Chapter Six
“W ow.” Chloe turned full circle as if looking at her carriage house apartment for the very first time. The furnishings were from Grandma Millie, all antiques pulled out of storage and refinished and reupholstered. It was clean, but not totally tidy. She had papers to grade organized on the dining room table, several open books strewn on different sitting places, and the kitchen… Well, the kitchen looked like hurricane Chloe had blown through, and the eye and back end of the storm had passed, but the debris had never been cleaned up.
She did a little happy hop and then tried to cover it up by pretending she’d tripped, which made everything more awkward.
“Rustin Wildish is in my apartment!”
“Want an autograph?” He tossed his leather jacket on her coat stand.
He was being facetious. He must be, but she couldn’t read his arresting, hard-planed face. He looked more like a man out of time. Tall, dark, edgy, cut, impatient. A rogue…more like a pirate instead of a refined, talented chef opening a restaurant.
“Some chefs are celebrities, so I probably should get your scrawl before there’s a long line of fan boys and girls. Have you been practicing?”
“Show me the cookbook, Chloe.”
“It’s not really a cookbook,” she stammered, hoping she hadn’t made the book sound epic as if it belonged in a museum. “It’s kind of…um…weird.” She couldn’t quite get over that Rustin was in her apartment and going to cook with her. This was a dream come true, yet she was hesitating like she was going to share her poetry or song scribbles in her journal.
God, the thought of sitting with Rustin, sharing…
“You said it had recipes.”
“Ummm, yeah.”
He held out a hand, palm up, and for a wild second, she imagined resting her hand in his. But no. Her imagination was galloping off without her brain. Rustin wanted the book.
“I don’t know why I’m feeling so protective about the book,” she admitted. “It’s not like it’s a family heirloom or anything.”
“Could be.”
“No, Grandma Millie wouldn’t have put a family heirloom in her mini library outside her house. You know the one,” she reminded. “She’s had it for years. Bring a book, take a book.”
His hands shifted to his hips, fingers arrowing toward the most masculine part of him, and Chloe’s heart skipped a beat. His eyes looked like shadows, swallowing her.
Act like an adult.
Rustin was in her home. He was going to help her—hopefully. She needed to leash her impulses and fantasies and show him respect since Jessica had been uncharacteristically rude.
To steady herself, she walked to the island peninsula that separates the living space from the kitchen and retrieved the bound book. Holding it to her chest, she faced Rustin.
“Maybe it is a Maye heirloom,” she said, hesitating. “Usually there are so many books in the mini library, but last night there was only this, as if it had been abandoned,” she whispered, hating the catch in her voice. “I feel like it called to me. Accepted me.”
I need to shut up now, relating the book to my past. Ugh!
“Show me,” he invited, and Chloe had to remind herself that he meant the book. Rustin gazed at her so intently it was hard to breathe. His whole sexy vibe and his masculine energy unnerved her, made her feel unraveled down to her essence in some way. Primitive.
“I’m not a Maye,” her dry voice croaked out. She tried to swallow. “Not really.”
“Maye enough.” His scrutiny swung over the entire carriage house apartment—the art, the antiques, the architecture, none of it chosen by her. “You’ve always been a Maye, Chloe.”
“I was wrapped in a pink blanket in a Moses basket and left on Grandma Millie’s doorstep like a Christmas gift fruit basket.”
His eyes widened. “That’s real? I thought that was just spiteful gossip because your coloring was so different and, well, Miss Millie raised you, not Elizabeth Katherine and Sean Ryan Maye,” he sneered their names.
Of course he wouldn’t like the three Ms’s parents. They were pillars of Belmont society and had taken their lofty positions quite seriously.
“Miss Millie kept you.” Rustin took two steps forward so that she could feel the heat, the snarling energy that pulsed off his body like he was some kind of cosmic phenomenon. “That meant something. She loves you. What matters is what you’ve become, not how you started out.”
Warmth infused her. Rustin made it sound so easy to leave the past behind. Her throat tightened, and her eyes pricked with tears. Never had anyone dismissed, accepted, and summed up her beginnings so succinctly.
“So be a phoenix,” she said doubtfully.
To her shock, he peeled off his black T-shirt, and she found herself looking at a chest that appeared airbrushed perfect. Her breath tangled, and her tummy heated.
“W-what…?” The bronze skin, the muscle definition, the ink made her head swim.
He tapped his left pec. “Phoenix,” he said. “First tat. Total cliché, but I was seventeen and was proving a point to myself. I needed something I’d see every day to remind me that I was rising from my past, not defined by it.”
Like I want to.
“Rustin,” she breathed into the rush of feelings.
“Show me the book, Chloe.”
The hardness of his voice and eyes was a slammed door on her feels.
She handed the book over, bracing for Rustin to scathingly shut her down. He’d been to culinary school. Had trained in some top kitchens in different cities and countries, and she had the impulse to snatch the book back, protect it from his well-trained scorn.
Rustin stared at the cover, one hand passed over the leather and binding reverently. He carried the book to the window that looked out over Grandma Millie’s garden and Maye Park with the bare oaks and crepe myrtle branches pointed toward a bright blue sky.
He slowly turned the pages, and she heard him murmur, “Food is love.”
For someone who’d grown up poor and started washing dishes and cleaning the kitchen at Millie’s for money and meals for his family before he was in his teens, food probably had felt like survival and a hard slog, not love.
“Food is love.” His finger touched each handwritten word.
“That resonated with me too,” she said softly. “I remember no matter how tough school was or what was going on, I could go to Millie’s Diner and get a cup of soup, a biscuit, and a kind word, and the day was instantly better.”
She stared at her toes as she spoke, not wanting to see his curled lip of disdain or impatience flash like lightning in his eyes. He had often been at the diner, and that had always soothed every hurt. Still, her troubles had been nothing compared to his.
“Millie’s felt like home to me too,” Rustin said after a long silence, still leafing through the book, one page at a time. “I often wished it was my home. If I hadn’t had my family to help, I would have snuck back in after closing and slept there surrounded by warmth and the comforting scent of biscuits baking. Then I would have been up at dawn firing up the grills.”
Sorrow pierced her.
“So, you came home and bought a part of your history but changed everything.”
*
Rustin heard the question but ignored it. He’d given Chloe Maye Cramer too much already and was now poised to give her more after seeing the book. She had no idea of its history. Value. Power. And he wanted total access. Ideas and plans and recipes shuffled through his brain like a pack of cards under the hands of an expert Vegas dealer.
Hungrily he read the recipes. The notes. The corrections. Written in different hands. Ink faded. And then as he read more deeply into the book, a few times he saw more personal notes. Some sketches. Romantic advice. That was unexpected. Notes on health and herbs. A couplet—or was it a haiku?—here and there. A smile teased. That, at least would interest Chloe. He’d heard she’d become a teacher.
“There’s a whole personal and family history here,” he said. “Like it was handed down, used, enjoyed, and added to. But why would anyone shove this obviously treasured book into Miss Millie’s mini library?”
He finally tore his gaze from the pages to look at Chloe, who rocked up and down on the balls of her feet. She’d done it as a kid, and he remembered she’d been teased by kids who’d asked if she was trying to fly. Knowing what a fey, free spirit Chloe had been she probably had thought she could fly.
“Sure it’s not Miss Millie’s?”
“I don’t recognize any of the handwriting,” Chloe admitted. She too was puzzled.
“No,” he said definitively, as Miss Millie had left him many notes over the years by way of lists of tasks, notes on recipes. “And I don’t recognize any of the recipes but the biscuits.”
He closed the book and faced Chloe ready to negotiate.
An idea niggled. Traditions. Heirloom recipes. Modern twist. Fusion elements from countries of origin. Themes.
“What’s your theme for the Moveable Feast?” he asked, knowing there was a theme every year.
He knew the event was the weekend following Thanksgiving, and it kicked off the holiday celebrations on Belmont’s busy Christmas calendar. Of course, he’d never attended, but from the age of twelve he’d helped Miss Millie’s crew pull it all together and cleaned up after, hidden away in the kitchen because no one would allow a Wildish to be a guest in their elegant, historic homes that perched like jewels ringing the crown of Maye Downtown Park.
“Last night after finding the book, I looked through it and Grandma Millie’s binder on all the previous feasts,” she said and cleared her throat. “I thought maybe Southern holiday traditions or…” She nibbled on a thumbnail and looked at him doubtfully.
“Roots.” His ideas coalesced. Usually, he only let his ideas roam freely in his kitchen when he was alone. Or sometimes he brainstormed with Rebekah because she was brilliant and thought in terms of marketing and monetizing, which was not his strong suit.
He brought out his phone and hit VOICE MEMO . “I could have a roots section on the menu, changing weekly. No, monthly. Seasonally aware, holidays when appropriate. Farm-to-table emphasis or a section. Beef up research on local food sources.” He paused, a little embarrassed for Chloe to hear him brainstorm.
“I love the roots idea, Rustin,” she said and bounced up on her toes. Her eyes shone, and her high, round cheeks pinked. “For your menu and the feast, but you probably want to keep your menu sacred. Perhaps a sample for the feast, and then you could experiment with something else at the Christmas Market the following weekend? You definitely should have a food truck there or…” And she was off, ideas flowing like a river sweeping him away.
“We could theme the Movable Feast ‘Back to Our Roots,’ and you could have a ‘Southern Roots’ section on your menu that rotates with recipes and perhaps roots from around the world.”
Not a bad idea.
His finger twitched on RECORD , but he hesitated, hearing again the first word in her sentence. “There is no ‘we,’ Clo Beau.”
She flushed Barbie pink, and he shoved down the guilt and unwanted need to protect her.
“ You are going to cook, Chloe. I’ll guide you through it.”
*
Chloe was thrilled. “Really?”
“Yes.” Rustin’s attention was on the book, not her.
Of course. He was a trained chef. Cooking was his passion, and she’d just handed him a historical text. It had nothing to do with her. It was the same as if she’d found a handwritten draft of one of Milton’s works or notes on a Wagnerian choral composition.
“When do we start?” she asked humbly.
“Now. Choose a recipe.”
That proved more difficult than it should have. She kept mentally dismissing each recipe. Not elegant. Not sure what it is. How would I cook that? I’ll blow through the budget Grandma Millie has set.
“Choose something you like to eat, Chloe,” Rustin said, his dark-eyed attention finally shifted to her. “No point in making something to impress others if you don’t think you’ll love it.”
She blinked at him. “You’re right.”
“Don’t sound so surprised.”
And now she felt nervous for a different reason. She and Rustin stood side by side. She could feel his energy and smell the faint cedar and bergamot scent that wafted off his skin. Was it body wash? Shampoo? Aftershave? Cologne? Innate?
“You smell good.”
She clapped her hand over her mouth.
“Sorry,” she mumbled.
“Let’s stick to food. I’m coaching, not on the menu.” But she saw a hint of a smile curve his mouth.
Was that a dimple in his left cheek?
“Do you have dimples?”
She’d never seen anything resembling a dimple. But then she’d never seen Rustin Wildish smile. He’d mostly scowled. Or intently focused on what he was doing in Millie’s kitchen. Or fighting with an arrogant townie prepster who’d mocked him or trash-talked his family.
Yeah. Rustin hadn’t had much to smile about.
“Recipe, Clo Beau.”
She carefully turned the pages. “I want comfort food. Tradition, but with a twist. And colorful or holidayish, like the jalapeno poppers you made, but those aren’t a main dish.”
“They can be part of a main dish,” he said. “A side. The Movable Feast is a combination of small plates. I’m going to start off with an aperitif that’s dry with a sweet and savory garnish.”
“Of what?” she asked eagerly.
“You’ll have to wait.”
“I could help.” She couldn’t resist trying to make him almost smile again.
“You’ll have your hands full, so pick something you enjoy eating. Festive jalapeno poppers and…”
The way he waited was so seductive.
Not that she’d ever been seduced like a heroine in a romance or anything. It was hard to think about anything other than Rustin, but as he’d said, he was not on the menu.
“Pulled pork is hearty. There’s a barbecue sauce recipe in here, I bet.” She flipped through, but the handwritten recipes, sketches, and notes of advice—some geared toward men’s hearts and stomachs—seemed rather sexist, and she wondered if Rustin was having a hard time not busting out laughing.
She blushed for whose ever ancestors had had the book but felt guilty that she now was the keeper of so much history. The book should remain with the family who had created it.
“Whoever wrote the recipes were rather randy,” she murmured.
That did get a laugh, and she thrilled.
“Gotta keep the generations coming.”
“Have you ever come close to marrying?” Yeah, her mind popped there. “You’d be a great dad. You’re so family oriented. Loyal.”
“No.”
And she’d just killed the synergy they’d been building. She hunched a little. He was back to being an edgy, icy, feral beast, chained and straining.
Always gotta push, Chloe.
The Maye sisters had always said it—kindly, but with exasperation. And their mother. ‘Button your lips,’ had been her favorite along with ‘No one wants to hear your random thoughts.’
“I love biscuits! Big fluffy biscuits dripping with butter and honey,” she sighed happily, picturing them so clearly that her mouth watered.
“I remember.”
Her tummy flipped. He remembered her as a kid running to Millie’s after school for a snack and to do her homework while Rustin was cleaning. But there was always one oven still baking biscuits for the mill workers, and then when the mills were closed, construction workers and others to buy and take home.
What would it take for Rustin to see her as a woman?
“Go for biscuits,” he said, as if she could really do what she wanted. “With pulled pork, you can’t get more North Carolina than that.” He flipped through the book. “There’s a savory biscuit, and you could use the sweeter barbecue sauce here. I have Miss Millie’s smoker. You could hire someone to do the meat the day before and let it marinate in the sauces the day of.”
That made it sound more manageable.
“And if I’m doing pulled pork sandwiches with biscuits, I definitely need slaw. I love slaw,” she said happily, beginning to think that she might not spectacularly fail.
“And I adore hush puppies. Look here, a recipe for crab and shrimp–stuffed hush puppies. Done.” She closed the book and did a little dance.
“No,” he said. “You’re just beginning.”
Rustin stalked over to her kitchen, opened drawers, cabinets, and the fridge.
“Make yourself at home,” she joked weakly.
His disapproval was tangible. “First, shopping.”