Bringing Home a Bachelor

by Karen Kendall

  Melinda sighed. “You’re not going to drop this, are you?” She could feel herself blushing.

  “How about ‘pretty’? Would that be so terrible? Can I call you ‘pretty,’ Mel?” His gray eyes were steady, serious behind the twinkle they held.

  She shifted her weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other.

  “Can I?”

  “Yes, Pete. You can call me that.” She fidgeted with her bracelet. “Thank you.”

  “Okay, Pretty Melinda.” He reached out and took her hand in his big, warm one. “Now, pretty-please, can we meet up for a drink after the party?”

  When he looked at her like that, when he stroked her palm with his thumb in that way and sent a shiver up her spine, he was irresistible. So much so that he could probably talk her into serving a jail sentence for him, despite the fact that she knew she’d just been professionally soothed and expertly charmed.

  “Yes, Pete.” Funny how his face lit up at those two words. “I’ll have a drink with you later—as long as you don’t give me a sales pitch on Playa Bella.”

  “Who, me?” Pete did his best to look innocent, but failed miserably.

  She had a feeling she was in for a long night. But not once did she admit that, in the face of Gutierrez’s lost business, the Playa Bella offer wasn’t entirely unappealing.

  14

  PETE SOON DISCOVERED that “meeting up” with Melinda to have that drink was complicated. First, he had to extricate himself from the return trip with Reynaldo in his Bentley.

  “What is that country saying, Pedro?” his boss mused. “Leave with the one you dance with?”

  He would make this difficult. Pete ran a finger around the inside of his collar. “Ha, ha!”

  “Ha, ha.” Reynaldo squinted from behind his fat Cuban cigar.

  “Uh, I believe it’s, ‘Dance with the one you brought,’ sir.”

  “And have we danced, Peter? Or should I ask—have you danced with those you should, this evening?”

  He meant Gareth Alston. Pete shuddered at a mental image of him and Alston twined in a tango. Never gonna happen. I’d as soon French-kiss a flamingo.

  “My dance card’s been very productive tonight, Mr. Reynaldo. I’ll follow up with Gary, in particular, this week.”

  “Gary, eh?” His boss chuckled and took a deep pull on the Cuban. “I’m delighted to hear it.”

  But I won’t pretend to be gay, you son of a bitch. He didn’t say the words aloud. It didn’t seem necessary, given his reasons for not riding back with the man. “So, I’ll see you Monday, then.”

  “You and your zipper, Pedro. Ah, to be young again…”

  Pete forced himself to give Reynaldo a purely male, conspiratorial wink, even though it didn’t feel right. It disgusted him, frankly. “Good night, sir.”

  “Good night, Señor Casanova.”

  Shoving aside his irritation at that dig, Pete hunted down Melinda and found himself heading back to Miami in her white bakery van, with the scent of sugar and vanilla in his nostrils and Scottie wedged behind them.

  “Isn’t this romantic?” Scottie quipped. “The moon, the stars, the double yellow lines…”

  Despite the very normal urge to stuff the little leprechaun into the nearest pot of gold, Pete had to chuckle.

  “Just the three of us, in perfect harmony,” Scottie sighed.

  Melinda cast him a speaking glance, but Scottie blithely ignored it. He was having too much fun.

  “There’s something so slick and sexy about a minivan, don’t you agree? And there’s room to rumble, if you know what I mean.”

  Pete stared out the windshield, refusing to egg him on.

  “Much better than, say, a cramped sports car. No contortions necessary, no accidental penetration by the gearshift—”

  Pete shuddered and clenched involuntarily.

  “Scottie,” said Mel, clearly outraged.

  “Well, it’s happened, I swear!”

  “I so do not want to hear about it.”

  “Not to me, you understand, but to a friend of a friend.”

  “Riiiiight,” Pete said.

  “It wasn’t me!”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So.” Scottie seemed to feel the need for a subject change. “Who was that handsome devil you were talking to?”

  Pete drew a blank. “Which handsome devil?”

  “That guy with the governor.”

  “Gareth Alston? The one in the awful purple tie?”

  Scottie nodded. “The gorgeous, violet Dolce & Gabbana tie.”

  Mel dug Pete in the ribs.

  “Right,” Pete said hastily. “That’s what I meant.”

  “So? Who is he? I like his style.”

  “Alston is Governor Vargas’s campaign manager.” Pete paused, guiltily wondering how he could spin this to his advantage. “Would you like to meet him?”

  “Oh, no. I have a boyfriend,” Scottie said, in tones that could only be described as gloomy.

  Still, Pete’s hopes were dashed.

  “Scottie, how many deliveries do we have tomorrow?” Mel asked, in the ensuing silence.

  “Four, I think. Oh, and did I tell you that Mrs. Temperley called to say that Stanley loved his golf course cake?”

  “Great,” Mel said. “So, can you do the deliveries tomorrow? Or do I need to call Roberto?”

  “No, I can do them.”

  “Thanks.”

  “De nada, Mistress Mel.”

  They dropped off Scottie at his Brickell high-rise and headed to The Blue Martini, a popular upscale bar in the area, where they sat at the curved bar bathed in blue light and ordered two of the signature martinis, which arrived with glow sticks in them.

  Mel’s dark hair glinted in the deep azure glow of the place, and her eyes seemed larger and more mysterious. She looked to Pete like a voluptuous 1950s film star, and he couldn’t get enough of her full lips as they molded against the rim of her glass.

  He remembered them molded against him as she’d taken him into her mouth, and an electric current shot through him, eddying out at his groin. She truly seemed to have no idea how sexy she was, as she toyed with the glow stick in her drink.

  “So tell me, Mel,” he said. “How did you get into the cake business?”

  She lifted a shoulder. “I always loved to bake as a kid—cookies, cupcakes, pies.”

  “Did you learn from your mom?”

  “My mom? No. She’s never really baked.”

  Pete frowned. “But I remember those amazing oatmeal-raisin cookies she used to make.”

  Mel poked her tongue into her cheek. “She didn’t make those. Our maid, Miss Alfie, did. You remember her?”

  “Yeah, I do…” Pete remembered a large lady who always wore white T-shirts under sleeveless cotton dresses. She had skin the color of milk chocolate, blunt features and kind eyes. “She was always very patient with us kids. Made us wash our hands a lot.”

  Mel smiled. “I’m still in touch with Miss Alfie, even though she hasn’t worked for my parents in years. I adore her.”

  “So you learned to bake from her?”

  Melinda nodded. “I used to ask her all kinds of questions, like why a glop of cookie dough would spread out flat in the oven. Or what made dough rise. Or why cakes were round or square but not triangular. She’d always do her best to answer. Never shooed me away.” She smiled.

  “She’d let me ‘help,’ too. Taught me how to crack an egg, even though I made a lot of messes for her to clean up.” Mel took a sip of her martini and looked at him.

  “I still can’t crack one right. I usually end up with bits of shell in my scrambled eggs,” he said ruefully. “I’m kitchen-challenged. I can’t even make microwave popcorn without burning it.”

  Mel laughed. “But you can take apart a car engine?”

  “Yes, but that’s different. I can put one back together, too.”

  She shook her head. “I remember you and Mark working on that old Impala.”

  He
nodded. “The green machine.” He’d slept in the backseat of that car on more nights than he cared to remember, escaping the ugly confrontations between his father and brother—and his brother’s need to take out his helpless rage on Pete afterward. Dad never laid a finger on their mother, but Brent had been a big kid with an inability to keep his mouth shut—and had taken a lot of physical punishment for it. Pete had learned at a very early age to either make nice or disappear when that wasn’t possible.

  “You loved that car.”

  “Yeah, I did. It was my escape chute back then.”

  “Escape from what?”

  “Oh, you know. Stuff.” Pete shifted the subject away from himself. “So back to cakes. How do you—I don’t know the right word for it—construct? How do you build one like the governor’s cake tonight? Because that wasn’t just baking—it was architecture and landscaping. The thing was a work of art. You didn’t just pour it into a mold and pop it out on a tray.”

  “I have some shortcuts and tools,” Mel admitted.

  “Such as?”

  “Well, for example I use a ready-made cake board for the base. And when I stack the different levels, I use ready-made bases, too. And the columns—those are molded plastic. I order them out of a catalogue.”

  “But the trees, the bushes and flowers, the tiny people?”

  “A lot of that I mold out of sugar-paste or marzipan, but you can order some ready-made things, too.”

  “Nazi-what?”

  Mel laughed. “M-a-r-z-i-p-a-n. Marzipan. It’s made out of almond paste and sugar.”

  “Almond paste. Right.” Pete wrinkled his nose. “Sounds weird.”

  “It’s not weird. It’s delicious.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. So were you an art major?”

  “No. Business.”

  “Then how’d you learn to sculpt things like that?”

  “You get a lot of practice in culinary school,” she said wryly. “And you also have to sample everything you make, so your education isn’t helpful to your figure.”

  Pete wasn’t about to let the conversation go down that path again. “I love your figure. I’ve been dreaming about it, if you want to know the truth.”

  Even in the eerie blue lighting, he could see Mel blush. She took a quick sip of her martini.

  “You’re hot, Melinda Edgeworth. There—is that an acceptable word?”

  The blush intensified.

  “Like a dark-haired, dark-eyed Marilyn Monroe.”

  She looked up and met his gaze, her eyes faintly disbelieving but questioning, too.

  Pete nodded.

  After another martini, her disbelief dissipated somewhat, and a smile tried to break free around the curve of her lips. He was getting through to her. Pete leaned forward, into her space.

  “I want to cover you in whipped cream and lick it off,” he whispered. “Or chocolate syrup. Maybe both.”

  She squirmed in her seat and he used her reaction to his advantage. “I’d like to eat your cupcake, sweetheart.”

  “Pete!”

  “In fact, I think we should finish our drinks and stop at a mini-mart for some Insta-Wip on the way back to your place.”

  Mel recoiled. “Absolutely not,” she said, as his face fell in disappointment.

  She poked him. “If you’re going to cover me in whipped cream, it’s not going to be a disgusting fake substitute. It’s going to be the real thing. With a little sugar and vanilla added.”

  He laughed. “I guess you don’t believe in store-bought chocolate syrup, either?”

  She shook her head. “Won’t touch it. Mine is much better.”

  “Can we make it naked?”

  She tilted her head and considered him for a moment. “Maybe.”

  “Or better yet, you could wear an apron and nothing else?”

  “And you can wear my toque.”

  “Your what?”

  “Chef’s hat.”

  “You have one?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then what are we waiting for?” Pete slid off his barstool and stood up.

  “It would be a good thing to pay for our drinks,” Melinda reminded him, reaching into her purse.

  “Oh, right…” Pete frowned at her as he dug for his wallet. “What do you think you’re doing? You’re not paying.”

  “Well, I didn’t want to just assume that—”

  “Assume,” Pete said firmly. “You will never pick up a tab if you’re out with me. Not once. Got it?”

  “Well—”

  “You’re too pretty to pay.” He winked at her. “How’s that for chauvinistic? Huh? See, I can be traditional, too.”

  Mel dimpled.

  “Now, let’s go find the dairy section in the nearest grocery store. Because, damn, woman! You’ve done it to me again.”

  Mel looked down at the all-too-familiar tent in his pants and pursed her lips playfully. “Do you have this problem with all the girls?”

  He shook his head and answered honestly. “No. Only with you, Melinda. Only with you.”

  15

  TWO MARTINIS LATER, they stood in Mel’s kitchen. Pete found that vodka was very helpful in forgetting guilt. It did a great job of anesthetizing his conscience and making him forget that not only did he have a secret “deal” with Jocelyn, but an assignment to manipulate Mel on behalf of his boss.

  Here he was, in her kitchen, ogling her mostly naked body.

  “What would Grandma say?” Mel asked.

  She’d put on for Pete one of that dearly departed lady’s vintage aprons, a white-lace thong and a pair of high heels that could only be described as slutty. Pete loved them.

  “Let’s leave Grandma out of this picture,” he suggested, his mouth going dry at the view as Melinda bent to retrieve her electric mixer from a cabinet.

  Evidently because her father’s sister hadn’t wanted them, Mel had inherited a box of her grandmother’s table linens and aprons, which she treasured and kept starched and ironed for use at dinner parties. Not that she threw many.

  But when she did, she informed Pete, she had them the old-fashioned way, handing out tiny embroidered cocktail napkins with the drinks; using silver candelabra and the rest of Grandma’s linens.

  The apron she wore now was made of blue gingham with a white cotton panel inset in front, which was dotted with big daisies. It had wide blue gingham straps that slipped over the shoulders, Mel’s spectacular breasts bare and showcased between them. The apron strings, also of gingham, tied in a bow at the back, right over her lacy little thong and cheeky cheeks. Pete wanted to take a bite out of one. He was downright slobbering and not ashamed to admit it.

  Then there were the shoes: strappy red-patent leather sandals, sky-high, that made her legs look twice as long and triggered all kinds of dirty fantasies in him.

  “Okay, but poor little Mami is truly shocked. She’ll never recover from seeing me like this.”

  Pete shook his head. He’d just made Mami’s acquaintance, kneeling to let Her Highness sniff him from toes to crotch. She’d deigned to accept a tiny, pink-frosted doughnut from Mel—one with colored sprinkles, no less. The dog had a little yellow-canopied bed in the living room, with tiny yellow sheets and pillows.

  Since Mami, tucked into a corner, had focused all nine of her pounds on gnawing a designer bone of some kind, Pete doubted any lasting damage to her psyche. “She’s seen you come out of the shower before, right?”

  “Yes, but that’s different.”

  “Not to a dog, it’s not. I promise.”

  “You’re probably right…so why do I feel like the corruptor of canine youth and innocence?”

  “You’re just self-conscious. How old is she?” Pete asked.

  “Seven.”

  “Then in dog years, Mami is forty-nine. She’s been around the block a few times. She’s not shocked.”

  Melinda lived in a small townhome in Coconut Grove, a once funky/artsy section of Miami that was becoming gentrified despite
resistance. She’d explained that she’d chosen the place for its gourmet kitchen, and had promptly installed high-end double ovens.

  She’d painted her walls a soft, warm peach color that reminded him of a woman’s skin in the evening glow of a fireplace. A sofa and love seat were upholstered in a sand color reminiscent of the beach, and held throw pillows in soft pastels.

  Photos dotted a side table under a painting of a seaside village. Pete had looked away quickly from the one of Melinda’s parents. He didn’t want to think about her mother, especially not at the moment.

  “It must be the martinis because I can’t believe I’m actually doing this,” Mel said, tossing her hair over her naked shoulder and slipping first one beater, then the other, into their slots. Pete envied them, which was a little sick, but he couldn’t help it.

  “Why?” He stepped up behind her and cupped her bottom, stroking the smooth, warm skin revealed on either side of the thong. He squeezed it, then snugged his chin over her shoulder and got an intimate view of her bare breasts, which he took into his hands next. They filled his palms and spilled over, their shape and weight making him crazy; making him want to rip off her thong and bend her over the counter right then and there.

  “Because I normally hide my body. I don’t tart up and display it.”

  “And that’s a damned shame, if you ask me.” He himself wore nothing but a pair of boxers, and they weren’t doing much to contain him. He pressed himself into her backside, groaning with the need to be inside her.

  “I didn’t.” But Mel grinned as she plugged in her electric mixer and turned to kiss him over her shoulder. He pressed harder, and she shook it at him. “Wait for it, perv boy. Wait for it…”

  Then she plunged the beaters into a steel bowl full of cream. He didn’t know why he found the sight erotic, but he did.

  “I can’t,” Pete told her.

  She pushed back against him and wiggled, teasing him. “You don’t have a choice.” Then she turned on the mixer.

  The noise should have been a mood-killer, but the small engine just served to remind him how hot his own was running, and as he stood behind her, playing with her breasts and watching the cream in the bowl slowly thicken, he imagined just what he’d do with it when it was ready.