With No Reservations

Sloane cleared her throat and pulled a pad of paper from her bag so she didn’t have to respond, making notes as she sampled the rest of the food in silence. There was an apple and brie panini, a chocolate croissant, a hybrid between a French dip and a croque monsieur, a salted brown butter and berry tart. The food was divine—all of it. She had to stop herself from clearing the entire tray. If she was in business mode, this food was putting up an involuntary out-of-office reply for her. The only thing that kept her in check was the mental tally of calories she’d have to plug into the app on her phone later.

“It was all very good.” Sloane squeezed another dollop of hand sanitizer into her hands as her own white flag of surrender to the food. “You’ve obviously done a lot of work with these flavor profiles.”

The corner of Cooper’s mouth curved into a crooked smile. “No offense, but what does a blogger know about flavor profiles?”

Sloane’s pulse pounded in her ears as she stared at the amused individual across from her in shock.

His grin faded to wide-eyed panic. “Wait. I’m sorry.” He leaned his head on his hands, realized he was still wearing his work goggles and set them on the table. “I think that came out the wrong way.”

“Whatever. It’s fine.” Sloane stared at the goggles. What else could he have meant? He was surely trying to placate her because he didn’t want to be inconvenienced by hurt feelings. She pulled her shoulder blades together. “Can we get back to work now? I’m sure you also have better things you could be doing right now.”

Two could play at that game.

“Go ahead.”

“So, Mr. Cooper. I asked you about the vision for this place. I take it you spearheaded the development yourself?”

Cooper laced his fingers behind his head, studying Sloane through heavy-lidded eyes. “Yes, ma’am. I wanted an answer to my father’s way of doing things, which works for him, I guess, but in a different way.”

Sloane scribbled the keywords that would help her remember their conversation later. “So you basically set out to create a restaurant that will cause a stir with how your father usually does things.”

Cooper frowned and shifted in his seat, scanning her pad of paper. “I wanted to create an atmosphere that said Stay awhile and a cost-effective, sustainable menu that said Savor. You can read into that whatever you want.”

“That’s very European. And the name? Where does Simone come from?” Some bimbo he’d met while enjoying the Parisian nightlife?

Cooper’s expression clouded. “Someone who was very special to me in France.”

For how long? A week?

“She taught me how to appreciate food and enjoy cooking it. More important than anything I learned at Le Cordon Bleu.” His words became more flavored with French as he spoke, as if saturated by the remnant of this woman in his mind.

“And, let me guess, she was a little reluctant to leave the motherland?”

Cooper looked up, his forehead creased. “No. She died right before I moved back.”

Died. The word snapped against Sloane like a whip. “Oh. Wow. Well, she must have been...something...to, you know, name your restaurant after her and everything.”

She focused so her breath didn’t release in shredded gasps as Cooper launched into a story about Simone. Something about standing next to her over her stove top.

But Sloane’s mind could only focus on one thing.

Aaron.

She’d unintentionally wandered into an area of Cooper’s life she didn’t have security clearance for. And the intrusion only served to land her square in the middle of the place she kept under lock and key in her own life. Every instinct told her to take cover from the impending explosion.

“Can I use your restroom?” She stood so abruptly that her chair clattered to the floor.

“The water’s not connected—”

“That’s okay. Just tell me where it is.”

Cooper furrowed his eyebrows and pointed to a hallway on the far side of the kitchen.

The door to the restroom closed with a thunderous crash when Sloane heaved her hip against it. She pulled the jade-green sleeves of her cardigan over her hands and clutched the pedestal sink, leaning into it. Deep breaths.

She willed her racing heart to slow, trying to abate the pressure of backed-up tears.

Refold short stack of hand towels.

Angle off-center soap dispenser.

Normally she could handle talk of death just fine. It happened every day. But sometimes the jolting blow of emptiness sneaked up on her when she least expected it, even more than a decade after her best friend’s death. The days and weeks surrounding his birthday were always terrible—agonizing at best and unmanageable at worst. Well, she’d have to learn how to manage it better if she wanted to keep her job. Even if it was clear Cooper wasn’t a fan of the arrangement either.

With a few more deep breaths, the pressure softened a little, leaving a dull ache in its place.

Sloane straightened and watched in the mirror as the peach undertones returned to her pale skin. Her fingers worked with practiced precision to tame the stray strands in her blond braid. And then she was ready to face the world again. Ready to give Graham Cooper some lame excuse and retreat to the safest place she knew.

But she wasn’t ready for the look on his face. For the way he stood and stepped in her direction when he saw her walking down the hall. For the trace of remorse in his confident facade that made her knees shake when he asked if she was okay.

“I’m fine,” Sloane said. “But I need to be somewhere right now. Unless you have anything else to tell me, I think I’ve completed everything on the agenda for today.” And, unfortunately, a bit more than she’d bargained for.

“No, of course. I think we’re good.” Cooper started gathering dishes as Sloane packed her bag. He disappeared into the kitchen then returned to walk her out.

Sloane paused in the doorway, a sputtering explanation forming in her mind. Maybe she could tell him she had a situation with her contact lenses. Or something to dispel the truth he’d certainly picked up on that she was a total wreck. But she fled with a flick of her hand the instant his eyes met hers. Before the tightness in her chest could escalate. Before the moisture in her eyes turned from annoying drip to full-fledged leak.

Once she’d made it to the end of the street and turned the corner, out of Graham Cooper Jr.’s sight, she leaned against a building and wafted air into her lungs with flailing hands. She called her car service and practiced her breathing exercises while she waited.

Inhale, two, three, four.

Exhale, two, three, four.

She’d try anything to keep her mind off Aaron.

Nine stoplights, sixty-seven trees and fifty-nine footsteps later, Sloane was in her apartment, hands scrubbed clean. Curled up in her bed where she finally emptied her lungs.

I can’t take this forever.

CHAPTER THREE

GETTING THE RESTAURANT ready had spoiled Cooper, and now that he’d gotten used to the loose cotton of his work clothes, his go-to suits felt like wool straitjackets. But today he was leading a training seminar at the J. Marian corporate offices, so he had to be on his game and look the part for the group of franchise owners who’d flown in from across the country.

To mentally prepare, he’d taken his black Lab Maddie to their favorite park. The mechanics of throwing the ball and watching her bound after it had reset his focus from repairs and recipe testing. A long shower had washed the smells of the kitchen from his skin and gave him the chance to rehearse talking points for the training he’d led countless times.

But in the clean confines of the old Land Rover Defender he’d rebuilt, Cooper’s mind veered from the gray Dallas streets to his sawdust-covered restaurant, alternating between his massive to-do list and scenes from the mind-boggling encounter he’d had with his new PR person.

He’d been too busy to do his research before the meeting. Totally unprepared for how stunning she’d be in her own unassuming way. She reminded him of those cartoons he used to watch with his sister, a fairy-tale princess who’d been forced to get a real job—milky skin, a healthy rose to her cheeks, immaculate braid in a warm, golden blond. Natural, he could tell, not bottled. But she’d traded in her ball gown for business garb. And judging by the revolving door of faces he’d seen on the woman, she’d traded in her happily-ever-after, too.

As he parked in his spot in the garage next to his brother’s limited edition Audi R8, he shuffled the few facts he’d collected about Sloane Bradley. She was hesitant yet professional. Bold, yet there was something fragile about her that had nothing to do with the fact that she couldn’t be much taller than five feet.

He moved on autopilot through the dim parking garage, remembering how Sloane had practically bolted when he told her about Simone. Cooper recognized the pain in her eyes like he was looking into a mirror. Yes, he was very familiar with the kind of grief that sneaks up on you. With the dark, smothering bag it throws over your head and the way it pushes you into the back of a moving van.

As he opened the sleek glass doors, he catalogued all thoughts of Sloane with the mental list of things left to do at the restaurant and stepped into the massive lobby—clean and white and futuristic with purple LED uplighting. The smell of new construction was acrid, more glue and fused metal than the round scent of aged wood he’d become accustomed to.

“Sandra said to tell you he’s in a mood.” The receptionist covered the mouthpiece on her headset and motioned Cooper to the elevator bank with a curt wave before continuing her phone conversation in a polite, robotic tone.

Perfect. He rode an empty elevator to the fifth floor, and when the doors opened, his father’s assistant’s desk was empty.

Graham Cooper Jr. His name in red marker on the top of a cream folder caught his eye.

Why was his file on Sandra’s desk?

He reached for it, double-checked that he was alone and flipped it open.

“Are you looking for these?”

Cooper whirled around at the sound of his father’s voice and pressed his back against the desk, closing his file with a nudge behind him.

His father brandished a trifold flier with the Simone logo and glossy images of Cooper’s food that had been redone four times before he finally approved them. He didn’t consider himself picky on principle, but this was his restaurant and it had to be just right. Only, the images still weren’t quite there.

“Yeah, thanks.” Cooper took the stack of proofs from his father and turned toward his office. “I’ll send off these final revisions when they’re—”

“I still don’t know why you insisted on hiring some computer girl when you have a full staff of top MBAs at your disposal,” his father muttered.

Cooper clenched his teeth around his knee-jerk instinct to mirror the acrid tone. Fighting back would accomplish absolutely nothing, he’d learned. “It’s the twenty-first century, Dad. The internet is where the numbers are.”

His father smoothed the lapels of a suit that probably cost more than the average Dallas corporate drone’s monthly salary. “We lost Baker and Mayfield.”

Cooper’s mouth turned cottony. He’d thought the two oil millionaires were in the bag. The paperwork to open their first two restaurants, though coming along slowly, was mostly complete. He’d even broken a personal rule and played golf with them the other month, for Pete’s sake.

“They’re investing in real estate instead, and they won’t be persuaded to change their minds. I tried.”

He scrubbed his hands through his hair. “Yeah, well, they decide everything together.” This was bad—worse because they weren’t the only ones Cooper had lost since he’d gotten the restaurant off the ground.

“You’re off your game.”

The muscles in Cooper’s neck tightened. “Dad—”

“You’re late to work all the time.” His father ticked off the items on his meaty fingers, pacing the plush carpeting. “You’re never home, always flying from here to that restaurant.” His voice rose. “It’s not healthy—for you or the company!”

Cooper sighed, his shoulders almost shaking against the strong urge to slump.

“I mean, do you even sleep?”

He scoffed at his father as heat edged his face. “Of course I sleep.” When he wasn’t bolting out of bed to do just one more thing.

“I need to know that you’re all in, Coop.” The senior Cooper tented his hands.

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Good.” He clapped Cooper on the back, walking toward his office. “Then deal with that massive pile on your desk before anything else falls through. And take care of that training today.”

Cooper watched his father leave, swallowing around the familiar itch in his throat that craved to be satisfied with a few cold Jack and Cokes. He cleared his thoughts and forced himself to relax, turning toward his own office.

It was a mess in there, half of his desk littered with coffee-ringed napkins and the other covered in tall stacks of file folders, at the top of which were the Baker and Mayfield accounts. Next on his list. Could they have been salvaged if he’d spent more time at his desk over the past few weeks? He snatched them up and let them fall in the metal wastebasket.

There. Two down, at least two days of follow-up calls to make and—he moved to check his watch, but it was sitting on his desk at the restaurant where he’d painted the interior walls early that morning. A glance at his laptop told Cooper he needed to be at the training auditorium in fifteen minutes, and he was meeting his restaurant manager after that.

He gathered a sizable pile of folders and locked his office. Even if it would be too late to call once his night at the restaurant was finished, at least he could take care of the clients who preferred to work by email. The company depended on him to recruit franchisees who would open their restaurants across the country—and to keep their business. It was a huge percentage of their annual revenue. So he’d work all night if he had to and possibly move some things around at the restaurant tomorrow.

Cooking had made him healthy again, a huge, necessary part of what had kept him away from the bottle for two years. But he owed it to his family not to let things go up in smoke. At least not again.

His father’s words circled in his mind as if they’d forgotten something. If Cooper was going to get it together at the office, ready the restaurant and actually have customers when they opened the doors, he was going to need all the help from this “computer girl” that he could get.

* * *

THE PERFECT LIGHT spilled through the kitchen window of Sloane’s condo, illuminating the crisp white plate, slate charger and teardrop vase she’d paired with a couple red-orange tulips. It shone like a spotlight on the star of the show, a juicy roasted lemon-rosemary chicken with the perfect golden-brown crust.

Not thrown together by the seat of her pants with the items in her pantry, as Cooper probably assumed. She’d scheduled the meal in her content calendar weeks ago, orchestrated so each ingredient was fresh from local farms when she cooked and photographed almost a month before each recipe’s scheduled posting date.

Sloane wasn’t even capable of operating on a whim. At least not anymore.

A tiny speck on the smooth white plate—invisible to most—caught her trained eye. She rubbed it gently with a napkin and climbed onto a chair for a look through her camera’s viewfinder.

She adjusted the ISO speed.

Who does Graham Cooper Jr. think he is?

She dialed the aperture down a few notches. Who was she kidding? She’d almost lost it in front of him.

With one tiny movement of the shading screen a camera equipment company had sent her to review, she flicked all thoughts of Graham Cooper out of her mind and returned to her position on the chair, one foot in a clean sock perched on the table for optimum angling.

Her computer interrupted the moment of perfection, beckoning her to the kitchen counter with the rhythmic ring of an incoming video chat.

Sloane scowled as she hurried to the kitchen. There was only one person who could be calling right now. “This better be important, Grace.” Sloane stuck her tongue out at her best friend to show she was joking when her freckled face appeared. Mostly joking. “I’m losing light.”

“Good morning to you, too, Meezy!” Grace lived in San Diego, two hours behind Sloane. She was still in her pajamas even though it was past nine there. She’d nicknamed Sloane Meezy based on the name of her blog, Mise en Place.

“I wanted to make sure you got my gift.” Her friend yawned, raking a hand through her fluffy red hair. “That’s a pretty valuable piece to be floating around in the possession of the postal service.”

The biggest kitchen catalog on the web, Good Cooks, had sent Grace a high-end enamel Dutch oven she already owned. So she’d taken pity on Sloane who had dropped her own brand-new one and shattered it during an unfortunate compound butter incident.

She shuddered at the memory of the slick beef short rib concoction that had covered every square foot of her kitchen. “I was going to text you after I finished my post for today. It’s gorgeous. I think the purple looks better in my kitchen anyway.”

“Good, good. Well let’s get right down to it.”

“What?”

“You and I both know I didn’t call to chat about cookware.”

Sloane sighed. Right. That. She should have known. “There’s nothing to tell, Grace. I’m working with their son to open his new restaurant. End of story.”

“Sloane, Sloane, Sloane. There’s always more to the story. How did he act? Was he decent to you? Did he have an entourage?”

“Okay, Hoda.” Sloane carried her laptop to the table and sank into the chair. She wanted to take a nap. “No, he didn’t have an entourage. He was alone. Doing his own repairs, for goodness’ sake.”

“Did he say why he’s been off the radar for so long?”

“He was in Paris. Going to culinary school.”

“From America’s party boy to chef who isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. Interesting.” Grace typed something into her computer. “He doesn’t sound like the monster Levi was thinking he’d be.”

The web coding and design genius they’d befriended hadn’t held back when voicing his opinions about Cooper’s character, much less his stance on whether Sloane was fit enough to work with him in the first place.

“Well, we know Levi can be a little trigger-happy with his Google searching.” Sloane laughed.

“Yes, my friend. You’re absolutely right. So, was he as good-looking in person?”

Cooper’s warm, caramel-colored eyes and his strong profile that could have been chiseled from granite appeared in hi-def in Sloane’s mind.

Quick. Play dumb. “Who, Levi?”

Grace raised her eyebrows.

“I, uh—”

“I’ll take that as a yes.” Triumph played in Grace’s eyes. Sloane was toast and she knew it. “Maybe I’ll get to find out for myself in a few weeks.”

Sloane sighed. “The conference.”

“You have no excuse this year. It’s practically in your backyard.”

“I know, but—”

“But don’t worry. I won’t let them devour you.”

This was why they got along so well. And why Sloane had finally agreed to attend their annual food blogging conference. It was true; she’d run out of excuses since the conference was in Dallas this year. But she couldn’t deny it would be good to finally meet Grace in person, even if her throat closed up a little when she imagined being in a room with thousands of bloggers and readers that were much less intimidating from their 2-D cyber distance.

“Well, I won’t keep you from your good light. Are we watching MasterChef tonight or what?” Grace was now typing furiously. Their conversation wasn’t long for this world.

“Sure. Eight my time?”

“Yep. I’ll tell Levi about it right now. And I’ll tell him to back off. I think one grand inquisition about the Coopers is enough.”

“Ha. Fat chance of that. Talk to you later.”

Grace closed the screen, foregoing a goodbye now that she’d moved on to the next thing.

After Sloane picked a new pair of socks, she returned to the chicken, rearranged everything according to the slight difference in lighting and snapped several shots from a bird’s-eye view.

Her meal might not be molecular gastronomy or whatever they taught at a fancy French culinary school. But she was going to teach some home cooks how to roast a chicken so bone-licking scrumptious that they’d never be satisfied with rotisserie from the deli ever again.

And she was going to buck up and prove she had a lot to bring to Graham Cooper’s table—rattled first impressions or not.

* * *

COOPER SAT AT his desk in his favorite corner of his home—besides the kitchen—head in one hand, the proofs for Simone’s promotional materials spread in front of him. They were clean, bright, cheerful—all the trappings of the J. Marian corporate signature. But all wrong for Simone.

He’d been staring at them for what felt like hours, absently rubbing circles into Maddie’s fur with his foot. He couldn’t put his finger on it or name exactly what changes he needed to make. Design had never been his forte. Not like sales and customer service were. But he knew the tone didn’t work at all. It fit what he was going for about as well as Maddie crammed into the nook under his desk, knobby legs sticking out in every direction. He sipped cold coffee, its acrid taste a far cry from what he would have been drinking a few years ago. It sure would make these proofs easier to swallow.

He sighed. Something had to give or history would repeat itself. He’d lose everything he owned if it meant he could stand the person he saw in the mirror each morning.

Cooper swallowed hard. Even the restaurant.

No. He sat up and turned the proofs over so all that was visible was the back of the page, frustration gnawing at his foundation like a termite. He’d been through too much to let his restaurant slip through his fingers.

And then he saw it. The scrap of J. Marian letterhead had slipped through a pile of papers. Sloane Bradley, it read in his father’s assistant’s slanted script. No email address or phone number. Not even the address for her website. Simply a name that opened the starting gate for a fresh round of loping thoughts.

He swiped a finger across the trackpad of his laptop and opened the browser. Sloane Bradley food blog, he typed into the search engine. The first result had a thumbnail of Sloane along with a short introduction to her website. Cooper cracked a half smile when he saw the title was French. Mise en Place.

“Dude, maybe you should get some glasses.”

Cooper shot up, and Maddie scrambled from beneath the desk, scattering a stack of papers with her tail in her excitement. “How about you warn a guy before you creep up on him like that?” He grinned to show he was joking. And to downplay the fact that his face had been inches from Sloane’s picture on his computer screen. “How long have you been here, man?”

“Just got home a few hours ago.” Jake Neighbors traveled all across America, helping surgeons install pacemakers and defibrillators all hours of the night in hospitals that didn’t have the technology. Cooper saw his roommate one or two nights a week—if he was lucky. Most of the time, Jake was catching up on sleep.

Judging by the rumpled T-shirt and sweatpants, that’s exactly what he’d been doing. “Well, don’t let me intrude on your beauty sleep, Neighbors. Because you need a lot of it.”

Maddie snatched her ball and pushed it against Jake’s leg. She’d given up on Cooper ages ago.

“Who’s the girl?” Jake bent and scratched Maddie’s ears.

Cooper shrugged. “Someone my mom recommended to help promote the restaurant.”

“Yeah?” Jake leaned forward on the desk for a closer look. “How’s that been going?”

Cooper sighed and picked up one of the proofs, extending it toward his roommate. “It’s going, I guess.”