The Complete Eagle Cove

Chapter 2 -11

Serrano chili, garlic, oregano, capers…it didn’t matter that there was no salt and pepper on the table; the dish had been seasoned to perfection. The cherry porter harkened back to the sweet berry puree under the First Course without adding an unwanted sweetness to the Halibut Veracruz.

Jessica wanted to wallow in the dish: like a luxurious trip to the spa. It was an adventure of flavor and texture. She’d done some restaurant reviewing—had chiseled out a brief niche among the new chefs of Chicago, though the niche had gone away when some New York reviewer had decided to move to town to make their name, imitating the huge splash Cassidy Knowles had made in Seattle. But in those first six months she’d learned a lot about innovative food. Greg didn’t innovate, at least not in the way most of them did. It wasn’t all molecular techniques, odd foams, and food that had been manipulated until it looked like anything other than what it was.

He’d found his challenge in simplicity, a much harder technique. When the dish was simple, when it was designed to highlight just one or two key ingredients, then perfection was required. There was no hiding a flaw when the artist’s palette was something as simple as a piece of mild white fish.

“For dessert,” Greg announced to the room, “I made a chocolate-strawberry roulade with a hazelnut meringue. Becky has paired it with her Deep Bay Espresso Stout.” Which Jessica was charmed to see served in little espresso cups.

“You can’t ruin this one,” Greg whispered to her as he served dessert to their table.

She looked up at him in surprise. Something had shifted in him during the course of the meal, and she didn’t think it was just in her own perceptions. There had been a nervous energy about him; of worry, thinking back to it. This meal had scared him initially and she could see why, it had been a large and complex undertaking for such a small crew. But now he carried himself with a confidence, a surety that he had lacked before. It was as if the boy had become a man over the last hour or so.

“How would I have ruined it?”

Then Greg did something wholly unexpected, he blushed. Deeply, until she could see his face was bright red despite the subdued lighting from the twinkle lights.

“How…” Jessica trailed off unsure if she wanted the answer to that question.

“I had to toss three roulades in the trash this morning…” he too trailed off.

“Because of…” there was only one thing that Jessica could think of that would explain his reaction, “…of me?”

After trying twice to speak unsuccessfully, he nodded, offered a charming shrug of, “And there it is,” then moved on to serve other tables.

Nobody at the table was studying their dessert this time, instead they were all looking at her.

Choosing discretion over stark embarrassment, she focused on her own dessert.

“Always knew he was sweet on someone—” her father’s voice carried far too well. Thankfully Mom shushed him. Even in what he considered to be a whisper, Dad’s voice still carried. “Well, it was as obvious as a hard bite on a long leader that there was some reason he never got serious with a girl.”

“We just never knew who.” At least Aunt Gina’s whisper didn’t carry past the table with how cozily crowded together they were, but it reached Jessica well enough.

“He’s certainly never made a meal as good as this one before,” her father’s voice carried again and people at nearby tables started agreeing, and then a round of applause broke out.

Under cover of the applause, as Greg did a fine job of bowing and looking both humble and pleased, Natalya whispered to her. “And now we know exactly why he cooked like that as well.” She offered a bawdy wink and a nudge with her knee where they’d been bumping each other under the small table all night.

Jessica could feel her ears going as hot as Greg’s face had been. She reached up to release her hair from its sidetail so that she could hide a bit, but her fingers caught on the flower she’d forgotten all about—the one that Greg had tucked there.

Certifiably lovely.

Oh crap!

Once the buzz at the table turned to other topics, she looked up and spotted Greg. He was squatting down between Dawn—the freshman-year hussy—and the cutest pair of twins Jessica had ever seen. By how Dawn and the girls were dressed up, maybe that old hussy assessment had been wrong as well. Vincent McCall sat with them. She vaguely remembered Dawn, Vincent, and Greg being close in school; three years behind her, she actually hadn’t given them much thought. Wouldn’t have given Vincent any at all if Dad’s best friend and fishing-and-crabbing buddy wasn’t Danny McCall.

And back in the day Jessica had only noticed Greg separately from the others because he was Harry’s little brother and had always been hanging around. As a matter of fact, he’d been a real pill to shed when she and Harry had been trying to finagle some alone time for experimenting. Greg had been a seriously tenacious little s**t.

As if he knew that Jessica was thinking of him, he looked up from whatever the twins were telling him; looked right at her.

For the first time she didn’t see Harry’s little brother. Instead she saw a darkly handsome chef who had just served one of the finest meals of both their lives.