Under Her Clothes. Louisa Edwards
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had died down and the steaks were all safe at the front of the grill did Colby swipe his forearms over his sweaty forehead. He winced, grimacing down at his arm, before going back to flipping steaks as if he hadn’t noticed the three-inch burn mark turning a more livid red with each passing moment.
Caught between approval of the kid’s stamina and an appalling desire to charge across the kitchen and stick Colby’s arm under cold water and wrap him in icy compresses to stop the burn, Dominic turned on his heel and stalked over to the dining room doors.
The runners stared at him, then shrugged at each other. It wasn’t often that Dominic made the rounds of the dining room; he preferred to command the kitchen himself or to preside from his office desk while dealing with the myriad of tasks that went along with running the city’s top French restaurant.
Ignoring the frisson of whispers and glances from the elegantly dressed diners, Dom stalked between the widely spaced tables with his facial expression set to neutral. All his attention was on the familiar stranger seated alone at the deuce by the front window.
Only eighteen months Dom’s junior, carefree and happy-go-lucky Marc had always seemed even younger. But the mischievous smile Dom remembered was nowhere in sight as Marc leaned back in the soft, upholstered chair and stared out the window at twilit Park Avenue. His carefully composed plate—the duck breast, Dom noted, at perfect medium rare—sat before him, untouched.
A dark shadow of beard roughened Marc’s hard jaw, and the crinkles beside his gray eyes didn’t look like laugh lines. Dominic felt a frown pulling at his own mouth.
What had happened to his brother while Dom wasn’t looking?
As if sensing the presence looming over him, Marc turned from his contemplation of the late-rush-hour crowds of CEOs speeding home in their black chauffeured cars. Blinking up at Dom, he said, “Finally. What does it take to give my compliments to the chef in this dump?”
Dom stiffened, unused to teasing. “It might help if you actually tasted the food,” he pointed out, crossing his arms.
“I don’t have to taste it to know that it’s perfect. You made it.”
The words sounded like a compliment, but there was a twist of bitterness beneath them that plucked at Dom’s patience. “Haven’t we outgrown this rivalry, Marc?”
“We didn’t have time to outgrow it or get over it. You left.”
Guilt soured the back of Dominic’s tongue. “Eva Jansen offered me an opportunity. I had to take it.”
“Even though it meant leaving Paris. Leaving your family.”
A fresh start in a new city and distance from the past—especially his father—had been the main reasons Dom took this job. He hadn’t intended to leave his brother behind, too, at least not completely, but after everything that had happened, it had been easy to let silence take root and grow until it blanketed everything. “If you want to be a great chef, Marc—”
“Oh, yes. S’il te plaît.” One of Marc’s thick, black brows winged up. “Remind me that I could be a great chef, too, if I’d only apply myself. If I had any discipline. If I only wanted it enough...”
Dom clenched his jaw. For some reason, a vision of Colby St. James—scrappy and tough and totally against the rules—rose up before his mind’s eye. “Believe me. It is possible to want this life too much. There are things you should not sacrifice.”
He hadn’t meant to say that, the words peeled from him like the rind from an orange, but for the first time in five years, Dom saw his brother smile. The broad, infectious grin sent a shaft of light down into the darkest parts of Dom’s heart.
“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Marc told him. “You should not give up your family.”
That wasn’t what Dom had been referring to, but he liked the look of Marc’s smile too much to correct him. Despite the way their father had occasionally pitted them against one another, Dom’s issues had never truly been with his brother. Which, of course, was what made him the perfect emissary to bring Dom back into the family fold.
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