Belatedly Ben glanced around and registered that there was only one empty seat at the table—and it was beside him. Before he could do more than swear under his breath, Tory was being ushered toward him.
He inhaled a waft of vanilla and musk as she sat beside him and they exchanged unamused looks at their forced proximity.
“Believe me, I know,” she said fervently.
“Feel free to ignore me,” he said as he drained the last of his cocktail.
“Ditto,” she said.
So saying, they both swiveled away from each other to face the person on their other side. Ben eyed the travel journalist with determination. He despised small talk, but the alternative—tense silence while pretending not to notice how good Tory looked and smelled—was not an option.
“So how are you finding the cruise so far?” he asked.
THE CAPTAIN’S PRIVATE dining room was a revelation. Timber floorboards glowed in soft candlelight, and plantation shutters gave the windows an exotic appeal. The table was a superb slab of honey-colored timber, the linen crisp and white, the table settings divine. The captain himself was a handsome, charismatic man, his fiancée equally attractive and vivacious. That they were wildly in love with each other was ridiculously obvious to Tory. The only fly in the ointment was Ben Cooper. But what was new about that? He’d single-handedly turned her tropical jaunt into a war zone—and they were only on the first day of their enforced collaboration.
Fortunately the middle-aged woman on her right turned out to be good company. Recently retired from the military, Lt. Williams had a host of fascinating stories about her postings throughout Asia, and they chatted easily through the starter and main course. Almost it stopped her from being aware of the man seated beside her. Almost she could ignore the low timbre of his voice, the brush of his shoulder against hers, the sound of his laughter. Almost but not quite. She was feeling just a little edgy as they neared the end of the main course—then she tuned in to Ben’s conversation with his neighbor, a travel writer who’d been introduced to her as David, and nearly dropped her wineglass. The instant she heard the words Cuisine Institute and petty revenge her stomach lurched and she jerked upright in her chair.
He wouldn’t dare. Surely he wouldn’t dare.
“…if it hadn’t happened to me, I probably would have thought it was pretty funny, too,” Ben was saying as she turned to face him.
His head was angled toward the man on his other side, but she glared at him nonetheless. She simply couldn’t believe he was about to do what she suspected he was about to do. Even Ben could not be that brazen. Could he?
“So, what, this guy just turns up at the Institute purporting to be a representative of one of the best, most exclusive restaurants in New York, and you bought it?” David said skeptically.
Tory’s whole body tensed.
“He was a brilliant actor. And it was more subtle than that. This classmate of mine—Victor—had set it all up beautifully.” Ben shot Tory a loaded look before returning his attention to the man on his left. “He started a rumor that a talent scout from Brown’s would be coming to put us through our paces, so when this guy called me out of the Institute’s restaurant kitchen after the meal and offered me a job once I’d graduated, I thought it was all aboveboard. I thought I was the luckiest bastard under the sun. I rang home and told my folks I wouldn’t be coming back to the family business straightaway after graduation, told them this was too good a chance to learn how it was really done to pass up. Then I hocked everything I owned to buy a wreck of a car and get to Manhattan.”
“Then you walked in the door at Brown’s…” David guessed, leaping ahead to the coup de grâce of Tory’s revenge.
“And they’d never heard of me, of course. Every single goddamned person in the kitchen turned around to stare at me when I announced myself, from the pot scrubbers to the chef de cuisine. I could still hear them laughing when I was back out front on the sidewalk.”
“So you had to go home with your tail between your legs?” David asked, shaking his head. “Tough luck, man.”
“Are you kidding? For starters, I’d lost my nonrefundable flight home when I decided to head to New York. Then there was the fact that I had told my parents I was going to be this big-shot New York haute cuisine chef,” Ben explained.
Tory squirmed in her seat as she felt a dull flush running up the back of her neck. She told herself that Ben had deserved every moment of her well-planned and executed revenge, but still her conscience burned.
“So what did you do?”
Tory realized she was holding her breath, wanting to know, too, how Ben had responded.
“I stood out on the street for about ten minutes, putting all the pieces together until I realized Victor had set me up. I swore a bit. Well, a lot, really. Then I finally realized that I had to find some work or starve. Across the road from Brown’s was this dinky little Italian place, Signor Mario’s, although the owner was actually called Luigi. He had a Help Wanted sign in the window, so I just walked across the street and told him I needed a job.”
“From haute cuisine to spaghetti Bolognese in five paces,” David said with an appreciative guffaw.
“Best thing that ever happened to me,” Ben said firmly. “The way he ran that kitchen, the way he loved and respected the food he cooked, the way he treated his staff, his customers—I couldn’t have had a better mentor.”
Tory squirmed again, gripped by an odd mixture of guilt, relief and annoyance. How typical—putting Ben on the spot at Brown’s might have momentarily fazed him, but, as usual, he’d landed on his feet. If only she’d been able to move on from what he’d done to her so easily.
To her dismay, she could feel Lt. Williams leaning forward on her other side to join in the conversation.
“I couldn’t help overhearing—it sounds just like the sort of cruel pranks that cause so many problems in the military academies,” she said, her dark eyes flashing with censure.
“Cruel—I guess I hadn’t thought of it in that context before,” Ben said. “But it was a pretty cruel thing to do. That’s a good word for it, actually.”
He didn’t so much as glance sideways at her, but Tory bristled nonetheless. He was using their dinner-table conversation to put her on trial. Any minute now he was probably going to reveal that she was the one who’d set him up, and she’d become a social pariah for the rest of the evening.
“You were at this Institute with Ben, I understand?” Lt. Williams asked Tory. “Was this sort of thing common?”
“Not precisely, no,” Tory said, hating herself for blushing furiously. She could feel smug satisfaction radiating off Ben in waves. Before she knew it, she was opening her mouth again. “We certainly had our fair share of frat-house bad behavior, though. And some of that was definitely cruel.”
It was Ben’s turn to stiffen in his seat, and she felt a surge of triumph. See how he liked it when the shoe was on the other foot.
“There was one girl in our year level who, through no fault of her own, had gained the reputation for being standoffish. They called her the Ice Queen, didn’t they, Ben?” Tory tilted her head to one side as though she were genuinely asking him to verify her memory of events.
He nodded minutely and avoided her eye. “I believe that was it.”
“Anyway, the guys started a book on who could be the first