Dishing It Out

“Sorry,” he said, wincing, slipping the fake vine into his pocket.

Deep inside Marie’s head things began short-circuiting.

“So Van, we don’t have anything to talk about.” She grew even more annoyed when his silence continued. He bent to examine the labels on her homemade vinaigrette.

“Are people really buying this stuff?” he asked, like he was peering into the underwear rack at a used clothing store.

“Yes, they do.”

“Amazing.” His tone implied he couldn’t believe it.

Marie tried deep yoga breaths, combined with calming thoughts and it did nothing to combat her irritation. “So feel free to show yourself out.” Jodi was beginning to laugh and Marie shrugged at her assistant. What was she supposed to do? “Van…”

“Your place is beautiful, Marie. Absolutely beautiful. I’ve seen pictures, but they don’t do it justice.”

Marie’s mouth fell open. She was so startled that she couldn’t say anything for a few moments. Finally, when she was getting her breath back to respond, he turned to her.

“I came to apologize for my part in the ambush today.” With a sheepish smile he held out a bottle of wine. She shifted her weight to one leg and leaned against the long wooden counter, feeling like the ground had moved under her feet. Van, apologizing? Bearing gifts? Maybe I was wrong….

She turned to Jodi, who was staring at Van like the man had come in on a golden carriage. “Jodi, go ahead and go home,” she murmured.

“You going to be okay?” Jodi asked under her breath as they watched Van turn and bend down in front of the dessert case and Marie took a moment to admire the view. Awful eyebrows, but not too bad from the back.

“Why wouldn’t I?” she asked.

Van straightened and looked up at Marie’s ceiling. “He looks…dangerous,” Jodi breathed.

Marie frankly couldn’t agree more but she rolled her eyes and pushed her assistant toward the door. “You need some sleep. See you tomorrow.”

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Jodi whispered and ran out the door.

He walked over to the dark salad case. “I can leave—after we talk.” He tapped the glass with his finger. “You buy this used? Looks used. Can you turn the light on?”

Unbelievable. The guy was just…unbelievable. Marie straightened and strolled over to the salad case, she rested her arms on it and her head was close to his.

“I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt,” she said with a smile that was pretty hard to muster up, “and guess that you have no idea how rude you are being.”

He stood upright, obviously alarmed. “I’m sorry,” he said, wincing. “I am. I am sorry. Marie, I did not mean to come in here and alienate you further. I’ve never been here before. It’s…” He took a deep breath, his hand touched his mouth and then the scar at his lip.

That’s adorable, she thought, knowing that she shouldn’t fall for this little show of regret. “Truce. Honestly.” He put the wine bottle on top of the case and she noted that he had brought some serious ammunition with a hundred-dollar bottle of Shiraz.

“Let me pour you some wine. I can have some of your marinated root salad everyone in the city is raving about and we can talk about AMSF?”

He smiled, sincerely with warmth and it changed everything. His face became something much more than interesting. He became arrestingly handsome.

“Marie?” She realized she had been staring at Van for a few silent moments.

“Sure,” she said with far too much volume, suddenly in overdrive, despite her better sense that told her that sharing a bottle of wine with this guy in her current tired and marginally attracted state would only come to no good. “Why not?”

“Is that a mural?” he asked pointing up at the painting on her ceiling.

“Yes.”

“Are those…?” He tilted his head and squinted.

“Yes, they are cherubs wearing aprons,” she told him on a huffy breath. She almost wished he would go back to rude; she could handle rude Van.

“So?” Van looked around at all the chairs up on the tables and then at her. He raised one of those eyebrows in a silent command/query.

“Go ahead,” she said, gesturing to the chairs. “I’ll grab some glasses.”

“No root salad?” he asked and she couldn’t quite make out the tone in his voice. Laughter?

“No root salad,” she told him. She grabbed two of her red wineglasses and came back to the table. Van had taken down both chairs and from one of the big front pockets of his black chef’s jacket he pulled out a corkscrew. With smooth, deft effort that Marie was somehow compelled to watch, he had the bottle open in moments.

“The photos of you don’t quite do you justice,” he said, seemingly focused on the task at hand. Marie’s eyes narrowed. She should have guessed that Van would be smarmy. Genetics had been kind to her for some reason and most men seemed to believe that the size of her breasts had an inverse relationship to the size of her brain. She waited for some wildly inappropriate comment about her boobs or her eyes or…

“You’re much taller than in the photos.”

She swallowed, her anger lessening as his gaze rested a little too long and a little too warm on her face. There were things he wasn’t saying.

“You look shorter,” she said.

“Let’s allow that to breathe.” Van set the bottle down on the edge of the table with a casual ownership that put her teeth on edge. He crossed his legs with a comfortable masculine grace.

Short and sweet, Marie.

“We don’t have that kind of time, Van.” She grabbed the bottle and poured, expertly, exactly four ounces of wine in each glass.

“Salute.” She tapped her glass to his and then sipped the dark red liquid. It was fantastic, mellow, dark and oaky. The kind of wine she loved. “It’s wonderful.”

“It would be even better in ten minutes,” he snapped, the sharpness of the comment belied by the tone of his voice, like he knew what she was doing. He smiled wickedly at her over the edge of his wineglass, his long fingers holding the delicate stem as he swirled the wine.

Oh my, she thought before she could stop herself.

“Let’s cut to the chase here, Van.” Marie sat back in her chair. She’d drink a glass of wonderful wine and send the pirate chef on his way. She opened her mouth to let him have it.

“You’re a coward,” Van interjected into the silence. It seemed he was bent on cutting to a different chase.

4

“EXCUSE ME?” There was no way he just called her, a woman who had climbed mountains and rafted rivers and started her own business all before the age of thirty, a coward.

“You heard me.” He took another sip of wine and set his glass back on the table “You’re scared that you can’t take the comparisons….”

“Comparisons?” Marie repeated because her ears were still ringing with the word coward. Is this a challenge? Is he challenging me? Marie’s inner DeNiro started to get antsy.

“Sure. It’s been coming up more and more in the papers, that my place is—” he shrugged as if he couldn’t help himself “—stylish, and Marie’s Bistro is…” He wrinkled his nose just a bit. “Quaint.”

“There is nothing wrong with quaint,” Marie told him, trying not to sound righteous. “Perhaps you missed the headlines calling me the new goddess of good taste?”

“No, but I saw the one that called you fussy.”

“Look! You jerk.” Marie’s wineglass hit the table with a ping. So much for adult. “This is precisely why I am not doing the show. I will not spend any more time in the company of a man I don’t like…”

“Not even if it means paying off your loans? Moving out of the apartment over your restaurant?” Again with the eyebrow, again with the slight rise in her core temperature. “Marie, you had to turn an old warehouse into this…” He looked around and Marie gritted her teeth. “Charming space. I know, I did the same thing and it wasn’t cheap.”

“Your place hardly needed any work,” she said and then bit her tongue. He didn’t know who he had been haggling with in that bidding war and he didn’t need to know.

“That’s what I thought until I bought the place, which was almost completely renovated, and then the sewage drains collapsed.”

Marie laughed and then clapped a hand over her mouth. Van’s look indicated that he didn’t think the sewage situation was all that funny. She quickly tried to compose her face into something convincingly sympathetic, but inside she was howling.

“It took three months to fix and another two to get rid of the smell. It cost me thousands.”

Marie took a sip of wine to hide her grin. Suddenly a broken dishwasher didn’t seem so bad.

“That is—” she worked hard at not laughing “—awful.”

“Right, so this show and the revenue could come in pretty handy.”

“AMSF isn’t going to pay that much money,” Marie pointed out.

“But, Marie,” Van said, leaning forward, his black eyes focused on her in a way that made Marie’s heart beat a little faster, “you and I both know it’s not about the salary from the show. It’s about what the show could do for us. Imagine if it takes off. Imagine Marie’s Bistro crowded every day for brunch, not just Sundays. Imagine people lined up three deep around your bakery counter, not just at 3:00 p.m. but all day long. Imagine tourists coming to Marie’s Bistro, because the whole nation had taken notice.”

It was like he had opened her head and saw her dreams. Her cooking empire. She was imagining lines out the doors, expanding her catering business, hiring an accountant. She imagined sleeping for three days. On a beach. In Mexico.

“Imagine being debt-free.” Van leaned back. “Free and clear.” He shook his head, a little wrapped up in the daydream himself.

“How bad is your debt?” Marie asked.

“Bad enough that…ah…” He took a sip of wine, flicked a dried tomato seed off his pants. Marie perked up. “I…ah…am asking you to do the show. You are getting to be a big star.” Marie could only blink as he continued. “And I understand that I am riding your coattails here, but I think with the weekly exposure you and I could take off.”

She took her time, sipping her wine, fiddling with one of her silver bracelets, grappling with what he had just said to her. He had laid himself bare, vulnerable, and she couldn’t ruin the moment by saying “gotcha.”

A woman isn’t handed a plum like this everyday.

Jodi’s words from earlier, about getting it all in writing came back to her. This just might work, she thought staring at the magnified tiles through the bottom of her wineglass. It just might.

Finally she glanced up at him and almost laughed out loud. Clearly the man’s pride did not sit well in his stomach. He looked like a food-poisoning victim.

He swallowed, looked up at her cherubs and took a deep breath. “Please?” he asked in a strangled voice.

Marie laughed great big belly laughs like she hadn’t in weeks. “Oh, that was hard, wasn’t it?” She wiped a tear from the corner of her eye.

“Are you going to do it or not?” he nearly barked.

“Come now, Van. Surely you’ve heard the one about honey versus vinegar?” One corner of her mouth lifted and she took a sip of wine.

“What do you want?”

Aha, now we’re getting somewhere.

“No more blues on Wednesday and Thursday nights.” She reached over and poured more wine into their glasses.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he scoffed.

“You’re the one who just said please.”

“I’ll shut it down at one.”

“Ten.”

“Midnight.”

“Ten.”

“Fine, ten. On Wednesday. You can’t have Thursday.”

Which was exactly what she was going for. She grinned at him. “That wasn’t so hard was it?”

“So, that’s it, you’ll do it?” he asked, his eyes narrowed.

“Not so simple, Van.” She shook her head at him and stood up. She found a notebook and a pen by the cash register and brought them back to the table where Van was looking at her warily.

“I learned something important today,” she told him as she flipped through her notebook and found an empty page. “Simon, despite saying he has my best interests at heart, is only looking after himself and ratings. Which—” she shrugged “—I can’t blame him for. So, I’ve got to take care of myself.”

“Should I have my lawyer here?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll have my lawyer draw something up,” she said and meant it. No more Mr. Nice Guy.

“Marie?” She looked up, arrested for the moment by the sudden wild, vibrant energy that was pouring out of him. He was lit up and Marie felt her body reacting. Her heartbeat sped up and her skin flushed with blood. “Are you going to do the show?”

“With a few minor stipulations.” She nodded. “Yes. I am.”

“Well then, a toast…” He held up his wineglass.

“Let’s hold off on the celebrating.” Marie pushed his glass back down. “First things first, there will be no secret meetings. You and I will be present every time one or the other meets with Simon.”

Van cocked his head to the side and studied her. “You’re not very trusting, are you?” he asked.

“Oh, on the contrary, I’m probably trusting to a fault.”

He laughed. “Could have fooled…”

“Just not with men and business.” Again Marie felt the strange physical nature of his gaze, like he was touching her, lifting her hair, looking in her pockets to see what she was hiding.

“I’m trustworthy, Marie,” he told her seriously and Marie swallowed hard. It was her nature to believe him. It was her nature to believe everyone. But it simply didn’t pay to trust everyone.

She shrugged. “We’ll see.” She returned to her pad of paper and her lists of demands she believed would truly protect her from Van MacAllister.

THE RESTAURANT WAS CLOSED on Mondays and Marie, after going in to feed her sourdough starter and proof some of the other dough, refused to stay and work on the books. So she had called her sister, Anna, and now they were shopping. Usually Marie loved to shop. But not today.

It was her first day off in what seemed like months and the last thing she wanted to do was spend it looking at crib liners. But she hadn’t spent any quality time with her sister in what seemed like forever, and all Anna wanted to do was shop for the baby and eat. So that’s what they did.

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