“Meier does mean dairy.” He smiled wryly at her. “It’s a sad fact that not a single person in my family deals with cows anymore. My great-grandfather was a dairyman in Germany when he decided to move to the States. My family ran a small dairy farm until my father had the good fortune to marry a woman with money. He bought out the neighboring farms, sometimes through hostile takeovers worthy of a Hollywood movie, until he had enough head of cattle to stop selling his milk to distributors and cheese makers and to start making his own product.”
To Dan Sr., food was a product. No love for the food, no heart, went into Meier cheese and dairy products. He could have as easily started a lumber company or a coal mine. His father had seen the future painted in cow shit on some whitewashed dairy wall and stepped into it until his entire world was colored brown.
“He foresaw Americans drinking less milk and bet my mother’s money on dairy products. Cheese, yogurt, sour cream, etc.” He shrugged. He could never decide if his father had been a genius or lucky. “He was right and it wasn’t long before a Meier cheese sandwich was in every little kid’s lunch box.”
“And your sister worked for your father.”
“More than worked for him, she’s been running the company for at least five years.” Dan couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice at the injustice of it all. Beth was wonderful for Meier Dairy. She was as firm as their father in business negotiations, but had a better vision for the future. Dan Sr. was still stuck in a world with only agribusiness; he couldn’t see opportunity in the new world of farmer’s markets and organic everything. “But he doesn’t want to pass the family farm, such as it is, on to his daughter. He wants me to work for him. Has for years.”
Beth slaved away for the man, even though every year Dan Sr. called his son and asked him if he was ready to take over. Every year Dan told his father to pass the company on to Beth and every year his father said the business needed a man’s hand.
Before he had given up on the company forever, Dan had wanted nothing more than to run Meier Dairy. He had dreamed of being a part of steering his heritage into the future. He might still be interested in working for the family company, so long as his father wasn’t breathing down his neck. It had occurred to Dan, if not to Beth, that the real reason their father wanted Dan to work for the company was not because he believed the company should be passed down the male line, but it was Dan Sr.’s excuse to keep his son where he felt he could control him.
“Why didn’t you go work for your father?”
“You think I should?” he asked, surprised.
“Not now. You have a career you enjoy. I mean, after college, before you had made a name for yourself.”
In a tiny apartment, before he’d either made money writing or reached the age of maturity for his trust fund, when he’d been eating ramen noodles for every meal so he would have enough money to pay for dinner at Chicago’s finest restaurants for his articles, he’d thought about it. For about one minute. He was poor and alternating between feast and famine, but his father no longer loomed over him.
“My father’s a hard man to please. He’s hard on Beth and harder on me. My senior year of high school, I snapped and decided I didn’t care anymore.”
“What happened?”
Dan’s hands gripped the steering wheel tightly, his knuckles turning white, as he thought about the day he told his father to go screw himself. He hoped Beth would be able to look back on her break with the family more calmly than he ever could.
“It seems so minor now, but I was seventeen years old when it happened. My dad wanted me to go to Iowa for college. They have the best wrestling program in the Big Ten, if not the country. I didn’t make it. I did, however, get a scholarship for wrestling at Northwestern, which has a decent program and, more importantly to me, has a school of journalism. Instead of being proud at my acceptance into Medill and a scholarship, my father told me how disappointed he was because I didn’t have what it took to be a Hawkeye.”
Tilly’s hand was warm as she squeezed his leg. Dan’s hands relaxed on the wheel. “I told him he could wed and bed a Hawkeye himself if it mattered that much to him, but I didn’t care any longer.” Actually, he’d said something more foul, but he wasn’t going to tell Tilly that.
“I’m sorry,” she said simply, comfort and concern in her tone and in the pressure of her hand on his leg. “I would never want my family to fail me.”
Dan lifted Tilly’s hand and kissed it, before placing it back on his knee. “What’s worse is that the way I wrestled in college would have easily gotten me a scholarship to Iowa. Without my father pointing out my every last fault, I wrestled because I enjoyed it and I was damn good at it. But I wasn’t wrestling for Iowa and he never came to a single one of my matches.”
Dan exited the freeway and followed the road to the Ravinia Festival parking lot among all the other cars of people with picnic baskets excited to sit on the lawn and listen to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. As he looked to his right before turning, he saw a self-satisfied, Cheshire-cat grin on Tilly’s face.
“You look like a cat in the cream.”
“When we met at the Taste, I thought you had to be a wrestler. You looked—look—so much like Midwestern-farm-boy goodness. With your build...” Short is what she meant, wrestlers were on the shorter side of the athlete scale. “...and rolling, confident gait, I decided you had to be a wrestler.”
“I still have my singlet,” he said, waggling his eyebrows. “We can play dress-up and I can wrestle you to the ground.”
“Probably not until your sister leaves.”
“We can play dress-up at your house and I can seduce the hot chef out of her chef’s uniform. We can probably find a naughty chef’s uniform on the internet if we search hard enough. A chef’s jacket and those red polka-dot undies would be costume enough for me,” he said, gratified when she blushed.
The car bumped along the parking lot and Dan found a spot.
“Will your dad try to talk your sister into coming back to Meier Dairy?”
“No more discussion of my family and their upcoming implosion while we’re here. Let’s enjoy the music.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
DAN AND TILLY carried their baskets through the gates and onto the lawn, where they found a place for their blanket between a group of retirees with an extravagant picnic—the full Ravinia spread—and a group of college students with what smelled like Harold’s Chicken Shack. The older group had set roasted chicken, ham, salads and a tier of cupcakes on their rollup table in a bag while they toasted someone’s birthday with champagne in flutes.
Dan laughed as he looked from the retirees to the college students with their greasy sacks of fried chicken, fries and white bread, all covered in sweet barbecue sauce. “I think between these two is right where we belong.”
The smaller basket held plates, napkins, cups, a heavy loaf of crusty bread, a bottle of cava wrapped in an ice pack and towels to keep it chilled, and one bottle of sherry. The second basket was brimming with small containers filled with many different kinds of food.
“Tapas,” Dan explained as he placed container after container on the blanket. “Tangerine-marinated olives and Romesco sauce.” Two more containers were added to the blanket. “Bacalao hash and marinated sardines. Tortilla, cantaloupe wrapped in Serrano ham, dates stuffed with Marcona almonds and, lastly...” Dan pulled the last container out of the basket and set it on the blanket. “...a selection of Spanish cheese and chorizo.”
“I’m going to be so full I’ll sleep through the concert.”
“You packed me delicious lunches every day for two weeks, the least I could do was plan a picnic. Besides,” he said, popping a date into his mouth. “I have a hot chef to impress. Here.” He speared a piece of juicy, orange cantaloupe wrapped in the salty cured ham and offered it to her. “I won’t bother you if you sleep through Brahms, but I’m waking you up for Beethoven.”
Tilly closed her eyes as she edged the cantaloupe off
the fork with her tongue and teeth. She chewed, pure bliss on her face, and Dan desperately wished his sister hadn’t called. Standing in his pantry, he could have put that expression on her face. Had dreamed of putting that expression on her face.
The strategic part of him knew sex too early would be a bad idea. Tilly was already skittish about their relationship and she wasn’t the type to believe sex cemented them together. She was more likely to see it as a ploy to win her trust. The strategic part of him was relieved his sister had called and provided an excuse to break apart. The rest of him needed release.
Loud laughter came from the retirees. They’d drunk too much champagne for four in the afternoon and were telling dirty jokes. The college students who had previously been looking longingly at the cupcakes were now a part of the rowdy crowd and providing their own jokes in exchange for glasses of champagne.
“Scoot closer to me and we can talk a little more privately while we finish our dinner.”
Tilly crawled on the blanket over to Dan and he put his arms around her. They sat silently, the noises of other symphony goers in the background as they fed each other bits and bites of tapas.
Warm from the sherry and the sun, Dan asked the question he had been pondering since brunch. “You said your grandmother left you money to open the restaurant when she died. Where did it come from?”
Her hair brushed against his bare biceps, stirring the warmth from his stomach to his toes as she lifted her puzzled face up to his.
“It’s a personal question, I know, but opening a restaurant is an expensive endeavor and I don’t imagine Healthy Food made your grandparents wealthy.”
“You don’t know?” Tilly asked softly, her brows still furrowed. “Everyone knows.”
“Knows what?”
“Twenty-two years ago, the driver of a brewing-company truck was drunk when he slammed into the back of my dad, grandfather and brother on the Kennedy.” Her voice was flat and her body tense against him as she talked. “They were coming home from Leon’s hockey game.”
Dan remembered. Not the accident, though it had probably made the news in Wisconsin, but the fallout. The driver had a history of DWIs and had still managed to renew his license after a hefty bribe made by the trucking company. Years later, Dan’s first year of college, the scandal was still creeping up the political hierarchy until several key state government employees were resigning in handcuffs. The Mileks weren’t the only family struck by tragedy as a result of the bribe scheme. A family in Wisconsin lost all six of their children in another horrible accident. Pundits and writers could joke about corruption in the great state of Illinois, but those involved had cost a family the lives of their children and the Mileks nearly half their family.
“Babunia never touched a penny of the insurance money. ‘Blood money,’ she called it. She set it aside for each one of her grandchildren to use so we could live a life Leon never could. She wanted us to live our dreams. Babka is my dream.”
Dan kissed the top of Tilly’s silky hair while her story flooded over him and with it came the surging realization that he’d made a grievous error. For him, the review had been a mild release after his mother’s terrible birthday dinner and the fiasco that passed for family bonding to the Meiers. So what if he was supposed to visit a restaurant at least three times before he wrote anything? One review, one restaurant, in the course of his career was nothing. A blip, soon to be buried amid the other content on CarpeChicago.
Babka was Tilly’s life and her connection to her grandmother, while also being a legacy for three lost family members. He’d made that legacy the laughingstock of Chicago and, when she’d questioned him about it, had given her some stupid lecture on separating business and personal. In her professionalism, she’d never once questioned the fact of the negative review, only that he’d written the review after eating at Babka once, and on a night that was clearly out of the ordinary.
In response, Dan had applied a lesson learned from eighteen years living under his father’s roof. Instead of admitting he was wrong and accepting the fallout, Dan had tried to manipulate Tilly’s emotions until she was willing to risk a relationship without his having to face his culpability. He’d had the ability to help fix the damage he’d caused and he’d let his experience with his father control his actions, even as he pretended to be free of the man.
He’d marveled at the generosity of women when wondering how Shane and his inane humor had a girlfriend—but why was Tilly even sitting next to him? She couldn’t have forgiven him, because he’d been too stupid to notice he’d done anything that needed forgiveness and too selfish to apologize even if he had noticed. He’d credited her willingness to see him again to his smile and charm, but that was bullshit. Their connection went deeper than charm. Their strengths complemented each other and they understood each other’s passions, but was that enough for her to share more than a meal with him?
At least he hoped she’d said yes to the date because of an emotional link binding the two of them together. When he’d asked her on a date, he’d been afraid she’d say no. Now he had no idea why she said yes. If her presence on his blanket, drinking his sherry, was due to his successful manipulations rather than an actual connection she felt for him, he would never forgive himself.
He had to fix the mistake he had made with the review. The bullshit he had been telling himself about the power of a reviewer’s voice being deadened by a correction was just that—bullshit. He wasn’t ten years old and needing his father’s approval anymore. Tilly’s good opinion was worth far more, if he was lucky enough to keep it.
Whether or not she forgave him, or even acknowledged his existence, he owed her the power of his voice to get people back in her restaurant. Tilly didn’t deserve a corrected review because of her story, but because he’d violated all the rules of critiquing he’d previously held dear. Chicago wanted to eat in her restaurant. All they needed was a push.
He wasn’t God or the fates, but he was a big name in the food business. The Eater could drive people to an unknown restaurant or dissuade people from a well-known one. His words, written in anger at the situation and not even at Tilly, had extended a tragedy in her life. Authenticity of The Eater or not, Dan had a moral obligation to repair the damage he’d done.
“I’m sorry,” Dan whispered, though the powerful stringed opening of Brahms’s “Hungarian Dance Number 5” drowned out his words.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
DAN PULLED HIS car into a space in front of Tilly’s apartment building and she stirred slightly in her sleep. He got out of the car and walked around to open the passenger door.
“Wake up, sleepyhead,” he said, unbuckling her seat belt.
“Are we back already?” She yawned and stretched.
“Already?”
Tilly had fallen asleep the instant they pulled out of the parking lot, her head flopped over against the window and soft snores coming from her mouth. With the traffic from Ravinia, she had been asleep for almost an hour.
She rubbed her eyes. “I love sleeping in the car.” She laughed softly. “I’m like a baby, the slightest bit of movement and I’m out like a light.”
He reached down and scooped Tilly up into his arms, swinging her out of the car and slamming the door behind them with his foot. “I will drive you around Chicago every night so you can fall asleep. I won’t even wake you up when we get home.” He spoke the words as if they were living together, as if saying such things could make them true. “And I’ll carry you to bed. Now, where are your keys? I have to get back to my sister but I’ll provide door-to-bed service for you.”
“Don’t be silly.” She squirmed and Dan let her down. She stuck her key in the door and turned to face him. “Thank you for everything today. I had a wonderful time.”
“We’re not saying goodbye yet. I said door-to-bed service and, even if you don’t take me up on that, I’d rather not kiss you on the stoop.”
Her smile was answer enough.
* * *
DAN TOOK HER HAND as he followed her up the stairs to her apartment. His thumb traced small circles on her palm and anticipation shivered up her arm. The desire she felt pushed away the last of her sleepiness. She fumbled with her key in the lock, distracted by Dan’s hand, which was burning her skin as he traced a line up her arm to her neck.
“Blue hair makes your skin glow and I think of every sandy beach that ever warmed my skin and cool ocean wave I’ve ever wanted to plunge myself into,” he whispered against her neck before lightly kissing the sensitive area beneath her ear. Tilly twitched with a burst of sensation and the lock popped open. Dan reached around, his body hard against her, and opened the door. As soon as the door shut behind them, Dan’s mouth came down on Tilly’s, awakening a hunger she’d previously associated only with food.
His lips were soft and still tasted subtly of cinnamon and sherry, but there was nothing soft about the kiss. His body molded to her, one arm around her waist, the other holding her face as though she might escape at any moment. She slid her hands along the smooth skin of his abdomen under his shirt and around to the strength of his back. She deepened the kiss, exploring the ridges of his teeth with her tongue and pushing her hips against his, his desire for her unmistakable.
“Tilly...” He pulled his mouth away from hers, his eyes half-closed with desire. “How did I manage to find you in the crowds at the Taste?”
Like a bucket of ice water, the reference jolted her back to reality. Wine, good food, sun and beautiful music had lulled her into a world where he was just Dan Meier, not also The Eater. She stepped back. “I’m sorry. I can’t do this.”
Heavens, but she wanted to.
He reached for her, his face stricken. “I can fix the review.”
She stepped away from temptation and the fantasyland their relationship existed in to put her hand on the door. “It’s too late. Even if you write a new review, I’ll always wonder—did you fix it because you wanted to or because you wanted me?”
Reservations for Two Page 17