Slow Simmer (Island Escapes Book 4) Read online

  “Yes, but Luke doesn’t.” Suzannah stopped in her pacing and shot him a ferocious look. “This isn’t going to work, Carlo. It can’t. I can’t work with you.”

  “Why not?” he asked, and heard the echoes of long-ago hurt in his voice as he added “You’re the one who left me, remember?”

  He couldn’t see the colour of Suzannah’s eyes in the dim light behind the restaurant, but he knew them by heart, could imagine the emerald in them brightening as she stared at him in wide-eyed silence.

  “If we could return to English for a moment,” Luke said dryly, and both of them snapped their heads around guiltily to look at him.

  “My apologies,” Carlo said guiltily. He was always very conscious of his manners, and he did answer to Luke, after all. Or would, if Suzannah could be convinced to let him stay.

  “Suzannah,” Luke nodded briefly at Carlo before turning his attention to his executive chef. “Do I take it that whatever issues you have with Carlo have nothing to do with his ability in the kitchen?”

  “No,” Suzannah said sulkily after a pause.

  “I’m sorry,” Luke addressed the remark to Carlo, “but I have to ask her this. Suzannah, has Carlo ever assaulted, threatened or intimidated you?”

  “No!” She looked shocked at the idea. “No, Luke, it’s nothing like that. We… have a history, that’s all.”

  “We were rivals in culinary school and then we were lovers,” Carlo said baldly, seeing no reason to hide the truth.

  “I see,” Luke said.

  Suzannah had flushed to the roots of her hair, the darkening cast of her skin available even in the bad light. “It didn’t end well,” she said, almost inaudibly.

  For a moment, the three of them stood in silence, and then Luke sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t think you’re being fair,” he told Suzannah finally. “How long ago was all this?”

  “Nine years,” Suzannah said immediately, making Carlo blink. He could name the exact day and time he last saw her, but hadn’t thought she would have the information on the tip of her tongue like that.

  “And you don’t think you’ve both grown up enough to work together?”

  Ouch. The biting remark found its target, Carlo saw, as Suzannah’s spine stiffened.

  “Give me an opportunity,” he said quickly, before she could lose her temper and say something she might regret. “I’m sure you’ve learned a lot in nine years; so have I. Let me make you a dessert dégustation menu, for lunchtime tomorrow. If you’re not completely sold on everything I make, I’ll go.”

  He was careful to keep his tone completely reasonable. Luke nodded approvingly at him, and they both looked at Suzannah to see her reaction.

  Carlo knew her well enough to guess she wanted to reject his suggestion on the spot, but doing so would look unreasonable at best, maybe even petty and vindictive, and she really wasn’t an unreasonable person. She had high expectations of herself and held others around her to the same standards, both in the quality of her cooking and in her personal life.

  “D’accord,” she said grudgingly at last, then translated for Luke’s sake. “All right.”

  “Excellent,” Luke said, and Carlo could tell he was being deliberately hearty. “I’ll come down, and bring Olivia over. She’s our marketing manager,” he advised Carlo. “Once you’re confirmed in the post, she’ll be the one plastering it all over social media. I understand you have almost a million subscribers on You Tube, and Jace agreed with you that you can continue to film here as long as it doesn’t affect the day-to-day operations of La Sirène?”

  “That’s right,” Carlo nodded. “I haven’t made any announcement yet, of course.”

  He was pretty sure Suzannah was grinding her teeth. They needed to talk, privately, but she didn’t seem inclined to give him even a moment.

  “I have to get back,” she said abruptly, turning to open the kitchen door. “The pastry kitchen will be open to you from six tomorrow morning,” she threw over her shoulder to Carlo. “Don’t be late… and don’t distract my staff. They have a lot of work to do.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said to the closing door.

  “That did not go how I expected,” Luke said after a long minute of awkward silence. “Would you mind filling me in on the details of ‘it didn’t end well’, please?”

  Suddenly, Carlo felt absolutely exhausted. He’d spent most of the last thirty-six hours on an aeroplane, and thinking about being face to face with Suzannah again for the first time in almost a decade had kept him from getting any sleep, even though Jace Hunter’s private jet was sinfully comfortable. His body clock was completely out of sync, and he had to get up in just a few hours ready to cook the best desserts he’d ever made in his life.

  Yet, he couldn’t refuse to explain.

  “Sure,” he said wearily. “Would you mind if we talked about it over a stiff drink, though? I’m feeling very much in need of one right now… and then a hot shower and a few hours of sleep before I get in the kitchen to impress Madam Picky.”

  Luke laughed, and put a companionable hand on Carlo’s shoulder. “Of course, mate. Right this way. I’ve got a bottle of Scotch in my cabin, and it’s just a couple of doors down from yours. You can go to bed right after we’ve talked.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” A glass of Scotch sounded heavenly, almost as good as a bed. Carlo followed as Luke set off through the resort, wending his way through palm-tree lined paths with confidence despite a lack of signs and limited lighting. It seemed like a maze to Carlo’s overtired mind, but he was sure he’d get used to it, just like the heat. Even after dark had fallen, the air was hot and muggy, the humidity much higher than he was used to. He just hoped his room was air-conditioned, or sleeping would be difficult no matter how tired he was.

  “This one’s yours,” Luke paused outside a small cabin. It looked pretty luxurious for staff accommodation, and with his brain filter compromised by exhaustion, Carlo said so. Luke laughed.

  “They used to be guest accommodations, actually. After a hurricane a few years ago damaged much of the existing infrastructure, the Hunters bought the island and did a complete rebuild. Left the existing cabins for staff. Only senior staff get these nice ones, but you definitely merit one, considering your celebrity status and how much we expect you to enhance the reputation of La Sirène, and by extension the whole resort.”

  Carlo wasn’t too tired to understand the warning in Luke’s tone. He nodded in understanding, and they moved on, walking a couple of cabins further along the row. Luke gestured him to take a seat on the small veranda, going inside and returning a couple of minutes later with a bottle and two glasses.

  Luke let him savour the first couple of sips, the welcome burn going down his throat, before speaking.

  “So, you and Suzannah had a thing going on. Tell me about it… and tell me why you didn’t let Jace know the pair of you had a history, please.”

  Carlo winced. “I know how good she is,” he answered the last part of the request first, “and I know you wouldn’t want to risk displeasing her, in case she walked out on you. I wanted to see her again, though, and please believe me that I genuinely want the job, and I’ll do it to the best of my ability.”

  Luke inclined his head in acknowledgement of the promise. “And the rest?” he asked, not unkindly. “I don’t like surprises, Carlo. If this is going to come back to bite me, I’d like the full story.”

  “I wish I had it,” Carlo said, surprising himself with the bitterness which came into his tone, “but I still don’t know why she left me.”

  Unwillingly, he found his mind ranging back over the years, to when he was young and hopelessly in love with a fiery redhead who cooked like a dream…

  Chapter Three

  Suzannah couldn’t settle to anything once Carlo and Luke had left. She managed to curdle a sauce for the first time in years, burned her wrist on the edge of a hot pan and for the final straw dropped a carton of eggs pulling them out of the fridge. Staring down at the oozy, sticky mess running over her shoes, the cardboard container and the floor, she heaved a deep sigh and closed her eyes.

  “Suzannah?” a voice said behind her, and then asked in her native French “Are you all right?”

  Opening her eyes she looked around and found a smile for Edouard, the restaurant sommelier. A charming, handsome Frenchman some ten years her senior, she guessed the rest of her staff had probably recruited him to approach her, and with any luck get her out from underfoot before she did something disastrous.

  “I think I’m having an off night, Edouard,” she replied in the same tongue.

  “So I see.” He cast an amused glance down at her feet. “Dinner is almost completed. Why don’t you call it a night? I’m sure your sous-chefs can handle whatever is left.”

  She knew they could. She’d trained them to her own exacting standards, after all. Looking around the kitchen, she saw a hive of ordered industry, everyone very studiously paying attention to their assigned tasks and not watching her at all.

  “You might be right,” she said. “It’s been a long few weeks. I haven’t had a night off since I sacked Vicky.”

  “You haven’t had a morning off, either,” Edouard pointed out dryly, taking a clean towel from a drawer and dropping it on the floor behind her. “Here. Step on that and clean your shoes off. Angelica,” he snapped his fingers at one of the apprentices, who dropped what she was doing and rushed over at once. “Clean this up, please.”

  “Yes, sir!” The girl practically genuflected, hurrying to get cloths as Suzannah stepped onto the towel and wiped the egg white off her shoes. They needed cleaning properly, but she didn’t want to remove them in the kitchen.

  “We’ve got this, boss,” Julie, her most senior assistant chef,
called across the kitchen. “Go have an early night. God knows you deserve one.”

  “All right, all right.” Suzannah surrendered to the inevitable. “Julie, you’re in charge.”

  “I won’t let you down, boss!” Julie’s look of determination made Suzannah smile. The other woman would be a hell of an executive chef one day, and a lot sooner than she realised.

  “Just a moment,” Edouard said, heading for the door, and when he returned he had a bottle of wine in hand. “Here. Take this with you and have a glass or two to help you relax.”

  The wine had been opened and re-corked, Suzannah saw as she accepted the bottle. Her brows went up as she read the label and she looked a question at Edouard.

  “A customer last night ordered and paid for it, but only drank half, and said he didn’t want to take it with him.” Edouard gave her a very Gallic shrug, and a wink. “It’s too good to give it to you heathens to cook with.”

  Suzannah laughed, and tucked the bottle under her arm. “Thank you, Edouard.” She put a friendly hand on his arm. “I’ll enjoy it.”

  Edouard smiled warmly back at her, urging her towards the rear door. “Go. Get some rest. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  * * *

  Outside in the warm, jasmine-scented darkness, Suzannah slipped her sticky shoes off and stuffed her socks into them. There was grass alongside the paths which led back to her cabin, and she revelled in the soft coolness under her tired feet as she walked slowly through the night.

  Crickets chirped in the bushes, and the soft strains of a piano being played at one of the resort’s bars drifted to her on the soft ocean breeze. It was an absolutely beautiful night, fragrant and serene. A night for lovers, Suzannah found herself thinking as she walked, and snorted aloud.

  It was Carlo’s surprise arrival which had her thinking about lovers, of course. While he wasn’t the last man she’d shared her bed with, he was the last - indeed, the only - who’d left a lasting impression. The only serious relationship she’d ever had, in those long-ago days of first love she’d daydreamed of the two of them getting married and running a restaurant together someday. To her at age twenty, that had seemed the pinnacle of ambition.

  Carlo, however, came from a very different background to Suzannah. She was the daughter of a working-class single father from one of the poorer districts of Paris, learning to cook when she wanted better than the simple meals which were all her weary papa could make when he arrived home tired from work. She got her first job aged thirteen at a cafe near their small apartment, and graduated from waiting tables to working in the kitchen a year later.

  School had never been something she particularly enjoyed, but in the hum of a busy kitchen, Suzannah found her place in the world. The cafe owner saw the passion in her work and encouraged her to become a professional chef, setting up a savings plan for her and matching her savings when she was offered a place at Le Cordon Bleu.

  Suzannah came from a working-class, hardscrabble background, and at just eighteen was thrust suddenly into a world she’d never realized existed. Most of the kids at the prestigious culinary school were from wealthy, even aristocratic backgrounds. Few of them had the ambition, drive or talent which propelled Suzannah to the head of the class almost immediately. Out of all her classmates, only Carlo could match her… and that was only because of his background, as the son of a wealthy Milanese family with an already-famous restaurant, one whose kitchen Carlo had literally grown up in.

  She’d watched him with fascination, this assured Italian man - for even at nineteen, Carlo was definitely not a boy - whose hands were as confident as his attitude. Handsome, cockily sure of himself and his place in the world, Carlo never seemed to have doubts about anything he did, whereas Suzannah was constantly questioning and second-guessing everything from whether she had put too much pepper in the soup to whether she belonged among the well-heeled, wealthy crowd she was thrust into.

  There were always girls hanging off Carlo, from the school and from other places, attracted by both his looks and the charisma he exuded as effortlessly as breathing. Invisible - or so she thought - Suzannah watched with both fascination and envy as the parade of beautiful, designer-dressed girls never seemed to end.

  She hadn’t thought Carlo was even aware of her existence, such was her own inability to blend in with her classmates, until he looked across at her cooking station one day, catching her surreptitiously watching him, winked and said “You’ll want to watch that sauce, Red. I can smell burning.” He sniffed theatrically.

  “It’s not mine,” she snapped back instantly, though she did take a moment to check. “I never burn things!”

  “I know. I’m envious.”

  To her surprise, Carlo smiled at her. Flustered, she said sharply “Maybe if you paid more attention to your cooking and less to chasing skirts, you wouldn’t burn things either.”

  “Ouch!” Flamboyantly, he clapped a hand over his heart. “A hit direct, Red! Jealous, are you?”

  “In your dreams,” Suzannah sneered. Narrowing her eyes, she added “And my name is Suzannah, not Red.”

  She hadn’t waited for him to respond, had turned her back and bent to check the soufflé rising in her oven.

  Of course, after that Carlo seemed to be underfoot everywhere, calling her Red and casting smoldering, smirking looks in her direction even when he had another girl - or two! - in tow. Suzannah did her best to ignore him completely, even though she was all too well aware her body had different ideas. The prickles of awareness which chased up and down her spine whenever Carlo was near warned her to stay as far away as she could get.

  Unfortunately, as the school’s star students they were constantly thrown together, being challenged and pushed to compete with each other by the professional chefs who saw their potential and wanted to get the best out of them.

  It was in their final weeks when things came to a head. Too busy with the practical examinations they were undergoing almost daily to prove their fitness for graduation to keep up his usual flirtations, Carlo turned his attentions to the nearest available female - Suzannah. She’d tried hard to stay unmoved, but failed dismally. Particularly as she got to know him better and realised he wasn’t the spoiled rich kid she’d thought him; yes, he came from a much more affluent background than she did and had been given every advantage, but he was also truly dedicated to the arts of fine cuisine and talented as hell.

  Eventually, one night after their final exams were over, she let him take her out to a wine bar and they both drank far too much. Unable to resist his blandishments, Suzannah invited him back to her place… and discovered that her few sexual experiences up to that point in no way prepared her for the incredible way Carlo could make her feel.

  She’d wondered aloud, afterwards, just how much practice it took to get that good at sex, and he’d rolled over to lean over her, give her that intense dark stare of his.

  “If that was just sex for you…” He shook his head, ran his hand through his hair. “That was life-changing. I don’t have the words to describe how incredible that was, Suzannah… and how much I desperately want to do it again.”

  He wasn’t lying about being eager for an encore, Suzannah discovered as his erect cock nudged her thigh. Truth be told, right then she couldn’t think of anything she wanted more, either.

  They’d spent almost an entire week in bed, surfacing only to get food and drink, and by the end of it Carlo finally had Suzannah convinced he didn’t view her as just another notch on his bedpost. When the phone call came to let Suzannah know she’d graduated top of her class, Carlo had been quite plainly overjoyed for her.

  “You deserve it,” he’d said, hugging her tightly. “You deserve every bit of success and acclaim. You’re going to be a superstar, Suzannah; we all knew it from the first day.”

  Carlo had been a close second, of course, and as the two top graduates they had their pick of positions. Both offered a one-year graduate position as sous-chefs at Alain Ducasse’s legendary Benoit bistro, for months they lived and worked together in perfect harmony. Suzannah was honestly surprised at how well they managed to get along; she’d spent so long sniping at Carlo and being envious of the ease with which he managed social situations, she’d never realised just how easy he was to get along with.