Chapter Three
Dani
“That’s your suggestion? Sleep with him?”
I glared at the smudge in the window’s top corner that I couldn’t quite reach with my rag and lifted higher on my toes, my balance on the windowsill growing more precarious.
“What?” Robin’s voice floated out of my phone’s speaker from where it sat on the small wooden coffee table behind me. “You said he was hot, right?”
“Of course, he’s hot. He’s Alec’s older brother. He’s like Alec one-point-oh.” A slightly taller, slightly broader, more mysterious, and no less disarming Alec. The icy blue of Jase’s eyes flashed to the front of my mind for about the hundredth time since I’d bolted from Ardena earlier that afternoon, bringing a shiver with it and a lick of heat close behind.
I wished I could say I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt this visceral attraction to someone, but I could. I remembered far too often in my dreams. The way Alec’s own blue gaze pulled me in and made it impossible to turn away. How his smile made my stomach flutter and my skin burn. How his touch?—
No.
I would not think about his touch.
“Well then, what’s the problem?” Robin asked.
“The problem,” I growled, swatting the rag against the window in a last-ditch effort to reach the smudge. It didn’t work. “Is that I’m trying to forget Alec. It’s been almost ten years, goddammit. I should not still be thinking about him. And now I have to look at what is practically his genetic clone for the next three months?” A more attractive clone, if that was even possible.
I hopped down from the window ledge and tossed the dust rag into the bucket of cleaning supplies before rummaging around for a toothbrush. I’d already cleared off, dusted, and reorganized my bookshelf; swept and mopped the floors; and polished the windows of my studio apartment. The baseboards were next.
“I’m sorry, but how is this not your perfect solution?” Robin argued. “Your body has basically been begging for one last ride on the Alec-go-round, and now here’s a carbon copy, all rugged and brooding, for you to scratch that itch with one last time and boot it out of your subconscious. Buh-bye Dream Alec.”
I knelt in front of the baseboard below the window by my bed, a toothbrush in one hand and a spray bottle of cleaning solution in the other. “I can’t just sleep with him,” I said as I scrubbed out my frustration. “I have to work with him. And how would that go over with his family? He’s Alec’s brother .”
Robin chuckled. “Yes, I heard. I’m not suggesting you marry the guy. And didn’t you say he didn’t even recognize you? His family would never know.”
I paused my scrubbing. “I’m not sure. It didn’t seem like he did.”
The look of confusion he’d worn as I stood there, hardly able to speak, certainly gave the impression he had no clue who I was besides the strange woman he was being forced to work with. And he was being forced, of that I was sure. He’d been as blindsided to learn about the symposium as I’d been to see him.
“We only met once while Alec and I were together,” I explained. At a family Christmas party Alec’s parents had thrown over winter break my junior year of college.
Now that I thought about it, I wasn’t sure Jase and I had even been formally introduced. There was just an image of him in my mind, standing in front of a wooden staircase across a room full of Alec’s aunts and uncles, his arms crossed and eyes listless. His hair had been longer then, falling across his forehead in careless waves instead of the sharp cut it had now, just long enough on top to grip with your fingers.
Not that I’d be doing that.
“Do you think I should tell him?” I asked Robin as I shuffled on my knees to the next section of the baseboard.
“Why would you?”
“To explain why I was the most awkward a person could possibly be today?”
“Or you could just ignore it and move on. For all you know, telling him might make things more awkward.”
A solid point. And I could totally act normal around him from here on out. It was just the surprise of seeing anyone tied to Alec that threw me off today. I’d be fine now.
One hundred percent fine.
I glanced up to see how much of the baseboards I had left, then took stock of the anxious buzz still churning its way through my ribs like a chainsaw.
Maybe I’d clean the oven next.
On Monday afternoon, I walked through the doors of Ardena determined to ignore the fact that Jase was Alec’s brother. It held no relevance to me. Alec was in my past, and Jase was just one of the many people whose help I needed to pull off what would hopefully be a wildly successful event.
The fact that my apartment was the cleanest it had been in the six months I’d lived there also held no relevance to the situation.
Goose bumps broke out over my legs as the cool air from the AC hit the skin below my shorts. I rolled down the sleeves of my blazer as I approached the bar, searching the room for Jase.
A young woman in a white chef jacket emerged from the doorway at the far end of the bar that I assumed led to the kitchen. Her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail and tucked under a white cap, and bright tattoos decorated the cool-beige skin of her forearms to where they disappeared beneath her short sleeves. The moment she spotted me, she paused, eyes widening before she turned and hurried back the way she’d come.
Before I could make sense of it, Jase strode through the same doorway, shrinking the room to nothing with his commanding presence. I clasped the pendant of one of my necklaces and tugged it along its chain as he headed my way, ignoring the pounding of my heart.
The smile that formed on his lips was more relaxed than the one he’d given on Friday. It softened his whole face with an approachable ease that caught my breath in my throat.
He resembled Alec in so many ways.
Yet I caught subtle differences in how he moved, in the hardness of his jaw, in the definition of his forearms. It was all too much, too confusing for my mind and body to process.
“Hey, welcome back.”
His voice was deeper than Alec’s. Fuller. For whatever reason, my brain found that worth noting.
“Come in and sit down. You want a drink?” he asked, hand hovering over the cooler behind the bar.
I snapped out of my daze and slid onto the stool closest to the door, looping my bag over the hook beneath the counter and pulling out my event binder.
“Sparkling water, if you have it? Or tap is fine.” Look at me go, almost a complete sentence. And spoken at a normal register too.
Jase ducked down and grabbed a carafe from a shelf beside the cooler, then brought it over to a fancy-looking fountain with two nozzles. He filled the carafe from the nozzle on the left and headed back to where I sat, grabbing a water glass on the way, his every movement fluid. He set the glass in front of me and filled it from the carafe, which he then placed on the bar beside me. Bubbles rose in the clear liquid, quickly condensing the surface of the glass.
“You guys have sparkling water on tap ?” I asked.
He nodded as he opened the cooler and pulled out a lemon along with a small knife and cutting board. “It’s just regular tap water that our system filters, chills, and carbonates,” he said, slicing the lemon in half, then into smaller wedges with the ease and speed of someone clearly comfortable with a blade. “Saves us money on bottled products, and it’s better for the environment.”
He put two wedges on a saucer and placed it in front of me, then slid the rest into a plastic container and marked it with tape.
“Thanks.”
His mouth tilted up, and I found my eyes glued to his lips.
Stop it.
I tore my gaze away, snatching a lemon slice and squeezing it into my glass before he could notice the heat rising in my cheeks. Not great, but nothing I couldn’t recover from.
“So your fundraiser,” he said, setting aside the cutting board and leaning his forearms on the bar. “I thought we should start by reviewing your food budget.”
I nodded, lowering the water glass from my lips as I finished my sip. “I was thinking that too.” I flipped open my binder and pulled out the budget, along with the menu I’d selected from the hotel caterer, my muscles relaxing a bit as I settled into the familiarity of my job. This I knew how to do.
I placed the papers in front of him. “I know it’s a tight budget for four meals, but I was able to make it work with the hotel’s menu. I thought we could keep the same food items to make it easier since we know the ingredients are cheap enough.”
“We could,” he said as he studied both pages. His face stayed neutral, making it too difficult for me to read his thoughts on the idea. “What are the four meals?”
“The first night is a cocktail hour with hors d’oeuvres. Day two includes breakfast and lunch during the speaking panels. Then, the last day is the fundraiser gala dinner.”
He nodded along, then studied the pages another minute. “This is actually more to work with than I expected. We can definitely plan out something nice.” He flashed me a smile that deepened the lines around his mouth. “Should be fun.”
The corner of my mouth rose at the boyish look on his face, something in my chest lifting with it. “Fun? You mean you won’t be bored by the lack of scallops or caviar or whatever other expensive products chefs love these days?”
He straightened and folded his arms, a quirk creasing his brow. “Are you implying all chefs are snobbish? Or are you too good for caviar?”
I wrinkled my nose. “Not too good for, just baffled by. I mean, fish eggs? Really?”
Laughter rolled through his chest, full and deep. It set off an explosion of giddiness that settled low in my core.
“But seriously,” I continued, my body easing into the conversation. “I don’t blame chefs for wanting to play with expensive ingredients. I just can’t offer you that luxury here.”
He lowered his folded arms to the bar and peered at the menu. “I really don’t mind. I like the challenge. Plus, it’s similar to a concept I’m working on for a new restaurant, so this gives me a chance to fine-tune it.”
I leaned in, mirroring his pose. “What concept is that?”
“I’m aiming for accessible fine dining. I want to serve average people elevated food that doesn’t cost three-hundred dollars a plate.”
“Isn’t that what you do here?” I asked, glancing around the dining room. “Ardena’s prices aren’t that high, are they?”
“No, but they aren’t cheap. Still too high for most of our staff if we didn’t give them a discount. And this is more casual fine dining. I want a place where college students who have never experienced more than an Olive Garden can try something new. For the mom working two jobs to be able to bring her kids out for a special meal at a fancy restaurant without having to worry about making rent late. I want to expose as many people as possible to the kind of food that changed my life. Food that I never would have been able to experience if I hadn’t stumbled into the back of a kitchen and started washing pots.”
Passion spilled from his every word and made it impossible to look away. It called to the echo of longing rattling around inside me that had spent the last nine years searching for a passion as strong within myself, a purpose for what I was doing. It was only now that I was working at HBC that I’d started to find it.
When he realized I hadn’t responded, he dropped his gaze, almost bashful. “Anyway. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to pull it off. It’ll take impeccable budgeting and management to keep that sort of operation in business, but…yeah.”
“I think that sounds amazing,” I said honestly.
He glanced up, his sharp blue eyes catching mine as his lips lifted. “Thanks.”
I thought back to that boy at the Christmas party and the listlessness in his eyes. Not a trace of it stared back at me now. Our gazes held, and I didn’t feel a chainsaw in my chest or cold clamminess in my palms. My body was loose, my mind quiet for the first time all weekend.
Did I ever feel like this around Alec?
The moment I thought it, my stomach turned.
“I used to date Alec,” I blurted, the words spilling from me without conscious thought. “In college. We were together. Used to be, I mean. We’re not anymore. Obviously.”
Stop fucking talking.
Jase’s shoulders jerked back, his spine going rigid as his face went blank. “What?”
I swallowed, my mouth suddenly lined with sandpaper. “Alec. Your brother.”
“I know who he is,” he snapped, then clenched his mouth shut. A muscle ticked in his jaw.
“Right.” I gripped the edges of my binder. “Well, we dated.”
He threw his gaze to the side with a sharp exhale of what might have been disbelief, as if he had no clue what to do with this information. I didn’t really know either, except that it suddenly felt wrong to sit here talking with him, for him to share these parts of himself with me, and for him to not know the history, however far removed it was, between us.
“Okay,” he finally said.
“I just thought you should know,” I attempted by way of explanation. “I mean, it’s not like it matters. We haven’t spoken in years, and he’s married and…everything.” Stephanie’s pregnant belly flashed through my mind. “I guess I just didn’t want it to be weird if you talked to him and it came up or?—”
“Can we get back to the menu?” he asked, avoiding my gaze. The words were stiff. As cold and detached as the rest of him had gone. Like a door had slammed shut on the warmth and laid-back ease he’d embodied a moment before. I wanted to pound my fists against it until it opened again.
“Of course.” I tucked my hair behind my ear, my face heating to about a thousand degrees.
I never should have said anything. Not only was it completely unprofessional for me to bring up my dating history at all, much less in the context of his brother, but now he probably thought I was some crazy ex stalking his family with the hopes of wedging my way back into Alec’s life. And at this point, anything I said to convince him otherwise would only make it worse.
“I’m not cooking this.”
It took a second for my mind to reel itself in and realize he meant the existing catering menu. “What? Why?”
He slid the paper back my way. “Besides the whole thing being boring and lazy, it’s totally unoriginal.” I guess that answered my question on what he thought of the idea. His opinion wasn’t a shock so much as his standoffish delivery of it.
“Does it have to be original if it tastes good?” It wasn’t like I was asking for frozen pizza bites. The menu came from one of the top-rated caterers in the city.
“If my and Ardena’s names are going to be on it, then yeah,” he said plainly.
I searched his face for some hint of the excitement he’d shown earlier, but all I found was a wall of indifference.
I pulled the old menu onto my binder and skimmed it again, running through a timeline for workshopping a whole new menu. It wasn’t like I had much of a choice. Thanks to Jillian, I was stuck with Jase, and I couldn’t force him to cook something he refused. “I guess come up with your own, then.”
“Any food restrictions?”
“No.”
“Good. I can have a tasting ready for you in a week. Anything else for today?”
I whipped up my head to find him two steps back from the bar, his body angled toward the kitchen. “I…no.”
He walked away without another word.
I sat frozen as I watched him disappear into the back, struggling to process what had happened. With each second that passed, more humiliation flooded me. In the span of two minutes, things had gone from surprisingly great to Jase practically running away from me.
Whatever hope I’d had of things going at all smoothly between us was clearly scorched to shit, thanks to my big mouth. And now I’d have to relive the humiliation whenever I saw him.
I’d thought being reminded of Alec every time I looked at Jase for the next three months would be torture enough, but this was worse. This was having to see Jase’s judgment every time he looked at me .
I had to get out of here. Now.
I sprang from my stool and hurried to gather my stuff, refusing to be here when he walked back out. My bag caught on the hook, and I wrestled it free, then shoved my binder inside as fast as my shaking hands could manage.
Fuck , why were my hands shaking? Why did I care this much about what Jase thought?
Alec’s brother or not, at the end of the day, he was a means to an end, and I didn’t need him to like me or think highly of me to pull this event off. I just needed him to cook good food.
I threw the strap of my bag over my shoulder and lowered my head as I strode for the front door, trying to forget the fullness of his smile as we’d talked and the glowing sort of heat it had blossomed inside me. Or how quickly it had all been wiped away by his blank stare.
If I walked fast enough, maybe I could leave behind the sting of it still lingering in my chest.