My heart stumbled. “That’s not what you said before. Cooking is your passion, you said.”
“I love to cook,” he said promptly. “When I was starting out, I worked twelve, fifteen hours a day, seven days a week. But I don’t have to make every plate anymore. I don’t need to be on fire, in the heat, on the line, all the time.” He reached out, his hand covering mine, clutching the fork. “Maybe I can learn to love more than one thing now, yeah?”
Warmth flooded my cheeks from his touch or the wine or the fire. I jabbed randomly at my plate, ridiculously happy.
After dinner, we did the dishes together. While he made coffee, I studied the shelves above the wine rack, where his cookbooks stood side by side like old friends. Alice Waters,The Art of Simple Food. Ferran Adrià’sEl Bulli.Dornenburg and Page’sThe Flavor Bible.
Eric came up behind me and dropped a kiss on the back of my neck, sending a pleasant shiver down my spine. “See any of your favorites?”
“Hm. No Charlotte Brontë. No Jane Austen.” I grinned at him over my shoulder. “And where’s your Harry Potter collection?”
“In the boys’ room,” he said.
That did it. Or it would have, if I hadn’t fallen for him already.
My fingers skimmed the spines. “Oh, look, Bill Neal’sSouthern Cooking. I used to eat at his restaurant all the time when I was incollege! Well, when I could afford it. Crook’s, in Chapel Hill.” Unable to resist the feel of a book in my hands, I took downThe French Laundry Cookbookand flipped to the title page. Signed by the author. “Thomas Keller,” I said reverently. “You met him?”
“I worked for him at Per Se.” Keller’s New York restaurant. He said it so casually, as if he rubbed elbows with legends all the time. “I learned a lot from him.”
“Until you left the nest,” I said.
“He kicked me out.” Eric’s voice was easy. Amused. “Time to fly on my own, yeah? Cook my own food. Find my own voice.”
I turned my head. “You should write a cookbook.”
I knew he hadn’t. I would have bought it.
“What I have to say, I say with food.”
“I get that. But not everybody has the chance to eat at your restaurant. You could share your recipes, your food, your story with more people,” I said with building enthusiasm for the idea. “People who might never come to New York.”
He shook his head. “I am a cook, not a storyteller.”
“A cook with a James Beard Award,” I pointed out.
“Awards do not make me a writer.” He met my gaze and smiled. “Maybe you should write my cookbook.”
“I... You’re not serious.”
“You are a writer, yeah? Lifestyle journalist,” he corrected. “You wrote about restaurant openings, you said.”
Oh God. He remembered.
“I didn’t set out to be a food writer,” I said. “I just... I needed a job. A writing job. I wanted to stay in New York. And I love to eat. Writing for theEmpire City Weekly... It was a way to explore the city. To try new foods. Knishes. Noodles. Everything sort of snowballed from there.”
He turned me in his arms. Boy, he smelled good. Like cherries and wine, like laundry soap and woodsmoke. “Jo, you don’t need to apologize for doing what you love. Not to me.”
But I did. I was already using him for inspiration. Without his knowledge. For him to suggest that I draw on his experience, his recipes, his passion in the kitchen, to write a book—his cookbook, with his name in big letters on the front...
“I don’t want to take advantage of you,” I said.
“Maybe I am taking advantage of you.”
“I don’t think so.” I had to tell him about the blog.
“No? Not when I do this?” His lips brushed my jaw. “Or this?” I felt the scrape of his beard as he kissed my neck. His body was hot and solid against mine.Oh, glory.
“You’re just after my pie,” I managed.
