Chapter Five #3
A boss, she had been mournfully told, who didn’t much care what he ate.
He even came into the kitchen and made himself toast and things that he called sandwiches.
She was amused by the complaints but hid it.
It was always frustrating to cook for someone who thought of food as fuel and not a sensory experience.
Luckily, it seemed that he did entertain quite a lot when he was in residence. Amy wondered what this army of artists did when he wasn’t, but she didn’t want to stir up trouble so she kept her thoughts to herself.
It was fifteen minutes since the last of the staff had left at her suggestion. Her initial assessment was that they were a good bunch with a couple of personality clashes but nothing major.
Amy didn’t mind the clean-up post service; she found it kind of relaxing. Sleeping straight after a tough service when her adrenaline was still high was hard, though a dinner party of thirty, no matter how indifferent to food artistry the host was, was not what she would class as tough.
She was cleaning the seals on the last fridge, an area too often missed, when she heard the door swing open.
‘I’ll be with you now,’ she tossed out, assuming it was someone assigned to showing her to her room.
‘Why are you cleaning? There are staff—’
Her stomach fluttering, she spun around so fast she almost lost her balance. She did lose a couple of hairgrips that fell with a gentle clatter onto the floor, and she immediately dropped to her knees and chased them, sticking them haphazardly back into her hair as she straightened up.
‘What are you doing here?’ She addressed the accusing question to the sinfully beautiful man dressed in a dinner jacket, his tie hanging loose, his broad shoulders propped against the wall as he stood there watching her.
His entire attitude seemed languid but his eyes were very alert and, now that she looked into them, she read annoyance and something else that she hastily skipped over in the ink-dark depths.
‘More like, what are you doing here?’ He noted the faint purple smudges beneath her eyes again and felt his aggravation rise. It was as if she was trying to make him feel guilty, but she wouldn’t succeed, he decided, nursing his resentment. ‘I brought you here for a tour of the kitchens, not to—’
Nostrils flared, she sucked in a deep breath. ‘You brought me here to watch me become overwhelmed, maybe cry a few tears. Or were you expecting me to seek a strong masculine shoulder to weep on?’
Her eyes went of their own volition to the area under discussion just as his broad, muscle-packed shoulders left the wall and his physical presence became even more dominating.
‘Sorry to disappoint,’ she sneered. ‘But you’ll have to do better than that. I have worked in kitchens a hell of a lot tougher than this one.’
‘I thought you were self-taught?’
The mockery in his voice was something she had heard before. ‘I had no formal training, yes. My training was all hands-on. I learnt on the job and worked my way up.’
‘I’m surprised Daddy allowed you to get your hands dirty.’
She laughed. ‘Oh, he was about as contemptuous about me doing menial work as you.’
Outrage at being compared with George Sinclair flashed in his dark eyes. ‘I have never termed any job as menial.’
His outraged stance was not exactly screaming equality and another time she might have laughed in his face, but she settled for saying, ‘You don’t need to, Leo, you have perfected the sneer.’
She might have been imagining it, but she thought her mocking admiration drew a low growl from him.
‘Dio!’ he cursed, seething through gritted teeth.
As much as he would have liked to react to the provocative glitter in her golden-brown eyes, he refused.
‘So there is something you care enough about to disobey your father.’ Annoyed that she had pushed him into a retort that had revealed an open wound he would not own even to himself, he closed his eyes.
They stayed closed long enough to miss her flinch and the blood draining from her face.
‘I was only nineteen, Leo.’ But I’m not now. This was what he wanted—to get under her skin. Why let him see that he had succeeded?
‘I am sorry if I hurt you back then.’
The sincerity shining in her face only fed his anger. Did she really think saying sorry made a difference now? Her attitude only hardened his resolve to see this thing through.
‘It’s ancient history.’ He produced a dismissive shrug, comfortable with the lie that came easily. ‘But I don’t want to see you weep.’ In his head, there was a line between retribution and bullying, and making a woman cry crossed that line—any woman, he emphasised for his own benefit.
Amy’s response to the admission which seemed dragged out of him was a cynical little smile. ‘But it would be a bonus?’
His tense jaw tightened another painful notch, her reaction making the guilt he had been fighting off throughout the evening with each successive course delivered to the appreciative diners even more irrational.
Her ability to play on his emotions was a weakness he had to acknowledge in order to guard against it.
‘I’m sure you’ve found enough sympathy and a few protective shoulders to cry on over the years.’
She arched a brow. ‘For the record, I do not gently crumble and cry out for strong masculine shoulders or even weak ones.’ She narrowed her eyes to show her self-reliance, which was real.
If it hadn’t been, she wouldn’t be here today, it was that simple.
She pushed away all the painful memories she had built a protective mental wall around—watching her mother fighting for her life, losing first Leo and then the baby Amy hadn’t even known she’d conceived, her mother’s death and then shortly afterwards her father’s shameful conviction.
She lifted her chin and thought, You’re tough, Amy, so act like it. ‘If I did need a shoulder, it wouldn’t be yours,’ she declared and immediately wished the rather childish addition unsaid. It did rather shake her off her firm footing on the high ground.
She took a deep breath and, channeling a calm she was a million miles from feeling, continued.
‘I am fulfilling my part of this deal and if it isn’t as painful for me as you obviously hoped, that’s tough!
I am good at what I do.’ She planted the spray she was still holding on the work surface and suddenly sagged, gripping the copper surface for support, her voice losing a little of the angry venom as she finished with a waspish, ‘Sorry if that makes you unhappy, but it’s a fact.
’ She swallowed. ‘It’s been a long day.’ Then wished she hadn’t added that because it sounded as if she was fishing for the sympathy vote.
‘Have you actually eaten anything while you’ve been producing miraculous food?’ he demanded, sounding less sympathetic and more annoyed.
Amy had decided the best way to deal with him was to maintain a snooty silence but her professional pride kicked in. ‘Miraculous?’
‘Well, even my grandfather didn’t complain. I think he actually said it was quite nice, and that in itself translates as miraculous.’
‘Did you like it?’ Oh, God, I sound so needy.
‘Yes, I did. Sit down before you fall down, Amy.’
‘I…’
A sound of hissing exasperation left his lips.
Before she had any idea of his intention, he spanned her waist with his big hands and with a casual display of strength lifted her up onto the counter surface of the kitchen island, which should not have impressed her or made the heat unfurl in her belly.
It did both and she despised her weakness.
He was rifling through the contents of one of the fridges. ‘There’s nothing to eat,’ he complained.
Despite herself, Amy laughed. ‘I thought you liked the food.’
‘It’s not for me, it’s for you—but I’m a big guy; I need quantity, not pretty.
’ She might be the exception, he admitted as his eyes travelled over her delicate features.
She was a classic example of small but perfectly formed and just looking at her made him hungry.
‘What’s this?’ he asked, turning his attention back to the fridge as he pulled off a cover and sniffed the contents of a large bowl.
‘Oh, there were some chicken livers left over and I couldn’t waste them, so I made a bit of paté.’
‘A bit?’ He eyed the massive bowl as he planted it on the work surface. ‘Bread?’ He walked to the huge terracotta crock and lifted the lid, pulling out a loaf.
‘Yum, that treacle bread is just divine. Jamie has a gift, seriously, she does.’
‘Who is Jamie?’
‘The only female in the kitchen?’ she said, her sarcasm losing its force as the level of surreal in this scenario finally hit her.
‘Other than you.’
‘Yes, I suppose so, but I don’t count. I’m just your token blackmail victim.’
He turned his head as she swung her legs and yawned. He turned away quickly, but not before the image had set free a protective surge of emotion that he told himself was nine years out of date. He had wanted to protect her back then and she had thrown it back in his face.
Now, the person she needed protecting from was him.
‘Who told you that you don’t count?’
Amy couldn’t have put a time stamp on the moment she’d realised that she would never really count. Nobody had said it outright, but it had been obvious from what they hadn’t said that she would never live up to her parents’ memories of the child they had lost.
The harder she’d tried, it seemed the more she’d failed, and when their disappointment had started to feel like knife thrusts she had decided to stop trying—it was just too bloody painful.
It had been about that time when Leo had entered her life and, for the first time in her life, she had not felt second best.
‘Have I said something amusing?’
A look of confusion crossed her face as she dragged herself back to the present. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You laughed.’ If you could call the strangled sound that had left her lips a laugh.