“What?”
She shook her head. “So how’d you start cooking.”
He pretended he didn’t hear that. The last thing he wanted to do was get into postaccident Conrad. In fact, there was very little about himself he wanted to discuss. Maybe a sliver of time when he’d been eight to ten years old and life had been good.
“You said you own the bookshop?”
She tilted her head and reached over to steal a piece of cheese she’d sliced for their sandwiches. “I do. I love bookstores. I used to spend all my money at the bookstore in Lansdowne...that’s where I grew up. So when I graduated and came back home to ‘figure myself out’ and it was up for sale, my parents suggested I buy it and run it.”
“Did you?”
“Yeah. But the town was dying, so I started making YouTube videos and then invited friends to come to town and help me make over different abandoned shops. I talked Nola into coming to town and opening a bakery. Which she did. Then my parents used their contacts to talk more families into either coming back to town or enticing their kids back. And then I got my show.”
“Sounds impressive. Why’d you leave?”
She chewed her lower lip for a second, drawing his eyes to her mouth. She had a full lower lip and a cute little Cupid’s bow on her top lip, which he’d noticed when he’d watched her videos. He really wanted to kiss her.
“I could never tell if my success was mine or because of my parents. I have my own show, but a big part of my success was due to my parents’ contacts and easy loans were used as an incentive to encourage people to move back and start businesses. Everyone in town made all of that possible.”
“So you came here?” he asked. He was only half listening to her. In his mind he was exploring the softness of her mouth, but this was important to Indy and he wanted to know about her.
“Yeah. I need to prove that I can do it without them. I know how that sounds,” she said with a little shrug.
“It’s cool—I get it.” He’d always been all about proving himself to everyone.
“What about you? How’d you become a chef instead of a CEO like your cousin Dash?” she asked.
He could do this, tell her the safe stuff. The simple answer he gave when strangers asked him. “Well I dropped out of college thanks in part to the accident. I was in a medically induced coma and then rehab for most of my junior year, so I didn’t go back. I went to Europe and took dishwashing jobs to piss my grandfather off and learned to cook.”
“Did you become a chef to tick him off?” she asked carefully, reaching over to steal another piece of cheese from his tray.
“Partially, but not really. I just loved it. I had a really good mentor and once I worked my way up from sous-chef tochef de partie, I knew that I was hooked,” he said, smiling to himself as he remembered some of the kitchens he’d worked in, and the people. He’d eventually earned a Michelin star and then felt like he’d reached the pinnacle. That was when he transferred control of the kitchen to his sous-chef and started making his TV show.
He saw her put the piece of cheese in her mouth and chew it slowly. Inwardly he groaned. He needed to get laid, either with Indy or someone else. Because he felt like he was one big hormone at this point. He hadn’t been this horny since he’d been a teenager.
“What about you? Is breaking curses your passion?” he asked to lighten things up.
She shook her head and her curls bounced around her face as she gave him a self-conscious look. “I’m not sure I actually broke anything.”
She was still hiding something. From experience he knew that passion only came when faced with a desperate choice; only then would a person find the thing that they were called to do. For him it had been cooking. For Indy, well she didn’t seem like the kind of lady who had ever had to face that choice.
Watching Conrad in the kitchen, he was starting to make more sense to her. At the park earlier today, he’d held himself as a sort of aristocrat in his fiefdom, but here in the kitchen he was different. There was a harmony to him and his movements, and she struggled to keep from staring at him.
Yeah, that was the reason why she couldn’t keep her eyes off him. It had nothing to do with the skintight T-shirt and his muscly arms. The choice of thorns wrapping around his body wasn’t one she understood. She wanted to ask about them. Why was she hesitating? It wasn’t like he’d feel pressured to answer her.
He’d probably never done anything just to be nice, which was sort of her modus operandi. She wanted to ask him about his past and how the car crash changed him. But that would be intrusive and she wanted to be chill maybe more refrained.
“Do your tattoos have special meaning?”
“Yes.”
She waited to see if he was going to elaborate, but it was clear he wasn’t going to. “Thorny bushes aren’t the typical tattoo, and what’s that thing mean?”
She leaned forward across the counter and touched the stylized symbol on his left forearm.
“It’s the Celtic symbol for brother,” he said.
“Do you have a brother? I thought it was just you and your cousins.”