Can't Stand the Heat - Louisa Edwards [70]
And now? Everything was all jumbled up.
The people working here were happy. The customers were happy.
Miranda was happy.
Well, she would’ve been if she didn’t have this book deal hanging over her head. Not to mention the tension over the true source of Adam’s interest in her. Despite Rob’s story about Eleanor Bonning, despite common sense, part of Miranda desperately wanted to believe that what she had with Adam was different. Special.
Ridiculous.
She sighed and let her mind wander while Adam went over the menu with Grant. The serving staff was beginning to pile into the kitchen to taste the evening’s specials so they could recommend things to customers.
Miranda hung back, her stomach too tight and knotted to handle the pickled-cherry clafouti, a tender puff of lightly sweetened pancake dotted with tart cherries, black with juice, and its little fan of perfectly crisped slices of duck breast. From the moans and groans of the servers, she was missing out, but Miranda couldn’t think of anything except the crop of rumors and gossip she’d gotten from Rob Meeks.
This cook has four illegitimate kids, that one has been in rehab six times. The servers are all screwing each other in the locker room except the ones who are screwing the cooks in the walk-in cooler.
Miranda’s eyes went automatically to Jess, joking around with Grant and the others, fencing with the tasting forks, and generally acting like the kid he was. Just looking at Jess, Miranda knew that not everything Rob had told her was the absolute truth. Even if Jess had been unaccountably busy for days, out late and up early, she was sure he wasn’t here at Market messing around with one of the pretty hostesses or that exotic-looking bartender.
But absolute truth wasn’t the point, she reminded herself. Having a source willing to go on record was enough for a trashy tell-all book like the one she was writing. The very thought turned her stomach again. God, what was she doing?
The words she’d written every night this week after getting home from her shift at the restaurant burned in her brain in letters two inches high.
Why not picture them flaming, with red devils and pitchforks cavorting around them? she mocked herself silently, but the shame refused to ease up.
She hadn’t been lying when she told Adam she’d learned a lot from him. Not all of those lessons centered around the stove. She was beginning to understand and appreciate Adam’s hedonistic love of life, as well. That ability to live so fully and truly that every action, every sensation, was magnified a hundredfold. Miranda had taken many short, exhilarating dips in the incandescent river of energy that poured through Adam, and she thought she could learn to navigate it pretty well, if she had the time. But time was running out. She had a due date looming—her editor wanted the rough draft of the book on Monday.
Miranda didn’t fool herself that there would be any more lessons in fun and food with Adam once the truth about her book came out. He’d hate her guts, and rightly so. It was why she hadn’t let herself go as far as she wanted to with him. As if keeping her hands off him for the last week would make that damn book forgivable.
She looked at Jess again. It was all for him, when it came right down to it. She needed money for his tuition. Period. The move into book publishing was something she’d always wanted, sure, but she’d never imagined it being like this. She’d pictured a serious, almost scholarly work of investigative journalism—not the horrible, tacky scandal sheet she’d come up with. Between Rob’s vicious stories and a looming deadline, Miranda had been shocked at how easy it was to slap words onto paper. Or type them into the computer, as the case may be.
If it were any good, if it had required any sort of thoughtful consideration, it would’ve taken longer to write.
The question now became, was it worth it? She was in pretty deep,