Turn Up the Heat

by Kimberly Kincaid

  Bellamy’s bare feet whispered over the floorboards as she rushed to escape. “Right. I won’t be long, and then we can head out.”

  “Stop.”

  Okay, the Jedi mind trick thing was so unfair. Her feet defied the go message from her brain, bringing her body to an abrupt halt at the foot of the bed. Bellamy steeled herself as she peeked up at him.

  “This is about what I said last night, isn’t it.” There wasn’t even a hint of a question in his voice, and his black-coffee eyes were on her, steady and unnervingly hot.

  Here we go. “Look, it’s really no big deal for me to stay at the resort. If you think I should. If you want me to, I mean.” Ugh! She really needed to work on quality control with her common sense. What the hell was wrong with her?

  Shane lifted a sable brow. “Truth?”

  No. “Of course.” Bellamy fought back the waver in the words.

  “I want you to stay.”

  Her lips parted in surprise. “You do?”

  He nodded, stepping in. Oh, the smell of his skin so close to hers was just plain cheating!

  “Look, I’m not going to lie to you, but I don’t think you’d want me to.” Shane paused to let a wry little smirk lift one corner of his mouth. “We have four days before I’ll be done with your transmission. I don’t know what’ll happen after that, but I do know that, until then, I don’t want you to go.”

  His honesty startled her. “I don’t want to go,” she admitted, the words spilling out of her.

  “So stay. Stay the four days with me, and we’ll figure the rest out when your car is done.” Shane’s eyes sparkled under the sooty frame of his lashes. He dipped his head to place a kiss on her neck, the softness of his lips canceled out by the brush of stubble on his chin. “Just . . . don’t go.”

  Not speaking your mind had never made sense to Bellamy. But what if the thing you needed to say scared the hell out of you? Then what?

  Guess she’d just have to be scared, that’s what. Bellamy steadied her hands and slipped them under Shane’s chin, lifting it to look him straight in the eye.

  “Okay. I won’t go.”

  “Okeydokey . . . darks over here, whites over . . . here.” Bellamy rooted through the suitcase she’d propped open on top of an oversized wash basin. “And slutty underwear over here,” she snickered, reaching into her purse for the scrap of lace and string that she might consider wearing again, just for the look it brought to Shane’s face.

  She’d been eternally grateful to find a small Laundromat in the basement of the resort, and although she had a sneaking suspicion it was reserved for staff, her need for clean undergarments outweighed the fear of getting busted using their facilities. Even in spite of the fact that she was checking out in a matter of hours.

  To stay with a guy she’d known for all of five days, but felt like she’d known for six lifetimes.

  Time to focus on the laundry.

  Bellamy filled two of the four washing machines in the tiny basement room, feeding them with the requisite amount of quarters and laundry detergent she’d gotten at the resort’s drugstore. Once her clothes were doing the swishy-samba with the water and bubbles, she plunked herself into the only chair in the cramped space.

  “No time like the present,” she said quietly, and popped open her laptop. Before her conscience or common sense could stop her, she pecked culinary school, Philadelphia into the search engine and hit Enter.

  “Two hundred forty-six thousand hits? Are you kidding me?” Her breath left her lungs in a burst of no-freaking-way as she scanned the list.

  Well, at least she had options.

  Forty-five minutes and two spin cycles later, she’d scribbled a page and a half’s worth of meticulous notes on a legal pad. Culling through the list was proving easier than she’d thought, and yielded a couple of very viable options.

  Sure. Provided she had the balls to follow through on applying.

  A loud crash just outside the open door frame brought her to full attention. Bellamy scrambled into the narrow service hallway, where she found a well-muscled, platinum-blond brick wall of a man, wearing chef’s whites and cursing up a blue streak at the plates and serving tray littering the floor.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, bending down to help collect the dishes. “Wow, it looks like you got lucky. I don’t think any of them broke.” Bellamy glanced at the scattering of kitchenware on the thin layer of carpet lining the hallway.

  The stormy hazel glare she got in return for her trouble made her regret opening her mouth. The guy flipped the tray over and filled it with startling efficiency, looking more at her than at the clean dishes he was stacking.

  “Am I okay? Well, let’s see. I’ve been waiting for a produce shipment for over twenty-four hours, my boss, bless her dark little heart, expects the impossible from me, and don’t even get me started on the sorry excuse for wanna-be line cooks cowering in the kitchen. Apparently, it’s too much to expect that even one of them might be able to break down a chicken without destroying the damned thing. Even the easy stuff is out of the question. Hell, at this point, I doubt that half of them can even wash dishes with much success.”

  By the time his tirade was halfway to rant status, he’d righted the tray under his massive hands and stood up to rake his cold, hard gaze over her. “I don’t suppose you’re any good at washing dishes and have a couple hours to kill, hmm? It would make you the bright spot of my shit morning.”

  Bellamy narrowed her eyes at him. She didn’t care that she didn’t know this guy from Adam. No way was she going to let some hard-edged kitchen jockey bully her around.

  “Of course I can wash dishes,” she shot back, thinking for only a split second before putting a hand on her hip and matching him tone for tone. “But I’m better at breaking down a chicken.”

  Brick Wall’s dark eyebrows kicked up in the direction of his bottle-platinum hair, and Bellamy noticed that one of them had a stainless steel barbell pierced through it. Shit. She just had to get mouthy with a guy who looked like he belonged in a motorcycle gang, didn’t she?

  “You can de-bone a chicken without rendering it useless?” Brick Wall’s expression clearly suggested he thought she was full of crap. He frowned for added emphasis.

  Bellamy stood as tall as possible without rising onto her tiptoes even though her heart had taken up permanent residence in her throat. “Yup.”

  He gave her a long up-and-down look as if she was a chicken, and her muscles grabbed tight around her bones.

  Bad idea! Getting flip with the big man was a bad idea! She took a quiet half step backward. Maybe she could get back to her laundry and her Google search unscathed if she just shut her mouth and went now. Never mind that she really could break down a chicken, and make twenty different things with it, to boot.

  “Well what’re you waiting for, Sunshine? Believe me when I tell you I don’t have all day.” He jerked his head down the hallway marked STAFF ONLY, and Bellamy creased her brow in response.

  “But I’m not . . . I don’t work here,” Bellamy stammered, willing her bravado back to the mother ship. She fastened him with an uneasy look. She couldn’t just go marching around in the resort’s kitchen, could she?

  Brick Wall cracked an evil smile. “Technically, I don’t either. Not yet, anyway. Look, I’m weeded up to my armpits, so really. If you wanna put your mayo where your mouth is, now’s the time. Otherwise, I’m a ghost.”

  Bellamy squeezed her eyes shut on the fastest prayer she could muster and slung her laptop bag over her shoulder, running to catch up. She did her best to block out the chorus of what the hell are you doing? coming from the back of her mind.

  “I’m Bellamy Blake,” she said, following the guy’s brisk strides to the end of the dingy back hallway.

  “Adrian Holt,” Brick Wall replied with a nod, bumping the door in front of them open with an elbow before barging through like he owned the place.

  Bellamy’s heart skittered in her chest as the name sank in and d
id the recognition dance in her brain. “As in, Carly di Matisse’s sous chef, Adrian Holt?”

  His evil grin reappeared. “One and the same, Sunshine. Now go grab some whites from the back room and let’s see what you’re made of, shall we?”

  After the third time Shane checked the same engine valves in Lucky Gunderson’s Cadillac, Grady arched his brow and followed it with a knowing grin.

  “You wanna tell me what’s on your mind, or are you gonna keep daydreamin’ and tell me it’s nothing?”

  Shane did his best to hide his smile in his flannel sleeve as he pushed his hair back from his face. It was pretty much a no-go.

  “Sorry,” he said, bracing himself with both palms against the Caddy. Lucky wasn’t exactly living up to his name as far as the Coupe de Ville was concerned, but that was okay with Shane. It gave him something to do other than watch the clock.

  “Nothin’ to be sorry about when you’re wearing a smile like that.” Grady’s laugh echoed through the garage on a rumble. “So what’s her name?”

  Damn, Grady’s sixth sense was just unnatural. “Who said I’m smiling over a woman?” Shane’s attempt to blank his expression fell woefully short, and he ended up grinning like a fool at the Caddy’s engine.

  “I might be old, but I ain’t stupid, son.” Grady chuckled as he examined the contents under the Cadillac’s hood, running his hands from the engine to the oil filter. “Only one thing brings out a smile like that on a man’s face, and that is a pretty girl.”

  Shane shook his head. He knew when he’d been beaten. “Her name’s Bellamy. She’s here for the week. As a matter of fact”—he paused to jut his chin at the Miata—“the two-seater is hers. She’s waiting for us to fix it before she can go home.”

  “And where would home be?” Grady kept his eyes on the car, but Shane felt his skin prickle at the question.

  “She lives in Philly.” He kept his tone purposely neutral, but Grady didn’t follow suit.

  “Huh. You do like a hornet’s nest, don’t you?”

  Shane exhaled, long and slow. “I know, all right?”

  “Do you, now?” There was no accusation in Grady’s tone, and the honesty of the question made Shane realize that he had no good answer for it.

  “It all happened kind of fast. I didn’t exactly plan on . . . you know. Any of it. But it’s no big deal,” Shane tacked on. The lie might as well have left scorch marks on its way out, considering how bad it tasted and how hard it burned. Still, big deal or not, Bellamy was headed home before the weekend was out, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  “Does she know?” Grady looked up from the Coupe de Ville to pin Shane with a questioning stare before lowering the hood.

  Shane folded his arms over his chest. “No.”

  “Mmm.” Grady turned his eyes back to the car and got behind the wheel to start it up, but Shane couldn’t tell whether he was just listening to the engine or waiting for a response.

  Goddammit, the last thing Shane needed was guilt over this. Knowing she was leaving was hard enough. Baring his innermost secrets to her would only take things from bad to worse.

  “It’s pointless to tell her, Grady. She’s going back to the city. It’s where she belongs.”

  The old man scrubbed a hand down the silvered stubble on his chin and killed the Cadillac’s engine. “Places are places, Shane. You come and you go, but in the end, it ain’t the places that matter. It’s the people you had with you that counts.”

  “The places matter to me,” Shane said, his voice cold with finality.

  Grady shook his head, and the faintest trail of a smile crossed his jaw, like he was thinking of something familiar. “You’ll learn. Now hand me that wrench, would you? The valves on this lifter are shot, and if we don’t pull it for a new one, it ain’t ever gonna run right.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “I gotta admit, Sunshine. When I first saw you, I didn’t think for a second that you could hold your own.” The fact that Adrian’s face only held slight disdain was a weird little comfort to Bellamy as she stood, exhausted and elated, at a food-splattered kitchen station deep in the bowels of the resort.

  “What do you think now?”

  “I think you’d better clean up your workstation before Chef di Matisse catches you. You’re a fucking mess.”

  Bellamy wrinkled her nose at him, but only to cover up the grin that wanted to work its way over her face. She still wanted to pinch herself at the fact that she’d spent over an hour working on a list of techniques and test dishes in a professional kitchen. It blew the tiny yet functional kitchen in her condo out of the water, and she was still kind of in shock that Adrian had let her come down here to play even after she’d told him she was just an armchair cook with no professional experience. It didn’t seem to matter, as nobody questioned her presence while they worked side by side on the same test dishes. Bellamy remembered that they were overhauling the restaurant. How freaking cool was it that she was getting to reap the benefits of menu-testing firsthand?

  “You’d better hope your cooking’s better than your kitchen management, girl. I’m not kidding about the mess.” Adrian tapped his foot impatiently, but Bellamy could see traces of a smile under the few days’ worth of dark stubble on his face.

  “You’re a real sweetheart, Chef Holt. Really. I’m swooning over here,” she muttered, starting to tackle the mess in front of her with fastidious hands. He couldn’t be serious about Carly catching her. Chef di Matisse would probably be pissed if she knew Adrian had let her come into the kitchen just to mess around, but she didn’t want to leave any signs that she’d been there, just in case.

  “If you want to have a prayer in the kitchen, you’d better be able to handle it. Nobody pats you on the head in this business, that’s for damn sure.” Adrian flicked a glance over the cavernous kitchen, bustling with movement and smells and sounds. He tipped his platinum head at her before turning to walk down the row of stainless steel counter space, each with stations that looked like different variations of the one Bellamy was currently cleaning.

  “By the way, I gave one of your test dishes to Carly. She’ll be back from her break in five.”

  Bellamy was ninety-nine percent sure that the not being able to breathe thing would subside eventually.

  “You never said . . . I mean, you didn’t . . . she’s not supposed to taste any of it!” She scrambled for wits that seemed to have no intention of surfacing. Adrian’s impromptu invitation to come show her stuff in the kitchen was supposed to be a fun-and-games kind of thing. She didn’t even have formal training, for Chrissake!

  Adrian crossed his arms over his retaining wall of a chest and eyed her. “This is a kitchen, not a playground. What do you think all of these people are doing here?”

  “Um, working?” Reality started to sink in, hard and fast.

  “Competing for jobs, sweetheart. This isn’t a swanky cooking class just for fun. This is the nitty-gritty, right here.” He creased his forehead, knitting his brows into a dark slash over his eyes. “Clean up your station. Anything for dishwashing goes on the tray under your table. You can take it back there.” Adrian thrust a meaty finger toward the back of the kitchen.

  And he was gone.

  “Don’t feel bad. At least Chef di Matisse saw yours. Some people’s test dishes didn’t even pass plating earlier. Chef Holt pitched one based on smell alone.”

  Bellamy swung around to see a tall brunette in splattered chef’s whites meticulously scrubbing down the workstation next to her.

  “Are you serious?” Bellamy reached out to brace herself with both hands, the coolness of the table seeping into her palms. Oh God. Oh God oh God oh God.

  The girl nodded, but didn’t even break stride with the bowls in front of her. “And he’s not even the hard-ass of the pair. Chef di Matisse sent two people home before lunch without even tasting their stuff. You don’t get where she is without being tough as nails.”

  Bellamy broke out of her pa
nic long enough to furrow her brow. “But when I met her the other night, she was so nice,” she said, confused. They were talking about the same woman who had patiently listened to Bellamy prattle on about plank salmon, right? Oh, this was going to be really, really bad.

  One brown eyebrow arched up from behind the adjacent workstation. “Let me guess. You weren’t working for her then, were you?”

  “I’m not working for her now,” Bellamy said, trying to swallow the knot of fear that had taken over most of her throat.

  “Oh yes you are, or at least you’re trying to. Look out.”

  The girl had no sooner given the set of swinging doors at the head of the room a pointed look than they flew open in one heart-sickening swoosh.

  “Adrian! Please tell me that we have fresh produce. That stuck-in-a-snowstorm excuse is wearing thin. I can’t make something out of nothing over here!” Chef di Matisse glided through the kitchen with graceful, latent strength, her dark eyes scanning the entire kitchen in less than ten seconds. “I’m not having messy workstations, people. Sloppy stations equal sloppy food. Neither one of those is happening in here.”

  She continued moving through the kitchen, stopping to shake her head, her chestnut-colored French braid swishing down her back as she peered into a bowl at someone’s workstation. “No, that’s not going to cut it. I can’t put remoulade that looks like that on anything, I don’t care how good it is. People eat with their eyes first, and if it looks like Elmer’s paste, that’s what they’ll taste. The recipe’s right in front of you. Do it again.”

  Adrian leaned in to murmur something in Carly’s ear, and both sets of eyes lasered in on Bellamy’s workstation, which was still dotted with dirty mixing bowls and utensils. She scrabbled to collect them and then wipe down her station with blinding speed, then bent low to snatch the tray from under the counter. Maybe she could hide under there if it got really bad.

  “You made chicken piccata.”