Read Online Feel the Heat (Hot In the Kitchen) by Kate Meader - Free Book Online Page A

pillows of gnocchi. The steak was cooked flawlessly, the fish flaking off the bone. All the same, Jack wasn’t too worried about the contest. He’d been cooking on the right side of perfection for years.
    What did worry him was how he’d made an arse of himself in front of her father, and he cursed Cara for neglecting to give him a heads-up. Luckily, Tony had been a gracious host and gave him a tour of the kitchen, in spite of Jack’s half-drunken drooling over his youngest daughter. A little acrimony might make for good TV, but he didn’t want to be on Tony’s shit list. He wasn’t sure why.
    “Ready to throw in the towel yet?” Lili asked.
    “I never back down from a challenge.”
    She laughed, a low throaty chuckle that blossomed into something full and husky and left him scrounging for air. Her mouth was lush and he had to take breaks to stop himself from staring at her. From staring at her mouth and imagining what he’d like to do to it.
    On one of his air-grasping sorties away from her mouth, he spied Laurent with a dangerously stacked blonde near the jukebox. So much for love Italian style. Not far off stood that Maximo-Mario guy, glaring in Jack’s direction. Earlier, while he and Laurent waited for the staff to arrive, this loser had tried to lease him a building for Jack’s new restaurant, the one he already had half built in Chicago’s West Loop.
    “What’s the deal with him?” he asked, nodding in the loser’s direction.
    Lili’s eyes sparkled, and Jack speculated that she might be buzzed.
    “Marco? He’s my father’s business partner.”
    “My condolences,” Jack muttered.
    “And I used to date him.”
    A mouthful of beer went down the wrong way. “Jesus, my sincerest condolences.”
    Marco was speaking animatedly on his cell, though it had all the hallmarks of a one-sided conversation. He probably had the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth as his ringtone and answered his phone with Yello . Tosspot.
    Lili smiled thinly. “He’s not so bad. He’s actually quite sweet.”
    Oh no, he wasn’t. Jack knew Marco’s type. With his pinkie ring, his manicure, and his shark eyes, he was the embodiment of a flash geezer. As if that wasn’t enough for Jack to hate him on sight, he sported the one thing no man over the age of twenty-one should ever leave the house with—a ponytail. That Lili had found him date-worthy, and maybe more, unsettled him.
    “He can be…” Her voice hummed so low he had to lean in to hear her. Standard bar trick. “He just needs a little support.”
    “And that was your job? The great woman behind the little man?” What would it be like to have a woman like this at his back? Pretty damn nice, he was willing to bet. To come home and talk to her, to listen to that beautiful laugh, then bury his tension in her softness.
    To come home and talk to her? That whack to the head must have knocked a few screws loose. How else to explain the leap from unbridled animal attraction to choosing china patterns and cozying up on the couch to Law and Order reruns?
    For a while now, he’d been hovering on the edge of ready, but every potential relationship was fraught with suspicion about the other party’s motives. After Ashley’s tell-all to the tabloids—and it didn’t matter that most of it was a bald-face lie—he was more careful now. More circumspect. He needed to keep that train of thought on the track and not get derailed with fantasies of waking up with Lili’s soft body curled into his…Jesus.
    Her mouth quirked like she could read his thoughts. “Doesn’t every man need a great woman, or a great man, behind him?”
    “What about the great woman? Doesn’t she have her own needs?”
    “All of us great women have needs.” She wrapped her lips around the opening of her longneck beer and he stifled that groan he’d been fighting all fucking night. His dick twitched in commiseration.
    Just to complete the circle of torture, he grabbed his beer from the bar and