she told him on a huffy breath. She almost wished he would go back to rude; she could handle rude Van.
“So?” Van looked around at all the chairs up on the tables and then at her. He raised one of those eyebrows in a silent command/query.
“Go ahead,” she said, gesturing to the chairs. “I’ll grab some glasses.”
“No root salad?” he asked and she couldn’t quite make out the tone in his voice. Laughter?
“No root salad,” she told him. She grabbed two of her red wineglasses and came back to the table. Van had taken down both chairs and from one of the big front pockets of his black chef’s jacket he pulled out a corkscrew. With smooth, deft effort that Marie was somehow compelled to watch, he had the bottle open in moments.
“The photos of you don’t quite do you justice,” he said, seemingly focused on the task at hand. Marie’s eyes narrowed. She should have guessed that Van would be smarmy. Genetics had been kind to her for some reason and most men seemed to believe that the size of her breasts had an inverse relationship to the size of her brain. She waited for some wildly inappropriate comment about her boobs or her eyes or…
“You’re much taller than in the photos.”
She swallowed, her anger lessening as his gaze rested a little too long and a little too warm on her face. There were things he wasn’t saying.
“You look shorter,” she said.
“Let’s allow that to breathe.” Van set the bottle down on the edge of the table with a casual ownership that put her teeth on edge. He crossed his legs with a comfortable masculine grace.
Short and sweet, Marie.
“We don’t have that kind of time, Van.” She grabbed the bottle and poured, expertly, exactly four ounces of wine in each glass.
“Salute.” She tapped her glass to his and then sipped the dark red liquid. It was fantastic, mellow, dark and oaky. The kind of wine she loved. “It’s wonderful.”
“It would be even better in ten minutes,” he snapped, the sharpness of the comment belied by the tone of his voice, like he knew what she was doing. He smiled wickedly at her over the edge of his wineglass, his long fingers holding the delicate stem as he swirled the wine.
Oh my, she thought before she could stop herself.
“Let’s cut to the chase here, Van.” Marie sat back in her chair. She’d drink a glass of wonderful wine and send the pirate chef on his way. She opened her mouth to let him have it.
“You’re a coward,” Van interjected into the silence. It seemed he was bent on cutting to a different chase.
4
“EXCUSE ME?” There was no way he just called her, a woman who had climbed mountains and rafted rivers and started her own business all before the age of thirty, a coward.
“You heard me.” He took another sip of wine and set his glass back on the table “You’re scared that you can’t take the comparisons….”
“Comparisons?” Marie repeated because her ears were still ringing with the word coward. Is this a challenge? Is he challenging me? Marie’s inner DeNiro started to get antsy.
“Sure. It’s been coming up more and more in the papers, that my place is—” he shrugged as if he couldn’t help himself “—stylish, and Marie’s Bistro is…” He wrinkled his nose just a bit. “Quaint.”
“There is nothing wrong with quaint,” Marie told him, trying not to sound righteous. “Perhaps you missed the headlines calling me the new goddess of good taste?”
“No, but I saw the one that called you fussy.”
“Look! You jerk.” Marie’s wineglass hit the table with a ping. So much for adult. “This is precisely why I am not doing the show. I will not spend any more time in the company of a man I don’t like…”
“Not even if it means paying off your loans? Moving out of the apartment over your restaurant?” Again with the eyebrow, again with the slight rise in her core temperature. “Marie, you had to turn an old warehouse into this…” He looked around and Marie gritted her teeth. “Charming space. I know, I did the same thing and it wasn’t cheap.”
“Your place hardly needed any work,” she said and then bit her tongue. He didn’t know who he had been haggling with in that bidding war and he didn’t need to know.
“That’s what I thought until I bought the place, which was almost completely renovated, and then the sewage drains collapsed.”
Marie laughed and then clapped a hand over her mouth. Van’s look indicated that he didn’t think the sewage situation was all that funny. She quickly tried to compose her face into something convincingly sympathetic, but inside she was howling.
“It took three months to fix and another two to get rid of the smell. It cost me thousands.”
Marie took a sip of wine to hide her grin. Suddenly a broken dishwasher didn’t seem so bad.
“That is—” she worked hard at not laughing “—awful.”
“Right, so this show and the revenue could come in pretty handy.”
“AMSF isn’t going to pay that much money,” Marie pointed out.
“But, Marie,” Van said, leaning forward, his black eyes focused on her in a way that made Marie’s heart beat a little faster, “you and I both know it’s not about the salary from the show. It’s about what the show could do for us. Imagine if it takes off. Imagine Marie’s Bistro crowded every day for brunch, not just Sundays. Imagine people lined up three deep around your bakery counter, not just at 3:00 p.m. but all day long. Imagine tourists coming to Marie’s Bistro, because the whole nation had taken notice.”
It was like he had opened her head and saw her dreams. Her cooking empire. She was imagining lines out the doors, expanding her catering business, hiring an accountant. She imagined sleeping for three days. On a beach. In Mexico.
“Imagine being debt-free.” Van leaned back. “Free and clear.” He shook his head, a little wrapped up in the daydream himself.
“How bad is your debt?” Marie asked.
“Bad enough that…ah…” He took a sip of wine, flicked a dried tomato seed off his pants. Marie perked up. “I…ah…am asking you to do the show. You are getting to be a big star.” Marie could only blink as he continued. “And I understand that I am riding your coattails here, but I think with the weekly exposure you and I could take off.”
She took her time, sipping her wine, fiddling with one of her silver bracelets, grappling with what he had just said to her. He had laid himself bare, vulnerable, and she couldn’t ruin the moment by saying “gotcha.”
A woman isn’t handed a plum like this everyday.
Jodi’s words from earlier, about getting it all in writing came back to her. This just might work, she thought staring at the magnified tiles through the bottom of her wineglass. It just might.
Finally she glanced up at him and almost laughed out loud. Clearly the man’s pride did not sit well in his stomach. He looked like a food-poisoning victim.
He swallowed, looked up at her cherubs and took a deep breath. “Please?” he asked in a strangled voice.
Marie laughed great big belly laughs like she hadn’t in weeks. “Oh, that was hard, wasn’t it?” She wiped a tear from the corner of her eye.
“Are you going to do it or not?” he nearly barked.
“Come now, Van. Surely you’ve heard the one about honey versus vinegar?” One corner of her mouth lifted and she took a sip of wine.
“What