Dishing Up Love Read online

  “I think we both know that’s a lie,” he says quietly through gritted teeth, his lips not moving as he smiles back at me, and I have to clamp my teeth around my lips to keep from bursting into laughter. “Now…” He claps his hands, glancing down into the pot. “We’re going to add in a fourth of a cup of chicken broth, and then use your wooden spoon to scrape up all the brown from the bottom of the pot. That’s the good stuff, where we get a ton of the flavor. Also, we have to make sure we scrape everything off the bottom of the Instant Pot. They call it deglazing, and we need to do it before starting the pressure cooking.”

  “What’ll happen if we don’t deglaze it?” I ask, because that’s just who I am as a person.

  “It’ll give us a burn message and won’t work,” he replies simply.

  “Fair enough.” This time, I do mess up a little, the liquid sloshing a bit as I try to do what he said. But he cleans up the little drops with a paper towel, his big body folding around mine so I don’t have to stop what I’m doing. It takes everything in me not to press myself against him, an overwhelming urge to be as close to him as possible filling me up.

  It confuses the hell out of me.

  I haven’t been in a relationship since I was twenty-three, almost a decade ago. With the way things ended with my ex, I’ve had zero aspiration to get close to a man, only for him to break my heart when he finds out I can’t give him everything out of life men instinctively desire. Max and I had been together three years, engaged and two months away from our wedding date, when the doctor delivered his heartbreaking news. He left me a month later. With barely enough time to contact everyone to let them know the wedding was off so they could cancel all their travel arrangements. I’d never been more embarrassed and hurt in my entire life, and I swore to myself I’d never let that happen again, essentially swearing off any and all relationships with the opposite sex.

  I haven’t had a single problem with this deal with myself in the last eight years. So why, all of a sudden, am I wanting to rub up against Curtis like a cat in heat? Why do I want to nuzzle into his tall frame that makes me feel so extra small and feminine? Why do I want to curl up together and see just how many TV shows we’re both obsessed with? And why in the world does a sense of loss take over my chest when I think about him leaving once we’re done cooking?

  I immediately regret him choosing something that would cook so quickly.

  His deep voice snaps me out of my thoughts. “Next, we’re going to add the rest of the four cups of broth the recipe called for, two large bay leaves, the beans we quick-soaked, and the ham hock.” As I add the first three ingredients, he removes one of the ham hocks from the packaging, setting it delicately into the pot once I’ve stirred everything together. “Now, we get to set the pot and forget about it for forty-five minutes to an hour. Select Pressure Cook mode, set the timer for thirty minutes, and press Start. The rest of the time will be fooor…?”

  “Natural Pressure Release?” I guess.

  And he gives me a wide grin. “Exactly. See? I knew you’d get the hang of this. No more microwave meals for you, sugar.”

  I roll my eyes but can’t help my genuine smile at his praise.

  Chapter 6

  Curtis

  HER SMILES ARE addictive. I’m beginning to crave them the way I used to crave admiration and praise in the cooking community. That’s not to say I don’t still enjoy all the attention I get for my abilities as a chef; I don’t think anything could feel better than being wanted above all others for an important benefit dinner. I mean, how cool is it to think “Man, these people think my food is so bad ass they believe it’s worth a thousand dollars a plate to bring in charitable donations for a good cause.”

  It’s the same feeling of pride I get when I can make this beautiful yet closed-off woman smile. She’s got some pretty sturdy walls built up around her. I don’t know enough about her to make any assumptions. But I plan to change that starting now.

  “All right, everybody, we’ve got about an hour break. Get yourself some dinner; you know the drill,” Martin calls out, and I see Carlos put down his camera for the first time in hours.

  Normally, everyone would immediately head for the front door, going out to the vans and cars for lunchboxes and smoke breaks. And everyone else sticks to the routine. But I stay behind, wanting to finally spend a moment alone with Erin to see if she may open up a little more without a camera and crew watching her every move.

  She slumps onto a stool next to the island, sprawling her arms across the marble countertop as she puts her cheek to the cold surface. “I’m staaarviiing. I was just running to the freakin’ store to grab a heat-up meal that would’ve taken three minutes and thirty seconds in the microwaaave,” she whines, making me chuckle.

  “Good Lord, woman, the least you could do is heat up a frozen pizza in the oven instead of the microwave,” I say, moving toward the refrigerator. “Is there nothing you can snack on while we wait for it to cook?”

  “The oven takes too long. Preheating sucks the life out of me,” she replies before adding, “and all I have is random crap and condiments that don’t go together.”

  “We’ll see about that,” I tell her, biting my lip as I take in all the “random crap” she has in her fridge and cabinets and spotting the perfect combination. She sits up at my “Ah-ha!”

  “What did you find? Be careful not to poison me with rotten food. It’s been a decade since I cleaned those condiments out. Does mustard even expire?” she asks, making me laugh.

  “You have cream cheese… that’s still good until the thirtieth,” I say setting that on the counter. “Raspberry pepper jelly that hasn’t even been opened yet…”

  “Blech. That was in a gift basket I got from a patient. Who the hell eats a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with peppers? I just didn’t have the heart to throw it out,” she grumbles, and I chuckle once again. Has a woman ever made me laugh as much as she does?

  “And a box of Wheat Thins that are, in fact, expired but—” I toss one into my mouth, testing the crunch. “—are still good. Not even stale yet.”

  She looks at me blankly. “Congratulations, Curtis. You’ve now discovered how a single woman lives in her bachelorette pad.”

  I purse my lips and hold her stare as I take out a Pyrex container I found in one of the cabinets, unwrap the cream cheese from its silver foil paper, place it into the container, and then heat it up in the microwave for just a few seconds, enough to soften the brick but not enough to melt it. I then pour the pepper jelly on top of it, sliding the combination and the box of crackers across the island to Erin and her scrunched face with its adorable wrinkled up nose.

  “Dafuck is this?” she asks, and my nostrils flare with my effort to keep a straight face.

  “Trust me” is all I say, and she narrows her eyes.

  After a stare-down that lasts a full minute and eventually makes my dick hard once again—randy fucker—she finally gives in, pulling a single Wheat Thin out of the box.

  “Do I fold in the cheese?” she asks, lifting a brow, and my whole face spasms trying not to laugh at her Schitt’s Creek reference. She dips out a tiny bit of the jelly and cream cheese, using the corner of the cracker.

  “Here goes nothin’,” she says, acting more like she’s on an episode of Fear Factor than in her kitchen tasting something made with simple ingredients. She squeezes her eyes closed and tosses the cracker in her mouth, chewing with a scared look on her face. Which quickly dissolves as she opens her eyes, a look of pure bliss coming over her every feature. “Holy shit!” She takes out another Wheat Thin and dips it into the mix, this time scooping a lot more onto the cracker before placing it in her mouth, her moans of pleasure making my balls draw up as she reaches for yet another cracker. “This is amazing!” she breathes, and I shake my head at myself, feeling overwhelming pride fill my soul at her reaction to something I made for her.

  It’s more than the regular feeling of achievement I get when someone praises the me
al I’ve made. It’s almost primal. My woman was hungry. I made her something to eat. She ate it, and not only is she getting the sustenance she needed to end her discomfort, but she thinks what I provided is “amazing.”

  Me Curtis.

  You Erin.

  Oo-oo, ah-ah.

  Caveman grunt.

  What. The. Fuck?

  When she pours several crackers right onto the counter in order to make the process of dipping and devouring a little more streamlined, I laugh and take hold of her hands across the island.

  “Don’t fill up on snacks, sugar. You still have a whole meal coming in just… fourteen minutes,” I tell her after glancing at the timer.

  Her bottom lip pouts out as she whimpers with her mouth full, “Plus NPR time,” giving me puppy dog eyes.

  And I fall for her right then and there.

  This sexy yet adorable, playful, spirited woman will be the end of Curtis Rockwell as we know him. From this moment forward, if I have anything to do with it, it’s gonna be Curtis and Erin. Like that one song says, “When they think of me, they think of you.” When everyone thinks about me, they’re going to instantly think of her. If I go anywhere without her, the first thing out of anyone’s mouth is gonna be “Where’s Erin?” Never in my life have I ever wanted an attachment like that. Not once have I ever craved an association between me and another person. Sure, it’s pretty nice having my name come up when people are talking about “the greats” of the chef world, but even being associated with the likes of Gordon Ramsay and Wolfgang Puck doesn’t compare to the idea of pairing up with this beauty, currently making her lip quiver in an attempt to make me let her hands go so she can eat another cracker dipped in cream cheese and pepper jelly, acting as if it’s the finest caviar.

  And I can’t deny her. I let her go, and she chomps down on the snack as if she thinks I might steal it out of her hand, grinning at me before pushing the container away.

  “Put a lid on that sorcery, please, before I eat the whole damn thing,” she requests, rolling the bag of Wheat Thins before closing the box. “I have so many regrets right now.”

  I lift a brow. “Did you eat it too fast?”

  “No. I regret I never knew about that deliciousness. Do you know how many jars of jelly with peppers I’ve kept over the years, just waiting for them to expire so I could finally throw them out without too much guilt? At least like… twenty. All this time, I could’ve been enjoying this journey, Curtis,” she says, her face twisted dramatically like she’s actually disappointed in herself.

  “Well, from now on, I’ll make sure you don’t miss any more food-related journeys. As long as you trust me, I’ll take those taste buds on a magic carpet ride you’ll never want to end,” I promise, and I watch her face soften for a long moment before I see the window behind her eyes board itself back up.

  During the rest of the break, she signs the show’s standard contract giving us permission to air footage of her, and I teach her a quick and easy way to make rice—without burning the bottom half of it, as she warned me she has a habit of doing. I pull bits and pieces of information out of her, enough to learn this girl has walls around her like a fortress. They’re incredibly high and armored, probably after years of reinforcing them. When I try to nonchalantly ask when her last relationship was, she immediately shoots me down with a change in subject, but not before I see a flash of pain in her eyes. Whatever or whoever hurt her must’ve really done a number on her, which makes me admire her more for her profession, wanting to help others even after she’d been hurt herself. It makes me think she’s pretty selfless, but at the same time, I wonder if she might be using her job to distract her from her past instead of dealing with it. To be honest, it makes her even more intriguing that I’m having to work to get to know her. Normally, the women I come into contact with can’t stop talking about themselves.

  When everyone comes back from break, we pick up where we left off making the meal.

  “Taking our big spoon, I’m going to remove the ham hock from the pot—” I follow my own instructions as I say them out loud. “—and place it on our cutting board.” I put the spoon back into the pot so it doesn’t make a mess on her countertop, since I didn’t see a spoon rest when I was going through her kitchen earlier. “Now, I’m going to chop it up into bite-sized pieces. I’ll do it this time, just because our student here looks like she’s about to fall out and shouldn’t be wielding a knife.” I wink at the camera and then grin at Erin, who looks grateful even as she sticks her tongue out at me. “When that’s done—” I finish the last three cuts. “We throw away the bone, and then take about a cup of the beans out of the pot and put them into a bowl.”

  Erin hands me a bowl before I’ve barely gotten the words out. She’s been doing that this entire time, practically reading my mind and producing everything I need. It’s been a dream to cook with her, like a dance in which we both know the choreography. The editing process for this episode should be a piece of cake, since usually they have to cut out long minutes of rummaging through drawers and cabinets and such. This time, they’ll only have to worry about making sure it reaches our TV-PG rating, assuring the footage of the constant boner I’ve had takes its final resting place in the cutting room garbage can.

  “Okay, now my lovely assistant is going to take a fork—” I hand her one out of the drawer I’m standing in front of. “—and mash the beans.”

  She takes the bowl from my hand and makes quick work of smashing the red beans up. When she gives it back to me, there’s a slight tremor to her fingers, and suddenly teasing her about being hungry is the last thing on my mind. I set the bowl down on the counter, ignoring the camera and other people in the room, my only concern being the woman I take hold of, forcing her to look up at me.

  “Are you all right, babe? When you were saying you were starving earlier, I thought you were just playing around and being dramatic.” I search her eyes, discovering surprise there along with a bit of discomfort.

  “I skipped lunch today and took on an emergency patient,” she tells me.

  “And what did you have for breakfast?” I demand.

  Her face turns guilty. “I don’t normally eat breakfast.”

  I feel my face heat with anger, and it startles me. She must read the look though, because she tries to make a joke.

  “Those clever millennials. They took skipping breakfast and made it into a fad, calling it ‘intermittent fasting.’” She snorts, her mouth smiling but her eyes looking uncomfortable.

  I hate that expression almost as much as I hate that she hasn’t eaten all day, so I give in to her joke for just a moment. “Aren’t you technically a millennial, sugar?”

  She scoffs. “I prefer Generation Y. I sleep with a top sheet and have beautiful cursive handwriting, thank you. But they were totally onto something when they invented avocado toast. That shit is gooood.”

  I ask as calmly as I can, “So what you’re saying is the only thing you’ve eaten today is the little snack I made you during the break?”

  She shrugs. “Hence why my ass was at the grocery store getting a quick heat-up meal.”

  I shake my head. “Unacceptable.”

  She gets a haughty look on her face, but before she can tell me off for my bossy tone, I cut her off.

  “From now on, you prepare yourself meals in advance using this handy appliance I just gifted you with. When you get down to the last day’s-worth of meals, you take one hour of your time to run to the grocery store, grab the list of ingredients I’m going to leave you with for several different recipes, and cook them before boxing them up the way I’m about to teach you. You take one to work with you, so you don’t even have to leave your office in order to grab lunch. You heat one up when you get home and eat it for dinner. That means, during the day, you’ll only have to fix yourself one meal. Breakfast. The most important meal of the day. You are obviously a very intelligent woman, one who needs fuel for her brain in order to help her patients throughout the day.
Your brain runs on carbohydrates. It does not run on an empty freaking stomach. So now, sit your ass on the stool and let me feed you.”

  Her mouth opens and closes a few times, a look of shock in her beautiful eyes, but finally she just nods, pulls herself out of my hold on her, and sits on the stool Martin brings around from the other side of the island.

  “All right, Carlos. Keep up. I’m going to make this fast,” I say, taking hold of the bowl of beans Erin mashed. When he points at me, I begin. “We return the chopped ham hock and mashed red beans to the Instant Pot, and then add our sausage we browned in the beginning. If you want the dish less spicy, leave the sausage out and you can just add a few of your slices to the plate.”

  I begin to mix all the pieces together with the spoon once more. “Stir everything together, cooking in Sauté mode, and then let it all thicken to your desired consistency, about five minutes.” I turn around, pulling two bowls out of the cabinet behind me. I dish out some of the rice I prepared during our break into both bowls, setting them on the counter near the cutting board.

  “I’m going to chop up our parsley, the last ingredient left in our recipe, so we can garnish with it and more of the green onions we prepared in the beginning,” I say, mindlessly cutting up the herb while keeping one eye on Erin just to make sure she’s truly okay. The way she talked about not eating today was way too nonchalant, as if it’s a frequent occurrence. The thought sets my ass on fire, making my hackles rise. I don’t like the idea of her not taking the time to care for herself while focusing all her energy on other people. Yes, that just adds to my reasoning that she’s a good and selfless person, but it makes this feeling of protectiveness overwhelm my every emotion. I don’t understand it, but I go with it. My instincts have never steered me wrong before, and because everything inside me has been screaming this woman belongs with me since practically the moment I laid eyes on her, I’m pretty sure it’s just part of wanting to protect what is mine.