One
Conrad Gilbert didn’t look like any beast she’d seen or envisioned. He had the sleeves of his chef’s white jacket rolled up to reveal muscly forearms covered in a tattoo that, when the camera zoomed in, seemed to be thorny vines. His hands moved with speed and precision. When he looked up to speak to the viewer, Indy Belmont shivered with sensual awareness which warned her it had been too long since she’d gone out on a date or had a hookup. She wasn’t listening to a single word that came out of that perfectly formed masculine mouth.
She wanted to kiss him. She wanted to feel those big arms wrapped around her, with him saying her name in that deep timbre of his that reminded her of long, hot summer nights.
“So what do you think?” Lilith Montgomery, the head of the Main Street Business Alliance and the woman in charge of this endeavor, asked as she hit Pause on the video screen. Leaving Conrad’s face zoomed in, looking intently out at Indy.
“Huh?” Indy asked, realizing her father would roll his eyes at the comment. She’d come to Gilbert Corners at the town council’s invitation. Her showHometown, Home Againhad taken off over the last season and now that Lansdowne was revitalized, her producers had been looking for another town in need of her skills. “Sorry. He’s very intense.”
“He is. Even as a youth he was. So can you get him to come to town and break the curse?” Jeff Hamilton asked.
Indy smiled and nodded with confidence. They were on the same network, so getting Conrad to come to Gilbert Corners should be easy. Her best friend was from Gilbert Corners and had bought and opened a coffee shop here, and Indy herself wasn’t too bad in the kitchen.
“I can get him here. What’s this about a curse?”
Lilith shook her head. “It’s just sad. Gilbert International closed their main factory, and the very next weekend the three Gilbert heirs were in a horrific car crash.”
“One boy-Declan Owen-was left dead and two of the heirs near death. After that the town started drying up.”
“When was this?” Indy asked not sure she believed in the curse.
“Ten years ago.”
About the time that inflation, combined with the economic downturn, made it hard for small businesses to stay afloat in small towns like this—where college kids went away and didn’t come back. She suspected that had more to do with vacant shops on Main Street than a curse. But a curse would make good TV.
“I’d say that curse has run long enough. I can do it,” she said. Though she had no specific plan. She’d learned that the only way to make things happen was to believe she could do them. “Are we sure getting him to come and do a cook-off in the town is what we need?”
She’d moved to the town of Gilbert Corners eighteen months ago when she’d purchased a failing bookshop and a fixer-upper Victorian house off the main town square. She had done something similar in her hometown after college. She’d started as a YouTuber with a small following, trying desperately to fix up the house she’d inherited as a way to find some peace with the woman she had become. Viewers had responded and she’d ended up with a massive following when the offer to do her own television show on the Home Living channel had come in. That was two years ago, and once she’d gotten the business thriving and the town back on the path to its former glory, she’d needed a new project. Especially since her partner—and the man she’d been crushing on forever—had fallen in love with someone else and married her.
Renovating the Main Street, breaking a curse and getting over her past seemed like a big ask and she knew she had her work cut out for her.
Gilbert Corners was close enough to Boston that it should be a booming commuting suburb but instead it had definitely seen better days.
“It’s a start,” Lilith said. “Do you think you can do it?”
Indy, who had been called obstinate and been told that she never gave up, wasn’t worried about that. “No problem.”
She left town hall and walked back across the park where weeds had choked out the once beautiful flower beds. Graffiti covered the base of the statue that honored the four founding fathers of Gilbert Corners who’d helped during the American Revolution. She entered her bookshop, Indy’s Treasures, and waved at Kym, the high school student who helped out in the afternoons, as she entered her office at the back.
Conrad Gilbert, celebrity chef known as the Beast. She pulled up his online profile.
He had thick dark curly hair that framed his face. His brows were thick and his eyes were an icy blue. He had a long jagged scar down his left cheek ending at the top of his lip. He wore a chef’s jacket but above the collar she saw ink from a tattoo that went around his neck. His arms were crossed over his chest.
Who dares challenge the Beast in his lair?
The words were emblazoned under his crossed arms. She read further and saw that he accepted cooking challenges from across North America to be televised on his show. There was a place to enter information to challenge him. He’d come to the town of the challenger and they would go head-to-head making a famous local or regional dish.
“Yes!”
“Yes, what? I heard you agreed to get the Beast to come to town.”
She glanced up as Nola Weston, her best friend and the reason she had come to Gilbert Corners, walked into her office. When Indy had been starting out on YouTube, Nola, her former college roommate and self-taught woodworker, had joined her team. Nola set her mug of coffee on the desk, leaning against it.
“I did. I mean, he’s notreallya beast, and I think it would be good to have a Gilbert to return to town.”
“Why didn’t you go for Dash? He visits all the time to see his sister at the sanatorium.”
“Conrad has a TV show which will get us some national exposure, plus Lilith thought he’d be the easier of the two.”