One Night Wager, page 1
Indy caught her breath.
It was him. The Beast.
“Hello, Mr. Gilbert. It’s nice to meet you.”
“Hello, Rosalinda.”
She furrowed her brow at hearing her given name but smiled at him.
“Why did you challenge me?” he asked.
He was even better looking in person. The scar on the side of his face just added to his appeal, making him look dangerous in a safe-but-sexy way. He was taller than she’d expected as well, and compared to her five foot five inches, he was about a foot taller than her.
There was a leashed power in him that made the air around him almost crackle and she felt a shiver down her spine.
He looked like a man who took what he wanted.
* * *
One Night Wager by Katherine Garbera
is part of The Gilbert Curse series.
Dear Reader,
I’m so excited to bring you the first book in The Gilbert Curse series! I have always loved fairy tales and remember the first time I saw Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. A heroine who reads and has brown hair and brown eyes—finally one who I could really identify with—and of course, a beastly hero has always been a favorite of mine.
Conrad Gilbert was so much fun to write. I think that the high-pressure world of the celebrity chef sort of lends itself easily to a man who comes across as a beast. It’s one of the few areas where everything has to be finished at an exact time and Conrad is used to everyone listening to him.
Indy isn’t one for taking orders, but she is determined to do whatever it takes to break the “curse” that the town council is sure the town has. If that means facing the beast in the kitchen and then making a risky wager, so be it.
I hope you enjoy the results of their One Night Wager!
Happy reading!
Katherine
Katherine Garbera
One Night Wager
Katherine Garbera is the USA TODAY bestselling author of more than a hundred and twenty-five books. Her award-winning books are known for their emotional intensity and sizzling sensuality. She lives in the midlands of the UK with her husband. She loves to connect with readers online at www.katherinegarbera.com and on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Books by Katherine Garbera
Harlequin Desire
The Image Project
Billionaire Makeover
The Billionaire Plan
Billionaire Fake Out
The Gilbert Curse
One Night Wager
Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.
You can also find Katherine Garbera on Facebook, along with other Harlequin Desire authors, at Facebook.com/HarlequinDesireAuthors!
This book is dedicated to my good friend
Joss Wood, a wonderful writer and also a good
person, who’s always there when I need her.
Acknowledgment:
Thank you to John Jacobson for their
keen insight and deft editing of this book.
I am looking forward to working
on a lot of books together.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Excerpt from Big Easy Secrets by Kira Sinclair
One
Conrad Gilbert didn’t look like any beast she’d seen or envisioned. He had the sleeves of his chef’s white jacket rolled up to reveal muscly forearms covered in a tattoo that, when the camera zoomed in, seemed to be thorny vines. His hands moved with speed and precision. When he looked up to speak to the viewer, Indy Belmont shivered with sensual awareness which warned her it had been too long since she’d gone out on a date or had a hookup. She wasn’t listening to a single word that came out of that perfectly formed masculine mouth.
She wanted to kiss him. She wanted to feel those big arms wrapped around her, with him saying her name in that deep timbre of his that reminded her of long, hot summer nights.
“So what do you think?” Lilith Montgomery, the head of the Main Street Business Alliance and the woman in charge of this endeavor, asked as she hit Pause on the video screen. Leaving Conrad’s face zoomed in, looking intently out at Indy.
“Huh?” Indy asked, realizing her father would roll his eyes at the comment. She’d come to Gilbert Corners at the town council’s invitation. Her show Hometown, Home Again had taken off over the last season and now that Lansdowne was revitalized, her producers had been looking for another town in need of her skills. “Sorry. He’s very intense.”
“He is. Even as a youth he was. So can you get him to come to town and break the curse?” Jeff Hamilton asked.
Indy smiled and nodded with confidence. They were on the same network, so getting Conrad to come to Gilbert Corners should be easy. Her best friend was from Gilbert Corners and had bought and opened a coffee shop here, and Indy herself wasn’t too bad in the kitchen.
“I can get him here. What’s this about a curse?”
Lilith shook her head. “It’s just sad. Gilbert International closed their main factory, and the very next weekend the three Gilbert heirs were in a horrific car crash.”
“One boy-Declan Owen-was left dead and two of the heirs near death. After that the town started drying up.”
“When was this?” Indy asked not sure she believed in the curse.
“Ten years ago.”
About the time that inflation, combined with the economic downturn, made it hard for small businesses to stay afloat in small towns like this—where college kids went away and didn’t come back. She suspected that had more to do with vacant shops on Main Street than a curse. But a curse would make good TV.
“I’d say that curse has run long enough. I can do it,” she said. Though she had no specific plan. She’d learned that the only way to make things happen was to believe she could do them. “Are we sure getting him to come and do a cook-off in the town is what we need?”
She’d moved to the town of Gilbert Corners eighteen months ago when she’d purchased a failing bookshop and a fixer-upper Victorian house off the main town square. She had done something similar in her hometown after college. She’d started as a YouTuber with a small following, trying desperately to fix up the house she’d inherited as a way to find some peace with the woman she had become. Viewers had responded and she’d ended up with a massive following when the offer to do her own television show on the Home Living channel had come in. That was two years ago, and once she’d gotten the business thriving and the town back on the path to its former glory, she’d needed a new project. Especially since her partner—and the man she’d been crushing on forever—had fallen in love with someone else and married her.
Renovating the Main Street, breaking a curse and getting over her past seemed like a big ask and she knew she had her work cut out for her.
Gilbert Corners was close enough to Boston that it should be a booming commuting suburb but instead it had definitely seen better days.
“It’s a start,” Lilith said. “Do you think you can do it?”
Indy, who had been called obstinate and been told that she never gave up, wasn’t worried about that. “No problem.”
She left town hall and walked back across the park where weeds had choked out the once beautiful flower beds. Graffiti covered the base of the statue that honored the four founding fathers of Gilbert Corners who’d helped during the American Revolution. She entered her bookshop, Indy’s Treasures, and waved at Kym, the high school student who helped out in the afternoons, as she entered her office at the back.
Conrad Gilbert, celebrity chef known as the Beast. She pulled up his online profile.
He had thick dark curly hair that framed his face. His brows were thick and his eyes were an icy blue. He had a long jagged scar down his left cheek ending at the top of his lip. He wore a chef’s jacket but above the collar she saw ink from a tattoo that went around his neck. His arms were crossed over his chest.
Who dares challenge the Beast in his lair?
The words were emblazoned under his crossed arms. She read further and saw that he accepted cooking challenges from across North America to be televised on his show. There was a place to enter information to challenge him. He’d come to the town of the challenger and they would go head-to-head making a famous local or regional dish.
“Yes!”
“Yes, what? I heard you agreed to get the Beast to come to town.”
She glanced up as Nola Weston, her best friend and the reason she had come to Gilbert Corners, walked into her office. When Indy had been starting out on YouTube, Nola, her former college roommate and self-taught woodworker, had joined her team. Nola set her mug of coffee on the desk, leaning against it.
“I did. I mean, he’s not really a beast, and I think it would be good to have a Gilbert to return to town.”
“Why didn’t you go for Dash? He visits all the time to see his sister at the sanatorium.”
“Conrad has a TV show which will get us some national exposure, plus Lilith thought he’d be the easier of the two.”
“The Beast, easier? They play it up on TV, but he’s a very arrogant and kind of just does what he wants. I’m not sure he’ll help you.”
“Oh, he’ll say yes,” Indy said. Nola was skeptical, but Indy was confident. The Beast’s Lair was a competition show where he accepted the challenges of amateur chefs and if they beat him they were awarded a $350,000 prize. That money would go a long way toward fixing up Gilbert Corners.
She filled in the application and used her grandmother’s Low Country Boil recipe, something which she had made a few times on her show for the crew and had gotten rave reviews.
Two days later she heard back from her contact at the network that her application for Gilbert Corners to be featured on The Beast’s Lair had been accepted.
After closing her email, Indy sat back in the leather chair that had been her grandfather’s and started making plans. Real plans. They’d need to clean up the park and get the graffiti off the statue, but she was excited...which she told herself had nothing to do with meeting the Beast in person.
* * *
“No.”
Conrad Gilbert didn’t suffer fools or repeat himself. He put down the bottle of garlic-infused olive oil he’d been holding and turned to look at Ophelia Burnetti who was the executive producer on his food television show.
“You can’t say no. I’ve already told them you’re coming.”
“Well you can tell them I’m not.” Conard Gilbert didn’t even bother looking up from his bench as he worked on the delicate design for the plating of his latest dish. His new assistant was going to be fired. He hated being disturbed when he was in his test kitchen, and everyone knew it.
“Con, this is happening. Gilbert Corners is close by and we need to fill the vacancy left by the unusable video we shot at the Kentucky Derby.”
“It’s not unusable.”
“The other chef had a meltdown and threw a bottle of bourbon at you. It would ruin him. This place is close, and they want you to film in less than three weeks. It’s ideal.”
He straightened to his full six foot five inches, giving her a withering stare. She looked back at him nonplussed.
Fuck.
He’d vowed to never return to Gilbert Corners except to visit his cousin Rory. And he didn’t want to break that vow now. He hated that place.
“If I go, I’ll arrive as the cooking starts and then leave as soon as we are done filming.”
“Fine. I only need forty minutes of airable footage. So do that and you’re out.”
Ophelia left a few minutes later after telling him she’d send the details to his assistant. Conrad followed her out into the main office area where his assistant sat doing something on her cell phone.
“Send it to me,” Conrad said to Ophelia, turning to his assistant. “You’re fired.”
He walked back into the test kitchen, but his mind was no longer on the dish he’d been creating. It was on fucking Gilbert Corners. He had no happy memories of the town that bore his family’s name. His grandfather had been a cold, demanding guardian who’d raised Conrad and his cousins after their parents were killed in an airplane crash as they’d been returning from a ski trip. Conrad had been ten.
He’d never felt like Gilbert Manor was home. He had missed his actual home—the brownstone that had been in his mother’s family, where he’d lived with his parents. He’d been loved and treated like their little prince and their deaths had left him empty. His grandfather had taken one look at Conrad and his two cousins when they’d shown up on his doorstep and immediately arranged for them to be sent off to boarding schools. He and Dash, who was like a brother to him, had been sent to the same one.
He reached for his phone and called Dash.
“Gilbert here.”
“Gilbert here,” he responded.
“Con, how’s it going?” Dash asked.
“I have to go to GC.”
“You have to? I thought no one dared tell you what to do.”
“Me too. But Ophelia isn’t scared of me, and we need an episode to fill a programming gap. Why would anyone invite me to town?” Conrad asked.
“You got me. They all think we’re bad luck.”
“Exactly. Well, I’m going to crush the challenger and then get out of GC. Want to join me?”
“Hell no. I visit Gilbert Corners’ care home once a week and that’s enough for me.”
“How’s Rory?” he asked.
Conrad rubbed his face. His scar was a constant reminder of the past but he’d learned to live with it. So much of who he’d been had been lost on that night. But the truth was, he was luckier than Dash and Rory, and he knew it.
He’d often thought that the crash had just brought his true self to the surface. His grandfather had wanted to have a plastic surgeon fix the scar but Conrad had refused. He was tired of playing the old man’s game. The scar had reshaped him. And he had no regrets.
“She’s the same. Her doctor is retiring. I need to be in GC to talk to the new doctor taking over. When are you going?”
“I’ll send the date when I have it,” he said. They hung up and he turned back to the bench where he’d been working earlier.
He wanted to smash something at the thought of having to return to Gilbert Corners. It didn’t matter that his grandfather had died almost eight years ago; he would always associate that town with the old man.
Ophelia forwarded him the information on his challenger, Rosalinda Belmont. He looked her up and saw that she had recently moved to town and had her own television show Hometown, Home Again on the same network his show was on.
He clicked on the promo video of her new program in Gilbert Corners. She had dark hair and a heart-shaped face. She wore glasses in her photo and had a book in her hands. She walked through the bookshop on Main Street in front of a sign that read Indy’s Treasures; underneath it was the slogan “Adventure is just one book away.”
Conrad never went into a challenge uninformed so he forwarded her information to a private investigator.
He looked down at her big brown eyes, felt something stir inside of him. Part sexual, part curiosity, part something he couldn’t define. He just wished he knew what she was up to.
* * *
“So...someone was in town asking about you yesterday,” Nola said as Indy stopped by Java Juice the next morning. “I don’t like it.”
“Ha. I’m sure it was nothing. Maybe that wealthy king and queen finally realized where they left me,” Indy said as she handed Nola her thermal to-go coffee mug.
“Your sweet parents would be devastated to hear you say that.”
“Naw, I promised to cut them in on my fortune once I’m found,” she said with a wink. She wasn’t too concerned about anyone asking after her. She had nothing to hide.
The morning rush was over and the tables of the coffee shop were filled with the usual suspects. Simone, who was working on her doctoral thesis, Pete, who was planning the next quest for his Dungeons & Dragons group, and then the young moms in the back enjoying some adult conversation while their toddlers played next to them.
Nola prepared Indy’s normal order of a large Americano with skim milk. “Would you mind if I put a flyer on your bulletin board asking for some help weeding in the park on Saturday? I want to try to get the park in better shape before the cooking competition. I mean, the town council should do it but...”
“They’re busy paying for things like road repair and other community needs.”
Indy turned to see Jeff Hamilton behind her. He smiled at her. “I know, but we need to make this place look nice.”
“The park is on the list, but there are so many things that need to be done,” Jeff said. “My wife, June, owns the nursery on the outskirts of town. I can talk to her about bringing plants for the bedding. Did you find a sponsor yet?”
“Not yet, I’m still in talks with one of the sponsors I use on my show. But Conrad Gilbert is coming to town on May 1 to film his show. Once I win, we’ll have a nice amount of money to put toward it. I’m going to use that to get more people involved. It is a long road but we will get there.”
