“The hair’s because of a bet,” the blue-haired woman offered in explanation. “I’m not sure if I won or lost.” She rolled her eyes extravagantly before seeing the enormous wet stain on his shirt. “Oh, I’m sorry.” She reached out to touch the stain, then pulled her hand back, her cheeks tinged a light pink.
Dan looked back at the stain on his shirt. He’d forgotten about the wet spot as soon as she began to speak.
A gut instinct told him to invite her to spend the day at the Taste with him. He’d been following his gut all his life and never been disappointed yet. It was the reason he told the city of Chicago to try the Vosges bacon and chocolate bar and the reason he’d written his post on Babka. His gut and his mom’s ruined birthday dinner.
He could take this woman to the demo, which would make the distasteful business more fun, walk around the Taste with her, then take her out for a fabulous meal. Up on Chicago was a great sushi place. His shoulders relaxed. The day was looking even better than it had ten minutes ago. Before the moon rose, he would know for himself if her hair felt as silky between his fingers as it looked.
“Don’t worry about it.” He flashed his best smile. No one turned down the smile. “You should always wear clothes you are willing to lose to the Taste anyway. You never know when someone’s pizza is going to land on your front.”
She smiled back at him, a gentle smile at odds with her fanciful hair. “Still, can I buy you another beer, or shirt? I feel awful. Not only did you lose half your beer, but you’re going to have to walk around with a wet shirt.”
“If you’re offering me alcohol to dull the pain of a hot summer day, I’ll bite. A cold beer will help cool me down.”
They talked a bit as they moved up the line. At the counter, Dan turned back to the intriguing blue-haired woman. “Do you like your dogs with everything?”
She raised her brows. “Of course.”
“Great.” He turned to the hot dog trailer and pushed food tickets through the window. “Two dogs with everything.” He turned back. “I’m bribing you. I’ve never met a woman with blue hair younger than my grandmother.” He flashed another smile. “Walk around the Taste with me.”
“Why do you need company? Surely you could’ve brought a date if you wanted one.”
“I didn’t want a date until I got my beer spilled all over my front.”
“Low blow.” She laughed. “You might not get much for your money. I can only wander around for about an hour. I have an appointment.”
“Deal.” When she took her hot dog, he lifted his dog up like a flute of champagne. “A toast, to blue-haired women and Vienna Beef.”
She laughed and lifted her hot dog to match his. “To free hot dogs,” she said and took a bite.
Her mouth was nicely shaped, with lush but not overly pouty lips. She ate her hot dogs with everything. He was definitely interested, in both her shapely lips and clear enjoyment of food. Judging by the roundness of her hips, whoever this woman was, she could eat.
She closed her eyes and moaned with pleasure as she took her first bite.
“Good, huh?” He took a bite and the spicy peppers hit his tongue, followed by the taste of the sweet, alien-green relish and acidic tomato. “I’ve eaten delicacies from all over the world and I think the Chicago dog beats them all.”
“I know.” She laughed again. She had a throaty laugh at odds with her sweet voice. The combination was intoxicating. As a package, the blue-haired woman was entrancing and, from the way she fluffed her hair and pursed her lips, she probably had no idea. “No French-trained chef could come up with this mix of flavors. The pickle is my favorite. Why have a pickle on the side of your meal when you can have it on top?”
“I like to think all the vegetables make this a complete meal.”
“An American one-upping of the Earl of Sandwich.”
“Exactly.”
She savored her last bite of hot dog and when she licked the celery salt off her lips, his jeans got uncomfortable. If the day continued this way, he would need to throw himself into Lake Michigan to cool off. “So, mystery woman...” He popped his last bite of hot dog in his mouth. “Do you have a name?”
“My friends call me Tilly.” She stuck out her free hand and Dan took it.
“Dan.”
His hand brushed scars and calluses as it slid out of her grip. Tilly did something with her hands for a living, which made him more curious about her. “Some street performers are over by the fountain. Shall we?” He offered her his elbow.
She took his outstretched elbow and they walked toward the lake. She smelled fresh, like lemons. Like her sweet voice and seductive laugh, the clean scent was unexpected with her vibrant hair.
They stopped at the street show. An aerial dance team had set up scaffolding and used black silk ribbons to propel themselves through the air in a dance, moving as naturally vertically as they did horizontally. They flipped upside down and did splits three feet above the ground with only the ribbons tied around their ankles keeping them from falling, all choreographed to Sam Cooke singing “Summertime.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Tilly said with awe. “I could watch them all day.”
Dan looked at the spellbound woman at his side. “You can,” he said to tempt her. “Cancel your appointment.”
A grand total of maybe twenty minutes in her presence and he wanted—needed—more. Dan didn’t believe in love at first sight, but he believed in desire at first sight. The woman at his side fit perfectly against him. A pairing as unexpected and perfect as French fries and champagne or, he smiled wryly, bacon and chocolate.
The way Tilly looked at him, she must think him a serpent offering her an apple from the tree of knowledge. Desire heated her rich, cocoa eyes, but something else lurked deep in their depths. Wistfulness, a need to live in the present and not think about the future. Not quite fear, but apprehension.
What about her appointment scared her?
“Oh, I couldn’t,” she said with all the force of an addict turning down another hit. “I’d be ruined. Please don’t ask again. I might take you up on it.” She turned back to watch the dancers, but pressed herself more tightly against him, as if he was the only thing keeping her standing.
Tilly had a secret. A secret she was trying to pretend didn’t exist, if only for the next hour. Was she married to an abusive, scary man? She didn’t wear a ring. An appointment with a doctor? Was the hair a wig covering up the bald head of a cancer patient?
Maybe it wasn’t any of his business, but he had to know before the day was over. Every cell in his body wanted him to stick to this woman as if she were honey. How could she not feel the same way?
Time for a new tactic. “I’m sorry. We can change the subject. Did you catch the Cubs game last night?”
“I’m a White Sox fan,” she said, still not looking at him.
Well, hell. Meeting Tilly was a magic moment, but apparently he was the only person here who felt that way.
She turned to face him, her back to the dancers and her attention completely focused on him. “I’m being rude. It’s just...” She sighed and all the warmth left her eyes, replaced by tension. “I’m a little nervous about what I have to do in forty minutes. I don’t want to talk or think about it, but I can’t miss it, no matter how tempting you are.”
“I won’t ask you to cancel your appointment, but I won’t promise not to get you to spend more time with me. Dinner?”
“Maybe. Depends on how the afternoon goes. I might want to crawl under the DuSable Bridge and never come out. If you hear reports of a troll, it could be me.”
“That bad?”
“Yes.” She bit her bottom lip and nodded. “That bad.”
He smiled at her. “Then my job for the next forty minutes is to keep your mind off whatever you are abandoning me to do. Baseball’s out, so how about I tell you a story?”
“A story? Like I’m a little kid?” she asked with amusement lifting the corner of her lips and l
eft eyebrow.
Dan smiled his best devious and inviting smile. “It’s not appropriate for a little kid, but let me tell you about the noodle restaurant I was assured had the best noodles in all of Thailand. I was traveling on a research trip and several Bangkok cabdrivers told me I must visit this place.” He looked at the children also watching the aerial dancers. “No, I can’t tell this story here. Too many innocent minds around and I don’t want to disturb the show. Let’s walk,” he said as he threaded his fingers in hers and pulled her along.
“Is the story going to be better than the dancers?”
“I don’t know about better than the dancers, but it will distract you.”
Once they were far enough away from any mothers likely to overhear him, Dan continued his story. “I’d been in Bangkok for over a week, subsisting only on noodles. Street vendors, little storefronts, fancy restaurants catering to tourists—if they sold noodles I tried them. Only the noodle shop the cabbies recommended wasn’t on any restaurant list I could find. My hotel told me they catered mostly to tourists. ‘If that was the type of place I wanted to try,’ they’d say in a hushed voice. Implying, of course, they thought I was different. I’d said I was trying to hunt down the best Thai noodles, but they wondered if maybe I was in Bangkok for some shadier reason.”
Dan chuckled at the foolishness of it all. “I decided the hotel was a stuffy lot and I would eat on the cabbies’ recommendations. The place looked like almost any other storefront noodle shop, only the cabbies had said to ask for ‘plus’ on anything I ordered. I stuck to the basics and ordered pad Thai, plus.”
“And was it the best noodle shop in Bangkok?”
“The noodles themselves were terrible. Mushy and drowning in fish sauce. One piece of chicken, one measly peanut. I wondered if the rubbery chicken and one stale peanut were the plus, and what a minus meal would be. But as soon as I put my fork and spoon down I found out why the cabdrivers told all their Western tourists it was the best.”
Dan looked over at Tilly to make sure she was paying attention. Her eyes were wide and dancing with curiosity. The tension had eased out of her body and been replaced with an eager lightness that brightened her skin. If she looked like that while he was telling her a story, how would she look as he stripped off her clothes? Would her skin flush and her eyes deepen with desire?
Any thoughts in that direction were stopped with a gentle elbow to his ribs.
“You can’t stop now. I have to know.”
“As an older woman picked up my half-full plate and empty beer bottle, this younger woman came up to me and asked if I ordered ‘the plus.’ When I nodded, she told me to follow her. Curious now, I followed her into a back room.”
“I think I know where this is going,” she said with pursed lips and raised eyebrows. “I can’t believe you’re telling this story on a first date.”
“In my defense, I was too creeped out to do anything more than scuttle out of the room. The pad Thai had killed my appetite for anything the brothel had to offer me. As for it being a first date story...” He waved her comment away. “You wanted to be distracted. You can’t tell me you are thinking about your appointment now.”
“No.” She snorted before her face got serious. “But please tell me the woman was over eighteen.”
“The story wouldn’t be funny if she were a child,” Dan said with enough gravity in his voice that she would know he found the situation as distasteful as she did. And he knew it could have been much worse. “I guess it’s lucky that while I looked like a man willing to have sex with a woman in the back of a noodle shop, I don’t look like a pedophile. I got two articles out of the trip, the one on noodles in Bangkok and the other on sex tourism and the sexual exploitation of children in the United States.”
The second article had landed one prominent Seattle restaurateur in jail for sex trafficking and been instrumental in closing down a trafficking route into Vancouver. Dan had flown to Seattle to be in the courtroom for the restaurateur’s sentencing, one of the proudest moments of his life. He wrote engrossing, thought-provoking articles on food, cooking, farming and how what people ate defined who they were. They were important articles—food was at the heart of every culture—but that was the first and only time his research on food had landed someone in jail.
“You’re a writer?”
“Mostly freelance, but my articles aren’t generally as weighty as sex trafficking.”
“Do you enjoy it?”
“I can’t imagine doing anything else. I get paid to create, and the final product, good or bad, is my responsibility. The control is both ridiculously scary and the most freeing thing imaginable.”
“I understand. I would have never associated the feeling with writing, but I get what you’re saying.” Tilly put her hand on his arm, the contact burning through the light cotton of his sleeve. “The control is why my job is important to me.”
Dan reached out and tucked a short strand of hair behind her ear, her dangling earrings ringing like tiny bells with the movement. The crazy blue hair slid through his fingers, slippery and smooth. It was like trying to hold on to the creek behind his parents’ house. He anchored one hand at the back of her head and used the other on the small of her back to pull her against him. The slight touch wasn’t enough. He wanted more. “I want to hear about your job. I want to hear everything you have to tell me.” He angled her face up to him and lowered his mouth until a breeze wouldn’t fit in the space between their lips. “But first, I want to kiss you.”
It wasn’t supposed to be a long kiss. A peck was all he’d had in mind. Then he noticed how soft her lush lips were against his and how they opened willingly under gentle pressure. He could taste celery salt when he ran his tongue along the inside of her bottom lip.
She made a noise in the back of her throat and he slid his hand down to cup her round butt, pulling her body close to him. Her arms came around his neck and her fingers pulled through his hair. God, she felt good.
Then the moment was nearly ruined when, through his haze of desire, he heard a catcall. He pulled back and looked at Tilly’s upturned face. Her eyes were half-closed and her mouth was partway open. She looked like a woman who still wanted to be kissed and he still wanted to kiss her.
He pressed his forehead against hers and chuckled. “I guess I got a little carried away. I promised I wouldn’t ask you to cancel your appointment, but maybe you can at least agree to meet me for dinner, no matter how the appointment goes. I want to see you again. Soon.”
“Okay,” Tilly said as she took a deep breath. “But I might not be good company for dinner.”
“I can’t imagine how you wouldn’t be.”
“It’s embarrassing. I’m giving a cooking demonstration here today.”
CHAPTER FOUR
AH, SHIT. That would make her...
Dan winced, but Tilly was too caught up in her story to notice his reaction. “And in the most recent review on CarpeChicago, my restaurant got slammed by The Eater. I’m afraid no one will be in the audience, or worse, they’ll show up to watch the woman whose career is over because of a series of ridiculous events.” She took another deep breath, the force of this one shuddering through her entire body.
“I mean, Chicagoans can be so brutal sometimes. They can get such pleasure out of watching someone fail spectacularly. I have a feeling the whole thing will be awful and when you asked, I was afraid to tell you. I’m embarrassed to be the woman at the butt of a whole city’s joke. What if people toss cats or something?” Her eyes were big and rimmed with tears. She sniffed and her laugh came out as a hiccup. “Oh, God, I’m crying in front of a stranger. This might be more embarrassing than the cats.”
He was here to watch a woman whose career he had ruined. He wasn’t planning on throwing any cats, but he had planned on her failing spectacularly. His mom had questioned his review, Mike had challenged him to a bet and Rich had all but ordered him to watch the demo. He was here to watch her fail so he could be ri
ght.
What if my mom and Mike were right and I am turning into my father?
And now she was crying. Did women know crying was an unfair tactic?
Dan put his hand under her chin and lifted her face to inspect her. God, she was pretty. On most people, the hair would look ridiculous, but instead it deepened the brown of her eyes and brightened her skin. On her, the hair almost looked natural.
His role in her tears didn’t dampen Dan’s desire to take her out to dinner after the demo. He didn’t want to think about what the yearning said about his sanity or the journalistic ethics Mike was already questioning. Was he a sadist because he was unwilling to let her go?
Unless Tilly could pull a rabbit out of her chef’s hat, he gave her restaurant six months at the most. The doomsday prediction bothered him. Some critics loved to brag about the restaurants they’d brought down or tried to out-insult big-name chefs, both things Dan found disgusting. He gave honest reviews, wasn’t afraid to criticize a chef he believed was overhyped, but he’d rather talk about restaurants he loved. Any idiot could write a review of a restaurant they hated. It took training and practice to write an intelligent, positive, critical review that was more than “dude, the food was tasty so I ate it.”
Unfortunately, he had to accept the fact that his attendance at her demo was not far off the distasteful scale from the critics he generally dismissed.
Even with her failure of a career, he wanted to spend the evening with her. In a big city with lots of women, he had never met one he liked so much so soon. Cute, interesting, funny. If he told her who he was, she would probably respond with more tears. Besides not getting to spend the rest of the day with her, the truth would make her feel worse about her cooking demonstration. He couldn’t do that.
And, he rationalized, if he were here to honestly judge her skills, telling her now would affect her performance. Any opinion he formed of her ability would be tainted. He could make sure he won the bet, but that would ruin his chances of seeing Tilly again. Not even to mention it was a shady way to win.
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