Synopsis
A free-spirited woman…
Eccentric interior designer Mirelle Brasseur is tired of
relationships with handsome, charming, fickle men—in other words men just like
the father who abandoned her. She’s fun and funky, but takes her career
seriously. She’s not about to let a man derail her dreams or wound her heart
again.
An ambitious man…
Award winning chef Bradan Hunt is handsome and charming, but
he's always honest with women about his one date-one night rule. Between his
best-selling cookbooks, his TV appearances, and his restaurant, he’s too busy
for a relationship. He saw what a lack of ambition did to his parents. Bradan
wants more. His newest restaurant is going to be the best, so he hires Mirelle
to help him design it.
Turn up the heat…
Soon it isn’t just the food sizzling in the kitchen, in
spite of Mirelle’s misgivings, as the attraction between the chef and the
designer heats up. It will take more than one date-one night for them to
overcome their pasts and find a way to cook up a sweet future together.
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Excerpt
Bradan threw himself into work that night. Every table was
booked for three full turns, and some even four. Even as he was firing a beef
entrée, even as he was carefully ladling creamy sake foam sauce and matsutake
mushrooms over a piece of perfectly roasted salmon, he was thinking about
Mirelle. He should be thinking about the menu for the new restaurant. He needed
to get serious about that and nail things down. He tried to make his mind go
there, but goddammit, he kept seeing Mirelle, her tear-streaked face at the
shelter when she’d looked at that mangy mutt. Christ, she had a soft heart.
Which gave him a strangely soft feeling in his own chest. He liked that about
her. He wanted to comfort her, to make her feel better.
Fuck, his mind was messed up.
She’d turned him down again. She had a date with another
guy. Who she’d just met. Jesus! More curses galloped through his mind as he
worked. He handed the plate up to the waiter waiting for it.
“Hey, Chef.”
“Yeah.”
Jimmy stood there frowning. “Is this…uh…you put the sake
sauce on the lamb.”
Bradan stared in horror at what he’d just done. Then he
rolled his eyes up in disgust and snatched the plate back. “Give me five
minutes. Apologize to the table. Comp their dessert.”
“Yeah, sure thing.”
Fuck, fuck, fuck. His hands flew as he worked, and he and
Paco did their familiar dance around each other, spinning and moving as they
cooked. The noise and chaos of the kitchen rose and fell around him, pots
clanging, voices shouting, the sizzle of a filet hitting hot oil in a pan.
He needed to seriously get a grip here. Women never rejected
him.
He almost snorted at his own ego. That’s all this was. A
little bruise to his fragile male ego. Christ, he had to be able to handle a
woman who wasn’t interested. So what if it hadn’t happened since…well since
that painful teenage incident he tried never to think about.
He’d had a crush on Tiffany Hudson all through high school.
One day she’d actually smiled at him in math class and then talked to him at
lunch. They’d begun a little flirtation and he’d begun to think there was hope
that she might actually date him, when his parents’ business went under. The
only job his dad could find was at Bronc’s Burgers, the cool place where all
the kids hung out. Bradan hadn’t wanted to go there, but he wanted Tiffany. While
sitting there trying to impress her, hoping like hell his dad didn’t see him,
his worst fear had materialized. His dad had called out a big greeting and
waved from the kitchen.
“Who’s that?” Tiffany’d asked with raised eyebrows. And when
he’d told her, she’d looked at him with repugnance and disdain, and that had
been the end of that budding romance.
Even though now he knew Tiffany Hudson was not worth getting
his boxer-briefs in a knot over, there would probably always be a little burn
of humiliation remembering that time.
Bradan prepared the poached prawns with Asian pear, mint and
coriander, meticulously arranging the food on the plate.
And now Mirelle had rejected him. More than once. She in no
way compared to Tiffany Hudson. Mirelle was warm and sweet and yeah, maybe a
little goofy with her pet rat and wacky clothes and purses, but Christ, he was
ferociously attracted to her.
Mirelle had said
she’d like to taste some of the dishes to give her design inspiration. He could
cook for her. Make some of the dishes he was planning for the menu of the new
restaurant.
But she was dating some other guy.
And he was an idiot to even be thinking of pushing things
with her. She was getting him all tied up in unfamiliar knots, making him do
crazy things like volunteer at an animal shelter, making him screw up at work.
He had to stop obsessing with her.
About the Author
Kelly Jamieson writes romances with heat that's sweet. Her
writing has been described as “emotionally complex”, “sweet and satisfying” and
“blisteringly sexy”. If she can stop herself from reading or writing, she loves
to cook. She has shelves of cookbooks that she reads at length. She also enjoys
gardening in the summer, and in the winter she likes to read gardening
magazines and seed catalogues (there might be a theme here...) She also loves
shopping, especially for clothes and shoes. But her family takes precedence
over everything else (yes, even writing). She has two teenage children who are
the best kids in the world, not that she’s biased, and a wonderful husband who
does loads of laundry while she plays on the computer writing stories.
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