Perfect Pairing (10 page)

Quinn's hand fell lightly on her shoulder, and Hal fought the urge to jerk away. Again with the touching, and damn it all to hell, she didn't like it.

“Are we talking about the sauce or you now?”

“There's no difference.” She pointed back to the pot on the stove. “That's me, at my best. It's not flashy. It's not fast or easy. But it's real.”

“It's impressive,” Quinn said softly. “It's perfect.”

Hal smiled, a little bashful all of a sudden, both about the compliment and the emotional babble that had sparked it. God, where had that outburst come from? One minute she was all so freaking satisfied, then the next she blew up and begged for understanding once again. Quinn had a brain-scrambling effect on her. “Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“I just needed you to understand.”

She nodded seriously. “I think I do.”

“Good,” Hal said, turning her attention back to the stove. “I'm glad one of us does.”

“Time to start canning,” Hal said, and Quinn hopped off the barstool she'd been perched on while watching her work. She'd looked forward to this step. Canning seemed like a field trip into American history. “Canning homemade tomato sauce sounds so idyllic. Italian grandma meets
Little House on the Prairie.”

Hal turned, her eyebrows raised.
“Little House on the Prairie?”

“Please tell me you watched that show.”

She returned her full attention to the sauce, but Quinn caught the corner of her smile in profile. “You did. You watched it.”

“I watched a lot of TV growing up.”

“Who did you have a crush on, Laura or Mary?”

Hal's smile widened. “Ma.”

A quick shot of laughter bubbled up unexpectedly. She'd been so studiously casual since Hal got heavy earlier, both of them a little shyer and more tentative than before, but the flash of Hal's true personality sent another spark of affection through her core. “That is the best answer ever. It also explains your canning fetish.”

“I don't have a canning fetish,” Hal said seriously. “I just like to do my job right.”

“All right, all right.” She didn't want to fall back into seriousness. Hal's plea for understanding had pulled her in a personal direction, and the weight of that responsibility unsettled her. Open, vulnerable Hal was too compelling, too alluring for a business partner. She didn't want to think about what that meant for them or the plans she'd already set in motion, so she simply didn't. She felt more comfortable in their quick, surface-level banter. “Just canning. Not a fetish.”

“Besides,” Hal added with more playfulness in her voice, “if that
show had given me any fetishes, it would've been for laundry. Every time Ma pulled out that washing board, it was a one-woman wet bodice competition.”

This time Quinn didn't even try to contain her laughter as it verged on a giggle fit. There was something so unexpectedly delicious about the idea of a teenage Hal getting hot and bothered by a fictional pioneer woman's laundry skills.

“Here, stir this while I line up the jars.” Hal handed Quinn a big wooden spoon. “And don't get all high and mighty about my TV crushes. You're the one who brought it up, which means you've got them too.”

Quinn thought for a moment before confessing. “Aunt Becky from
Full House
was probably my first, but Kelly Kapowski from
Saved by the Bell
was the longest.”

“America's high school sweetheart for all of the nineties,” Hal said, setting a row of quart-sized glass jars on the counter and topping the first off with a wide-mouth funnel. “I bet you were just like her in high school, all preppy and school spirity.”

“Not hardly,” Quinn said. “I was very studious.”

“Chess club?”

“Not quite that studious.”

“No? What club were you the president of?” Hal asked.

“I wasn't. I had a job after school.”

“Babysitter's club?”

“No, I worked at a small consignment shop in the evenings until I turned seventeen, then I got a summer job as a bank teller at the drive-up window. When senior year started, they let me stay on in the evenings and Saturday mornings.”

“Wow, that's like, a legit after-school job.”

“Too legit to quit, literally,” Quinn explained. “I've been working at the same bank ever since.”

“Really? You didn't go away for college?”

“No, I went to Erie Community College for a few classes at a time to get my associate's degree. Then when I got promoted to managing the other tellers, the bank paid for me to get a bachelor's in business at Damien College. All local, and all while working full-time.”

Hal dropped a few silver lids into a small saucepan of simmering water. She watched them quietly, and Quinn waited. Was this a very important step that required their full attention, or did Hal not know what to say next? Maybe she had shown too many of her cards. The thought disconcerted her. She rarely gave away personal information without carefully planning to do so, but with Hal, the details of her life had sort of spilled out easily.

“You hold the funnel while I spoon the sauce into the jars, then move it to the next one, and wipe off anything that spills on the rim of the glass or the lids won't seal properly.”

So we're back to business.

Probably for the best. She was generally adept at jumping from personal to professional, but for some reason she felt off her game today, or maybe Hal had thrown her off. “Got it.”

“We're going to go down the whole line, then cap them quickly so we seal in as much heat as possible.” Without waiting for another acknowledgment, Hal began ladling the sauce through the funnel into the jars. When each one reached the level she wanted, she'd nod, and Quinn would quickly and carefully move on to the next one. Then while Hal went back to the stove, she'd wipe off the rims of the jars with a clean rag. They moved in a rapid rhythm, quickly and quietly draining half the vat of sauce into nine quarts. She found it soothing to have something to occupy her mind and her hands. They really did work well together as long as they never talked, or touched, or even really looked at each other.

“Now the lids,” Hal said, handing her a set of silver rings, “I'll put them on and you fasten them with the bands.”

Hal used a set of rubber-tipped tongs to lift each silver disc out of the simmering water and drop it carefully onto each quart so their edges matched up perfectly. Quinn followed behind, twisting the bands over the top to fasten everything down. The process seemed so much more scientific than she imagined. All the stainless steel and glass felt more like a lab than a farmhouse.

“What next?” she asked, both curious and nervous that perhaps the mere presence of an outsider like herself might upset the balance in what seemed like such a delicate process.

“Now we lower the jars into the pressure canner,” Hal said, then added, “and by ‘we,' I mean ‘me.'”

She made no argument. “Those things are dangerous, right?”

“They can be if you don't use them right. But then again, so can almost anything in the kitchen.”

Hal grabbed another set of tongs with longer, curved ends to fit around a jar, then carefully lowered each quart into another large pot. She sealed the whole thing with a heavy lid and motioned Quinn over.

“Tomatoes are a relatively high-acid food, so I could just seal them by boiling them in water, but because I want to be extra cautious, and because we get inspected by the food safety folks before every major event, I pressure-can my sauce at five pounds of pressure for fifteen minutes.”

“Sounds official, but I didn't understand any of that.” Numbers she knew, people she knew, science, not so much.

“The steam inside this pot will cause the air to expand, which will raise the pressure of everything it touches. We'll be able to measure the amount of pressure by watching this gauge.” She pointed to a little dial on top of the pot that looked like a speedometer. A thin red hand crept slowly up until it reached the five-pound marker.

“That's as high as we want it to go, so I'll lower the heat.” Hal twisted the stove knob to lessen the flow of gas to the burner. “We could also vent some steam through the top if we needed to, but that's riskier and less exact.”

Quinn nodded. “What now?”

The furrow of concentration in Hal's brow finally relaxed. “We dance.”

“Dance?”

“Ten-minute cleaning dance party. It's a thing.” Hal hit a switch on her iPod dock, and Enrique Iglesias's bass beat reverberated against every surface in the kitchen. Hal snatched a dishrag from the sink and bopped to the rhythm. She bounced around the kitchen, scrubbing spilled tomato sauce and spices as she went. “Come on, banker. You buttoned-up types always have the best moves.”

Quinn shook her head and leaned against the butcher-block island. “You're crazy.”

“
Sí, soy loco,”
Hal affirmed and tossed another rag to her. “Do your part.”

“I'm only here to steal your business secrets.”

“And I'm showing them to you. That's part of what I do.” She pointed to the stove. “And so is this.”

She rolled and rocked her hips to the music in a way that suggested Hal had salsa in her DNA. The move caused Quinn to wonder briefly about Hal's nationality. Orion sounded Irish, but she certainly didn't look it as she shook a shock of black hair off her deeply tan forehead, then turned around and dropped it like it was hot. Suddenly Hal's ancestry was the last thing on her mind.

She bumped and ground her way past the length of the prep counter, scrubbing as she went. Quinn remained rooted in place, pleasantly hypnotized, watching her go, or more accurately, watching her ass. It was a perfect ass, high, firm, and—

Hal turned to catch her staring. She grinned and raised an eyebrow. “You know you want to.”

“I know nothing of the sort,” Quinn said abruptly. The heat that had been settling in her stomach now burned her cheeks. “I don't even know what you're talking about.”

“You do.” Hal inched closer, her hips still moving in a way Quinn couldn't imagine employing, even after years of yoga. “You . . . want . . . to . . . dance.”

“Dance?” She exhaled heavily. “Wouldn't it be more efficient if we focused on cleaning?”

“Sure,” Hal said, “but that kills all the joy. I've been trying to tell you all along, I don't bow to your god of efficiency. I do what I do because I love it.”

“I enjoy what I do, too.”

“Enjoy, maybe, but love?”

“I feel a great deal of pride in my accomplishments.”

“But do you feel the love, Quinn?”

“Love is a very strong word.”

Hal laughed and spun as the beat shifted with the start of Ricky Martin's version of “Sexy and I Know It.” “That's why we'll never partner up.”

Quinn stiffened at the first reference Hal had ever made to their business association going beyond consulting. Or at least she thought she'd used the word partner in the business sense. Either way, it wasn't a pretty summation. “Because I don't dance?”

“Because you don't ever do something just because it's fun.”

“That's a little rash. You don't even know me.”

“Don't I?” Hal asked. “What makes you think you're the first banker in my life?”

Quinn pursed her lips. She wasn't sure what bothered her more, that Hal kept making gross generalizations about her, or that she thought she'd met other women like her in the past. She wasn't like the others. She wasn't some cliché. “I'm not just some repressed banker. I have plenty of joy in my life.”

Hal danced up close behind her. Too close. Close enough that Quinn could feel the heat of her body when she whispered, “Show me.”

She didn't shiver, at least not enough that anyone else would notice. The challenge had been issued in a low and almost sensual whisper, but it was a challenge, plain and simple. She didn't like being challenged, not by anyone other than herself, and to dance of all things. She'd done more embarrassing things on the way up. She'd wined and dined men who'd tried to look down her blouse all night, she'd batted her eyelashes a time or two, she'd let sweaty palms hold hers in handshakes that went on too long not to be suggestive. Surely a little dance in a kitchen with a sexy, barefoot chef would be more enjoyable. Maybe that's why she resisted Hal so hard—because dancing with her wouldn't feel like some hoop she'd have to jump through.

Maybe it wouldn't feel like business at all.

Anger flared up, replacing her misgivings. So she liked women. She found Hal attractive. She was human. But that didn't have to make her dumb or weak. Contrary to what Hal thought, she did know what she liked, and she knew how to get it. She also knew what she didn't like. She didn't like other people telling her what to do. Even more than that, she hated allowing someone else to have the upper hand. She didn't like feeling off balance. If anyone needed to be shaken up, she'd do the shaking. And if Hal wanted to open the door
to a sexier, more personal place, Quinn wouldn't simply follow along, she would lead.