Write It Up!: Rapid Transit / The Ex Factor / Brewing Up Trouble

And before she could say a word in response to that, he kissed her again, briefly, almost chastely this time, and strode to the waiting car. “I’ll see you tonight,” he said as he opened the door. “Six o’clock okay?”

Dumbly, she nodded.

“I’ll wait till you’re inside,” he added, jutting his chin up toward her front door. “Then I’ll go.”

Still not trusting herself to say anything that didn’t make her sound like an idiot, Julia fumbled for her keys and made her way up the steps to unlock the front door. When she turned to wave goodbye a final time, managing a soft “Good night,” Daniel lifted his fingers to his lips and let them drop again, the masculine version of blowing a kiss. Then he climbed into the cab and closed the door, and the taxi pulled away from the curb. But his face was framed in the back window as the car drove away, watching her.

Leaving Julia to wonder when she would wake up. Because there was no way a man like Daniel Taggart could exist anywhere outside of her dreams.

CHAPTER FOUR

IN SPITE OF JULIA’S HAVING assured Daniel she would shop for everything they’d need to cook dinner, he showed up at her front door with two brown grocery sacks brimming with the makings of a meal that promised to be infinitely more elaborate than the meat loaf and tossed salad she had planned herself.

And he looked even yummier than the food, wearing a pair of snug, lightly faded blue jeans and a lightweight, equally faded forest-green polo that gave the green in his eyes a bit more dominance over the blue. She was glad she’d dressed casually, too, likewise in faded blue jeans, though hers were topped by a colorful, long-sleeved T-shirt decorated with a beaded, spangled art deco French postcard. So accustomed to being in her stocking feet at home was she that she had neglected to put on shoes, which she only now realized as she looked at the heavy hiking boots on Daniel’s feet. However, she didn’t feel any big urge to go put some on. Already she felt that comfortable with him.

She directed him to her kitchen—which wasn’t hard to find since her apartment was roughly the size of an electron—where he deposited the bags on what little counter space was there and began to unpack them. And unpack them. And unpack them. And unpack them.

Whoa. He’d brought more stuff than she would have thought a man could even find in a market, let alone know what to do with. A loaf of French bread, a leafy head of romaine, a bottle of olive oil, free range chiken, she saw with some surprise when she inspected the label—tomatoes, parsley and…a wheel of Brie?

Where were the meat and potatoes? she wondered. Most guys she knew would have brought a half dozen cans of Dinty Moore beef stew and called it dinner.

“And for dessert,” Daniel said, reaching deep into the first sack—Good God, what was in the second? she wondered— “Godiva white chocolate torte ice cream. A pint for each of us.”

All right. That did it. Julia was ready to propose.

“Wow,” she said. “I hope you know what to do with all that. I’m still working on getting the hamburger I’d planned to mix with onion soup mix out of the plastic wrapper. Do you know how that works?”

He grinned smugly. “Not only can I get this chicken out of the plastic,” he said, pointing at the product in question, “but I can infuse it with fresh rosemary, poach it in a dry, kicky chardonnay and garnish it with a radish rose.”

“My God,” Julia whispered reverently. She poked him lightly in the ribs. “Are you sure you’re for real?”

He laughed as he turned his attentions to the second bag. “My parents own a restaurant in Indianapolis,” he said as he withdrew fresh herbs, red, yellow and green peppers, garlic, onions, mushrooms and two bottles of white wine—presumably a dry, kicky chardonnay. “My dad’s the chef, my mom’s the manager. When I was growing up, while my friends’ dads were out in the backyard pitching baseballs to them, my father had me in the kitchen showing me how to broil lamb chops and put the finishing touches on a chocolate soufflé. It goes without saying that I got my ass kicked at school on a regular basis.”

Julia smiled. “Yeah, but I bet the girls were crazy about you.”

He wiggled his eyebrows playfully. “Good point. And using the blow torch on the crème brûlée was always fun.”

“So what can I do to help?” she asked.

“Well, I won’t make you take the plastic off the chicken,” he told her. “So why don’t you open the wine?”

She nodded. “No problem. I’m much better wielding a corkscrew than I am a garlic press. I’m also seriously qualified to choose excellent dinner music.”

“That’s good to know.”

For the hour that followed, and accompanied by the dry, kicky tunes of Michael Bublé, Julia and Daniel worked side by side and shoulder to shoulder—and often hip to hip, so tiny was the kitchen—putting together a meal that was more elaborate, and doubtless more delicious, than anything she’d had since leaving home.

Never before had she realized how intimate—and sensual—creating a meal could be. Along with the sound of jazzy music, the aromas and textures and tastes of the food—to which they frequently helped themselves and then fed to each other—there was the jolt of electricity and the thrill of anticipation that shot through her every time their bodies touched. By the time they sat down to eat, they’d already finished one bottle of wine and opened the second, and they’d sampled enough of the meal to make them leave fully half of their dinners on their plates.

They did, after all, have to save room for ice cream.

But first, Julia wanted to simply bask in the happiness that was dinner with Daniel. He was amazing. Incredible. Too good to be true. Gorgeous, funny, smart, decent. He smelled great—and not just from the garlic, either—was easy to talk to and made her feel as though nothing in the world would ever go wrong again. And he could cook.

There had to be something wrong here, she told herself. No guy could be this perfect and still be available. And she wasn’t the sort of woman who experienced this kind of good luck.

So maybe, she thought, finally, her turn had come. Maybe it was possible to meet Mr. Right through a venue like speed-dating. Maybe, just maybe, her prince had finally come.

“THAT WAS WONDERFUL,” Daniel said at the end of dinner as he twirled his wine idly by the base of the glass.

He hoped Julia would realize he was talking about a lot more than the meal. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d enjoyed himself this much on a date. Probably, he thought, because he’d never enjoyed himself this much on a date.

He still wasn’t sure what had come over him to make him offer to cook for Julia. That was a side of himself he normally never showed to anyone, male or female. It wasn’t that he thought cooking wasn’t a masculine pursuit, or that he was ashamed of what his father did for a living. On the contrary, not only was Steven Taggart one of the most celebrated chefs in Indianapolis, whose restaurant commanded four stars from the Michelin Guide, he was also the one who had fostered Daniel’s love of both basketball and hockey.

But as adept at cooking as Daniel was, it was neither a vocation nor a hobby he had wanted to pursue, and he hadn’t done much of it since leaving home. Cooking reminded him too much of home. It was something he did with family, in a family environment, something that roused feelings of comfort and affection and happiness and domestic tranquility. Which, now that he thought about it, might be why he’d never wanted to share it with women.

So why had he been so eager to offer to cook for Julia?

She looked great tonight, he thought, pushing the question away without answering it. He liked her better in the jeans and T-shirt and sock feet than he had in the party-girl outfit of the night before. If she was wearing any makeup tonight, he sure couldn’t see it. And instead of the curly, flyaway do her hair had been arranged in the night before, tonight it fell in soft waves over her shoulders, enough of it clipped back in a barrette to make Daniel’s fingers itch to loosen it.

“It was good, wasn’t it?” she agreed, looking at him in a way that told him she was talking about more than just the meal, too. “But now we have to clean up,” she added, wrinkling her nose.

“It won’t take long with two of us,” he said.

And, with two of them, it didn’t. In no time at all, they had completed the task and were bringing fresh glasses of wine into the living area—the apartment wasn’t large enough for an actual living room. But as comfortably as they’d spoken throughout the preparation and consumption of dinner, once they were sitting beside each other with nothing to do, neither seemed to know what to say.

Julia had dropped into one corner of the sofa while Daniel had folded himself onto the other. It was a small couch, and the gap between them probably wasn’t more than a couple of feet. Just enough to be annoying, he thought, but still enough that if he scooted himself closer to her, it would be an obvious ploy to get closer to her.

But then, why shouldn’t he be obvious about that? he asked himself. He and Julia weren’t in high school, right? Even if, for some reason, he had sort of felt like an adolescent with his first big crush since meeting her. Gee whiz, maybe they could play spin the bottle. Golly willikers, maybe that would give him an excuse for why he had to kiss her and get her girl cooties all over himself.

He blew out an exasperated breath at the thought.

“What?” she asked, obviously hearing it.

He shook his head. “I was just sitting here trying to think up some excuse for why I could move closer to you,” he said.

She smiled. “Why do you need an excuse to do that?”

He smiled back. “Good question.”

Just as Daniel began to scoot himself down on the sofa toward Julia, she scooted herself closer to him, until they were seated immediately beside each other, almost touching, in the middle.

“That’s more like it,” he said.

“Indeed it is,” she agreed.

“So. Come here often?” he asked.

“Occasionally,” she replied. “But I don’t like to be a regular anywhere. So some nights, I go to the chair over there in the ’burbs, and other nights, I like to go uptown to the table. When I’m feeling really wild and want to party hearty, I head downtown, to the kitchen.”