Page 32

The Temptation

Eleanor was a sight as she worked in the auxiliary kitchen of the hotel. A cooking goddess in her element, her tied-back hair under a bloodred handkerchief was striking. Her snow-white chef’s jacket was a stark contrast to it. Before her was an array of tiny beige blobs, but Rafferty couldn’t see what they were from that distance.

She wasn’t alone in the room: two other people armed with a camera and another with a microphone on a stick documented her every move. Or rather the cameraman did. The mic guy was leaning against one of the empty counters watching as his counterpart zeroed in his camera on the surface that Eleanor worked on.

There was also a fourth, familiar, person in the room. éliott stood on the other side of the workspace, getting in the way of the mini-camera crew while he talked at her in a low voice. Whatever he was saying seemed urgent, and not for the millionth time, Rafferty hated that he couldn’t sharpen his hearing to catch it.

What really caught his focus was all four sets of eyes shifting up to him. A feeling of unworthiness washed th rough him.

“Let’s take a few minutes,” Eleanor finally said to the two working men, wiping her hands on a damp towel, but her stiff demeanor was reserved f or éliott.

He took the silent rebuke, straightening himself, then turned, walking toward the door where Raffe rty stood.

“If it’s alright with you, I’ll go ahead and get some still shots,” the camera guy said, clearly uninterested in what was happening.

“Yeah, sounds great,” s he agreed.

“Hi,” éliott said to Rafferty, “what are you do ing here?”

“Eleanor asked for my help,” he said simply. “What a bout you?”

But éliott clapped his shoulder instead of answering. “I’m glad. That’s good. She needs all the help she can get, and you are a good person to give it.”

Rafferty frowned at him. “The one thing I am definitely not is a goo d person.”

But éliott only gave a sad smile. “And if you need help, brother, know that I am here for you.” Then he exited out the swinging doors of the auxiliary kitchen, which rebounded into Rafferty’s backside, as if giving him a little push to ente r further.

Taking the impetuous, he crossed the space to meet Eleanor, still wiping up with her towel, which she tucked under her arm as she crossed them. “Well, there he is,” she said, the hostility from the first time they met having returned with f ull force.

Instead of cowing him, he felt the familiar posturing of the king’s kitchen slip through him. Crossing his arms, he leaned one hip into the table beside him, letting a confident grin overtake his face.

A twinkle appeared in her eye in response, despite her determination to maintain her scowl.

He had missed this game.

She huffed, relenting first. “I only called you back because I’m in a bit of a bind, okay? I want to make things very clear right now that just because you’ve got a patron or whatever, I have absolutely no problem kicking you out of my kitchen, so I wouldn’t go throwing your weight around like you’re the boss. Because I’ll do it. I ’ll walk.”

“You mean, I’ll walk,” he corrected. “Don’t worry. I’m very good at working under people.” The innuendo was not lo st on her.

Her expression didn’t shift, but the crimsoning of her cheeks and ears told him his tease had been received and understood. “As long as things are clear. This is a one-time gig, and I only pay you after the work is c ompleted.”

“Understood,” he said simply, then shrugged out of his coat.

Eleanor flinched at his easy capitulation like she had been about to voice an argument in a fight that hadn’t come. It set her off-balance, and she undid her crossed arms to set them instead on her hips. She clearly didn’t believe him, but anything else she had been prepared to say didn’t fit anymore, leaving her nowhere to smoothl y go next.

Instead, Rafferty turned his head toward her worktable and asked the question every chef, cook, and aspiring wanted to be asked. “What are yo u making?”

She turned with him. “Oh.” Her arms dropped completely, and she went back over to the worktable. The cameraman had moved around the table, carefully recording footage of what looked like a flight of tiny birds made of dough. “It’s not much. Just a little feature on a local online talk show. A fun thing people can do with crescent roll dough. You know, for kid’s parties and stuff. Thanksgiving maybe. People like cutesy videos like this. We can usually get two, maybe three out of this footage. One how-to video, and then another just watching us make it with some sort of beautiful piano music underneath. That sort of thing.”

Rafferty cocked his head to one side. “People just want to watch you make it?” he asked, fascinated by the idea. “They don’t want you to explain it or anything?”

“Nope. Not necessary. Some of our most viewed videos. People put them on a playlist and have them going in the background while they work,” she said, nodding at her flock. “We also sell the footage to companies that make reels for bakeries or whatever. It’s a business. It will pay the bills ev entually.”

He bent down to examine the little creations further. “What are you using for the eyes? Pop py seeds?”

“Mini chocolate chips, actually,” she said, lifting a small ramekin of the tiny dots of chocolate to show him. “They melt just right when I bake them in the oven.”

“Hmm,” Rafferty said, and she offered the top of the ramekin to him, wordlessly inviting him to help himself to a couple of the chips.

He thought about refusing; he didn’t want to corrupt her chips with his unwashed hands, then rethought that she might take it as an insult. She seemed to be done making her flock since there was an absence of wait ing dough.

“This is worthy of the king’s table,” he said, popping the chips into his mouth, letting the chocolate burst and spread over his tongue. It took every ounce of willpower to keep fro m moaning.

“The king’s table?” Eleanor said, wrinkling her nose at the c ompliment.

He realized too late that again he had s lipped up.

“I mean…”

“Oh right. éliott said you are from France, right?” she continued, nodding at him. “He said you worked in the kitchens at Versailles, doing those recreational meals for the fundraisers and such. You know, donate a few hundred thousand dollars, and come eat like King Louis the XIV. Right?” She looked back at him to confirm éli ott’s lie.

But why would he lie at all, and with something so close to the truth?

“I… yes,” he answered. It was true.

Eleanor nodded. “Then I’ll take it as the compliment that it is,” she said.

“Truly,” he agreed. “It was a compliment. Food presentation at the king’s table was as much showmanship as it was taste. These sort of novelties… would have been all the rage in h is court.”

“Yeah, beautiful,” the cameraman added so rotely, clearly the word had lost its true meaning to him. Why he had injected himself into the conversation, Rafferty couldn’t clearly discern, but it was a good reminder that they were not, in fa ct, alone.

The interruption seemed to annoy Eleanor. “Great, now if you’ll excuse me. I got to get these little guys in the oven, and then I got to get another cake started. That is actually what I need your help with,” she said with an unenthuse d grimace.

“Great, can Pedro and I go get lunch?” the cameraman asked, setting down his amazi ng device.

“Oh sorry, Rafferty, this is Peter, my cameraman, and his partner Pedro,” she said, indicating the mic guy who gave a halfhearted salute. “And yeah, that’s fine,” Eleanor dismissed. The two men didn’t waste much time with further niceties. Peter simply hauled his camera to a door on the opposite wall, holding it open for Pedro to follow with the long stick holding the mic, and then they were both gone without a backwa rd glance.

Eleanor noticeably relaxed once they were gone. “Okay, now, have you ever made opera cake before? I need to make five hundred of them. I know it’s not something one would find on the king ’s table.”

A grin cut across his face.

“So did she do it?” Eleanor asked as she flipped her cake pan over onto the work surface, popping the thin sponge layer from the pan before pulling off the parchment paper with one smooth, dramat ic motion.

Rafferty paused as he poured a measure of brandy into a cup destined for the saucepan before him, where he was preparing the coffee syrup for the layered cake. He caught himself from overfilling it at the la st second.

Eleanor grinned as she noted it. “Scarlet Kovacs. You were there, weren’t you? You were the chef who worked the Winter Rose Ball? That’s why she’s doing this whole… sponsoring-you-thing. To get you to ke ep quiet.”

Rafferty didn’t answer that; he knew a loaded question when he heard one. He just wanted to enjoy the peace and ease that came with preparing a decadent, multistep dessert that took his mind and focus away from h is… life.

“Hey, Rafferty!” Elean or called.

He blinked and jerked. “Sorry, what?” he asked.

“Your sy rup, man!”

He jumped as he realized that the coffee espresso in the pan had been boiling too long.

“Dammit, dammit, dammit,” he repeated as he set aside the brandy so as not to waste it, too. He grabbed up the pan and went to the sink to dump the ruined liquid. It hissed and smoked in burnt-coffee anger as it dra ined away.

He could feel Eleanor staring at him as he rinsed the pan, then set it on the back burner to cool down. Before he could go get a different, clean pan, the other chef set one down on the stove to p for him.

“You don’t have to talk about it because it’s none of my business, and, frankly, I don’t really care, but…” She paused and leaned, seeking out his eyes. He found he couldn’t deny her gaze. “Are you alright?”

It was too hard. It was too hard to lie. Maybe it was this newly fragile human nature he had been saddled with, but his eyes filled up to blurry against his will. Even as he tried too late to look away, the words came tumbling o ut anyway.

“I saw a man bitten in half and eaten by a monster. And I just stood there. I couldn’t do anything about it. I spent my whole existence trying to never be powerless again… and I couldn’t do anything… I couldn’t even protect her . She saved me.” Dammit, I’m weeping like a child! h e thought.

Rafferty sniffed hard, trying to clear his throat and bottle the feelings back down, but they didn’t seem to care about what he wanted.

Eleanor stayed beside him, a horrible look of… pity! Her eyes were full of pity for him. “That’s not yo ur fault—”

“If it hadn’t been for Helena, we would both be dead. I wasn’t able to save her or Scarlet, or the idiot who summoned the damn creature in the first place!” He grabbed the cup of brandy he meant to cook with and downed it. The burn sliced through him, hot as a knife and fortifying as it pinned his feet to the ground to keep from running away. He gripped the opposite sides of the stove, just to have something to hold onto; his altar to the only higher power he had truly worshiped in his heart.

“So… she didn’t do it,” Eleanor said instead of asked, her voice barely above a whisper and full of a cceptance.

“ No ,” he growled. “No, she didn’t do it. She could barely get out of her wheelchair, never mind…” He shook his head again as his throat threatened to close up. “None of us should be alive. She is just as innocent as the re st of us.”

He had never voiced it before. Do I feel… is this sympathy? he thought. Sympathy for Scarlet? Have I been feeling it this whole time? Do I care for someone other th an Helena?

Churned up, he stepped back from the stove. Anger had replaced his guilt, and he wanted to destroy something. The only safe thing to him was the measuring cup he had poured the br andy into.

He hurled it with all his strength.

It smashed gloriously onto the unyielding, ti led floor.

They both stared silently at it, and instantly, Rafferty regretted it. That wasn’t his t o destroy.

“Hey! Eleanor, are you alright?” the camera guy asked, his head popping out of the lounge. Even though he spoke to her, his eyes flashed warning at Rafferty.

“Yeah, we’re fine, thank you, Peter,” Eleanor said, waving the cameraman away. She didn’t seem mad.

Instead, she went to get a broom and dustpan to clean up the tempered glass. “Look, I’m sorry. Like I said, it’s not my usual M.O. to pry into other people’s personal lives. I got enough of my own baggage and all that. But you clearly need to talk to someone.”

“I don’t… talk,” he sa id lamely.

“Yes, I know, I know,” she dismissed. “The idea of sharing all your private whatever is intimidating, and then you run your car through your boyfriend’s restaurant and lose your job and then your apartment and before you know it, you’re doing underground cooking contests for ex tra cash.”

“Or you’re dragged into hell,” he agreed, out loud, too late to rethink if it was a good idea to do so or not.

She paused, then dumped the shards in the large garbage can. “Yeah, and I’m sorry about that, too. It’s just I can’t say I have felt entirely comfortable with the whole Scarlet Promotions thing, taking it all over, you know? As much as I gripe about it, Cooking Underground saved my sanity, you know. I’m protective of it. But also, it’s not like any of my other opportunities were working out.” S he sighed.

Rafferty could feel it. The signs of a mark. She was vulnerable; her gaze had drifted downward, staring long at dreams that have died before they go t to live.

“So this whole thing with views and making videos and stuff, this isn’t what you really wa nt to do?”

Eleanor shook her head. “No, not at all. It’s just what I can do. Once I had my… issues with my boyfriend, no one would touch me after that. The investors I was trying to line up all disappeared. It’s just that instead of quitting or moving away like everyone and their dog wanted me to do, I picked myself up, went into rehab, and have been working to raise my profile ever since. At a certain point of celebrity, all that past stuff is just, you know , quirky.”

“And what is it that you really want, then?” he asked before he could stop himself, his instincts to give her that littlest push too hard to resist.

“A tea house,” she said softly, before blinking and shaking her head. “Sorry, that’s stupid…”

“No, no, no,” he assured. “It’s not stupid. It sounds lovely. It was one of my favorite things to make. Tea cakes, sandwiches, and such.”

It was all the encouragement she needed. “What I’m actually thinking about is a hybrid place. There would be two rooms with soundproofing between them. One side would do the full formal high tea. We’d also serve lunch and brunches, but the other side would be like a tea express with desserts and snack boxes. People could come in and work like they do at coff ee shops.”

Her eyes twinkled as she talked, going into more details about how she would lay out the kitchen and what they would serve, things she wanted to try. He listened contentedly as he refocused on making the coffee syrup. “That seems like a lot of work,” he said as he stirred in the brandy and sugars into a few fresh cups of espresso.

“Yeah, but it would be work for myself for once,” she muttered, the bitterness of her last few years slipping into her voice.

“I know what that is like,” he agreed as he took the cooked-up syrup off the heat and poured it into a bowl to start cooling. Then he picked it up to hand over to the chef.

Their hands met as she reached to take it from him, and they both stopped. “You do, don’t you?” Eleanor asked, her voice as dreamy as her gaze. A new spike, sharp and electric, leapt from where his hand met her skin. It wasn’t literal, but it felt real. His heartbeat sped up as a sensation flooded through him. It was a different one from when he touched…

Eleanor shyly tucked a stray hair back behind her ear. “You know, Rafferty, I was thinking, once we get this done, we could go grab a little dinner and maybe have that talk we didn’t get to have?”

“Talk?”

“About what kind of future you’re looking for,” she smiled shyly. “Maybe, it’s one in a tea shop?”

“I…” he tried to say, but he was too lost in her eyes to remember what it was. Her hard-as-nails exterior gave way to a sweeter one before him, much like Helena’s had b een once…

He stepped back, breaking the tension bet ween them.

Then his p hone rang.

Desperate for any sort of escape, he let the bowl go too fast, forcing Eleanor to finish grabbing it. The liquid inside bounced dangerously close to the lip inside the bowl.

“Apologies,” he muttered as he dug out his phone from under the borrowed apron, his heart jumping again when he saw Helena’s name a nd number.

With shaking fingers he an swered it.

She didn’t wait for him to greet her. “Hey, Raffie. What are you doing r ight now?”