Eat Your Heart Out: A Romance Charity Anthology

by Skye MacKinnon

  “Come,” he said.

  And she nearly did.

  Then he released her and stepped back, allowing the cool night air to take the place of his rock-hard body, and Kelsey’s brain started working again. She pulled in a stuttered breath, then turned to face him.

  “You have to stop this,” she said, only slightly meaning her words.

  “Stop?” he asked, confusion knitting his eyebrows together.

  She shook her head, flustered, still unable to think clearly. He was too near, too close for comfort. She started to turn away from him, but he slid his fingers around her wrist.

  “Venir. Je veux que tu essayes mon dessert.” He led her away from the barn, and every thought in her mind was a mix between yes, please and run, girl, run! They walked back to the main house and he pulled her into the kitchen, and the bright lights combined with the chaos of cooks and food preppers brought her back to the present and snapped her out of her lust-filled haze.

  Mostly.

  Jean-Luc motioned toward the dessert cups spread out on the large kitchen island and Kelsey stepped toward them. He stood behind her as she surveyed the deliciousness before her. Two-dozen tiny cups were filled with creamy filling and topped with fresh fruit—kiwi, strawberries, mandarin orange segments, blueberries—and covered in a glaze that made the dessert shine like it was an elegant figurine, not an edible indulgence. Gold flakes dusted each tiny tart, and a large chunk of dark chocolate stuck out of each sweet treat like the mast of a ship.

  Speaking of masts…

  One of them was pressed against her ass.

  She owed the crew a raise after this. None of her team paid her any attention as this sexy chef damn near seduced her right here in the middle of the busy kitchen, and she was thankful that she had yet to catch anyone’s questioning glances. They’d worked enough high-profile events to know how to keep their heads down, but Kelsey would surely hear about this later. Just because you pretended you didn’t see that A-Lister with his hands in the cookie jar, or that record producer with a woman on his lap that wasn’t his wife, didn’t mean you didn’t know it was happening.

  And, surely, one of them was privy to the situation going on right now between their boss and the French pastry chef with the accent that could melt butter and the erection that put many a French baguette to shame.

  Jean-Luc reached past her, dragging his finger through the leftover custard in a large metal bowl, then brought his finger to her lips. “Goûtez ceci,” he whispered in her ear.

  She opened her mouth and he slid his finger inside, coating her tongue with the sweetest vanilla custard she’d ever tasted. She closed her mouth around his finger and he moaned quietly in her ear. Kelsey’s eyes fluttered closed and she allowed herself this brief moment to flirt with the ultimate temptation, then she sucked his finger clean, released it, and turned slowly in the cage of his arms.

  His eyes heavily-lidded, desire a bright flame in his dark irises, he smiled slowly. “Bon?”

  She inhaled a deep breath, licked her lips, then placed her hands on his hard chest and pushed him away from her. “Yes. Very good.” She shook her head. “But this?” She motioned between the two of them. “Not bon.”

  He smirked, but before she could question what about this was so funny—she was smart enough to know when she flew way too close to the flame—she stepped away from him and hurried out of the kitchen, gasping for fresh air as soon as she reached the outside patio.

  Holy shit. If she allowed him to, that man could demolish everything she’d worked for with one flick of his accented tongue.

  Chapter 4

  The day of the Harrington wedding was one of those balmy, Southern California summer days, with the sun bright and warm, the sky an impossible shade of blue, and only a spattering of white fluffy clouds too small to block out any of the sun’s rays.

  But it wasn’t the seventy-nine degrees that had Kelsey sweating like a sinner in church.

  No, that would be too easy to solve. Less layers. A cool drink. A jump in a cold fucking bath of ice.

  No, her problem was much harder to solve. Jean-Luc Dumonde—French pastry chef extraordinaire, dark-haired sex god, and completely arrogant bastard—had inserted himself into her mind, grabbing ahold of every thought, and she’d spent the last few hours envisioning all the ways she wanted to fuck him.

  And, to be fair, there were a lot of ways she wanted to fuck him.

  So, on this day that should have been amazing—one of the biggest events of her career thus far—Kelsey was unfocused, hot, and… well, Kelsey was flustered.

  And horny.

  And it was practically impossible to concentrate on anything but the desperate hunger in her loins and the ache between her legs. And, because life wasn’t fair and men were assholes, Jean-Luc kept appearing everywhere she went.

  Literally. Everywhere.

  He was outside her room when she woke up this morning, as if right outside her window was the only place he could stretch before his morning run. And, good grief, that man in gray sweatpants? That shit should be illegal.

  Then, she’d happened upon him on her way to the far lawn this morning to check on the set-up of the reception chairs. What was the pastry chef doing over by the reception chairs?

  Hell if she knew.

  But Kelsey’s money was on: purposely torturing her. There just wasn’t another explanation for the way he continued to pop up everywhere she went, making her imagine him popping up in other ways.

  And now, as if life wasn’t cruel enough already, she had to go to the kitchen, which meant she would definitely run into the man she couldn’t stop thinking about.

  Kelsey’s jaw hit the floor as soon as she crossed the threshold into the rented estate’s large kitchen. It wasn’t the memory of her intimate moment with Jean-Luc last night that had her breath stalled in her throat; although, thinking back to that moment now, and the beautiful chef’s finger in her mouth was a welcome distraction from this.

  The kitchen was a complete disaster. Flour dusted every surface. Pots, pans, and baking utensils were strewn about everywhere. The entire room was in complete disarray. The money she would have to charge the Harringtons just to pay a crew to clean this place after the wedding made Kelsey’s stomach churn.

  French pop music blasted through the room from a speaker somewhere in the corner, and though Kelsey didn’t hate the melody—or the way Jean-Luc moved his hips while he worked, unaware that he was no longer alone in this hellscape—the volume was a bit much and she couldn’t think straight.

  But even that wasn’t the real problem, because frankly, she hadn’t been able to think straight since she met the sexy chef.

  On the large island in the center of the room, every last one of Kelsey’s nightmares had collaborated to create one giant, hideous monstrosity.

  That three-tiered pile of sadness could not possibly be the wedding cake. And a man that deliciously beautiful couldn’t possibly have created something so exactly the opposite.

  She breathed in deeply through her nose, assessing the scene before her, even as her mind began mentally scrolling through the rolodex of pastry chefs she knew in Los Angeles. How quickly could she get one of them out to the desert? How quickly could they make a wedding cake of this size?

  The icing was green. And not, like, sage or sea foam, or some other muted, wedding-appropriate variant of green. No, this was straight up Oscar-the-grouch-green, three tiers high. The shade actually hurt Kelsey, deeply.

  She cleared her throat and the handsome chef looked up at her, quickly flashing her a sexy-as-sin smile.

  But it was his cake that was the real sin, and Kelsey couldn’t get distracted by her ridiculous attraction to him. Eye on the prize, Kels.

  “Bonjour, Kelsey. Comment vas-tu aujourd'hui?”

  “Bonjour,” she replied curtly, too consumed by the sight before her to even try to figure out what he’d just asked. “What is that?” She pointed to the… cake. Could she even call it a cake?
Was the inside green too? She shivered at the thought.

  “Je ne comprends pas,” he said in that sexy way of his.

  Mmm. His mouth curled around each word like—

  No. Kelsey gave her head a little shake. She would not get swept away in this man’s sexy voice, his mouthwatering accent, or the way his dark eyes always seemed to have a straight connection to her core. She would ignore the way the memory of his finger in her mouth made her thighs press together.

  This was business, and she couldn’t mix business with pleasure.

  She pointed to the cake, searching her brain for the tiny bit of French she’d retained since middle school. She’d barely passed that class. She could say mushroom. Champignon. Cat. Chat. Black. Noir. But she couldn’t for the life of her remember how to say ‘what the fuck is that hideous monstrosity you call a cake?’.

  So she just waggled her finger at it and hoped for the best.

  “Le gâteau?” Jean-Luc asked, brows furrowed.

  She frowned, motioning to the cake again. “Green. Um…” She scanned her brain for the name. Verde? No, that was Spanish. Oh! “Verte! Verte!” she yelled excitedly.

  His eyes lit up and he nodded. “Oui, oui! Vert. Is… good?”

  Ignoring the way his mouth formed her native language with the sexy caress of his French accent, she shook her head. “No. Nooo,” she said, probably a little too harshly but they were down to mere hours until the wedding and this shit had to be fixed. And quick.

  Jean-Luc’s black as night eyebrows furrowed as he looked back and forth between Kelsey and the cake. “Tu n’aimes pas le gâteau?”

  Kelsey grimaced, shaking her head. Even though she wasn’t one-hundred percent sure of what he was asking, if it involved that pastry blunder on the table, the answer was no.

  His eyes narrowed. “Tu n’aimes pas le gâteau?” A bit of an edge had slipped into his tone.

  Kelsey hesitated this time, choosing not to answer him or give him any body language response as he assessed her, then assessed the cake, then he finally he brought his gaze back to her.

  “Vous, les Américains, êtes tous pareils. Rien n’est jamais assez bon pour toi. Tu n’aimes pas le gâteau? Bien. Ce gâteau est poubelle!” His voice rose as he shouted at her in a language she should have been able to pick up on but couldn’t. Because middle school was, like, a thousand years ago anyway, and living in Southern California meant she should have learned Spanish, not French. Her friends often made fun of her over this little fact, but even with a hot French chef shouting at her now, she still thought it was a really, really sexy language.

  Especially when sharpened with anger. Ugh. She really needed to get laid. Just one more day at this estate and she could head back to L.A. and hit up any number of her frequent flyers.

  “Ce vert est trop vert pour toi? bien!” He dragged his fingertips through the icing on the side of the cake and Kelsey gasped. There wasn’t enough time to create a whole new cake. If he did more than just wreck the hideous frosting? They’d be out one wedding cake and in a heap of trouble, with a pissed off client she couldn’t afford to piss off.

  She raised her hand in an attempt to surrender, or calm him down, or something. Anything. She should have kept her damn mouth shut about the cake. Were all French people so quick to fly off the handle? Or was it just this man? This alluring, fiery man with a temper almost as hot as he was.

  Kelsey breathed deeply. “Chef, please…”

  She just had to get through this wedding and pull it off without a hitch.

  A vomit-green, three-tiered hitch.

  “S'il vous plaît? Peut-être que vous devriez faire le gâteau, vous pensez que vous êtes tellement mieux à elle que je suis,” he continued angrily. “Tu veux faire le gâteau, Américaine? Peut-être que je vais reculer et vous me montrer la façon de faire un vrai gâteau, oui?”

  Kelsey’s pulse sped as he stepped around the table toward her, an angry set to his jaw and those midnight eyes boring into hers. He untied his apron, then pulled it off and dropped it to the floor, stalking toward her like a lion approaching its prey. His sleeves were rolled up to almost his elbows, exposing sinewy, muscular arms.

  Maybe from all that kneading.

  She had something he could knead.

  His white dress shirt was unbuttoned enough to show a sneak peek at his muscular chest, but that wasn’t what made her nearly lose her balance. She never wore heels when she worked, but she’d put them on for Jean-Luc today, to give back some of the teasing he’d been dishing out since they met yesterday morning. But, now, with the unsteady legs of a newborn deer, she regreted her decision immensely.

  Jean-Luc’s chef pants were snug in all the right places, taut against the thick thighs that matched his broad shoulders and muscular arms, and showcasing the massive cock she’d felt—and fantasized about for the past twenty-four hours.

  Is that a rolling pin in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me? She nearly laughed at her own ridiculous thought, but laughter was the last thing this man elicited from her. Lust. Appreciation. Carnal fucking desire.

  She should step away, leave the kitchen, hurry off to do something else, anything else, rather than get reamed by this man, but she found herself stuck in the intensity of his gaze.

  As he slowly stalked toward her, the anger was replaced with vivid, unadulterated lust. He stopped just a foot away from her, chest rising and falling heavily. “Préférez-vous me montrer comment faire correctement le gâteau, Kelsey? Ou devrions-nous simplement obtenir le fucking hors de nos systèmes?”

  Jesus, she could barely inhale a steady breath. Her cheeks and chest were hot, the summit of her legs even hotter. He could have just asked her to take out the fucking trash or drop to her knees and take him in her fucking mouth, and either way, his words were lost to her past the way his French accent formed the word fucking. His deep voice slipped down into her core, twisting her insides into a roiling fire of desire.

  She would not last much longer. Either Kelsey had to have him, or she’d have to stay away. There would be no in between.

  They stood silently, his chest rising and falling heavily and her insides heating in response to his dark gaze, then he took another step forward and Kelsey drew in a shaky breath. This was so very wrong, but something about Jean-Luc made her want to break

  Every.

  Single.

  Rule.

  Especially her self-imposed don’t fuck the staff rule.

  He licked his lips and his gaze fell to her chest, which now rose and fell in rhythm with his. “Nous avons dansé autour de ce désir, n’est-ce pas?” he reached out and gripped her chin, sending a tremor through her body at his firm, commanding touch. She only vaguely registered the fact that her face was now covered in green icing. “Tu réagis si facilement à mon toucher,” he whispered.

  “Mmm.” Kelsey hadn’t meant to make a sound, especially one that sounded remarkably like a sound she only made in the bedroom. Embarrassment flushed her cheeks, but then he rubbed his thumb over her bottom lip, his intense gaze zeroed in on her mouth as he bit down on his bottom lip, and her lips parted reflexively, and embarrassment was out the window as all the blood rushed south. Jean-Luc dipped his thumb into her mouth and she closed her lips around it, eyes fluttering as she sucked the sugary goodness off his finger. The frosting may have been hideous to look at, but the pronounced vanilla buttercream flavor was damn near sinful. Or maybe he was downright sinful.

  The chef dragged his dark eyes back up to meet hers, raising his eyebrows in question as he removed his thumb from her mouth.

  With a deep breath, Kelsey said the first thing that came to her mind. “Voulez vous coucher avec moi?”

  Jean-Luc’s lips twitched into a smirk and the hard set of his jaw relaxed, then he nodded, eyes bright with amusement. “Oui, Kelsey. C’est tout à fait le cas.”

  She didn’t know what that meant. Hell, she wasn’t even totally clear about what she’d said, but she knew it was something se
xy. And he’d just said yes to her question, which meant… they were about to do something sexy.

  Which was a terrible, terrible idea.

  The door opened and Kelsey jumped back, quickly putting as much space between her and the pastry chef as she possibly could. He smirked, then turned slowly to face whomever just interrupted them.

  The delivery man’s eyebrows crept up his forehead—probably because Kelsey was covered in frosting—but he quickly made his expression neutral as he asked, “Where do you want this stuff?”

  It was just another delivery in a long line of deliveries made this morning, but Kelsey’s cheeks warmed from embarrassment at the sight of him regardless. It didn’t matter who had just caught her teetering dangerously close to the danger zone, the fact was that someone had caught her. And sleeping with sexy chefs was not something she wanted to be known for in the event planning business.

  She smiled at the delivery guy and pretended she wasn’t weak from head to toe. Weak and wet.

  And desperate for this distraction.

  As she spoke with the delivery driver and instructed him on where to place the packages, she wiped at her face and throat with a paper towel. No matter where she turned or what she did, she could feel Jean-Luc’s gaze on her as if it was a physical touch. She caught him watching her out of the corner of her eye and instantly felt the soft touch of his fingers on her neck. He cleared his throat and she recalled the way tasting the frosting off his thumb nearly sent her over the edge just moments ago. On autopilot, she signed for the delivery, smiled at the delivery guy, then watched him leave.

  Steadying herself with a deep breath, she prepared herself to turn around and face the handsome chef, ready to tell him exactly how very strongly she felt about not sleeping with staff—and not allowing that hideous cake anywhere near the Harrington wedding, but his hands found her hips, and the heat of his body behind hers stopped all thoughts in her brain.

  Jean-Luc pressed against her and her eyes widened. His fingers tightened on her hips and her breath stuttered in her chest. He brought his lips to her throat and time stood still. “Lock the door,” he murmured against her skin, the heat of his breath dancing across her flesh and constricting her belly.