Page 95 of Christmas with the Denton Billionaires

It wasn’t like Dan mattered. Clearly he and Mara were seeing each other for the first time in a long time, so that answered the whole:Did she marry that idiot?question. But still—maybe they had something going on anyway. Mara wasn’t the type of woman to greet justanybodywith a big hug and a flushed smile.

Dan eased his way into the journalist flow and stepped forward for a question. “Mara, once you win, what are you planning on doing with the earnings from the competition? Have you thought about that yet?”

Mara quirked her lips into a private smile, and Chris felt himself scowling.

“I’ve got some big plans,” she finally said, shrugging. “I don’t want to talk about them quite yet, but the earnings will be going to a very exciting project.”

Chris’s head flooded with thoughts about the secret on-again, off-again relationship that Mara and Dan had been maintaining over the past few years. The weekend trips he’d make from wherever he lived, the scandalous getaways they’d probably been having. Hell, Dan was probably married with kids and kept Mara as a side piece. That seemed his speed. Especially with that bomber jacket and his general cockiness. Seriously. Who dressed like that? Did he think he was some sort of maverick?

Jesus, this is over the top, even for you.Okay, Chris knew he was letting his imagination run rampant, but when it came to Mara, he couldn’t seem to help himself.

Once the question-and-answer session was over, Chris stormed away, more than ready for his lunch break. He’d originally planned to eat with his team, but after that display, he needed some alone time.

Dan meant nothing. Not to Chris or his career.

So why did that asshole still bother him so much?

It was something he thought about for a full hour as he cruised Glenford in his car and ate a chicken burrito in the park. Coming home spurred a whole host of emotions, a lot of which he hadn’t been counting on. But Dan and Mara? That shouldn’t bother him.

Not if he was being rational about things.

Which meant that last night had officially pushed things over into irrational territory. Chris had somehow let his feelings get mixed into the batter, and now he had the hard task of cleaning himself off and continuing forward.

The more he thought about it, the more he realized this could be one of Mara’s revenge tactics after he’d embarrassed her all those years ago. Except. She’d done more than embarrass him when they were in school. Chris had been in love with Mara Lancaster and had been fantasizing about what their life would be like once they were out of school. Until he’d found her kissing Dan while they were at the dance together. He’d stepped away to get them both something to drink and when he returned, she was in a lip lock with Dan. He’d been so surprised, he’d dropped their drinks. His anguish at the discovery that she didn’t reciprocate the feelings he had for her hurt more than he wanted to admit.

He sat there dwelling on their shared past and jumped when his phone rang. Assuming it was someone from the show telling him to get his ass back to the set, he answered without looking at the caller ID.

"This is Chris.” His answer was clipped, and he was already gathering his trash to toss before returning to his car.

“Oh! Chef Chris, you’re so dreamy,” came a male voice followed by laughter.

“What the–?“ He looked at his caller ID and laughed. “Chase Elkin. Staying out of trouble?”

“Barely. But then what’s the fun in that?” was his friend’s reply. Chase was the same age as he was, and the two had managed to get into their fair share of trouble when Chris used to visit Elk Lodge with his family. “How’s the gingerbread baking going? A competition like that seems beneath you.”

“Wait. How did you know about it? I don’t remember telling you about it.” It wasn’t that he was embarrassed by the competition, but he wasn’t one to call or text his friends to announce his activities.

“Dude, you’re all over the place. Twitter, Insta. I even saw a TikTok video with a montage and an ode to your ass.” Chase laughed as he said that. “Shit, don’t you keep track of what’s said about you online?”

“Well, I don’t, no, but I’m sure my assistant does or the PR team for the show.”

“Wow. That’s sort of refreshing or possibly ignorant. Seriously, you should set up alerts to notify you when you’re mentioned. It’s good to keep ahead of things before they explode and bite you in the ass.”

“Talking from experience, I take it?” Chris asked. He knew that Chase had been a hothead when he’d been competing professionally and had gotten himself in a number of entanglements that might have seen him canceled. Or worse. But then he’d gotten into that career-ending accident.

“You know it. Actually, I did call for a reason and not just to give you shit. That was extra. Potato salad.”

Chris had been walking to his car and paused. “What now? Potato salad? Can’t you just Google that like you do your name?”

“Ha ha. I thought you had a recipe.”

Frowning, he tossed his trash and then hit the key fob to unlock his car. “I don’t. Wait. Do you mean the one Amelia’s mom makes?” His cousin Josh’s new mother-in-law was the keeper of her family’s decades-old potato salad recipe that had been rumored to bring feuding families together over a shared love of roasted, not boiled, potatoes with dressing. Chris had to agree it made for a tasty side dish, and he’d tried to make some adjustments to it, but the one her mother makes was damn-near perfect.

“That’s the one. Don’t suppose you can share it with me. Tana is having cravings, and I want to see if she’ll appreciate it as much as I do.”

Laughing, he slid behind the wheel and put his seatbelt on. “I take it things are going well between you two?”

“Dude, I am so in love with her. She’s, just, yeah….” Chase got quiet, and then Chris could hear him talking to someone else. Christ took the moment to put his phone on speaker and pull up the recipe to send to his friend. “Sorry about that. Duty calls. So any chance you can hook me up?”

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