Page 12 of Sexy as Sin
“You’re good.” Her hands kept moving, tweaking flowers and arranging food, as he stapled, and the whole thing began to look cheerful. Less like a function, and more like a party.
“No,” he said. “I’ve just had a lot of things go wrong over a lot of years, until it’s not even ‘going wrong’ anymore, it’s just a curvature in the plan. There’s always some answer, some way out, and most people won’t care unless you do. Most people won’t even notice.”
“Ah. The Julia Child approach. She’d say, if you can’t flip the potato pancake or your chicken falls on the floor, turn it into something else lovely. Never apologize, and never explain. What do people want? They want to eat and drink delicious things, and they want to have fun. They don’t care what your original plan was.”
“Exactly. Which is why we’re having a picnic.”
She smiled at him, and something in him caught and held, stuck in that smile and that face and thatvoice.“And we have awesome sweets,” she said, “if I do say so myself. Julia also said that a party without cake is just a meeting. Do you like sweets, Mr. Hunter? Did you like mine?”
He’d stapled all the way around the tables. He needed to do the entrance, then get out there. But he was a foot from her, and how could he go? Her skin was flushed, and tiny tendrils had already escaped the severe knot of hair. “Yes,” he told her. “I think you know I do. I like sweets, and I liked yours. I try not to eat them, though. Too decadent. Too self-indulgent.”
“Mm.” The smile got a little more assured. “I may get you to try some more of mine all the same. I’m very, very good with sweets. The trick is to make them delicious, of course, but then to go that step too far. The magic happens when you take things over the top. Bananas are fine. Caramelized bananas with vanilla bean whipped cream, though, the bananas heated into creaminess and coated with all that crackling burnt-sugar crunch? They’re pure sin. Looking at them, smelling them, tasting them. That’s when you’ve gotpleasure.”
Entangled,he told himself.Wrong.
It wasn’t working.
“Mr. Hunter?”
He closed his eyes for an instant, then opened them and turned.
“Yes, Wendy?” he asked the PR woman. She was efficient, he’d give her that. If she reminded him of his fourth-grade teacher, that wasn’t her fault. It also wasn’t her fault that he hadn’t liked his fourth-grade teacher. She’d been all about the rules, like they’d been set down by God, whether that was how many paragraphs your book report had to be or that you could only be absent four times a quarter without your grade dropping. She’d thought order mattered more than fairness, more than progress. He’d disagreed then, and he disagreed more now. Part of him, however well disguised, would always be that rebel pushing it too far.
“The partners are asking where you are.” Wendy’s gaze flicked between him and Willow. “And they’re eyeing the food as well.”
“Good.” He grabbed a chair and lifted it over the crepe-paper barrier. Something to stand on. “Nothing like anticipation to whet the appetite. I need to put on the finishing touches anyway. Let me know when you’re ready, Willow,” he said, turning back to her and wishing, despite every better intention, that she’d unbutton one more button on that plain white blouse. Or that he could do it. Slowly. “We’ll see how the anticipation pays off, and whether we can get this group all the way to ‘pleasure.’ I’m betting on yes.”
Three hours later, Willow was so far from pleasure, it wasn’t funny. She’d also gone from “hot” to “lava flow.”
She didn’t wear makeup on jobs. She might have dark-red brows and lashes that wouldn’t feature on any magazine page, but too bad. “Melting” might be a wonderful state for a romance heroine, but it wasn’t a flash look on your face. Byron Bay in summer wasn’t as hot as Brisbane—thank the sea breeze for that—but the humidity generally hovered around the ninety-percent mark, and today, it was all but dripping off the trees. Her trousers and white blouse were as wet as if she’d been swimming in them, bits of hair were stuck to her forehead and the nape of her neck in absolutely unbecoming fashion, and her face, she was positive, was giving beetroot a run for its money.
The event, though, was surviving much better. Two huge fans at opposite corners of the marquee, connected to a portable generator hidden discreetly nearby, kept the air moving, and the guests circulated as easily from the shade of the trees back and forth to the drinks table and the dessert bar. Her lemon curd and chocolate mousse tartlets in shortbread were down to a final lonely half-dozen, and best of all, the ice blocks had been a smash hit, turning Australia’s moneyed elite into kids for a few wonderful minutes. Lime juice decorated Tommy Bahama shirts, women had mopped their partners’ red juice mustaches with serviettes printed with the Southern Cross, and everybody had started to have fun.
Julia, as always, had been right. A party without dessert was just a meeting. What they had here was a business function that had turned into a party.
“All we need is a sprinkler to run through,” a voice at her elbow said, “and we’ll have achieved full aspirational-lifestyle mode.”
She took a swipe at her dripping face with a tea towel, stuck it back through the waist strap of her black apron, and said, “Funny, isn’t it? You wouldn’t think something so simple would work so well. That was my leap into the dark. Ice blocks. My legacy.” She worked while she talked, consolidating the remaining tarts onto a single tray, rearranging the table one more time, and casting an eye over her servers. She needed to get Jamie and Crystal moving. Jamie was useful with ice-carrying and tub-emptying and so forth, but otherwise, he wasn’t much chop, and he and Crystal didn’t exactly reinforce each others’ work ethics. Unfortunately, Jamie was Amanda’s husband’s nephew, so there you were.
“Itisfunny,” Hunter said. “I don’t know about Australia, but back in the States, we spend fifty weeks a year with our noses to the grindstone, all for the sake of those couple weeks when we can go to the lake, watch fireworks from the dock, eat Popsicles, and float on an air mattress like we’re ten again. Except that when we actuallywereten, we couldn’t wait for our lives to be full of exciting grown-up times, with a heavy focus on blonds and martini glasses and penthouse apartments. We glossed over the grindstone part. Except me, of course.”
She had to quit working, then, and look at him. “Except you? Because you’re on your Jet Ski every weekend already, with a blond and a martini glass?”
He smiled. “Nope. I don’t like the water, remember? Because I like to work. Or because I choose to work. It’s all in how you look at it.”
“That’s a bit bleak.” She wondered why he was telling her this. If he’d had seduction in mind, it might make sense. If she were a different person, at least.I’m a busy man, baby. A rambling man. But we’ll take the good times while we can.Here, have a diamond.Except that he’d turned her down, and shewasn’tthat person, so none of it made sense. “One second,” she told him, giving up on figuring it out. She headed over to the other side of the marquee and told Jamie and Crystal, “Make another round outside, please, with sparkling water refills, and remind them there’s tea and coffee in here.” They’d removed the wine an hour ago. Australian drunk-driving laws were no joke, and the narrow, winding roads of the hinterland were seriously unforgiving.
Jamie gave her a stare that nearly reached “insolent,” and Crystal said, “We were just going.”
“Awesome,” Willow said. “Don’t let me stop you.” Jamie was, alas, in addition to lazy and related to the owner, extremely good-looking in a Black Irish sort of way, his blue eyes and black hair and the dimple in his chin making him more desirable as a waiter than he deserved. He’d tried flirting with her at the beginning. It hadn’t worked. He’d seemed surprised.
She watched them go, then headed back to Hunter, who was, after all, the client. He couldn’t possibly be interested in her at this point, with all her dripping sweatiness, so she’d work on the “relationship management” part of the deal.
This was part of Nourish’s big leap, branching out from small-time weddings, and she’d made it happen. She happened to know that Omnivore, the trend-setting Brisbane firm she’d worked for until this year, had gone after this gig, and they hadn’t been the only ones. The consortium hadn’t even broken ground yet, and surely there were many, many more high-end functions to come, and a whole lucrative corporate world beyond that. Byron wasn’t getting any less fashionable. Nourish had won the job on their menu, despite Amanda’s nervousness, and this was her chance to nail down their advantage.
The PR woman had said ninety-five dollars a head, though. Where hadthatcome from? It seemed too high. She’d never been on the business end of things, but wasn’t that high?
Not the right time to explore that. Right now, she needed to focus on the human element. She told Brett, “I cannot believe you still look that cool.” There, that was neutral. Friendly. Feeding him the lemon tartlet had been over the top, no matter how much of a rush it had given her to suck whipped cream from her finger and have him watch her do it. She’d be better off cultivating the Aussie partners instead, even though they’d barely looked her way so far.
