Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Colby drizzled black cherry coulis over her last two dessert plates of the night, then carried them out to the dining room where a certain head chef sat across the table from the hottest redhead in the pub tonight.
“She’s married,” Colby said as she approached the table. “And holds the legal keys to the empire.”
“Sue me,” Greg said with a flit of his hand in the air.
His husband, Tony, batted it down as he slid in beside the table with another round of drinks. “If flirting was a crime, New Orleans, you would’ve been locked up a long time ago.”
“I couldn’t even get you out of that one,” CC said with a laugh.
Greg huffed at them all, at Tony the loudest, who wiped the mock offense off his face with a kiss. “Behave,” he affectionately warned before heading back to the bar, which typically stayed busy long after the tables cleared out.
Colby slid the plates onto the table, and Greg pulled over another chair. “You know you didn’t have to work tonight.”
“I wanted to,” Colby said as she glanced around the light and lively interior of the gastropub she’d called home for five years.
She’d left here over a year ago, but everything at Dram was still exactly where and how it was supposed to be, everyone—from staff to guests—as welcoming as ever, a testament to the hospitality Greg and Tony exuded, to the community they’d built here in their little corner of New Orleans.
“Nice to know you can go home again.” She snagged an extra spoon off the table Greg had stolen her chair from, then scooted close enough to CC to snag a bite from the plate in front of her. “Thanks for letting me crash.”
“For this . . .” Greg waved his own loaded spoon in the air. “Anytime.”
“This better be going in the cookbook,” CC said around her first bite.
“Practice for the shoot tomorrow,” Colby said with a nod to the plates. “We’re calling this one Misbelievin’.”
Loquats, or “misbeliefs” as the the locals called them, could be found in homes and markets across town, and in her time here, Colby had learned to use the sweet and tart stone fruit in dozens of ways, including for upside-down cake.
She knocked aside CC’s spoon to scoop up another bite for herself, dragging the back of her utensil through the cherry coulis for that little bit of over-the-top she could never resist.
“Are you sure I can’t lure you back?” Greg prodded after another bite.
“You have a terrific pastry chef. I trained her! You don’t need me.”
“I’m greedy,” he said with a shrug. “I wouldn’t mind two. One for here, one for the speakeasy.”
“You sure you don’t mind us shooting there tomorrow?”
Cash had arrived in town a day before her, had gone to grab a drink there, and a second location had been added to their shoot.
Colby couldn’t blame them. The place was gorgeous.
Dram’s speakeasy offshoot was in the building that used to house the distillery that had brought CC and Al together a year and a half ago.
Originally a church, the 1800s Creole-style building had been meticulously restored and converted by the former owners, and while the distillery operation had been sold, the vestiges of it were a perfect backdrop for a speakeasy.
“Don’t mind at all.” Greg swallowed his last bite of cake and leaned closer. “Especially if you agree to come back.”
“You want to go to war with your best friend over me?”
“Or your East Coast manager?” CC chimed in.
Greg’s brows raced north, his dark eyes alight with curiosity. “Oh, do tell!”
Colby glared in CC’s direction, a nonverbal shut it, before turning her attention back to RH’s Chief Gossip Officer. She did not need Greg on this case. “I love you, hon,” she told him. “But I’m staying at Chess, for now.”
“A glimmer of hope,” he singsonged as he stood.
He dropped a kiss on her crown. “Until then, you let me know if you need anything.” He joked, he teased, he gossiped, but deep down, Greg Valteau was all heart and just wanted the best for his loved ones.
“Good to have you back, Chef, even if only for a few days.”
Once he was out of earshot, Colby swiveled toward the traitor she shared genes with. “Did you have to—”
“I’m not wrong, am I?” CC said as she reclined in her chair, smug smile hidden behind the rim of her tumbler.
“It’s nothing serious.”
“I’d believe that based on the lack of calls over the past ten days, but I’ve also lost count of how many times I’ve had to put in earplugs to drown out the ‘Oh, Ford’ moaning.”
She narrowed her eyes at her sister. “You just had to knock the walls down in the house, didn’t you?”
When Colby had lived with CC, their shotgun double had technically been two separate units under one roof, but after Colby left, CC and Al had knocked down the dividing walls to give the combined space a more airy feel. Privacy had wafted out the window in the process.
“To live in it with my wife, yes.”
“Where did she go?” Colby said, swiveling in her chair, pretending to look around for Al, all the while knowing that she was in Greg’s office on the phone with her grandkids.
CC knocked her shin under the table. “It’s okay if this thing between you and Ford is something serious now. If you miss him.”
“I miss you all the time too.”
CC leaned forward, forearm resting on her crossed knees. “Look me in the eye, sister, and tell me it’s the same.”
Of course it wasn’t.
CC was the person who knew her best in the world. She missed being able to plop down next to her on the couch while CC put on the perfect movie for her mood, without even asking.
With Ford, she missed plopping down next to him on the couch and being surprised by what he put on.
Missed the thrill of cooking something new for him or eating whatever goodness he cooked up for her before or after work.
Missed the matching socks and boxers, the wild morning hair, the aroused curiosity whenever she pulled a new toy out of the drawer, and the gentle earnestness in his blue eyes whenever he looked at her.
And she’d only been gone ten days.
As busy as those days had been, it had felt like the longest of her life.
CC laid a hand over hers. “What are you afraid of, Col? Love?”
Her heart lurched into her throat like it had that night in Boston when Ford had told it her wasn’t Miles he wanted. It was her. She’d been over the moon . . . and scared shitless. “Love doesn’t always work out.”
“You’re right. It doesn’t always. See me and Quinn, and I know you did. You were my ride or die through all that mess. But Col, does what you have with Ford look like that, or like what I have with Al? Like what Miller and Clancy have, Greg and Tony, our parents?”
She didn’t even have to debate her answer. All she had to do was recall the way Ford had looked at her that night in Boston, each time they’d had sex since New Year’s Eve, every day since he’d first stepped off the ferry.
“Okay, so that’s one fear handled,” CC said, accurately intuiting her thoughts. “What else is holding you back?”
“I don’t want to let him down.” CC opened her mouth to no doubt object, but Colby held up a hand, needing to get out her most crucial point, the heart of the mental and emotional gymnastics that had kept her from doing the one thing she’d wanted to do most the past ten days—hear Ford’s voice.
“His ex really did, CC. Like, really. I can’t do that to him. I don’t even want to risk it.”
“Why do you think you will?”
“It’s what I do.”
CC reared back, some of her Manhattan sloshing over the rim of her glass. She set it aside so forcefully that more alcohol escaped. “Since when?”
Colby almost laughed at how similar CC sounded to how she had when she’d first learned what Ford’s ex—and his brother—had put him through.
Were still putting him through. Learning all that, hearing how unjustly he’d been treated for who he was and how his family had so quickly turned their backs on him too, made it even more important for Colby not to hurt him.
Not to disappoint him like so many others.
She was terrified she already had, like she always did.
“Since I dropped out of college,” she said, skipping childhood misses and jumping ahead to adulthood. “Since I didn’t become a lawyer or doctor, since I didn’t get married and start a family, since—”
A balled-up napkin hit her square in the forehead, and in its wake, CC was right there in her face, her brown eyes intense, every bit the lawyer.
“That is this dumb-as-shit timeline we’re living in talking.
Have I or our parents ever made you feel that way?
” When she didn’t reply, CC barreled on.
“Your first biscuit was perfect, Colby. Textbook.” She mimed a chef’s kiss.
“And you could barely reach the oven knobs. You didn’t need college.
Not everyone does. All you needed was a whisk and an apron.
And not once have you let me down. You were there during the worst period of my life.
Fuck, sis, you uprooted your entire life to get me out of San Francisco—”
“I found—”
“A job in a city we knew nothing about but that had a law school where I could get my LLM degree. Where I could recover. I know what you did, Col. You didn’t let me down. Or any of your friends or family. Or any of your diners, night after night. You won’t let Ford down either.”
Colby wiped away the tear that tracked down her cheek, her sister’s words filling her heart and boosting her confidence. “Thank you.”
“Love is scary as hell, especially for a good person like you who wants to get it right, for yourself and even more so for the person you love.” She clasped her hands.
“You gotta ask yourself . . . are you more afraid of love or of missing out on it altogether? Because when it comes to Ford, all the evidence points to this being the real thing.”
Colby chuckled through the tears crowding her throat, through the truth in her sister’s words that she couldn’t deny, that caused hope and yearning to sprout and do somersaults in her belly. “I thought you were a deal lawyer, not a courtroom lawyer.”
“I just play one on Thursdays,” CC said with a wink, her wry humor familiar, comforting, and much missed.
It was just the kick in the ass Colby had needed to admit how much she missed the other person who made her laugh, who comforted her, who made her excited to fly for the first time in her life.
Home to him.
She just hoped it wasn’t too late, that she hadn’t disappointed Ford already. That his heart hadn’t moved on without her.