All Fired Up (Kate Meader) (6 page)

This wasn’t about finding happiness. That was a touch too abstract, too pie-in-the-sky for Cara. A chance to connect with the family she felt so separate from—that she could focus on. Not men, not relationships. Certainly, not a Vegas mistake husband.

But she’d forgotten she had good reasons for leaving Chicago in the first place, like how hard it was to be the odd one out in a family that planned dinner at lunch. If she never ate another plate of Aunt Sylvia’s baked ziti again, it’d be too soon.

“I’m usually too busy for lunch at Mom and Dad’s. Gina’s wedding took up all my time and now with yours—”

Lili cut her off with a look. “Don’t use my wedding as an excuse for not stopping by. You know if Jack wanted to get married tomorrow, he could make it happen with or without you. You don’t need to be spending every minute on this.”

“But I want to. I want it to be special for your big day. It’s important.” She tried to keep the reedy note of entreaty out of her voice, the one that said,
I need this. You owe this to me because I owe it to you.

Lili delivered the smile of the oppressed younger sister. “I know. You and Jack are going to drive me mad with its importance. Just come to lunch next Sunday. I could do with some buffering.”

“Why?”

“Because now that I’m almost an old married woman, you know what comes next?”

Cara nodded as awareness of where Lili was coming from dawned. When food and marriage had been exhausted as topics of conversation, there was only one option left for the Italian table. One that Cara, the sharp-angled career girl for whom the idea of family was supposedly anathema, was never expected to partake in.

The production of heirs.

Chapter 3

Cara DeLuca for Mason Napier.” She made sure to inject a shot of steel into her demand so it was clear she meant business.

“Just a moment, Ms. DeLuca,” the well-trained receptionist replied smoothly, though Cara imagined her making a face on the other end of the line. She didn’t need to be in this woman’s presence to get her back up. She’d graduated summa cum laude in getting on the wrong side of other women.

Ms. DeLuca.
Wasn’t that hilarious? She was tempted to correct her.
I’m Mrs., bee-atch.
A married woman, demanding all the rights and respect due her new status. Sure, if she were living in a Jane Austen novel.

She cast a gaze about her office, not much bigger than her walk-in closet but with room enough for a yoga mat and a pony. One wall housed a giant bulletin board for menus, party ideas, and images torn from lady mags and glossies that struck her fancy. The other sported an Advent-calendar-style grid with colorful Post-its representing the next month’s private-event bookings. Most of the slots were full, some with two events per day.

She could do this job with her perfectly lined peepers closed.

When Jack hired her to run the events side of the business, she’d expected a challenge. A job more suitable to someone of her considerable organizational skills. She’d produced television shows and managed enough grousing talent to be able to write a book on it—and a rather unflattering one to some of the more famous names on her résumé.

Chicago might be the Second City but it still had its fair share of glamorous socialites looking to throw a charity brunch or a high tea with martinis instead of Earl Grey. Her work with some of the city’s most well-known cancer charities had put her in touch with its social elite, contacts she wanted to use as she ramped up the event planning business into fifth gear. It had also put her in the path of several ambitious mamas offering their sons up on a silver platter. Mostly preppy types eager to brag about their big portfolios, though the lasting impression had been small minds, smaller dicks.

A long sigh shuddered through her body. This wasn’t how she had envisioned her return to Chicago. Once you’ve seen one second-tier trust-fund baby dancing on a table, you’ve seen them all. She wanted to take on bigger events and more prestigious parties, but Jack continued to push back. And she knew why.

He didn’t—in his parlance—give a toss.

Oh, he recognized that the private events were a nice little earner and kept the restaurant front and center, but he’d opened up the party rooms only because Lili had asked him to. So Cara would have a job. Cara wasn’t the only one who felt she had a debt to pay her sister.

Jack had invented the position for Cara because he had left her in the lurch when he threw over his network deal. It had been Cara’s ultimate goal to produce that show. They had been the dream team in cable culinary television, and that Jack had packed it all in without a second thought had hurt more than Cara would have imagined possible. Now she harbored brittle hopes they could bring back the gang and strike gold. Every day, she fielded calls asking for Jack to design a menu for a society wedding or a hedge fund manager’s birthday. Not two weeks ago, she had spoken with a representative of the star pitcher for the Cubs. And every day, she turned business away! With her superior wrangling skills and Jack’s creativity, they could be raking in a fortune planning weddings and special events for Chicago’s movers and shakers, but Jack refused to see beyond the friendly confines of the Sarriette kitchen. For someone who was once the most ambitious guy she knew, he could be remarkably myopic.

“Cara.” Mason’s deep baritone echoed over the phone, pulling her back to the reality of her tiny job and her tinier office. There was also the reality of her marital situation but she already had a plan for that. “What can I do for you?”

Mason Napier. Scion of the Napier banking group. Art collector and opera lover. Triathlete and all-American. And son of Penny Napier, chairman (never call her “chairwoman”) of the Napier Foundation, Chicago’s most prestigious charity. People bruised their shins to be in her proximity. Cara liked her shins the way they were, thank you very much, hence her more indirect gambit.

“Oh, Mason, isn’t it always what
I
can do for
you
?” She schooled her voice to a breathy, Marilyn Monroe gush. As well as being one of Chicago’s elite, Mason was also a man’s man, and he liked women who conformed to a certain stereotype.

He chuckled. “I’m enjoying this conversation already.”

“Hm, well, I’m filling up my spots for December and I was wondering if your mother had given any thought to choosing Sarriette for her annual Pink Hearts Appreciation Dinner.” Madame Napier threw a party every year to thank her foundation staff. It was a relatively small affair but it would serve nicely as a gateway for the more prestigious foundation events.

A slightly evasive cough warned her she wasn’t going to like the next words out of Mason’s silver-spoon-filled mouth. “The dinner is going to be bigger this year, maybe sixty or more. I think you said you could only accommodate thirty.”

This was exactly why her job sucked. Jack’s reluctance to give her free rein meant she was stuck with the Mitzies and Betsies and their bachelorette lunches.

“Well, Sarriette’s dining room has seating for close to seventy.” Of course, Jack would never let her close it down for one event, especially during the busy holiday season. He insisted it created the wrong impression for the regular punters. “And we’ve also taken over the lease on a new space. Right next door.” Please God, don’t strike her down, at least not until she’d had a chance to talk to Jack. She’d had her eye on the defunct space for the last three months; it fit perfectly with her plans to double the seating for Sarriette.

“You know restaurants and hotels practically fall over themselves to get this gig,” Mason said. “And I’ve heard your boss isn’t really interested in the big stuff.” Every refused booking came back to bite her neck. Trust Mason to know about that. “I’m pretty sure my mother’s just going to go with the Peninsula like she did last year. It’s a known quantity.”

Cara could feel her face crimping. Once these banker types brought out the corporate speak it was usually all over but the shouting. Hard to get a businessman to plump for the new kid on the block over the establishment.

But he wasn’t hanging up. Willing to let him lead, she waited it out. Her eyes wandered to the seating plan for Jack and Lili’s wedding reception. Colored stickies circled a map of pie charts as she tried to figure out who should go where. Uncle Aldo might be persona non grata but she would find a way.

“I’d have to talk to her,” Mason said in a brighter tone. A lightbulb tone, she might have called it. She had something he wanted and he was thinking of how to ask for it. Was she really going to have to date this guy just so she could get his mother’s business?

Yes, she would, because she needed this to start something—
anything
—and if that required breasts blazing and eyelashes batting, then so be it. A nagging voice reminded her that she was still Mrs. Shane Doyle.
Not for much longer,
she sniped back a few seconds too late. The “Mrs.” had already created a soul-deep rut in some forgotten corner of her brain, one that had been masked in dusty old cobwebs since she was a girl. Good Lord, it didn’t sound half bad. She would need to shore that up PDQ.

“I did ask what I can do for you, Mason,” she prompted, wishing he’d just get on with it.

“I want Jack.”

She almost dropped the phone. “Jack?”

“I want to eat in the kitchen.”

Cara flipped through her mind’s nostalgia Rolodex while she tried to get to grips with the fact Mason didn’t want to date her or, shudder, anything else. Chef’s tables, popular about ten years ago, were lately back in vogue if last month’s issue of
Restaurant Magazine
was to be believed. Clearly Jack’s celebrity still counted for something, and if that’s all Mason wanted, she would make it happen.

“You want a chef’s table?”

“Yes, a chef’s table. I’d like to have dinner with a couple of friends in Jack’s kitchen.”

The temptation to mutter “Is that all?” was so close to spilling she had to mash her lips together to keep it in.

“You can make it work, right, Cara?” Mason purred down the line.

“Leave it with me,” she purred right back.

*  *  *

It is a truth universally acknowledged that he who rules the kitchen rules the iPod, and this was especially true at Sarriette where Jack Kilroy ruled with a velvet fist and heaven help the man tempted to ask for alternative tuneage or, shock, a peaceful backdrop to dinner service. Watch that the door to the alley doesn’t smack your arse on the way out.

Last week, it had been sixties Motown while Shane made his summer fruits bread pudding and the week before that, seventies funk played backing vocalist to his more experimental forays into flavored Madeleines (hazelnut was a winner). This week, Jack was on an eighties Manchester kick, starting with the entire back catalog of New Order. And now, as they counted down to dinner service, the Smiths with their working-class dirges interspersed with teenage angst seemed as good an accompaniment as any to that most basic of staples, bread. Like a fine Bordeaux to Chateaubriand, the jangly guitar of Johnny Marr on “Big Mouth Strikes Again” was the perfect pairing to Morrissey’s mournful wail.

Knead and pound. Pound and knead.
Shane enjoyed the rituals inherent in baking, more so than cooking, which had always been a touch haphazard for his liking. Too much art, not enough science. He loved the exactitude of making bread, the minute differences a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon could make to a pastry.

To a casual observer, Shane’s life outside the kitchen was without ritual and measurement but casual observers didn’t know shit. So he didn’t accumulate belongings, he lived out of a duffel bag, he came home at all hours, and slept until midday. It didn’t seem all that disciplined. And when you go do something crazy like marry a girl within hours of meeting her, accusations of carelessness might be justified.

Pound and knead. Knead and pound.
Bread dough was also the perfect punching bag for his frustrations right now. Last night after moving in, he’d knocked on Cara’s door but she wasn’t home. Two hours later, he knocked again. Then an hour after that. She still wasn’t home by 1 A.M., which twisted his mind in a direction it wasn’t prepared to go.

His wife was on a date. With someone who wasn’t her husband. Which he shouldn’t give a rat’s arse about, but which really stuck in his craw.

That they needed to talk was the under-fucking-statement of the century. Three days ago, at her cousin’s wedding, she had made it abundantly clear she wanted out, and he agreed. Wholeheartedly. It had been a whacky night fueled by alcohol and topped off with a whacky wedding, and there was no reason why they couldn’t get it resolved with a few bucks and a couple of signatures.

Why they hadn’t already sorted it out was beyond his ken. It was almost like she
wanted
to be married to him, though in truth, there was nothing stopping him from printing off those magical get-out-of-jail forms himself. Before his shift was through, she was going to talk to him if he had to nail those sexy stilettos of hers to her desk. But for now, his personal problems would have to take a backseat to a more important issue. What’s for dinner.

Shane had worked at some great restaurants and some not-so-great restaurants and his opinion was often decided by what the sous- or executive chef did with family meal. The prevailing custom at most places was to take the rubbish leftovers, bung some cheese on it, and bake it for forty minutes. In a Jack Kilroy joint, that