“I hope that’s not the Brussels sprouts you’re talking about.”
We’d been so deep in our speculations, I had no idea Jim was standing right behind us until his comment interrupted our discussion. I jumped, and the chestnuts I was just pouring out of the can landed half in the sink and half on the floor.
“Sorry.” Jim sprang into action. He stooped to retrieve the chestnuts on the floor. I suppose in the great scheme of things, I should have been grateful for his gallantry.
Except that I bent to get them at the same time.
We clunked heads, and both of us came up rubbing our foreheads.
“Sorry,” I said sheepishly. I was all set to bend down again when I saw that Jim was going to, too.
“Sorry.” It was his turn.
We exchanged uncertain smiles, and though it was unspoken, we made the executive decision to let the chestnuts stay put for a while.
“So…” He concentrated on the ones that had landed in the sink. When he leaned over to scoop them out, his arm brushed mine.
I suppose I was still jittery from the whole snoop-around-the-gallery adventure, not to mention the way we made our excuses to Yuri and hurried out of there after I found Drago’s office looking like a tornado had gone through it. I sucked in a breath as my arm involuntarily jumped.
“I hope I’m not that scary.”
The smile Jim turned on me was as hot as his accent. And believe me, that accent was plenty hot.
I reminded myself that he was just being nice, like any cooking teacher would naturally be to any cooking student, and did my best to corral the suddenly out-of-control fantasies that threatened to leave me grinning back at him like some brainless bimbo. Or worse, like a woman whose head was too easily turned by something as simple as a man being nice to her.
Even when the man in question was the yummiest thing she’d seen since the last pint of Funky Monkey she’d gone through.
He turned off the hot-as-hell smile just as quickly as he had flashed it and backed away enough to take in both Eve and me in one quick glance.
“So, you were saying? About the Brussels sprouts?”
I was still too electrified by the brush of Jim’s skin against mine to cobble together any sort of reasonable response. It occurred to me that I knew I was in trouble when I left the logical replies to Eve.
“Not Brussels sprouts,” Eve said. So far, so good. That seemed sensible enough. She leaned in closer and lowered her voice even more. “We were talking about Drago.”
Thatwas not sensible!
I jumped again, this time back into the conversation before the spark of interest that lit in Jim’s hazel eyes kindled into anything else. Like curiosity. Or more questions.
“Oh, Eve, you are such a kidder!” I gave her arm a playful whack and turned to Jim, my discombobulation forgotten in the face of my need to steer us clear of a subject we had no right to be discussing. Not with Beyla and John only a few feet away. “Of course she’s not talking about that poor dead guy. We didn’t know the dead guy. We don’t know anything about the dead guy. We were just talking about the Brussels sprouts.”
I flashed what I hoped was an extremely carefree smile and returned my attention to my chesnuts. Jim stood in silence for a moment, regarding us with a glimmer in his eye. Then he turned and walked away.
As I watched him go, I found myself wondering just how much he knew.
“He’s cute.” Eve’s words cut into my thoughts.
“Not what I was thinking,” I told her.
“Yeah. Right.” She smiled broadly.
“I mean it. He’s cute, all right. But that’s not what I was thinking.”
Her gaze followed Jim as he made his way to the front of the room. His back was to us. He was wearing tight jeans that stretched nicely over his butt.
Need I say more?
“Oh honey, if you weren’t thinking about that…” Eve grinned, then eyed me, curious. “Whatwere you thinking?”
“That we shouldn’t say too much in front of strangers. That we don’t know who to trust. That we haven’t sorted things out yet and that means we don’t know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.”
Eve’s expression wilted. “You don’t think-”
“I don’t know what to think,” I told her, and it was true. Deep down, I didn’t believe that there was anything shady about Jim.
But if that was true, why was I more nervous than ever just thinking about him?
BY THE TIME I WAS BACK IN CLASS THE NEXT evening, I was still mulling over the questions that filled my head, as crowded and as noisy as the summer tourists out on the Clarendon streets-the ones I had to fight my way through to get to the shop.
There was the good guy/bad guy question: which people associated with Très Bonne Cuisine could we trust?
There was the Jim question, but I won’t get into that. Every time I thought about Jim, my mind ping-ponged like a… well, like a Ping-Pong ball. Part of me was concerned with what he’d overheard the night before, what he thought of it, and the whole trust issue. But the other part of me…
OK, I had to admit it: I had a thing for Jim. Lately, every one of my fantasies featured him in a major way. It was playing hell with my head, not to mention my body.
Better not to go there. At least not there in class when he was standing ten feet away. I wasn’t crazy: I knew he couldn’t read my mind, but I couldn’t risk him reading my body language, either. If he guessed at half the thoughts that flitted through my head and raised my temperature as I watched him prepare for tonight’s pasta class, I’d die from embarrassment.
I decided it was a lot less dangerous to think about what Eve optimistically called “our case.”
There was the Monsieur Lavoie question, and what he knew about Drago, and why they’d been arguing the night Drago was killed. I hadn’t had a chance to address that one, because every evening when I arrived at the shop, the little Frenchman either wasn’t around or was busy with customers.
There was the John question, too. I’d paid little attention to it so far because I figured it was just an aberration and it would go away. But it hadn’t. And I wasn’t imagining it, I swear.
Every time I glanced his way, John the accountant was looking back at me.
And there were more questions. Like who had trashed Drago’s office? And why had his partner, Yuri, seemed unconcerned enough about it that he could chat with us out in the gallery instead of being in the office trying to get things back in order?
But then, that might have been the neatnik in me talking.
As if all that wasn’t enough, as of that afternoon, I had something new to consider.
I might have felt better about the whole thing if I’d had a chance to tell Eve and get her take on things. Trouble was, I’d discovered this piece of the puzzle on my lunch hour, and by then, she was already at work behind the cosmetic counter at Hecht’s. Because of her work schedule, we’d decided it was easier (logistically speaking) to meet at Très Bonne Cuisine tonight rather than drive together. And now I couldn’t wait to talk to her.
I unpacked my groceries and waited semipatiently. Didn’t it figure that tonight Eve was late?
I watched the minutes tick away on the clock that hung above the classroom door. If Eve didn’t show up soon, Jim would start class, and we wouldn’t have a chance to talk until break. Call me crazy, but if I had to hold onto this new information that long, I thought I might burst.
Lucky for me, Eve made it just under the wire. Unlike most people who at least would have made the effort to look frazzled to be arriving at the last second, she strolled into the classroom without a care in the world, every hair in place and her makeup perfect.
I waited until she was standing next to me before I turned my back to Beyla and John’s cooking station and made apsst sound.