Читать книгу With No Reservations - Laurie Tomlinson - Страница 12
ОглавлениеGETTING 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.”
His roommate’s face was unreadable as he scanned the brochure. But Cooper was pretty sure he saw him wince. “Why don’t you see if this woman...” He waved a finger at the computer screen.
“Sloane.”
“Sloane. Why don’t you see if she can help? I mean, these are good and everything, but her style seems more up your alley, you know?”
Cooper nodded, trying to reconcile the hot mess of a girl he’d met at the restaurant—she’d wiped her silverware, for crying out loud!—with the spirited image she conveyed on her website.
Once Jake had left to run some errands, Cooper opened his browser and dug deeper.
So, her thing was mise en place. The recipe prep. Neat piles of ingredients staged so they were appealing to the eye. He got that about Sloane, in the way she’d rearranged things and seemed to have a particular order as she sampled his food at the restaurant.
She was an interesting girl—feisty, even. And she certainly wasn’t lacking in the looks department. The head shot on the website header affirmed that. Her shiny blond hair was pulled to one side, full lips parted like she was about to say something to the person taking the picture. The light pink of her sweater highlighted something younger, an almost playful vibe. Totally different than the guarded professional he’d met. A black apron with her Mise en Place logo accentuated her figure, petite and curvy. Trim, but healthy enough to show she wasn’t the kind of woman who only ate birdseed and water. He could appreciate a woman who didn’t refuse a fluffy, buttery roll or two when the bread basket was passed around. Life was too short for that.
Cooper rested his chin in his hand and scrolled to her most recent post, a recipe for pumpkin spice cake doughnuts prepared two ways. Some were sprinkled with a spiced sugar concoction and the others were drizzled with a multilayered vanilla bean glaze.
He did a double take and leaned close to the computer to make sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks when he saw that her post had over two hundred comments. And he could see why.
Sloane’s images were gorgeous. From the assembled ingredients to the close-up of the baked, spongy center. And the final product arranged in a doughnut pyramid, shot on a vintage sherbet-colored cake stand against a wood pallet backdrop.
Jake was right. This was what he wanted for Simone. Charming, rustic, cozy, mouth-watering. Just like he promised the real Simone it would be.
Maybe his mother’s instincts were spot-on and Sloane could do his restaurant promo justice.
There it was. A glimmer of hope where he’d had nothing a minute before. He had to talk to her. He scrolled through his inbox, scanning the names for one that might have her contact information. “There you are.” Finally. He tapped the numbers into his phone.
It wasn’t until it rang that something twinged in the pit of his stomach. The warning sign that perhaps he should have thought this through a little better.
She answered as he was clearing his throat.
“Sloane, it’s Cooper.” Silence. “From Simone?” It felt good to say that out loud.
“Right, right.” Her tone remained flat, all business. “What can I do for you?”
He cleared his throat again, replaying their last meeting. Did he do something to offend her? He couldn’t remember. But that didn’t matter. Even if she never wanted to work with him again, it was time to lay it all on the line.
“I need you.”
* * *
“THANK YOU SO much for coming on such short notice.” It was the third time Cooper had said it, but he didn’t care.
He picked up the last box from the trunk of the black Lincoln Town Car that had brought Sloane to the restaurant.
“Careful with that one,” she warned him, looping one forearm through the handle of a reusable bag and bunching the brown cotton of her skirt in the other to protect it from the wild winds. “Thanks, Henry,” she called to the uniformed driver.
What was up with the car service? Maybe hers was in the shop or something. But that wasn’t important right now. The fact that she was there to save his bacon was all that mattered.
Cooper set the last box on the stainless steel prep area of the kitchen with the rest of Sloane’s impressive assortment as she began opening containers and lifting a menagerie of items from them—plates, stands, serving dishes, ceramic spoons of inviting colors and textures.
“Where do you find all of this stuff?”
At first, Sloane ignored him, her eyes sweeping back and forth between the props. She shook her head, and the focus returned to her eyes. “eBay, mostly. Online shops. May I see the food you prepared for this shoot?” Quick. Impersonal. Proper.
“Um, yeah.” He ran a hand through his short curls. “It’s right over here.”
Cooper watched as Sloane inspected the dishes he’d made for her to photograph. Her expression didn’t look promising—somewhere between fierce concentration and measured grimace.
“Okay. I can work with this,” she finally pronounced. Without a word of explanation, she picked up three of the plates and whisked them from the kitchen to the café.
Cooper followed suit with the rest of the plates but stopped when he saw Sloane moving from table to table, inspecting each surface. What was she looking for? Crumbs or something?
“The lighting is best right here.” Sloane framed a patch of light on one of the front tables with cupped hands. “But we don’t have much time.”
“Just tell me what you need me to do.”
Sloane looked up at him. For a moment, he saw a flicker of warmth in her blue-gray eyes that jolted him enough to raise the hair on his arms. And then it was gone.
He stood at a distance, nibbling the thumbnail of one hand. Watching as Sloane moved in silence, transferring food to her dishes, expertly molding and reshaping with silverware, dabbing crumbs and smudges from immaculate surfaces. Adjusting her camera and snapping photographs from every angle imaginable.
Food styling had never been Cooper’s thing in culinary school. But this took it to a whole new level. Precise. Methodical. What Sloane was doing was an exact science she could write the book on.
She didn’t acknowledge him again until the very last shot when she looked up and, after a fleeting blink of confusion, seemed to remember that he was there.
“You don’t happen to have milk here, do you? Or cream? And a tall glass?”
Cooper saw where she was going with this and jogged to the kitchen. The milk may have been a day or two expired, but its only purpose in life was to look good next to a molten chocolate cake.
That, it could do.
Right as Sloane had the shot lined up, something occurred to Cooper. “Wait. Just a minute.”
He hurried into the kitchen, opening drawers and slamming them, upending packing materials and dishes until he found a plastic bag and tore it apart with his teeth on his way back into the dining room. He placed the teal-striped straw he’d gotten from a vendor in the glass of milk and stood behind Sloane to survey it from her vantage point.
She whipped around, a glimmer of life in the wide blue-gray eyes he now noticed were rimmed with brown. “You’re a genius!”
“I’m glad my sole contribution pleases you.”
After snapping the last photo of the molten chocolate cake, Sloane heaved a sigh and plopped into the chair. “You don’t mind if I eat this, do you?”
Cooper shook his head, mind blown. “Go ahead.” He laughed. “But the milk is at your own risk.”
She rubbed on hand sanitizer and polished her spoon with a wipe before digging into the cake. “Mmm. This is so good.” The cake’s liquid chocolate center pooled at the corners of her mouth, and Cooper tore his eyes away. “They’re going to be lining up for this cake alone—mark my words.”
“We’ll see about that. It’s about the only thing I like to bake. I’ll take a knife and a skillet any day.”
Sloane’s head snapped up from the cake. “What’s so bad about baking? It’s pretty much the best thing ever.”
“There’s no...improvisation in it.” Cooper pulled out a chair from Sloane’s table and sat on it backward. “It was my least favorite thing about culinary school. Everything has to be so measured and set in stone or else it turns out awful.”
She took another bite and chewed it delicately, staring at the rich, gooey cake in front of her. “Set in stone isn’t always awful. Here.” She handed him the camera, her white-collared shirt draping open at her smooth, pale neck. Her thumb rotated the dial, demonstrating how to scroll through the pictures.
They were exactly how he wanted to represent the bistro. The lighting, the angles, the food...it was all amazing. She’d really done it.
“Not bad for a measly blogger, is it?” Sloane narrowed her eyes, a half-smile curving her lips.
“These are perfect, Sloane. Seriously.”
She scraped her spoon against the bottom of the ramekin, avoiding his eyes. “You didn’t seem to think I had much to offer when we met the other day.”
“Sloane, that didn’t come out the right way at all.” Cooper dropped his head in surrender. “I’m sorry I said it like that. Clearly, I need you to make this happen.”
“I know.” Sloane’s voice was even. Not arrogant, just stating the obvious. “That’s why I’m here. It really was a logical move to put your focus on online marketing for this project. You’re attracting a different crowd, Cooper. J. Marian has the soccer mom and older crowd down, but this—” she indicated the room “—your people are different. They’re waiting to find you online.”
She was right. And the confidence in her voice told him she knew how to make that happen.
Memory card clutched tightly in his palm, Cooper walked around the back of the Town Car to thank Sloane after the last of her serving props had been loaded in the trunk.
To his disappointment, the distant, professional version of her had returned the minute their conversation reached a lull. Maybe feeding her chocolate cake was the magical key to unlock her. To give her permission to relax a little.
Before he could reach her window, she was gone with a swift wave and a tight smile, leaving a deluge of questions in her elusive wake.
