A Beauty For The Billionaire

As if she could dismiss him. She’d never met anyone with a more commanding presence. Although he had to be standing at least five feet away from her, she felt as if he were right on top of her, breathing down her chef’s whites, leaving her skin hot to the touch. He was easily a foot taller than she was in her Super Birkis, and his shoulders had fairly filled the doorway when he entered the room. His hair was the color of good semolina, and his eyes were as dark as coffee beans. Chloe had always had a major thing for brown-eyed blonds, and this man could have been their king. Add that he was dressed in well-worn jeans, battered work boots and an oatmeal-colored sweater that had definitely seen better days—a far cry from the fresh-from-the-couturier cookie-cutter togs of other society denizens—and he was just way too gorgeous for his own good. Or hers.

She lifted her hand to the top button of her jacket and twisted it, a gesture that served to remind her of things she normally didn’t need reminding of. But it did no good. Hogan was still commanding. Still earthy. Still gorgeous. Her glasses had begun to droop again, so she pushed them up with the back of her hand. It was a nervous gesture she’d had since childhood, but it was worse these days. And not just because her big black frames were a size larger than they should be.

“So…how’s Anabel doing?” he asked.

Of all the questions she might have expected, that one wasn’t even in the top ten. Although he didn’t strike her as a foodie, and although he’d already filled out a questionnaire she prepared for her employers about his culinary expectations and customs, she would have thought he would want to talk more about her position here. She’d already gathered from Anabel that her former employer and her new employer shared some kind of history—Anabel had tried to talk Chloe out of taking this position, citing Hogan’s past behavior as evidence of his unsophisticated palate. But Chloe neither cared nor was curious about what that history might be. She only wanted to cook. Cooking was what she did. Cooking was what she was. Cooking was all that mattered on any given day. On every given day. Chloe didn’t do well if she couldn’t keep every last scrap of her attention on cooking.

“Anabel is fine,” she said.

“I mean since her divorce,” Hogan clarified. “I understand you came to work for her about the same time her husband left her for one of her best friends.”

“That was none of my business,” Chloe told him. “It’s none of yours, either. I don’t engage in gossip, Mr. Dempsey.”

“Hogan,” he immediately corrected her. “And I’m not asking you to gossip. I just…”

He lifted one shoulder and let it drop in a way that was kind of endearing, then expelled his breath in a way that was almost poignant. Damn him. Chloe didn’t have time for endearing and poignant. Especially when it was coming from the king of the brown-eyed blonds.

“I just want to know she’s doing okay,” he said. “She and I used to be…friends. A long time ago. I haven’t seen her in a while. Divorce can be tough on a person. I just want to know she’s doing okay,” he repeated.

Oh, God. He was pining for her. It was the way he’d said the word friends. Pining for Anabel Carlisle, a woman who was a nice enough human being, and a decent enough employer, but who was about as deep as an onion skin.

“I suppose she’s doing well enough in light of her…change of circumstances,” Chloe said.

More to put Hogan out of his misery than anything else. Chloe actually didn’t know Anabel that well, in spite of having been in her employ for nearly six months, which was longer than she’d worked for anyone else. Now that she thought about it, though, Anabel was doing better than well enough. Chloe had never seen anyone happier to be divorced.

“Really?” Hogan asked with all the hopeful earnestness of a seventh-grader. Gah. Stop being so charming!

“Really,” she said.

“Is she seeing anyone?”

Next he would be asking her to pass Anabel a note during study hall. “I don’t know,” she said. But because she was certain he would ask anyway, she added, “I never cooked for anyone but her at her home.”

That seemed to hearten him. Yay.

“Now if you’ll excuse me…” She started to call him Mr. Dempsey again, remembered he’d told her to call him Hogan, so decided to call him nothing at all. Strange, since she’d never had trouble before addressing her employers by their first names, even if she didn’t prefer to. “I have a strict schedule I adhere to, and I need to get to work.”

She needed to get to work. Not wanted. Needed. Big difference. As much as Chloe liked to cook, and as much as she wanted to cook, she needed it even more. She hoped she conveyed that to Hogan Dempsey without putting too fine a point on it.

“Okay,” he said with clear reluctance. He probably wanted to pump her for more information about Anabel, but unless his questions were along the lines of how much Anabel liked Chloe’s pistachio financiers, she’d given him all she planned to give.

And, wow, she really wished she’d thought of another way to put that than He probably wanted to pump her.

“If you need anything else,” he said, “or have any questions or anything, I’ll be in my, uh…”

For the first time, he appeared to be unsure of himself. For just the merest of moments, he actually seemed kind of lost. And damned if Chloe didn’t have to stop herself from taking a step forward to physically reach out to him. She knew how it felt to be lost. She hated the thought of anyone feeling that way. But knowing it was Hogan Dempsey who did somehow seemed even worse.

Oh, this was not good.

“House,” he finally finished. “I’ll be in my house.”

She nodded, not trusting herself to say anything. Or do anything, for that matter. Not until he was gone, and she could reboot herself back into the cooking machine she was. The cooking machine she had to be. The one driven only by her senses of taste and smell. Because the ones that dealt with hearing and seeing and, worst of all, feeling—were simply not allowed.

A ham and cheese sandwich.

Hogan had suspected the dinner Chloe set in front of him before disappearing back into the kitchen without a word was a sandwich, because he was pretty sure there were two slices of bread under the crusty stuff on top that was probably more cheese. But his first bite had cinched it. She’d made him a ham and cheese sandwich. No, maybe the ham wasn’t the Oscar Mayer he’d always bought before he became filthy, stinking rich, and the cheese wasn’t the kind that came in plastic-wrapped individual slices, but croque monsieur was obviously French for ham and cheese sandwich.

Still, it was a damned good ham and cheese sandwich.

For side dishes, there was something that was kind of like French fries—but not really—and something else that was kind of like coleslaw—but not really. Even so, both were also damned good. Actually, they were better than damned good. The dinner Chloe made him was easily the best not-really ham and cheese sandwich, not-really French fries and not-really coleslaw he’d ever eaten. Ah, hell. They were better than all those spot-on things, too. Maybe hiring her would pay off in more ways than just winning back the love of his life. Or, at least, the love of his teens.

Chloe had paired his dinner with a beer that was also surprisingly good, even though he was pretty sure it hadn’t been brewed in Milwaukee. He would have thought her expertise in that area would be more in wine—and it probably was—but it was good to know she had a well-rounded concept of what constituted dinner. Then again, for what he was paying her, he wouldn’t be surprised if she had a well-rounded concept of astrophysics and existentialism, too. She’d even chosen music to go with his meal, and although he’d never really thought jazz was his thing, the mellow strains of sax and piano had been the perfect go-with.

It was a big difference from the way he’d enjoyed dinner before—food that came out of a bag or the microwave, beer that came out of a longneck and some sport on TV. If someone had told Hogan a month ago that he’d be having dinner in a massive dining room at a table for twelve with a view of trees and town houses out his window instead of the neon sign for Taco Taberna across the street, he would have told that person to see a doctor about their hallucinations. He still couldn’t believe this was his life now. He wasn’t sure he ever would.

The moment he laid his fork on his plate, Chloe appeared to remove both from the table and set a cup of coffee in their place. Before she could escape again—somehow it always seemed to Hogan like she was trying to run from him—he stopped her.

“That was delicious,” he said. “Thank you.”

When she turned to face him, she looked surprised by his admission. “Of course it was delicious. It’s my life’s work to make it delicious.” Seemingly as an afterthought, she added, “You’re welcome.”

When she started to turn away, Hogan stopped her again.

“So I realize now that croque monsieur is a ham and cheese sandwich, but what do you call those potatoes?”

When she turned around this time, her expression relayed nothing of what she might be thinking. She only gazed at him in silence for a minute—a minute where he was surprised to discover he was dying to know what she was thinking. Finally she said, “Pommes frites. The potatoes are called pommes frites.”

“And the green stuff? What was that?”

“Salade de chou.”

“Fancy,” he said. “But wasn’t it really just a ham and cheese sandwich, French fries and coleslaw?”

Her lips, freshly stained with her red lipstick, thinned a little. “To you? Yes. Now if you’ll excuse me, your dessert—”

“Can wait a minute,” he finished. “Sit down. We need to talk.”

She didn’t turn to leave again. But she didn’t sit down, either. Mostly, she just stared at him through slitted eyes over the top of her glasses before pushing them into place again with the back of her hand. He remembered her doing that a couple of times earlier in the day. Maybe with what he was paying her now, she could afford to buy a pair of glasses that fit. Or, you know, eight hundred pairs of glasses that fit. He was paying her an awful lot.

He tried to gentle his tone. “Come on. Sit down. Please,” he added.

“Was there a problem with your dinner?” she asked.

He shook his head. “It was a damned tasty ham and cheese sandwich.”

He thought she would be offended that he relegated her creation—three times now—to something normally bought in a corner deli and wrapped in wax paper. Instead, she replied, “I wanted to break you in slowly. Tomorrow I’m making you pot au feu.”

“Which is?”

“To you? Beef stew.”

“You don’t think much of me or my palate, do you?”

“I have no opinion of either, Mr. Dempsey.”

“Hogan,” he corrected her. Again.

She continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “I just happened to learn a few things about my new employer before starting work for him, and it’s helped me plan menus that would appeal to him. Which was handy since the questionnaire I asked this particular employer to fill out was, shall we say, a bit lean on helpful information in that regard.”

“Shouldn’t I be the one doing that?” he asked. “Researching my potential employee before even offering the position?”

“Did you?” she asked.

He probably should have. But Gus Fiver’s recommendation had been enough for him. Well, that and the fact that stealing her from Anabel would get the latter’s attention.

“Uh…” he said eloquently.

She exhaled a resigned sigh then approached the table and pulled out a chair to fold herself into it, setting his empty plate before her for the time being. “I know you grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Astoria,” she said, “and that you’re so new money, with so much of it, the Secret Service should be crawling into your shorts to make sure you’re not printing the bills yourself. I know you’ve never traveled farther north than New Bedford, Massachusetts, to visit your grandparents or farther south than Ocean City, New Jersey, where you and your parents spent a week every summer at the Coral Sands Motel. I know you excelled at both hockey and football in high school and that you missed out on scholarships for both by this much, so you never went to college. I also know your favorite food is—” at this, she bit back a grimace “—taco meatloaf and that the only alcohol you imbibe is domestic beer. News flash. I will not be making taco meatloaf for you at any time.”

The hell she wouldn’t. Taco meatloaf was awesome. All he said, though, was, “How do you know all that? I mean, yeah, some of that stuff is probably on the internet, but not the stuff about my grandparents and the Coral Sands Motel.”

“I would never pry into anyone’s personal information on the internet or anywhere else,” Chloe said, sounding genuinely stung that he would think otherwise.

“Then how—”

“Anabel told me all that about you after I gave her my two weeks’ notice. I didn’t ask,” she hastened to clarify. “But when she found out it was you who hired me, and when she realized she couldn’t afford to pay me more than you offered me, she became a little…perturbed.”

Hogan grinned. He remembered Anabel perturbed. She never liked it much when she didn’t get her way. “And she thought she could talk you out of coming to work for me by telling you what a mook I am, right?” he asked.

Chloe looked confused. “Mook?”

He chuckled. “Never mind.”

Instead of being offended by what Anabel had told Chloe, Hogan was actually heartened by it, because it meant she remembered him well. It didn’t surprise him she had said what she did. Anabel had never made a secret of her opinion that social divisions existed for a reason and should never be crossed—even if she had crossed them dozens of times to be with him when they were young. It was what she had been raised to believe and was as ingrained a part of her as Hogan’s love for muscle cars was ingrained in him. Her parents, especially her father, had been adamant she would marry a man who was her social and financial equal, to the point that they’d sworn to cut her off socially and financially if she didn’t. The Carlisle money was just that old and sacred. It was the only thing that could come between Hogan and Anabel. She’d made that clear, too. And when she went off to college and started dating a senator’s son, well… Hogan had known it was over between them without her even having to tell him.

Except that she never actually told him it was over between them, and they’d still enjoyed the occasional hookup when she was home from school, in spite of the senator’s son. Over the next few years, though, they finally did drift apart.

But Anabel never told him it was over.

That was why, even after she’d married the senator’s son, Hogan had never stopped hoping that someday things would be different for them. And now his hope had paid off. Literally. The senator’s son was gone, and there was no social or financial divide between him and Anabel anymore. The blood he was born with was just as blue as hers, and the money he’d inherited was just as old and moldy. Maybe he was still feeling his way in a world that was new to him, but he wasn’t on the outside looking in anymore. Hell, he’d just drunk beer from a glass instead of a longneck. That was a major development for him. It wouldn’t be long before he—

“Hang on,” he said. “How does Anabel know I only drink domestic beer? I wasn’t old enough to drink when I was with her.”

“That part I figured out myself,” Chloe said.

“There are some damned fine domestic beers being brewed these days, you know.”

“There are. But what you had tonight was Belgian. Nice, wasn’t it?”

Yeah, okay, it was. He would still be bringing home his Sam Adams on the weekends. So there, Chloe Merlin.

“Is everything you cook French?” he asked. He wasn’t sure why he was prolonging a conversation neither of them seemed to want to have.

“Still angling for that taco meatloaf, are we?” she asked.

“I like pizza, too.”

She flinched, but said nothing.

“And chicken pot pie,” he threw in for good measure.

She expelled another one of those impatient sighs. “Fine. I can alter my menus. Some,” she added meaningfully.

Hogan smiled. Upper hand. He had it. He wondered how long he could keep it.

“But yes, all of what I cook is French.” She looked like she would add more to the comment, but she didn’t.

So he tried a new tack. “Are you a native New Yorker?” Then he remembered she couldn’t be a native New Yorker. She didn’t know what a mook was.

“I was born and raised in New Albany, Indiana,” she told him. Then, because she must have realized he was going to press her for more, she added, with clear reluctance, “I was raised by my grandmother because my parents…um…weren’t able to raise me themselves. Mémée came here as a war bride after World War Two—her parents owned a bistro in Cherbourg—and she was the one who taught me to cook. I got my degree in Culinary Arts from Sullivan University in Louisville, which is a cool city, but the restaurant scene there is hugely competitive, and I wanted to open my own place.”

“So you came to New York, where there’s no competition for that kind of thing at all, huh?” He smiled, but Chloe didn’t smile back.

He waited for her to explain how she had ended up in New York cooking for the One Percent instead of opening her own restaurant, but she must have thought she had come to the end of her story, because she didn’t say anything else. For Hogan, though, her conclusion only jump-started a bunch of new questions in his brain. “So you wanted to open your own place, but you’ve been cooking for one person at a time for…how long?”

She met his gaze levelly. “For five years,” she said.

He wondered if that was why she charged so much for her services and insisted on living on-site. Because she was saving up to open her own restaurant.

“Why no restaurant of your own by now?” he asked.

She hesitated for a short, but telling, moment. “I changed my mind.” She stood and picked up his plate. “I need to see to your dessert.”

He wanted to ask her more about herself, but her posture made clear she was finished sharing. So instead, he asked, “What am I having?”

“Glissade.”

“Which is? To me?” he added before she could.

“Chocolate pudding.”

And then she was gone. He turned in his chair to watch her leave and saw her crossing the gallery to the kitchen, her red plastic shoes whispering over the marble floor. He waited to see if she would look back, or even to one side. But she kept her gaze trained on the kitchen door, her step never slowing or faltering.

She was a focused one, Chloe Merlin. He wondered why. And he found himself wondering, too, if there was anything else—or anyone else—in her life besides cooking.

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