mind if I open the windows instead of putting on the air?”
On an evening like this, it seemed almost criminal to breathe in artificially cooled air rather than the sweet smell of summer. Some girls were kind of picky about the windows, though, as if the possibility they might sweat a little or get their hair mussed up was public enemy number one.
“Not at all.” Carly’s expression became wistful, and she glanced out the window at the trees that had grown so tall, they met the trees on the other side to form an archway over the road. Jackson lowered both windows and was instantly rewarded with the earthy scent of the leaves overhead.
“Okay, so the suspense is killing me. What’s tripe?”
A tiny smile lifted one corn
er of her mouth. “Are you sure you want to know?”
“Absolutely.” He nodded. How bad could it be?
“It’s the stomach lining of a cow.”
That bad. Jackson could count on one hand the number of times he’d lost his appetite, but this definitely made the list. “Sorry I asked.”
Carly shrugged as if tripe was as common as table salt. “To be honest, if you knew what went into some processed meats, you’d probably feel the same way about hot dogs.” The breeze coming through the window loosened a strand of hair from her braid, and it danced around her face, framing her big, brown eyes. He resisted the urge to tuck it behind her ear, arching a brow at her instead.
“You cannot blaspheme against hot dogs on the Fourth of July. It’s totally un-American.” His mind zipped to the two loaded chili dogs he’d had for lunch. Please, God, he thought. Let some things stay sacred.
Carly chuckled. “Oh, I have nothing against a good hot dog. I’m just saying that sometimes ignorance is bliss.”
Jackson thought about it for a second, watching the leaves whoosh by in an emerald green blur rinsed in the lowering sunlight. “Did you know what the tripe was when you ate it?”
“Not the first time, no. It was my first year of culinary school, and we were studying different ethnic cuisines. I had this classmate who swore his nonna made some of the best rustic Italian food on the planet.” Carly shifted toward him, moving her hands to accentuate the story. “Coming from one hell of an Italian family myself, I knew I had to experience this phenomenon firsthand.”
“Sounds innocent enough.” Actually, it sounded like some damn fine dining as far as Jackson was concerned. He could put a hurt to some eggplant Parmesan.
“That’s what I thought, too. The spread was unbelievable. I mean, this woman pulled out all the stops—antipasti, pasta fagioli, two different vegetarian dishes plus a veal Parm that was to die for. This lady was the real deal,” Carly affirmed, grinning at the memory before she continued.
“Most of the dishes I recognized in one form or another, so I never thought to ask her what was in them. I mean, I’ve had veal Parmesan so many times, I’d know it in the dark.” Despite the breeziness in her voice, Jackson sensed a whammy brewing in the story, and he leaned toward her, listening.
“So we got to this one dish, and I had no clue what it was, but my friend was ripping at the seams to see what I thought of it. I tried to be polite, I really did, but I couldn’t get into it, let alone place what the hell it was. I’ll never forget the look on his face when he looked at me just as cheery as Disney World and said, ‘Don’t feel too bad. I can’t stand tripe either.’”
Jackson tried to hide his laugh behind the guise of a coughing fit, but it was no use. It didn’t help that she’d told the story with the funniest little facial expressions, like she was reliving the memory right then and there. Carly tipped her head at him, a nonverbal oh, really? and he knew he was busted.
“Sorry. That’s classic, though. Did you kill him?”
She turned the tables and borrowed his crooked smile. “No, I hired him. Adrian’s been my sous chef for five years. Can’t imagine my kitchen without him.”
“The tripe guy?” Couldn’t say he saw that one coming. Huh.
“The tripe guy,” she confirmed with a decisive nod. “We serve his nonna’s recipe for calamari at the restaurant. It’s one of my top five favorite foods.”
Jackson’s jaw popped open in shock. “You eat octopus too?”
Carly’s velvety laughter filled the truck, nearly cutting him off at the knees. “Squid. Totally different species. You should try it.” She looked at him as if it were completely normal to consume tentacled sea creatures, and he looked back at her as if she’d lost her mind. It sounded like the kind of thing he used for bait, for Chrissake.
“Whatever you say, Ahab,” Jackson replied with a wink. No way in hell was that going to happen.
“Moby Dick was a whale, not a squid.” Carly’s smile still played on her lips, even though her laughter had faded.
“Potato, potahto. I don’t think I trust you around marine life in general.”
He guided the truck off the main road, heading toward his mother’s house. The seductive smell of slow-burning charcoal rushed in through the open windows from a mile out, and Jackson’s stomach perked to life with a low rumble that translated to I could eat. Looked like all that tripe talk hadn’t put a permanent damper on his appetite.
Carly shrugged. “You never know what you might end up liking. Just a little food for thought.”
He suppressed a chuckle at the irony of her words, bumping along the gravel pathway that led to the drive for a minute before letting Carly in on the joke. “Funny you should mention food, because we’re here.”
“We’re where?” She squinted through the windshield in confusion.
“Welcome to one of Pine Mountain’s best food experiences.” He pulled the truck to a stop in the grassy side yard and turned his hand palm-up in a small flourish.
“But this can’t be right. This is someone’s house,” Carly said, as if he’d surely made a mistake. “Are you even invited?”
Laughter welled up in his chest, and he jerked his head toward the festivities. “Let’s just say I doubt we’ll get kicked out. Come on.”
Carly took a breath and tried as hard as she could to erase the bewilderment from her expression. It turned out to be an exercise in futility.
“You okay?” Jackson’s door closed with a bang, and they circled around opposite sides of his truck to meet at the tailgate.
“Yeah, I just . . . after you said it would be crowded, I assumed we were headed to a local hangout or something. You know, a public place.” She eyed the cars and trucks lining both sides of the narrow gravel driveway leading up to the house, realizing with a tiny smile that Jackson had actually been spot-on about the parking. Her Honda would’ve been toast on the slope of the grassy yard where they’d parked, and it was the only open space as far as she could see.
“You know what they say about making assumptions,” he tsked with a wink, sliding the ice-filled cooler from his truck in an easy, one-armed movement that would’ve sent Carly on her ass even if she’d used both arms and brought a friend for help.
Refusing to bite even though every sarcastic fiber in her being screamed in protest, Carly replied, “So I take it this is a Fourth of July party.” She pointed to the festive red, white, and blue buntings fluttering from the porch railings. The smoky, hypnotic scent of a charcoal grill going full-bore sent her straight into mouth-watering mode, and the deep draw of fragrant air kicked her appetite into gear.
“Sort of.” Jackson bent down to unearth the two bags holding the ice cream from inside the cooler, and she saw his shoulders draw up with a hitch.
Oho, smartass-boy. Not so fast.
“Sort of?” she repeated, scooping up the bags while he replaced the lid with a muffled thunk.
“It’s a family get-together.” He led the way past the front of the house with the cooler in tow. Little beads of firelight glowed from within the wrought iron lanterns lining the brick walkway, casting the hushed beginnings of shadows at their feet. The buzz of voices and occasional bursts of laughter carried over the breeze from the backyard, and a group of boys thundered past them toward the grassy front lawn, Frisbees in hand. Something loosened in Carly’s gut, smoothing over her with a familiar sweetness.
“Cousins or nephews?” She gestured to the boys, whose hooting and hollering carried over the air like a carefree blanket.
Jackson’s grin returned. “Both. The younger one is my nephew, but the older two are my cousin’s sons.”
Carly’s heart tugged at her ribs. “I have six.”
“Sons?” Jackson lifted his brow, rounding the side of the house.
“Nephews,” she emphasized, not giving him the satisfaction of putting her on the spot. “And four nieces.”
“Hey, me too. On the nieces, anyway. You’ve got me beat i
n the nephews department,” Jackson replied, then paused. “So it doesn’t make you uncomfortable to come to a big family gathering?”
“I’m the youngest of four kids, Jackson, and I have ten immediate cousins. My family is massive. I think I’ll be fine. Although you could’ve warned me.” It felt pretty good to put the shoe on the other foot and tease him for a change, and she gave him a bump with her hip for good measure.
“It would’ve wrecked the intrigue, which is why you came.” He nudged her right back.
“You lured me with food,” she corrected. “That’s why I came.”
“Okay, okay. Let’s get this cold stuff where it needs to go and I’ll make good on my promise. Come on.”
As soon as the backyard was in full view, Carly had to resist the urge to stop and stare. Paper lanterns peppered the edges of a huge, white tent canopy, soft light diffusing from the thin, white globes and mixing with the growing dusk. Beneath the tent, a small crowd of people milled around, filling their plates to the brim. Even more guests sat around small wooden picnic tables with little candles in brightly colored jars in the center. The thick, lemony scent of citronella hung in the air, mixing in with the smoky perfume of the grill to form a flawless suggestion of summertime.
A cluster of men stood, laughing and drinking from frost-covered bottles of beer at the far end of the yard, and Carly squinted at the familiar objects they were tossing toward a square patch of sand just shy of the tree line.
“Are those horseshoes?” A metallic clang resonated across the yard, followed by an enthusiastic cheer that punctuated the unspoken answer to her question.
Jackson glanced over his shoulder, which was still as wide as a doorframe and oh-so muscled beneath the white cotton of his T-shirt. “You’ve never played horseshoes?”
“The closest thing I had to a yard was my grandmother’s garden, which is a six-by-six plot of dirt in Brooklyn, surrounded by bricks and buildings.”
Okay, fine. So two of her three brothers had moved to the New York suburbs with their families years ago, and both had beautiful yards with green grass and fences. But Carly’s space had always been in the city, either in the duplex where she grew up or in the brownstone she’d hung a FOR SALE sign on the morning she’d left for Pine Mountain. Sadness swirled in her belly, but she mashed it down just in time to catch Jackson watching her with curiosity.
Gimme Some Sugar Page 10