Can't Stand the Heat

by Shelly Ellis

  “Stubborn’s my middle name.”

  “And I guess ‘mule’ is your last name?”

  Lauren smiled despite herself. “Hardy har har.”

  “Hey! Excuse me!” a male voice suddenly called out from the other end of the darkened kitchen near the entrance leading to the dining area.

  Lauren and Paula exchanged a look.

  “Is anyone back here?” the voice asked.

  They could see his head bobbing over the metal shelving in the “pick-up” area. He certainly was tall.

  “Why don’t people read the sign on the door? Can’t they tell this is the kitchen?” Lauren whispered.

  Paula giggled.

  “Sir, if you’re looking for the bathrooms, you’ll have to go back where you came. They’re at the other end of the hall. This area is for staff only,” Lauren began, pushing away from the counter. She walked toward him as he rounded the corner. “You can’t come—”

  Her words froze on her lips as their eyes met. Her breath caught in her throat.

  The man who had wandered into their kitchen had the physique of a football player, though she doubted that he was part of any defensive line. A face that nice couldn’t have encountered too many contact sports.

  His eyebrows, nose, and full mouth were finely sculpted yet masculine. Even his high cheekbones looked like they could have been carved out of marble, making her wonder whether, if she reached out and touched them, they would be smooth and cool to the touch. His skin was the color of nutmeg and his almond-shaped eyes were ink black, but not flat and expressionless. They seemed warm and kind as he smiled faintly. His dark, curly hair was closely cropped to his head.

  “I wasn’t looking for the bathroom,” he said. “I was looking for the chef. I wanted to compliment him on tonight’s meal.”

  “Oh,” Lauren uttered breathlessly. “Oh, well, I know he would . . . appreciate that. So you . . . you liked the food?”

  “Oh, yeah.” He gave a vigorous nod and a chuckle. He then patted his rock-hard stomach. The ripples of muscles were visible even through his white dress shirt. The shirt was unbuttoned at the collar and rolled up at the sleeves, revealing the tattooed scales of the Chinese dragon that encircled his forearm. “I just decided to come here on a whim,” he said. “Honestly—and please don’t take offense—I wasn’t expecting much from this place.”

  She didn’t take offense. People rarely expected a lot from small-town restaurants. Soup from a can and gravy and potatoes from store-bought packets is what they usually anticipated.

  “I’m glad I was wrong, though, because it was the best food I’ve tasted in a long time.” He looked around the now-empty kitchen. “I tried to talk to the chef earlier, but the manager said he was busy and couldn’t come out.” His eyes returned to Lauren. They locked gazes again. “I guess I missed him, huh?”

  So this was the VIP guest Nathan had spoken about earlier? She scanned his face more carefully. He did look vaguely familiar. Was he famous?

  “Oh, the executive chef left hours ago,” Paula suddenly piped up from behind Lauren. “But if you want to talk to the chef who was on duty tonight, you need to talk to Lauren here.” She nudged Lauren’s arm. “She’s our sous chef.”

  “So you’re the one I should be bowing down to?”

  With his eyes on her, Lauren felt like she was under the glare of a spotlight. Suddenly, she wished she wasn’t in a chef’s jacket, wrinkled jeans, and scuffed tennis shoes. Suddenly, she wished she had done something to her hair today and not thrown on a red bandanna to hold her locks out of open flames and saucepans. She didn’t look like an alluring woman but rather a twelve-year-old boy in search of the nearest skater park.

  Lauren had felt so much pride minutes earlier and for some strange reason, it was being whittled away in this man’s presence.

  “Well, uh . . . well, no,” she answered nervously. “No, not really.”

  The stranger’s smile faded.

  “I mean, there are lots of line cooks in here and, uh, Phillip—he’s the executive chef—came up with the menu. He’s great at coming up with dishes. I just make a few suggestions here and there, but it would be wrong to take credit for his brilliance. They’re mostly all his ideas.”

  Oh, Lord! What the hell am I saying? What’s gotten into me?

  Lust: that was what had gotten into her, and it had come out of nowhere.

  “I mean . . . we’re a team, here,” she continued to babble. “I can’t take credit for this all by myself. We’re . . . uh . . . we’re a team. It’s a team effort. I couldn’t do it without . . . everyone’s help.”

  The kitchen fell silent with the exception of the steady chug of the dishwashers.

  “Well, my compliments to the team, then.”

  “We appreciate it,” Paula said. “Go, team, go!”

  The stranger laughed while Lauren turned to narrow her eyes at Paula. Paula grinned apologetically in return.

  “Well, thank you for the wonderful dinner.”

  “You’re welcome,” Lauren said, finally regaining her calm. “Thank you for patronizing our restaurant. We hope you’ll come back soon.”

  “Oh . . .” He gave a slow and meaningful nod. “I most certainly will.”

  Butterflies started to flutter in her stomach again.

  Don’t start, she silently told herself. He enjoyed the food. That’s all he meant.

  He stared at her for several seconds more, not saying anything. Lauren stared back. Paula coughed loudly to break the awkward silence and he smiled.

  “Well, it was nice meeting you ladies.” He headed back out of the kitchen. “Good night.”

  “Good night!” Paula called after him.

  “ ’Night,” Lauren whispered.

  The door shut behind him.

  Paula grabbed Lauren’s shoulders and turned her around. “Oh my God, he was so checking you out!”

  Lauren yanked her bandanna off her head. “No, he wasn’t! He was staring at me like I was an escaped mental patient. I wasn’t making any sense.”

  “Yeah, what was all that stuff about ‘team effort’?”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “He made you nervous, didn’t he? You liked him, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know him, Paula.” Lauren walked across the kitchen to a door that led to the women’s locker room. “I talked to him for two minutes.”

  “Thirty seconds is all it takes. Ever heard of love at first sight?”

  “Ever heard of a quickie divorce?” Lauren muttered as she shoved open the wooden door. “Because that’s what happens when you believe in love at first sight.”

  She slouched onto one of the wooden benches perched in between two rows of green metal lockers.

  “I told you to stop being so cynical. It doesn’t become you.” Paula began to tap her fingernails on one of the lockers. She dropped her other hand to her hip. “Is it just me or did that guy look like someone I’ve seen before?”

  Lauren nodded. She unbuttoned her chef’s jacket and opened the locker directly in front of her. “No, it’s not just you. I thought I recognized him from somewhere, too. I just can’t place where. He must be someone important, though, if he was the VIP Nathan was raving about earlier.”

  Each woman tried to summon a recollection of his face.

  “I know his name,” Paula said. “It’s right on the tip of my tongue. But I just can’t think of it.”

  “Well, don’t strain yourself. It’s not like you win any money for remembering.”

  “He said he’d be back here to eat again. Maybe you’ll find out his name and you two will have a chance to talk a lot longer than two minutes.”

  “I doubt it.” Lauren tossed her chef’s coat into her locker and retrieved her sandals. She sat down and changed out of her tennis shoes and sports socks. “Besides, I’m not interested.”

  “Oh, come on, Lauren! How can you not be interested in him? Are you blind? That man was beautiful! Did you see his tattoo?” She clos
ed her eyes and groaned. “Oh, I love a man with tattoos!”

  “Yes, Paula, I noticed him . . . and his tattoo.” Lauren rose to her feet and shut her locker door. “But he just didn’t do it for me,” she lied. “Besides, I’m just focused on other things.”

  “Like what?”

  “My life . . . my goals . . . me. I’m focusing on me. I’m making myself better. I’m my biggest priority—in a good way.”

  And I’ve still got a lot of work to do.

  Lauren climbed over the bench and waved. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Wait! What are you going to do if he comes back?” she called as Lauren walked toward the door.

  Lauren glanced over her shoulder. “If who comes back?”

  “The guy from ten minutes ago! Mr. Gorgeous! Who else?”

  “Feed him, I guess,” she answered nonchalantly. “Nighty-night.”

  Paula sighed. “Good night, Lauren.”

  Chapter 2

  “Twenty minutes,” Lauren muttered the next morning as she pulled her car to a stop in the circular, paved-stone driveway. “Keep it to twenty minutes and no longer. Tell them as soon as you get in that you can’t stay long.”

  Lauren had just left Phillip’s place. She had decided to check on him that morning, not liking the sound of his voice over the phone the day before. She found him in good spirits and looking much better than he had looked when she had last seen him. He promised that he would make it to the restaurant on time and would be raring to go.

  “All I need is my apron and my spatula, chérie!” he had growled in his Louisiana drawl. “It only takes me one day to mend. Nothin’ is gonna stop me!”

  It had been hard to leave him. In Phillip’s fatherlike presence she felt warm and reassured. She felt the opposite now as she sat in front of her mother’s palatial home. Lauren could think of a million places she’d rather be, but Saturday brunch at Mama’s was a family tradition that had lasted as long as Lauren could remember. Yolanda Gibbons didn’t mandate that all her girls attend, but Lauren knew she would be punished with cold silence if she didn’t.

  Lauren opened her car door with a loud, ear-piercing squeak, climbed out, and slammed the door shut with her hip. As she walked up the slate pathway leading to the manor’s French doors, she passed several bushes of blooming pink and white dahlias and then her sisters’ cars that were parallel parked along the curb: one black Lexus SUV, one silver BMW sedan, and one blue Mercedes-Benz convertible. The sparkling automobiles stood out like a line of preening beauty queens while Lauren’s rusted, dented 1991 Toyota Corolla sat at the end like the ugly girl in high school who would never get asked to prom.

  She took a deep breath before ringing the doorbell. After a few seconds, she spotted the silhouette of one of her mother’s many maids through the stained-glass window. One of the French doors slowly opened.

  “Good morning, Miss Gibbons,” the petite woman greeted timidly in her thick accent. She dipped her dark head and stepped aside, then gestured Lauren to step through the doorway.

  Lauren nodded after wiping her feet on the doormat. She stepped into the air-conditioned foyer and smiled. “Hi, Esmeralda. How’s it going?”

  “Very good, ma’am. And you?”

  “Eh, I could be better.” She glanced around her.

  The foyer was decorated in baroque style with rich mahogany and cherrywood furniture, jewel-colored upholstery, and glass vases spilling over with roses and freesias that were cut from the terraced garden in the backyard.

  Lauren’s mother thought the space set the right tone for whoever entered her home. She wanted it to look opulent and sophisticated.

  Lauren had always found it gaudy, though. She felt the same sense of claustrophobia she had felt whenever she stepped into James’s mansion a mere five miles up the road. This much opulence was overbearing.

  “Are they in the dining room?” Lauren asked.

  Esmeralda quickly shook her head. “No, in the sunroom today.”

  “Is everyone here already?”

  Esmeralda gave a rueful smile and nodded.

  Great, Lauren thought morosely as she glanced down at her watch. I’m the last one, as usual.

  She was bound to hear some smack about her tardiness.

  “All right, I guess I better head back there, then. Thanks.”

  Esmeralda nodded again and shut the front door behind her.

  Lauren made her way through the foyer and then the corridor that led to the sunroom. On one side of the hallway was a row of windows that brightened the dark corridor with shafts of midday light. On the other side was a row of portraits.

  Lauren glanced at the portrait of her grandmother, Althea Gibbons. While most people had photographs of their elderly grandmothers smiling demurely at church jubilees or family picnics, the last portrait painted of Althea was quite the opposite. The seventy-five-year-old woman had looked several decades younger than her age in a blue velvet catsuit that complemented her curvy figure. She had accented it with a sapphire necklace given to her by her third husband. Her pose was also far from motherly. She reclined on a white satin chaise with her gray hair falling around her shoulders, her ample cleavage on display, and her late Pomeranian, Coco, perched at her feet.

  It was a saucy portrait that epitomized Althea perfectly. Even until the day she died of heart failure, the family matriarch refused to look anything but alluring and fabulous.

  “You never know what man could be watching,” Althea had always warned with a furtive glance around her shoulders, like men were stalking ninjas that could pop out at any moment. “That’s why you make sure you always look your best, honey!” she would say with a wag of the finger. “Not a hair out of place. Not a frown on your face.”

  If Althea could see her youngest granddaughter now, with her faded, wrinkled jeans, white T-shirt, and face deeply creased with a frown, the matriarch would roll over in her grave.

  “There you are!” Lauren’s mother exclaimed as Lauren stepped out of the corridor into the well-lit sunroom. The backyard pool and lush gardens showed through the windows behind her, flanking her like a photograph of the Garden of Eden.

  Lauren’s three sisters turned in unison to stare at her. Cynthia and Dawn, the oldest two, exchanged glances when she entered. Her sister Stephanie silently chuckled and shook her head. The only one who didn’t look up was her seventeen-year-old niece, Clarissa. The girl kept her dark head bowed and continued to stare down at her lap.

  “I was beginning to wonder if you were going to make it at all. You seemed to be aiming for a record. Where have you been, chile?” her mother asked as she closed her newspaper, folded it neatly, and lowered it to the breakfast table. “We’ve been waitin’ on you!”

  “Sorry, I lost track of time,” Lauren mumbled. She walked across the room and noticed that she had been the only one, as usual, to dress casual. Everyone else wore colorful sundresses in flower and paisley patterns and expensive fabrics.

  When she reached her mother’s chair, she leaned down and lightly kissed the older woman’s cheek and inhaled, smelling the light, citrusy fragrance that her mother always wore.

  “I can’t stay long. I have to be at the restaurant by one o’clock.”

  “So you’re late and you have to rush off?” Though her mother was smiling, irritation was clearly audible in her voice. “Do you plan to eat or should we just make you a doggie bag?”

  Lauren flopped down in the chair between her mother and Stephanie, who was snickering again. She grabbed the white linen napkin neatly folded on the bread plate in front of her, shook it open, and slung it over her lap.

  “Mama, I tell you every Saturday that I have to be at the restaurant in enough time to start preparing for the evening rush. I’m a sous chef. That’s my job! What do you want me to do?”

  An uncomfortable silence fell over the sunroom. Yolanda Gibbons slowly leaned back in her rattan chair.

  Many people said Yolanda bore a striking resemblance to Diahann Carroll. In fa
ct, all she needed was the sequined gown, big hair, and big shoulder pads, and she could have been Dominique Deveraux in the 1980s soap opera Dynasty. She even had the character’s regal air and a glare that could freeze you dead in your shoes. She was directing that withering glare now at her youngest daughter, Lauren.

  “Oh, I understand that you have a job, my dear.” She adjusted her cream-colored sweater around her shoulders. “I also understand that your sisters have busy lives, too, but unlike you, they’ve always managed to make it here on time every week. Unlike you, they have never kept their mother waiting.”

  Lauren lowered her gaze to her lap at her mother’s words. She could feel her sisters staring at her, their eyes silently conveying their judgment.

  “They understand how important this is and would not dare disappoint me.”

  Lauren didn’t say a word, knowing it was useless to argue. Anyone would be ill advised to engage in a battle of words with Yolanda Gibbons.

  After some seconds, Yolanda’s face gradually softened. Her glare disappeared.

  “We’re family, baby,” her mother said tenderly. She placed her warm hand over Lauren’s smaller one and squeezed. “And this is how we stay a family. Money comes and goes and men will always come and go, but no matter what, you have us. Understood?”

  Lauren slowly nodded grudgingly. “Understood.”

  “And we’re important. Our time together is important. It should be treated preciously.”

  Her mother squeezed her hand again and released it before sitting forward in her chair. She waved a hand. “Rosa, you may serve the coffee, honey.”

  Another maid immediately stepped forward with silver teapot in hand.

  The light air and chatter immediately returned to the room. Cynthia passed around a basket of croissants and Stephanie began to boast about a pair of Ferragamo shoes she had bought last week. Dawn took a bite from a slice of bacon while Lauren quietly thanked Rosa as she poured her a cup of coffee. Clarissa took mousy nibbles on the end of a piece of toast, making Cynthia glance at her.

  “Stop slouching,” Cynthia said tightly before nudging her daughter’s shoulder.

  Clarissa instantly sat upright, smoothing the pleats in her pink dress.