Authors: Tara McTiernan
“They are,” Bianca agreed and then turned to Kate. “So, darling. You start on Monday at eight-thirty. Can you do that?”
“Oh, Bianca?” Kate said, her face wobbling with emotion. “How can I ever thank you enough? You’re so good to me. I just…I’m sure? I’ll find someone for the office? Oh, no! I’m supposed to go visit my brother next week.”
Bianca wanted to scream. Kate drove her to her wits end. But a girl had to do what a girl had to do to get a man, and Kate was her albatross, the price Bianca had to pay to have Grant. She couldn't have Kate spending the majority of her time with her husband and knowing exactly what he was doing all of the time. With this job taking Kate out of the office every day, it would make Grant's weekday mornings a mystery and subject to misinterpretation and, with Bianca's careful efforts, suspicion.
“I’ll tell you what,” Bianca said. “I’ll call Pastor Grimes and see what we can work out for next week and you can start the week after. They have a temporary person filling in right now; what’s one more week?”
"Thank you so much? I can't wait!"
Bianca smiled at Kate, eyes narrowing with pleasure. She couldn't wait either.
Chardonnay
Lucie held the restaurant's white hand-towel under the running tap until the water ran warm, squeezed out the extra moisture, and then used it to wipe the back of her neck, trying to take off the smear of chocolate she'd missed there. Her face was still rosy with embarrassment and lingering passion that made her skin feel hypersensitive to even her own touch. As she looked in the mirror at her neck, she caught herself smiling involuntarily, thinking of Ryan. Afternoon delight with melted chocolate. What was next? Feeding each other blindfolded and private strip-routines?
It had started innocently, or not so innocently, enough. Not having enough refrigerator space, she had asked Erin yesterday to keep a couple of chocolate mousse cakes in her apartment's refrigerator for a birthday party Lucie would be catering the next night. When she'd called that morning to discuss Erin's marketing efforts - that was the role they'd finally settled on -she'd jokingly asked about the cakes.
"So, how are my cakes doing? Do they miss me? Send them my love and kisses. Oh, and thanks again for keeping them. Our fridge is bursting."
"Well..." Erin said, whining a little and dragging the word out.
Lucie felt a chill go through her. Those two large cakes had taken almost an entire afternoon to bake and assemble with their perfectly-made chocolate curls and the cakes seven layers each, each layer separated by whipped chocolate mousse. In addition to the effort, the chocolate was expensive Swiss, not Hershey's. She took a deep breath and asked, "What? What happened?"
"Um, see, I had a little party last night. Taylor and Savannah came over? And I need to make room for our leftover Chinese. So I put the cakes on the counter. Just for the night. But...they're kind of listing to side now and...some of the curly's? They're melty, kind of crumpled looking?"
Lucie blew out the air she'd been holding in her lungs, wanting to moan with misery but stopping herself. Erin would take it badly if there was even a hint of criticism in Lucie's response. "Oh. Really? Okay. I'll stop by and look at them and see if I can fix them."
Of course, they were destroyed. Erin's warm kitchen had melted not only the chocolate curls, but the mousse that required refrigeration had liquefied and puddled on the plates on which the once-picture-perfect cakes had perched, each cake looking shrunken and lumpy. Lucie had simply taken the cakes away after they discussed Erin's idea for Facebook ads, pretending she would fix them at home.
After throwing the cakes out in a public garbage can outside of the grocery store where she went to get more ingredients, Lucie went home to start from scratch, worried about her menu now as she had planned to spend the afternoon preparing the soup and appetizers. Also, she had unreturned calls piling up in her voicemail, voices ringing with urgency. Even if she rushed, she would be behind.
Another wrench in the works was that Ryan was home, fresh out of his makeshift darkroom he'd fashioned out of the walk-in coat closet and anxious to see her. They had hoped to grab an hour to catch up and have a little time together before she left for cocktails with the girls, a break she’d been looking forward to and had considered cancelling in light of everything, but decided against as Chelsea had made a point of taking Lucie’s suggestion of Café Luna for their meeting place.
Things had been crazy-busy ever since her father set her up with free ads in all five of the local magazines and newspapers his company published. The truth was that she suddenly had more work than she had time for and she needed to hire someone, someone other than her step-sister, who made more messes than she fixed. It was more than the incident with the cakes – Erin was actually driving away business rather than bringing it in. In addition to coming up with expensive marketing campaigns that strained even Lucie’s enlarged budget, she was “helping” with customer support and, as usual, bringing her own special mix of hyper-personal enthusiasm and stormy peevishness into her efforts. And every time Lucie felt pushed to the edge, ready to let Erin go, Erin would apologize abjectly and promise to improve.
Lucie closed the front door, put down her bags with her ingredients and one large tote containing her two chocolate-smeared platters on the floor and leaned her head against the wall for a moment, trying to marshal some energy for the tasks ahead. The sound of Ryan typing on his laptop came from the dining room for a moment and then the soft chattering of keys came to a stop. “Hey, you,” he called.
“Oh,” she moaned, eyes closed, forehead pushing harder against the textured plaster. “Je suis tres fatigue…”
She heard him push his chair away from the table, the legs scraping against the wood. “What…okay, you’re going to have to translate.”
“I don’t know what to do,” she said, pushing away from the wall and picking up her bags before turning to face him. He crossed the living room to her and she saw that he had dressed for her, wearing her favorite shirt, a forest green button-down that flattered his hazel eyes and tidied up his usually shaggy appearance via its neatly pressed nature. “It’s Erin. Again. She…you’re not going to believe this, but she took the cakes out of her fridge, left them out overnight. After I told her they
had
to be refrigerated. It’s like her hearing doesn’t work.”
Coming to a stop in front of her, he shook his head and said, “She doesn’t listen, that’s what it is. What are you going to do? Can I help?”
She looked at him afresh, considering. He could help, at least make it possible for her to get all the dishes made, if he did the prep work to get the ingredients ready. But he already worked so hard, having taken on more time at the bar due to lack of photography work. This was supposed to be his one afternoon off. “No. I can’t ask you. You already work all the time. I’ll figure it out.”
He put his hands on her shoulders. “Yes, you can ask me. You work all the time too lately. And besides, I didn’t want to intimidate you or anything, but I am a master prep chef,” he said, a smile creeping onto his face. “You should see me slice and dice. I’m a machine, I tell you. I will rock your world.”
A little snort of laughter puffed out of her nose. “What would I do without you. Vou etes fou!”
“That’s right, keep talking in French. It will get you everywhere. And I mean everywhere,” he said, wiggling his eyebrows at her.
They decided to start with the soup as she had to make the stock and let it simmer. Then they made the miniature mushroom and leek beggar’s purses that the hostess for the next night's birthday party had requested after hearing raves about them from her friend, a woman in Westport who’d hired Lucie for a dinner party. Once the shrimp were cooked, peeled, and de-veined for her special shrimp cocktail with its trio of secret-recipe dipping sauces, Lucie put Ryan to work chopping the chocolate that would be melted for the cakes. That was when things had gotten frisky.
Ryan had been serious with his assignments up until then, working hard as he focused on chopping, slicing, and dicing the ingredients to Lucie’s specifications, but when pieces of chocolate started flying around on the counter as they were chopped off from the larger bar by his knife, Lucie couldn’t resist teasing him a little. “Quel desastre!” she said, putting her hands on her hips and shaking her head.
He looked up at her, his face crumpled with embarrassment. “I know. I can’t stop the pieces from flying around.”
She laughed and said, “I had the same problem once. Here, let me show you.” She took the large chef's knife from him and demonstrated. "It's important to press down firmly and evenly on the chocolate, rather than just chopping hard. You begin at the corner, see? Angle the knife slightly outward. Kind of like whittling?"
He came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her, putting his hands on hers. "Like this?" he asked and kissed her neck, his tongue hot and wet and making a thrill zip down her spine.
"Oh, yeah...like that," she said, her breath stopping and starting.
Using her hands, he put down the knife. Then he pushed her hands down on the chocolate-covered cutting board, pressing against her from behind, his tongue traveling up to her ear. Splinters of chocolate swiftly melted under Lucie's hot hands. She groaned and said, "But...oh..."
He whispered, "No buts. It's been weeks."
It had been weeks, nearly two full ones, which was a barren desert in the middle of their lush watered-daily garden. Her need for him sweeping through her violently, she turned in his arms, forgetting the chocolate on her hands, letting it leave trails and droplets on both of them as they fell, entangled, to the kitchen floor.
Afterward, they lay panting and staring at the ceiling, spread-eagled on the floor where they had just clung so hard to each other it had been as if they were trying to melt their skins together. Finally catching his breath, Ryan said, "Well, I don't think that part will end up on your French-meets-American cooking show. Won't make it past the censors."
She groaned a little, still aroused, electric bolts shooting through her, and then laughed. “No, I don’t think so either. Though, I don’t know about that French-American angle. As much as I want to honor Mere, Dad hates it and he’s the one bankrolling this whole thing.”
Ryan’s voice lost its humor. “Why is he running the show? Just because he has some money and he’s spreading it around? It’s
your
career.”
“He’s my father. And he wants to help me.”
“He wants to show off.”
“Please, Ryan, try to understand. He’s a good man, he’s just hard. He means well,” she said, feeling helpless in the face of the downward spiral of relations between her boyfriend and her father.
Ryan had become more open in his dislike of her father, which bothered her deeply and, now that Lucie was under her father and Flo's wing financially, she constantly had to listen to her father's criticism of Ryan. She hated to admit it, but some of that criticism was beginning to stick in her mind and heart, grabbing hold and making her see Ryan differently. She fought against this daily, making herself remember all that was so right between them.
The whole thing reminded her of the time during her parent’s divorce when Lucie had considered divorcing her father herself. He’d always been hard on her and Mere, always critical. He expected perfection and she wondered if she would ever be a good enough daughter - even then, when she was top of her class and “going places” as her father liked to say. Because even then his sharp eyes found errors, mistakes, problems with his almost-perfect daughter. Her nose was too pointed, too much like her mother’s; she needed a nose job. She was too quiet and introverted; she needed to be livelier, a social butterfly. She wasn’t sophisticated and worldly enough; she needed to read the paper more and travel somewhere other than France.
She’d told her mother of her decision about her father during her last visit to Paris, switching back to English as she wanted to be clear and knew her French was clumsy. They were out having dinner at a heated sidewalk cafe terrace, bundled up as the heaters only partially banished the cold and taking little sips of their wine. When Lucie finished talking, her mother, who had been eying her daughter with her index finger across her lips as if telling herself to hush, put her hands down in her lap and leaned back in her chair before speaking.