Feeding Her, page 4
part #1 of LeClarks Series
Kaitlyn crossed her arms over her chest and glared up at him. “Libelous? That review was generous.” To put some space between them—and because she needed it—she walked into the kitchen and opened a bottle of wine. She was unsettled but unsurprised when he followed her in.
“Do you really even care what I say about Rathskeller? You hardly seem invested in the place—beyond financially, I mean.”
“I don’t give a shit what you think about Rathskeller,” Landon corrected, looking through her peeling, yellowing cabinets for another wine glass. “But when you put it in print, share it with the town, and my business drops 5%, I start to get a little bothered.” Finding one, he gave himself a generous pour.
“Did I invite you to stay?” Kaitlyn asked, eyeballing the thirty dollars of wine to which he was helping himself. Why hadn’t she opened a cheaper vintage? Oh right, because she hadn’t expected to be sharing. Then she made the mistake of looking into his face and saw the smirk quirking up his hard mouth. She frowned, what had she—oh. “I mean,” she corrected herself quickly, “you aren’t staying. So you hardly need half a bottle of wine.”
“I think we have a few things to work out before I pack my overnight bag,” Landon said silkily. “For one thing, this place needs to be fumigated first. But I’m not saying no to a quick roll on the linoleum.”
Kaitlyn bit off a sharp laugh. “You don’t have to, I’m not offering.”
He drank deeply, his eyes locked on hers.
He was too close, Kaitlyn thought breathlessly. The fucking apartment wasn’t big enough to get away from him. Maybe in the glorious, open-concept condo she could have gotten enough space between them without looking like she was retreating, but here, she was going to have to stand her ground.
It’s a kitchen, Kaitlyn, she told herself fiercely. You have been in the kitchen with men who stood too close before. You know what to do. Granted, they hadn’t been men who looked like Landon James. And she didn’t have that embarrassing, irritating memory of having been half in love with him when she was a gangly thirteen-year-old. Fifteen years ago, he was already well on his way to being devastatingly handsome. High school girls had flocked to the restaurant to see him. “Can we have a view of the kitchen?” they’d ask Gilles hopefully, who would always find a place where they could catch glimpses of Landon without having a direct line of sight into the kitchen. Girls had come for Grayson, too, of course, but Kaitlyn hadn’t hated those girls and so they didn’t stand out in her memory.
“Stalkers at table 9,” she’d say spitefully, and he’d get that smirk, the same one he was giving her now. The one that had always been arrogant, but now seemed predatory. Kaitlyn set her wine on the counter to keep from gulping it down. She had to keep a clear head because he wasn’t the boy he’d been fifteen years ago. He had grown up every bit as good-looking as his genetics had promised, and he’d inherited the aura of power that had clung to Randolph James. He wasn’t Grayson’s best friend anymore, he was his father’s son. And that made him as dangerous as any snake.
A snake who was speaking, she realized.
“Take down the review, Kait,” he was saying quietly. “I don’t want to make this ugly for you, but I will.”
“Ugly how?” she asked with a laugh she hoped sounded contemptuous rather than choked.
“I could pull my investment out of LeClarks.” Moving so quickly she didn’t even have time to consider retreating, he caught her hand and held it up. Under the fluorescent lights, every broken nail looked especially jagged, and her skinned knuckles looked raw and red. Kait studied her hand with interest. It had been a long time since she’d worked so hard they looked like this. It didn’t embarrass her, not even in front of Landon. It felt good to be in her own kitchen again, even if she was just cleaning it so far.
Then what he’d said sank in, and her gaze raised to his.
He nodded. “Think about it. It’ll take you another two weeks to get that place into shape without the extra help Gray’s hiring.”
Furious, Kaitlyn tried to yank her hand free, but his long fingers tightened around her wrist.
“Pull it then,” she snapped. “I’d rather clean the whole thing with my toothbrush than take your money.”
Landon studied her and saw the truth behind her hot words. She didn’t have Gray’s cool logic that was constantly calculating how every month of rent without income pushed them further into the red. His money wouldn’t move her an inch. It was a rare woman who wasn’t moved by his money, and it only intensified his interest in her.
Ignoring her efforts to free herself, he sipped his wine and considered. If not money, what would sway Kaitlyn LeClark? He didn’t know her well enough to target what she loved, besides LeClarks. But he knew well enough to know what she hated. And Landon excelled in negative reinforcement.
“Okay,” he said slowly, relishing the beauty of the idea that had come to him. “Here’s the deal. Take down your review and issue a retraction, or I will be at LeClarks every single day looking after my investment.”
Kaitlyn froze. “You wouldn’t.”
Landon shrugged, “You’re costing me money with Rathskeller, Kait. I’ve got to make sure the new LeClarks makes up for that, don’t I?”
Kaitlyn’s voice sounded desperate even to her own ears. “My review is costing you pennies. You probably spent 5% of Rathskeller’s weekly net income on your tie.”
That was true, in fact, but that wasn’t the point. “Are you going to take it down?” Landon asked, knowing the answer even before she spat it out.
“No way in hell.”
His lips curled, and Kaitlyn got the feeling that was exactly what he wanted to hear. She lost her breath. Damn him. He wanted something from her, she knew that look, but she couldn’t figure out why. He was Landon James. He could have anyone and anything from here to New York.
“If you’re doing this for a quick roll on the linoleum,” she managed, “that’s not going to happen. Ever.”
Landon’s eyes dropped to the linoleum beneath their feet and then rose slowly up her slim body to her flushed face. He hadn’t turned Rathskeller into an 800 million dollar franchise or made James Investments a billion-dollar company by running away from a challenge. And if she knew men at all, she’d know that the hot, screw you look in her eye was a mistake.
“No quickies. Got it.” He set his wine glass down on the counter beside them and hauled her up against him. “Why don’t we start with this.”
“Don’t even—” Kait started to say, but then his mouth was on hers, hard and demanding. He tasted like expensive wine, smelled like expensive cologne, and felt like a fortress surrounding her. His hand tangled in her hair and dragged her head back, deepening the kiss.
Kaitlyn resisted for as long as she could, and then she opened her mouth helplessly and gave into the kiss. His mouth was hot on hers, erasing her ability to think straight. And that was good because some distant part of her brain was screaming at her that kissing a man like Landon James was dangerous. He’d capriciously decided to help LeClarks, but he could just as easily destroy it. And getting tangled up with him like this would give him the ability to destroy her, too.
Then, just as suddenly as the kiss had begun, he released her. Kaitlyn stepped back, head spinning, and reached for the counter. Dazed, she looked up at him, unsurprised to see he looked as cool and unaffected as ever.
He tilted her chin up, rubbed the pad of his thumb over her swollen lower lip, and smirked down at her. “I’ll see you tomorrow, partner.”
Chapter Six
The next morning, Gray was less than pleased to find Kaitlyn at his door an hour before he’d planned to wake up.
“This is a controlled access building,” he complained. “Who let you in?”
“Rich people get up early,” she said, pushing past him and going straight to the kitchen to make a strong cup of coffee with the fancy machine she hadn’t gotten a chance to use during her brief stay. “And they’re weirdly trusting.”
“I’m going to have to register a complaint with the owner,” he sagged into the barstool at the end of the island and rubbed his tired eyes. “I just went to bed five hours ago, Kait!”
“While you’re complaining to the owner,” she said, ignoring the second part of his statement, “tell him LeClarks doesn’t want his money.” She’d spent half the night awake, unable to erase Landon’s kiss from her memory. If he didn’t leave her alone, she would give in to him eventually, and they both knew it. The only answer was to disentangle from him completely.
He dropped his head onto the glistening quartz countertop and said indistinctly, “Why would I do that when LeClarks does want his money?”
“You don’t think it’s spitting in the face of mom and dad’s legacy?” Kaitlyn asked, filling the water reservoir and beginning to flip switches at random. “The James family is why LeClarks has to be revived in the first place. His parents basically killed ours.”
“That’s a little extreme, don’t you think?” Grayson raised his head now to see if she was serious.
Kaitlyn kept her back to him, partly because she didn’t want him to see her hesitation—did she really believe that?—and partly because the machine had begun to make a low, ominous hissing sound. “Think about it,” she reasoned for both of them. “It was his mom who started it all. And even if they didn’t physically kill them, they died because they lost LeClarks. They were never the same.”
A baffling series of food poisonings fifteen years ago was what ran LeClarks into the ground. They might have recovered from the unfortunate incidents if not for Martha James getting sick. She spread the news all over town, claimed to have been at death’s door and would never, ever risk eating at LeClarks again. Then Randolph James got involved. He paid for a specialist to come in who traced the illnesses back to bad mushrooms. Articles about how careless the LeClarks were ended up on the front page of the newspapers. They were peppered with quotes from anonymous sources that claimed the only surprise about the food poisonings was that they hadn’t happened sooner. Their insurance went up.
“We’ll survive it,” her father had said grimly. But they hadn’t been able to. The James family had brought a lawsuit against them, and they’d had to mortgage the restaurant and land just to pay the lawyers. Losing had put the final nail in the LeClarks’ coffin.
Grayson couldn’t argue any of those points, but he couldn’t quite equate them to her ugly conclusion. “Mom and Dad were never the same because they never tried to be the same,” he said so quietly she almost couldn’t hear him over the angry grinding the machine was now making. “If they’d been strong, they’d have at least tried to get back on their feet instead of just licking their wounds for the rest of their lives.”
“They didn’t have to be strong,” Kaitlyn said, giving up on the machine and moving what she hoped was a safe distance from it. Now she did turn to face Gray because she believed wholeheartedly in every word she was saying. “They were good. They fed people, even people who couldn’t afford a fancy dinner. Remember Thanksgiving? They lost thousands every year closing the restaurant to cook at the shelter.”
“Of course they were good. I’m not saying—”
“You want them to be strong like the James family?” Kaitlyn scoffed. “All stiff upper lips, iron backsides, and no heart?”
“Strength isn’t a bad thing, Kait. You can be strong and good.” Grayson was starting to get a little pissed now. It was really early, he was really tired, and Kait had more than likely broken his coffee maker on top of making this asinine claim that he wasn’t honoring their parents. Everything he’d done in the last five years when he first vowed to bring the LeClark name back to New Canton had been to honor them. “And this is a pointless argument. It’s not about wanting or not wanting Landon’s money; it’s about needing it. With his investment, I can hire a crew to get the restaurant into shape and we can start brushing up on the recipes and working on the cookbook. We’ll be able to open a full six weeks earlier, and I don’t need to tell you what it’s costing every month to lease a restaurant that isn’t making any money.”
Kaitlyn couldn’t argue any of these statements, so she took a minute to rally her thoughts while Gray stomped around the counter to fix the coffee machine. Giving her a black look, he emptied a bag of espresso beans into a funnel she hadn’t noticed before. Suddenly the angry chomping noise became a gentle whirling grind.
“I don’t like him,” she finally admitted when no other logical arguments came to mind. “He’s—arrogant.” He unnerves me, was what she meant. Arrogance had practically been a job requirement to work in a New York City restaurant. She had her share when she tied on an apron, slicked back her hair, and picked up her knife. She’d learned to handle men with master-of-the-universe complexes, so what was it about Landon’s kiss that got under her skin? Was it just their shared past, or—
“Kait?” Gray said in a way that made her think it wasn’t the first time, and she realized that he was offering her a cup of coffee.
“Thanks.” She took a sip and frowned. “It tastes—”
“Like you burnt out the gears on the grinder?” he finished pleasantly. “I agree. Drink up.”
Kait didn’t ask if he’d heard her before. She could tell by the faint frown lines creasing his forehead as he drank his coffee that he had, that he was thinking about it. Trying to figure out if they could do it without him. Hope bloomed in her chest, along with an aftertaste of something she didn’t recognize. It couldn’t be disappointment. That wouldn’t make any sense.
“Listen,” Gray said finally, meeting her eyes. “If you tell me that you’re scared of Landon, that he reminds you of...anyone...then it’s done. I’ll give back the money, and we’ll make it work somehow.”
It was her way out, Kaitlyn knew. And it would have been so easy. She could see how uncomfortable Gray was even bringing anyone up. All she had to do was avert her eyes, swallow hard, and nod, and she’d never have to think about Landon James again. Gray would make sure of it. But that would have been an unconscionable lie. Landon was many terrible things, but he did not remind her of what Gray couldn’t say aloud. She had no trouble stretching the truth to call his parents murderers, but she couldn’t go this far.
“No,” she finally sighed. “That’s not it. I just don’t like him.”
The tension broke, and she could hear relief in Gray’s laugh. “Then I’m sorry, Kait. We need him too much. But I don’t think you’re going to see him around all that much. He’s going back to the city tomorrow.”
“I’m not coming back to the city,” Landon said by way of greeting when Carter picked up.
“The fuck you aren’t,” Carter said. “We have a meeting with Sunwise tomorrow, and we start the merger on Friday.”
“I’ll call into the meeting,” Landon said. “You can handle the merger.”
“I can handle it,” Carter agreed. “But that’s not how we do things. I can’t be good cop and bad cop. If you aren’t there, I’ll end up firing all of their people and sleeping with the CEO’s wife.”
Landon laughed. “Are you saying I’ve been playing good cop all these years?”
“Obviously.”
Carter’s voice was muffled, and Landon knew him well enough to know that he was brushing his teeth. Carter had the nicest teeth in New York City, and he treated them better than he did his girlfriends.
“What’s so important in New Canton anyway,” Carter said after he spat out his prescription-grade whitening toothpaste. “You usually don’t last this long when you go back.”
The memory of Kait’s slim body in his arms flashed across his brain, but he couldn’t tell Carter about her. His friend liked natural redheads too much. “Family shit,” Landon said instead and waited again while Carter flossed and rinsed. “If you really need me, I’ll come back. But if not—”
“No,” Carter cut him off. “I’ve got it. But don’t blame me for what happens on Friday. I did warn you.”
“We’ll celebrate your banging the CEO’s whole family on Saturday,” Landon said and hung up.
For the first few hours they were at Baratellis, Kaitlyn was on edge. Every time the door opened, she expected Landon to stride through it. But as morning became afternoon and she got used to the crew Gray hired banging in and out, shaping up the restaurant much faster than the two of them could have ever managed, she relaxed.
It helped that Gray had unpacked their parents’ cookbooks, and she had enough time to pour over them while she took a late lunch. They weren’t just her parents’ cookbooks, really. They stretched back generations. They were a hodgepodge of handwriting styles, scraps of yellowing paper in varying sizes, and written in a mixture of French and English. “We might need to hire a translator,” she called to Gray. “Can we afford that?”
Her brother’s sigh reached her all the way from the bar where he was working on the booths. “Right now, we can afford Google Translate,” he called back. “Try that first.”
Reluctantly, Kaitlyn pulled out her phone. The screen was cracked from a careless night out, and the battery only held a charge for a few hours, but it was serviceable. Once LeClarks was making a profit, though, a new one was at the top of her list of things to buy.
She was halfway through the first recipe when she heard the doorbell jingle. We need to get rid of that, she thought irritably, her concentration broken. What kind of restaurant put a bell on their door? Were the previous owners trying to create some sort of Pavlovian reaction in their customers? Whenever they heard a bell ring, they’d begin to crave overcooked pasta and cheap wine? If so, it clearly hadn’t worked.
Sensing that someone had come into the dining room, she said, “Gray, can you kill that bell? Like immediately?”
Instead of answering, he came to stand over her. The hairs on the back of her neck lifted, and her heart began to beat faster. Slowly, she raised her eyes up the length of his body and met Landon’s dark eyes. With effort, she kept her face impassive and said, “It’s been a long time since you kept restaurant hours, hasn’t it?”
