“So? Come on. What did you think?”
Chloe looked at Hogan from her seat on his right at his gigantic dinner table. He was beaming like a kid who’d just presented for show-and-tell a salamander he fished out of the creek all by himself.
“You liked it, didn’t you?” he asked. “I can tell, because you cleaned your plate. Welcome to the clean plate club, Chloe Merlin.”
“It was...acceptable,” she conceded reluctantly.
He chuckled. “Acceptable. Right. You had second helpings of everything, and you still cleaned your plate.”
“I just wanted to be sure I ate enough for an accurate barometer of the taste combinations, that’s all.”
“And the taste combinations were really good, weren’t they?”
All right, fine. Taco meatloaf had a certain je ne sais quoi that was surprisingly appealing. So did the carrots. And even the biscuits. Chloe had never eaten anything like them in her life. Mémée had never allowed anything frozen or processed in the house when Chloe was growing up. Her grandmother had kept a small greenhouse and vegetable garden in the backyard, and what she hadn’t grown herself, she’d bought at the weekly visits she and Chloe made to the farmers’ markets or, in the coldest months, at the supermarket—but organic only.
Chloe had just never felt the urge to succumb to the temptation of processed food, even if it was more convenient. She enjoyed prepping and cooking meals. She enjoyed buying the ingredients fresh. The thought of scooping food out of bags and jars and boxes was as alien to her as having six limbs. It wasn’t that she was a snob about food or cooking, it was just that...
Okay, she was kind of a snob about food and cooking. Clearly, her beliefs could use some tweaking.
“You know,” she told Hogan, “I could make some taco seasoning myself for you to use next time, from my own spice collection. It would have a lot less sodium in it.”
He grinned. “That would be great. Thanks.”
“And salsa is easy to make. I could make some of that fresh, the next time you want to cook this.”
“I’d love that.”
“Even the biscuits could be made—”
“I have to stop you there,” he interjected. “I’m sorry, but the biscuits have to be that specific kind. They’re what my mom always made. It’s tradition.”
And it was a taste of his childhood. Chloe got that. She felt the same way about gratin Dauphinois.
“Okay,” she conceded. “But maybe fresh carrots next time, instead of frozen?”
He thought about that for a minute. “Okay. I mean, we already changed those anyway, since that stuff you call brown sugar is actually beige sugar, and you didn’t have any margarine. By the way, what kind of person doesn’t have margarine in their kitchen?”
Before, Chloe would have answered a question like that with some retort about hexane and free radicals. Instead, she said, “Butter is better for you.”
She managed to stop herself before adding, And you need to stay healthy, Hogan. Because what she would have added after that was I need you to be healthy, Hogan.
She refused to think any further than that. Such as why she needed Hogan to be healthy. She told herself it was for the same reason she wanted anyone to be healthy. Everyone deserved to live a long, happy life. No one knew that better than Chloe, who had seen one of the kindest, most decent human beings she’d ever known have his life jerked out from under him. She didn’t want the same thing to happen to Hogan. Not that it would. The man looked as hearty as a longshoreman. But Samuel had looked perfectly healthy, too, the day he left for work in the morning and never came home again.
She pushed the thought away and stood. “Since you cooked, I’ll clean up. It’s only fair.”
Hogan looked a little startled by her abrupt announcement, but stood, too. “You helped cook. I’ll help clean up.”
She started to object but he was already picking up his plate and loading it with his flatware. So she did likewise and followed him to the kitchen. Together they loaded the dishwasher. Together they packed the leftovers in containers. Together they put them in the fridge.
And together they decided to open another bottle of wine.
But it was Hogan’s suggestion that they take it up to the roof garden. Although he’d told her on her first day at work the house had one, and that she should feel free to use it whenever she wanted, especially since he probably never would, Chloe hadn’t yet made her way up there. She really did prefer to stay in her room when she wasn’t working or out and about. Save that single excursion to the library—and look how that had turned out. When they made it up onto the roof, however, she began to think maybe she should reconsider. New York City was lovely at night.
So was Hogan’s rooftop garden. The living section—which was nearly all of it—was a patchwork of wooden flooring and was lit by crisscrossing strings of tiny white lights woven through an overhead trellis. Terra-cotta pots lined the balustrade, filled with asters and camellias and chrysanthemums, all flaming with autumn colors from saffron to cinnamon to cayenne. Beyond it, Manhattan twinkled like tidy stacks of gemstones against the night sky.
Knowing the evening would be cool, Chloe had grabbed a wrap on her way up, a black wool shawl that had belonged to her grandmother, embroidered with tiny red flowers. She hugged it tightly to herself as she sat on a cushioned sofa pushed against a brick access bulkhead and set her wine on a table next to it. Hogan sat beside her, setting his wine on a table at his end. For a long moment neither spoke. They only gazed out at the glittering cityscape in silence.
Finally, Chloe said, “I still have trouble sometimes believing I live in New York. I kind of fell in love with the city when I was a kid, reading about it and seeing so many movies filmed here. I never actually thought I’d be living here. Especially in a neighborhood like this.”
“Yeah, well, I grew up in New York,” Hogan said, “but this part of the city is as foreign to me as the top of the Himalayas would be. I still can’t believe I live here, either. I never came into Manhattan when I was a kid. Especially someplace like Park Avenue. I never felt the need to.”
“Then how did you meet Anabel?” Chloe asked. “She doesn’t seem like the type to ever leave Park Avenue.”
He grinned that damnably sexy grin again. He’d done that a lot tonight. And every time he did, Chloe felt a crack open in the armor she’d worn so well for so long, and a little chink of it tumbled away. At this point, there were bits of it strewn all over his house, every piece marking a place where Hogan had made her feel something after years of promising herself she would never feel anything again. What she ought to be feeling was invaded, overrun and offended. Instead, she felt...
Well. Things she had promised herself she would never feel again—had sworn she was incapable of ever feeling again. Things that might very well get her into trouble.
“How I met Anabel is actually kind of a funny story,” Hogan said. “She and a couple of her friends were going to a concert at Shea Stadium, but they pissed off their cab driver so bad on the way, he stopped the car in the middle of the street in front of my dad’s garage and made them get out. She and the guy got into a shouting match in the middle of Jamaica Avenue, and a bunch of us working in the garage went out to watch.” He chuckled. “I remember her standing there looking like a bohemian princess and cursing like a sailor, telling the cabbie she knew the mayor personally and would see to it that he never drove a cab in the tristate area again.”
Chloe smiled at the picture. She couldn’t imagine Anabel Carlisle, even a teenaged one, behaving that way. Her former employer had always been the perfect society wife when Chloe worked for her.
“Anyway, after the cabbie drove off without them, all us guys started applauding and whistling. Anabel spun around, and I thought she was going to give us a second helping of what she’d just dished out, but she looked at me and...” He shook his head. “I don’t know. It was like how you see someone, and there’s just something there. The next thing I knew, me and a couple of the guys are walking up the street with her and her friends, and we’re all going for pancakes. After that she came into Queens pretty often. She even had dinner at my house with me and my folks a few times. But she never invited me home to meet hers.”
There was no bitterness in his voice when he said that last sentence. There was simply a matter-of-factness that indicated he understood why she hadn’t wanted to include him in her uptown life. That was gentlemanly of him, even if Chloe couldn’t understand Anabel’s behavior. She imagined Hogan had been just as nice back then as he was now. Anabel must have realized that if she’d become involved with him. Who cared what neighborhood he called home?
“It was her parents,” he said, as if he’d read her mind. “Her dad especially didn’t want her dating outside her social circle. She would have gotten into a lot of trouble if they found out about me. I understood why she couldn’t let anyone know she was involved with me.”
“If you understood,” Chloe said, “then how come you’re still unattached after all this time? Why have you waited for her?”
She thought maybe she’d overstepped the bounds—again—by asking him something so personal. But Hogan didn’t seem to take offense.
“I didn’t sit around for fifteen years waiting for her,” he said. “I dated other girls. Other women. I just never met anyone who made me feel the way Anabel did, you know? There was never that spark of lightning with anyone else like there was that night on Jamaica Avenue.”
Chloe didn’t understand that, either. Love wasn’t lightning. She did, however, understand seeing a person and just knowing there was something there. That had happened to her, too. With Samuel. The day he walked into English class in the middle of freshman year, she’d looked up from The Catcher in the Rye and into the sweetest blue eyes she’d ever seen, and she’d known at once that there was something between them. Something. Not love. Love came later. Because love was something so momentous, so stupendous, so enormous, that it had to happen over time. At least it did for Chloe. For Hogan, evidently, it took only a sudden jolt of electricity.
“And now Anabel is free,” she said, nudging aside thoughts of the past in an effort to get back to the present. “You must feel as if you’re being tasered within an inch of your life these days.”
Even if he hadn’t done much in the way of trying to regain the affections of his former love, she couldn’t help thinking. She wondered why he hadn’t.
He looked thoughtful for a moment. “I think maybe I’ve outgrown the fireworks part,” he said cryptically. “But yeah. I really need to call her and set something up.”
“Why don’t you have a dinner party and invite her?” Chloe suggested. Wondering why her voice sounded so flat. She loved preparing meals for dinner parties. It was great fun putting together the menus. “You could ask her and a few other couples. Maybe she’s still friends with some of the girls who were with her the night you met her,” she added, trying to get into the spirit. And not getting into the spirit at all. “Other people would offer a nice buffer for the two of you to get reacquainted.”
By the time she finished speaking, there was the oddest bitterness in Chloe’s mouth. Maybe the wine had turned. Just to make sure, she took another sip. No, actually, the pinot noir tasted quite good.
“Maybe,” Hogan said.
“No, definitely,” she insisted. Because...
Well, just because. That was why. And it was an excellent reason. Hogan clearly needed a nudge in Anabel’s direction, since he wasn’t heading that way himself. He’d made clear since Chloe’s first day of employment that he was still pining for the woman he’d loved since he was a teenager. He needed a dinner party. And Chloe needed a dinner party, too. Something to focus on that would keep her mind off things it shouldn’t be on.
“Look, Chloe,” he said, “I appreciate your wanting to help, but—”
“It will be perfect,” she interrupted him. “Just a small party of, say, six or eight people.”
“But—”
“I can get it all organized by next weekend, provided everyone is available.”
“But—”
“Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll take care of all the details. It will be your perfect entrée into society, which, for some reason, you haven’t made yet.”
“Yeah, because—”
“A week from tomorrow. If you’ll supply the names, I’ll make the calls to invite everyone.”
“Chloe—”
“Just leave it to me.”
He opened his mouth to protest again, but seemed to have run out of objections. In fact, he kind of looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights. Okay, proverbial stag in the headlights.
Then he surprised her by totally changing the subject. “So what was it like growing up in... Where did you say you’re from? Someplace in Indiana.”
“New Albany,” she replied automatically. “It’s in the southern part of the state, on the Ohio River.”
“I’m going to go out on a limb and say it probably wasn’t much like Manhattan,” he guessed. “Or even Queens.”
“No, not at all. It’s quiet. Kind of quirky. Nice. It was a good place to grow up.” She couldn’t quite stop herself from drifting back into memories again. “Not a whole lot to do when you’re a kid, but still nice. And Louisville was right across the river, so if we wanted the urban experience, we could go over there. Not that it was as urban as here, of course. But there were nights when we were teenagers when Samuel and I would ride our bikes down to the river and stare at Louisville on the other side. Back then it seemed like such a big place, all bright lights and bridges. Compared to New York, though...”
When she didn’t finish, Hogan said, “You and your husband met young, huh?”
And only then did Chloe realize just how much she had revealed. She hadn’t meant to bring up Samuel again. Truly, she hadn’t. But it was impossible to think about home without thinking of him, too. Strangely, though, somehow, thinking about him now wasn’t quite as painful as it had been before.
“In high school,” she heard herself say. “Freshman year. We married our sophomore year in college. I know that sounds like we were too young,” she said, reading his mind this time—because everyone had thought marrying at twenty was too young. Everyone still thought that. For Chloe and Samuel, it had felt like the most natural thing in the world.
“How did he...?” Hogan began. “I mean...if you don’t mind my asking... What happened?”
She expelled a soft sigh. Of course, she should have realized it would come to this sooner or later with Hogan. It was her own fault. She was the one who’d brought up her late husband. She couldn’t imagine why. She never talked about Samuel with anyone. Ever. So why was she not minding talking about him to Hogan?
“Asymptomatic coronary heart disease,” she said. “That’s what happened. He had a bad heart. That no one knew about. Until, at twenty-two years of age, he had a massive heart attack that killed him while he was performing the physically stressful act of slicing peppers for tastira. It’s a Tunisian dish. His specialty was Mediterranean cooking,” she added for some reason. “We would have been an unstoppable team culinarily speaking, once we opened our restaurant.”
Hogan was silent for a moment, then, very softly, he said, “Those are his chef’s jackets you wear, aren’t they?”
Chloe nodded. “After he was... After we sprinkled his ashes in Brown County, I realized I didn’t have anything of him to keep with me physically. We didn’t exchange rings when we married, and we weren’t big on gift-giving.” She smiled sadly. “Symbols of affection just never seemed necessary to either of us. So, after he was gone, I started wearing his jackets when I was cooking.”
She had thought wearing Samuel’s jackets would make her feel closer to him. But it hadn’t. It wasn’t his clothing that helped her remember him. If she’d needed physical reminders for that, she never would have left Indiana. But she’d been wearing them for so long now, it almost felt wrong to stop.
She reached for her wine and enjoyed a healthy taste of it. It warmed her mouth and throat as she swallowed, but it did nothing to combat the chill that suddenly enveloped her. So she put the glass down and wrapped her shawl more tightly around herself.
“I’m sorry, Chloe,” Hogan said, his voice a soft caress in the darkness. “I shouldn’t have asked for details.”
“It’s okay,” she told him, even though it really wasn’t okay. “It was a long time ago. I’ve learned to...cope with it. The money I make as a chef goes into a fund I started in Samuel’s name that makes testing for the condition in kids less expensive, more common and more easily accessible. Knowing that someone else—maybe even a lot of someone elses—might live longer lives with their loved ones by catching their condition early and treating it helps me deal.”
Hogan was being quiet again, so Chloe looked over to see how he was handling everything she’d said. He didn’t look uncomfortable, though. Mostly, he looked sympathetic. He’d lost people he loved at a young age, too, so maybe he really did understand.
“I lied when I said the reason I came to New York was to open my own restaurant,” she told him. “There’s no way I could do that now, without Samuel. It was our dream together. I really came to New York because I thought it would be a good place to lose myself after he died. It’s so big here, and there are so many people. I thought it would be easier than staying in a place where I was constantly reminded of him. And it’s worked pretty well. As long as I’m able to focus on cooking, I don’t have to think about what happened. At least I didn’t until—”
She halted abruptly. Because she had been this close to telling Hogan it had worked pretty well until she met him. Meeting him had stirred up all sorts of feelings she hadn’t experienced in years. Feelings she’d only ever had for one other human being. Feelings she’d promised herself she would never, ever, feel again. She’d barely survived losing Samuel. There was no way she could risk—no way she would risk—going through that again. No way she would ever allow someone to mean that much to her again. Not even—
“At least you did until I asked about it.” Hogan finished her sentence for her. Erroneously, at that. “Wow. I really am a mook.”
“No, Hogan, that’s not what I was going to say.” Before he could ask for clarification, however, she quickly concluded, “Anyway, that’s what happened.”
The temperature on the roof seemed to have plummeted since they first came outside, and a brisk wind riffled the potted flowers and rippled the lights overhead. Again, Chloe wrapped herself more snugly in her shawl. But the garment helped little. So she brought her knees up on the sofa and wrapped her arms around her legs, curling herself into as tight a ball as she could.
“You know how people say it’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Hogan replied softly.
“And you know how people say it’s better to feel bad than to feel nothing at all?”
“Yeah.”
“People are full of crap.”
He paused before asking even more softly than before, “Do you really think that?”
She answered immediately. “Yes.”
Hogan waited a moment before moving closer, dropping an arm across her shoulders and pulling her to him, tucking the crown of her head beneath his chin. Automatically, Chloe leaned into him, pressing her cheek to his shoulder, opening one hand over his chest. There was nothing inappropriate in his gesture or in her reaction to it. Nothing suggestive, nothing flirtatious, nothing carnal. Only one human being offering comfort to another. It had been a long time since anyone had held Chloe, even innocently. A long time since anyone had comforted her. And now here was Hogan, his heat enveloping her, his scent surrounding her, his heart thrumming softly beneath her palm. And for the first time in years—six years, nine months, one week and one day, to be precise—Chloe felt herself responding.
But there, too, lay problems. After Samuel’s death, she’d lost herself for a while, seeking comfort from the sort of men who offered nothing but a physical release for the body and no comfort for the soul. The behavior had been reminiscent of her mother’s—erratic and self-destructive—and when Chloe finally realized that, she’d reined herself in and shut herself up tight. Until tonight.
Suddenly, with Hogan, she did want holding. And she wanted comforting. And anything else he might have to offer. She reminded herself that his heart and his future were with someone else. He was planning a life with Anabel. But Chloe didn’t want a future or a life with him. She’d planned a life once, and the person she’d planned it with was taken from her. She would never make plans like that again. But a night with Hogan? At the moment a night with him held a lot of appeal.
She tilted her head back to look at his face. His brown eyes were as dark as the night beyond, and the breeze ruffled his sandy hair, nudging a strand down over his forehead. Without thinking, Chloe lifted a hand to brush it back, skimming her fingers lightly along his temple after she did. Then she dragged them lower, tracing the line of his jaw. Then lower still, to graze the column of his throat. His pupils expanded as she touched him, and his lips parted.
Still not sure what was driving her—and, honestly, not really caring—she moved her head closer to his. Hogan met her halfway, brushing her lips lightly with his once, twice, three times, four, before covering her mouth completely. For a long time he only kissed her, and she kissed him back, neither of them shifting their position, as if each wanted to give the other the option of putting a stop to things before they went any further.
But neither did.
So Chloe threaded her fingers through his hair, cupped the back of his head in her palm and gave herself more fully to the kiss. At the same time, Hogan dropped his other hand to her hip, curving his fingers over her to pull her closer still. She grew ravenous then, opening her mouth against his, tasting him more deeply. When he pulled her into his lap, wrapping both arms around her waist, she looped hers around his neck and held on for dear life.
She had no idea how long they were entwined that way—it could have been moments, it could have been millennia. Chloe drove her hands over every inch of him she could reach, finally pushing her hand under the hem of his sweater. The skin of his torso was hot and hard and smooth beneath her fingertips, like silk-covered steel. She had almost forgotten how a man’s body felt, so different from her own, and she took her time rediscovering. Hogan, too, went exploring, moving his hand from her hip to her waist to her breast. She cried out when he cupped his hand over her, even with the barrier of her sweater between them. It had just been so long since a man touched her that way.
He stilled his hand at her exclamation, but he didn’t move it. He only looked at her with an unmistakable question in his eyes, as if waiting for her to make the next move. She told herself they should put a stop to things now. She even went so far as to say, “Hogan, we probably shouldn’t...” But she was unable—or maybe unwilling—to say the rest. Instead, she told him, “We probably shouldn’t be doing this out here in the open.”
He hesitated. “So then...you think we should do this inside?”
Chloe hesitated a moment, too. But only a moment. “Yes.”
He lowered his head to hers one last time, pressing his palm flat against her breast for a moment before dragging it back down to her waist. Then he was taking her hand in his, standing to pull her up alongside him. He kissed her again, long and hard and deep, then, his fingers still woven with hers, led her to the roof access door. Once inside the stairwell, they embraced again, Hogan pressing her back against the wall to crowd his body against hers, their kisses deepening until their mouths were both open wide. She drove her hands under his sweater again to splay them open against the hot skin of his back, and he dropped a hand between her legs, petting her over the fabric of her pants until she was pushing her hips harder into his touch.
Somehow they made it down the stairs to Hogan’s bedroom. Somehow they made it through the door. Somehow they managed to get each other’s clothes off. Then Chloe was naked on her back in his bed, and Hogan was naked atop her. As he kissed her, he dropped his hand between her legs again, growling his approval when he realized how damp and ready for him she already was. He took a moment to make her damper, threading his fingers through her wet flesh until she was gasping for breath, then he drew his hand back up her torso to her breast. He thumbed the ripe peak of one as he filled his mouth with the other, laving her with the flat of his tongue and teasing her with its tip. In response, Chloe wove her fingers together at his nape and hooked her legs around his waist as if she intended to hold him there forever.
Hogan had other plans, though. With one final, gentle tug of her nipple with his teeth, he began dragging openmouthed kisses back down along her torso. He paused long enough to taste the indentation of her navel then scooted lower still, until his mouth hovered over the heated heart of her. Then he pressed a palm against each of her thighs and pushed them open, wide enough that he could duck his head between them and taste the part of her he’d fingered long moments ago.
The press of his tongue against her there was almost more than Chloe could bear. She tangled her fingers in his hair in a blind effort to move him away, but he drove his hands beneath her fanny and pushed her closer to his mouth. Again and again, he darted his tongue against her, then he treated her to longer, more leisurely strokes. Something wild and wanton coiled tighter inside her with every movement, finally bursting in a white-hot rush of sensation that shook her entire body. Before the tremors could ebb, he was back at her breast, wreaking havoc there again.
After that Chloe could only feel and react. There were no thoughts. No cares. No worries. There was only Hogan and all the things he made her feel. Hogan and all the things she wanted to do to him, too. When he finally lifted his head from her breast, she pulled him up to cover his mouth with hers, reaching down to cover the head of his shaft with her hand when she did. He was slick and hard, as ready for her as she was for him. But she took her time, too, to arouse him even more, palming him, wrapping her fingers around him, driving her hand slowly up and down the hard, hot length of him.
When he rolled onto his back to facilitate her movements, Chloe bent over him, taking as much of him into her mouth as she could. Over and over she savored him, marveling at how he swelled to even greater life. When she knew he was close to coming, she levered her body over his to straddle him, easing herself down over his long shaft then rising slowly up again. Hogan cupped his hands over her hips, guiding her leisurely up and down atop himself. But just as they were both on the verge of shattering, he reversed their bodies so that Chloe was on her back again. He grinned as he circled each of her ankles in strong fists, then he knelt before her and opened her legs wide. And then—oh, then—he was plunging himself into her as deep as he could go, thrusting his hips against hers again and again and again.
Never had she felt fuller or more complete than she did during those moments that he was buried inside her. Every time he withdrew, she jerked her hips upward to stop him, only to have him come crashing into her again. They came as one, both crying out in the euphoria that accompanied climax. Then Hogan collapsed, turning their bodies again until he was on his back and she was lying atop him. Her skin was slick and hot. Her brain was dazed and shaken. And her heart...
Chloe closed her eyes, refusing to complete the thought. There would be no completion of thought tonight. There would be completion only for the body. And although her body felt more complete than it had in a very long time, she already found herself wanting more.
Her body wanted more, she corrected herself. Only her body. Not her. But as she closed her eyes against the fatigue that rocked her, she felt Hogan press a kiss against the crown of her head. And all she could think was that, of everything he’d done to her tonight, that small kiss brought her the most satisfaction.