“Your—what?” Had he missed the spaceship that had dropped her off? She wanted him to teach her and she was broke? “Okay, rewind. How about you start by telling me why you want to learn to cook.”
“Oh.” She held out a skinny pamphlet. “I want to enter this.”
“The By the Bay Food Festival.” Again. Everywhere he turned, he was reminded of that blasted festival. “Wait. A televised cooking competition?” How had he missed that little detail? He reviewed the dates. “You do realize this starts in two weeks.” He’d been right. Gary’s booking him at the Flutterby was on purpose. Tricky son of a—
“Yeah, I know,” Abby said. “But you’re good at this stuff. You said so yourself. It’s in your back cover bio.” She waggled his book in front of him like a red flag in front of a very irritated bull.
His mouth twisted. “Not funny. And not interested.” Even if the idea of stepping foot in a kitchen again didn’t make him twitchy, some people were beyond hope.
“Oh, come on! You’re already bored out of your mind and you’ve been here less than a day. You need something to do. What else is there besides biding your time between sunsets?”
“Someone told me the sunsets are worth the wait.” Clearly his refusal needed an explanation in order to wipe that puppy glimmer out of her all-too-tempting gaze. “Learning to cook in the best of circumstances takes time and patience.” Something he was willing to bet she didn’t have much of. “It’s stressful and demanding.” And required human interaction.
“I don’t have to be able to cook for the president.” Abby rolled her eyes. “I need to learn enough to compete and not set anything on fire. And maybe not poison anyone. Oh, and win, of course.”
Yeah. Nothing to it. “After what I saw this morning? In two weeks? No, I’m sorry. It can’t be done.”
A bit of the fight drained out of her, but in its place, a spark lit her face. That same spark he’d seen when she’d battered that smoke detector. “Is that why you’re hiding out in Butterfly Harbor? Did the stress of running a restaurant get to you after your brother died?”
“No.” His lungs tightened. “No, it wasn’t the stress.” Exactly.
“Then what?”
“Leave it to me to find the one person in the hemisphere who hasn’t heard.” He plucked his tablet from beside the bed to search for himself, a humbling experience for sure, then skimmed past the links detailing David’s crash. “Why don’t you read this and then we’ll see if you want to continue this conversation.” He held out the pad and ignored the unease circling in his stomach. At least Abby’s dislike of him from the start had been genuine and not based on gossip rags and internet features.
She exchanged the pad for his cookbook that he set, cover down, on his bed. Needing some air, he pushed open the terrace doors and leaned his arms on the railing, waiting for the inevitable shocked and disgusted reaction he’d come to expect. Maybe paying for the room in advance hadn’t been such a smart move.
Normally it took a couple of minutes for the facts to hit, but, as he’d begun to learn about Abby, she was ahead of the curve.
“I am sorry about your brother.”
He squeezed his eyes shut until he saw stars. He hated the sympathy, the concern, the apology that accompanied the comment that was cursory at best. He’d heard hundreds if not thousands of them in the last six months. But none had been spoken in Abby’s soft voice, with a gentleness that brushed over his ears as gently as if she’d touched his hair with the tips of her fingers.
“Thank you.”
“Is this true? Did you really cheat in the last round of that competition?”
He didn’t hear shock in her voice, or condemnation, but genuine curiosity. As if she didn’t quite believe he was capable of sinking so low.
“It says you brought in a ringer to help you win this reality show thing.”
Jason leaned over and stared into the bottomless surf. “I tried to pass off a dish my sous chef cooked instead of the one I attempted myself. I needed to win.” Because losing hadn’t been an option. Not with his brother’s memory and his family’s reputation on the line. Not with his father’s expectations set so high he’d have to use a jet pack to reach them. “And then I lied about it.” Which was, when all was said and done, his real crime. “On live TV. You can watch it on YouTube if you want. It’s been viewed over two million times. How do you not know about this?”
“Do I strike you as an avid NCN viewer?”
Her sarcasm pulled a deeply buried smile out of him. “It also made national news. I was every media outlet’s disgrace story for over a week.” While Marcus Aiken, his sous chef, had been given his own show and a font of new endorsement deals.
“Big deal. So was the governor, and her approval ratings went up. So you made a mistake. People, humans, make them all the time.”
She sounded so much like Gary she gave him a headache. “People are allowed to make mistakes. Celebrities, Corwins are held to a higher standard, especially in the food industry. Scandals like mine kill careers, Abby. Especially after you’ve been built up as some kind of icon. I’m proof of that. My own shareholders ousted me from the company my bro—” The word stalled in his throat. “The company we built.”
“Icon. Wow.” She sighed and shook her head. “Ego check on aisle seven. So, what? You ran? You’re hiding out here because a bunch of people know you cheated and you were a jerk about it? You’ve been a jerk about a lot of things with me. What’s the big deal?”
When had this conversation veered off the verbal cliff? He hadn’t run away from New York, he’d walked away after it had been made abundantly clear he was too much of a liability for Corwin Brothers. “When you’re one of the faces of a million-dollar brand, people—shareholders, specifically—shift into damage-control mode.”
David had been the negotiator, the peacemaker. David had been the diplomat while Jason had been the moody artist few people wanted to deal with. Without David as a buffer, he’d had no patience or charisma to keep anyone on his side. He’d lost count of how many so-called friends had made the suggestion in less than understanding terms.
“Corwin Brothers is beyond my help,” Jason continued. “And don’t get me started on how my father plans to fix the company.” By going against every principle their grandfather had held dear. But not even that was enough to push Jason back into the kitchen.
“Pfffh.” Abby waved her hand again and shrugged. “What do network executives and shareholders know? On the bright side, if you tell me your girlfriend dumped you and then your truck broke down, I bet you could start a new career as a country music singer.”
Jason marveled. She had the oddest view of the world.
“There was no girlfriend.” That’s all he would have needed to complete the equation. He faced her, part of him worried about what he’d see on her face, but all he saw was the same Abby he’d met in a billowing fog of smoke. Part energetic bunny, part warrior woman who would fight smoke and burned scones to the death. “I’m toxic to anyone and everyone in the industry. Nobody wants me.”
“I want you.” Abby jumped to her feet, then, as her words sank in, her cheeks went that brilliant—and all too familiar—shade of pink. “I mean, oh, buttered biscuits!” She spun in a circle as if she could go back in time. “You know what I mean. I don’t care about some scandal from your past or the fact you tried to cheat your way out of something or even that it sounds as if you ran away instead of fighting for your career. And I’m sorry, but what kind of father lets a bunch of shareholders oust his son so he can slither into his position? That’s disgusting.”
He stared.