Where Dreams Are Born (Angelo's Hearth) (5 page)

The sip and quick intake of breath over the wine as it still swam on her tongue gave the expected results. Lemony and a confirmation of the anise on the nose rode into the finish. She spit into the bucket and nosed the wine again.

There was something more. She didn’t have it yet.

Another swirl and sip. More air. Another spit. Exactly the same dark richness.

Ah. There it was. Not something there, but something missing. Almost no tannins at all. A wine this dark, yet so clean. Not mainstream. A true challenge wine to set apart the real tasters.

She opened her eyes and realized that the restaurant was completely silent. Every face was turned in her direction, even the early diners had stopped eating to watch her. Mr. Terence, that obnoxious cookbook chef who always avoided any request for his first name, probably said “Mister” on his birth certificate, had peeked at the wine label and then crumpled his bit of notepaper. The restaurant owner had noticed and was scowling. There was someone who had just lost his next invitation here.

Cassidy didn’t need to look.

It took her several moments to come back to the wine, the taste still rolling across her tongue. To come back and realize that she really had done something.
She had moved out of the crowd of being but one of many in the New York tastings. Here, in Seattle, the many were waiting to hear her verdict. Hers.

The temptation to dismiss the phenomenon as a big frog in a small pond
was there. But Josh was here from
Gourmet Week
as well, which had made her nervous through the first four wines. He’d actually trained under Parker. He too wore a look of anticipation. He held up a piece of notepaper, carefully folded to show he was ready. He nodded for her to go ahead. Well, there was no avoiding it, and she didn’t need to on this one.

“Italian. Apulia.” Some of the diners’ faces blanked. “That’s the region. The bootheel of Italy.” And the brightness returned.

Josh was grinning when she turned to face Mister Terence who was making a show of hiding the bottle.

“Taurino from the Negro Amaro grape. The Notarpanaro Salento Rosso. Either the ’97 or the ’01, but I’d bet on the former.”

Terence’s face fell and Josh flipped open his slip of paper and turned it for her to see. He’d written just a number on it, “97.” The restaurant owner clapped his hands together and laughed, his teeth bright in his dark, Italian face.

“An exquisite final choice, Mr. Parrano. It truly completes the other wines. Even a rearrangement of your last name. A nice touch.”

He bowed deeply before taking her shoulders and kissing each cheek.

“Angelo.” He had one of those Italian accents that was designed to make a woman melt and it wasn’t hard to give in to it. “Please call me, Angelo, Ms. Knowles. Always Angelo.”

“Cassidy then.” She let herself melt a bit farther, her wine columnist attitude slipping off a little more.

He took her hand and raised it. “Ten wines and not a miss.” Josh had missed one, but a totally understandable mixup unless you’d specifically studied the Loire Valley Vouvrays. He’d gotten the region and grape, but not the winery. Mister Terence had missed the Vouvray placing it as an Oregon Pinot of all silliness, the Taurino, and three others, two of them quite obvious mistakes. Two of the three amateurs had bested his score though they both missed the Vouvray, a tricky wine because of its gentle voice, and the Taurino.

“A meal on the house. No, you don’t get to order, I will make the menu specially for you.”

Everyone applauded as he conducted her to a table set for two. Angelo looked around and waved for Josh to take the other seat. He left Terrence out in the cold with the three amateurs to browse the free appetizer table.

“If you give me the meal, I can’t write it up. Conflict of interest.”

“Some other time, you come back and I charge you double. Not tonight.” He lowered his voice. “I’ve been waiting for an excuse to chase that hoity-toity Mr. Terence out of here, but you have taken care of that for me. He won’t dare show his face around here for quite a while to come. For this I am eternally grateful. And you are eternally welcome in my restaurant.”

She nodded, not minding being used to that end in the least, and then glanced at Josh. “Perhaps I could make one request about the menu.”

She raised an eyebrow and Josh laughed, then flipped open his slip of paper again. Angelo tried to look angry but he couldn’t hold it for more than a moment. He stepped back to the tasting table and, securing the Taurino from Terence with a slight tug, he placed it at their table.

“The meal shall match this perfectly.”

# # #

“Damn, you’re good!” Russell took another piece of garlic bread and mashed it around in the red sauce to soak up as much as he could.

“You should see what I sent out on the floor tonight. Exquisite. The cingale with truffle sauce.” Angelo kissed his fingertips and threw the kiss to the kitchen’s ceiling. “Outdid myself even if I’m the one who says so.

He slapped Russell on top of the head. “That’s grilled boar meat to you, you peasant.”

“I know what cingale is,” he cuffed him back somewhat harder. “And your food is always awesome, buddy.” Russell kissed his own fingers and then made a show of licking them clean of the garlic butter.

“Yeah, you need to clean up. You’re messing up my kitchen, man. Just by breathing.” Angelo peeked into an oven and closed it again. He returned to dicing chives at an impossible rate for some garnish.

Russell looked down to inspect himself. His jeans were smeared with white fiberglass resin from the seals on the new decking. It had hardened into crackling streaks that wouldn’t let go of the cloth even when he picked at them. His shirt was clean, just a couple tears from where he’d caught it on the old decking he’d been tearing off the boat. Maybe he was a bit disreputable for the stainless steel and white kitchen.

Just because Angelo was right, Russell wasn’t about to admit it.

“Wait until I start the woodwork. Then I can offer you a healthy dose of sawdust on your tile floor to make it look decent. You could eat off the damn thing.”

“Thanks, but no thanks. I think a health inspector would rather see a rat in my kitchen than you.” Angelo danced around a half-dozen desserts with a squirt bottle adding little swirls of reduced pomegranate sauce even as the waiters put them on their trays. A moment later his sous chef dumped a steaming cauldron of homemade pasta into a colander. Angelo attacked it with quick tongs and a bit of oil before plating it next to an eggplant Parmigiana that still bubbled from the oven.

Russell licked another dribble of butter off the back of his hand.

He smelled her before he saw her. Like warm wood and something else he couldn’t identify but could never forget.

He turned to look and wasn’t disappointed. Trim and chic in a black pantsuit over a black turtleneck. The cut was perfect for her figure which was pleasantly womanly in its curves. It suited her five foot ten very nicely, making her look even taller and more slender than she was. He checked her shoes, okay, five foot eight without the heels, which fit her even better. Her face was so well made up it looked as if she wore no makeup at all. Her russet hair pulled back into a tight chignon from which not a
single strand strayed. The shape of jawline to neck, of ear to cheek, was like a flash from the past.

For the first time in the month and a half since he’d closed the studio, he wished for lights and a camera. But she was everything he was leaving behind. Everything that had been wrong with his former life. He could imagine Melanie on his boat long before this one, even Melanie let her hair down on occasion, actually made a trademark of just that.

Where Melanie’s voice was affected French,  to cover her upstate New York, this woman’s voice was throaty and warm as she did the “thank you so much” thing with Angelo. She glanced at him twice with intensely hazel eyes that were deeper than the ocean. A glance he could easily read. “What was this slob doing dirtying up Angelo’s pristine kitchen?”

Then she was gone and Angelo just stood there beaming.

“Hey, Buddy-boy.” Russell poked his fork into his pasta. He had to do it a couple times before he finally landed some. “She’s got you bad.”

“Oh yeah.” Angelo sounded a little dreamy. “You weren’t here. She’s just the nation’s hottest food-and-wine columnist. It took me six months to tempt her here.” He shook himself and then punched Russell’s arm hard.

“And she loves my food and my restaurant!”

“Hey! Ow already!” He knocked Angelo’s hat to the floor just as Angelo kicked
Russell’s stool over backward. He landed hard against the refrigerator. Once he had his balance, he prepared to lunge forward.

Angelo moved faster and aimed his weapon at Russell’s chest.

“More garlic bread?”

Russell kicked the stool back into place and took another steaming slice from the wicker basket. He easily matching his friend’s grin.

# # #

“The what of January?”

“Just grab a bottle, cheese and crackers if you have ‘em and come along.”

Russell dug around in the cooler, found a couple of beers. The cardboard box that was his pantry had some Ritz crackers, his absolute weakness. He slapped the package against his thigh to dislodge the worst of the wood dust from the box.

He closed up his boat and followed Dave down onto the floating slipway. They turned toward the far end of “D” dock.

“The what of January?” He repeated, his breath puffing a white cloud into the night air. He had to trot down the dock to catch up with Dave even though the man had to be in his fifties.

“The ides.”

“I thought only March had ides. The day Brutus stabbed his buddy Caesar in the behind.”

“The ides. The fifteenth of March, May, July, and October, I think. The thirteenth of all the others. And today’s the thirteenth. Sounds like a good reason for a party.”

Russell didn’t need any more prompting than that.

“Lead on, Brutus. Just be careful of any desires to do some stabbing.” They arrived at Dave and Betsy’s forty-four foot catamaran. Russell had been sorely tempted to buy one of these, they were fast, spacious, and stable as could be. Unless you got flipped. In something nasty, like a hurricane, a monohull would roll under and usually self right, sometimes without its mast, but at least it would right. A catamaran was more stable upside down than rightside up. A little too wild for him. It would also be a hell of a lot of boat to single-hand in a storm.

He’d befriended Dave just to get a look inside and they’d spent hours talking about ocean crossings and ports of call.
Russell had helped a buddy do the New York-Bahamas run on his friend’s thirty-five foot J/boat, but that was a long step from crossing one of the oceans. Dave and Betsy had taken the
Lark
on a four-year tour that included both capes, Good Hope and Horn and all of the seven seas.

“Ponds,” Betsy had corrected him. “Not seas. We talk about crossing the ponds, not so scary that way.”

Still scared him either way.

He clambered aboard and joined the crowd of “D” dock liveaboards. Teri and Tom were curled up on one of the settees, a bottle of cheap white wine in front of them. He’d been here barely two weeks and he already knew of their reputation.
It had been hard to miss actually.

T
hey had terrible fights when running in the local races, and screamingly good, or at least loud, sex when at dock. Few secrets could be kept through a few millimeters of fiberglass hull. Even his
Lady’s
double-plank, oak hull wasn’t going to muffle all that much if he ever had a flesh-and-blood lady aboard. Most sailors were discrete, Teri obviously didn’t care or didn’t think to. He eyed the incredibly tight sweater on the shapely dishwater blonde. Or maybe she liked bragging.

Russell slid in next to Perry. The old man had a bottle of decent whiskey capped beside him, a small tumbler in his massive fist. He rarely spoke, but Betsy had told Russell that the old-timer had been born on a tugboat off Vashon Island. Had worked boats, mostly log tugs and fishing tenders, for the eighty years since. He lived on a 1904 Arrow tug, one of only four built that year, he was
restoring it a little way down the dock.

Dave and Betsy had made their money then moved to the boat and the seas. He drank Heineken and she had a glass of red wine in a short, wide glass
that would tip easily.

Others he didn’t know drifted in behind him, each arriving with a cold blast of the chill January air and a muttered curse from those closest to the hatch. As the crowd grew, he refused to be nudged from the small table with Perry and Dave. Soon, people were perched on counters or squatting by the windows.

“What do you do to keep yourself busy?” Dave grabbed a couple of his Ritz crackers.

“Other than
my boat, you mean?”

“Other than
your boat.”

“I take pictures. Used to.”
Russell thought of the images of Angelo and the lighthouse still in his camera. “Still do.”

“Any good?”

Dave had asked the question, but it was Perry who inspected him with blue eyes shaded by a black Greek sailor’s hat, the rest of his face mostly lost in a white beard and mustache that would have put Santa Claus to shame.