A Beauty For The Billionaire

“And the door locks with a dead bolt?” she added.

He guessed women had to be careful about these things, but it would have been nice if she hadn’t asked the question in the same tone of voice she might have used to accuse someone of a felony.

“Yes,” he said. “The locksmith just left, and the only key is in the top dresser drawer. You can bolt it from the inside. Just like you said you would need in your contract.”

Once that was settled, she walked into the room, barely noticing it, lifted her duffel onto the bed and began to unzip it. Without looking at Hogan, she said, “The room is acceptable. I’ll unpack and report to the kitchen to inventory, then I’ll shop this afternoon. Dinner tonight will be at seven thirty. Dinner every night will be at seven thirty. Breakfast will be at seven. If you’ll be home for lunch, I can prepare a light midday meal, as well, and leave it in the refrigerator for you, but I generally spend late morning and early afternoon planning menus and buying groceries. I shop every day to ensure I have the freshest ingredients I can find, all organic farm-to-table. I have Sundays and Mondays off unless you need me for a special occasion, in which case I’ll be paid double-time for those days and—”

“And have an additional day off the following week,” he finished for her. “I know. I read and signed your contract, remember? You have Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Thanksgiving off, with full pay, no exceptions,” he quoted from it. “Along with three weeks in August, also with full pay.”

“If I’m still here then,” she said. “That’s ten months away, after all.” She said it without a trace of smugness, too, to her credit. Obviously Chloe Merlin knew about the Park Avenue chef-poaching game.

“Oh, you’ll still be here,” he told her. Because, by August, if Hogan played his cards right—and he was great at cards—Anabel would be living here with him, and his wedding present to her would be a lifetime contract for her favorite chef, Chloe Merlin.

Chloe, however, didn’t look convinced.

Didn’t matter. Hogan was convinced. He didn’t care how many demands Chloe made—from the separate kitchen account into which he would deposit a specific amount of money each week and for which she alone would have a card, to her having complete dominion over the menus, thanks to his having no dietary restrictions. He was paying her a lot of money to cook whatever she wanted five days a week and letting her live rent-free in one of New York’s toniest neighborhoods. In exchange, he’d created a situation where Anabel Carlisle had no choice but to pay attention to him. Actually not a bad trade, since, if history repeated—and there was no reason to think it wouldn’t—once he had Anabel’s attention, they’d be an item in no time. Besides, he didn’t know what else he would do with all the money his grandfather had left him. It was enough to, well, feed Liechtenstein.

Hogan just hoped he liked...what had she called it? Croque monsieur. Whatever the hell that was.

* * *

Chloe Merlin studied her new employer in silence, wishing that, for once, she hadn’t been driven by her desire to make money. Hogan Dempsey was nothing like the people who normally employed her. They were all pleasant enough, but they were generally frivolous and shallow and easy to dismiss, something that made it possible for her to focus solely on the only thing that mattered—cooking. Even having just met him, she found Hogan Dempsey earthy and astute, and something told her he would never stand for being dismissed.

As if she could dismiss him. She’d never met anyone with a more commanding presence. Although he had to be standing at least five feet away from her, she felt as if he were right on top of her, breathing down her chef’s whites, leaving her skin hot to the touch. He was easily a foot taller than she was in her Super Birkis, and his shoulders had fairly filled the doorway when he entered the room. His hair was the color of good semolina, and his eyes were as dark as coffee beans. Chloe had always had a major thing for brown-eyed blonds, and this man could have been their king. Add that he was dressed in well-worn jeans, battered work boots and an oatmeal-colored sweater that had definitely seen better days—a far cry from the fresh-from-the-couturier cookie-cutter togs of other society denizens—and he was just way too gorgeous for his own good. Or hers.

She lifted her hand to the top button of her jacket and twisted it, a gesture that served to remind her of things she normally didn’t need reminding of. But it did no good. Hogan was still commanding. Still earthy. Still gorgeous. Her glasses had begun to droop again, so she pushed them up with the back of her hand. It was a nervous gesture she’d had since childhood, but it was worse these days. And not just because her big black frames were a size larger than they should be.

“So...how’s Anabel doing?” he asked.

Of all the questions she might have expected, that one wasn’t even in the top ten. Although he didn’t strike her as a foodie, and although he’d already filled out a questionnaire she prepared for her employers about his culinary expectations and customs, she would have thought he would want to talk more about her position here. She’d already gathered from Anabel that her former employer and her new employer shared some kind of history—Anabel had tried to talk Chloe out of taking this position, citing Hogan’s past behavior as evidence of his unsophisticated palate. But Chloe neither cared nor was curious about what that history might be. She only wanted to cook. Cooking was what she did. Cooking was what she was. Cooking was all that mattered on any given day. On every given day. Chloe didn’t do well if she couldn’t keep every last scrap of her attention on cooking.

“Anabel is fine,” she said.

“I mean since her divorce,” Hogan clarified. “I understand you came to work for her about the same time her husband left her for one of her best friends.”

“That was none of my business,” Chloe told him. “It’s none of yours, either. I don’t engage in gossip, Mr. Dempsey.”

“Hogan,” he immediately corrected her. “And I’m not asking you to gossip. I just...”

He lifted one shoulder and let it drop in a way that was kind of endearing, then expelled his breath in a way that was almost poignant. Damn him. Chloe didn’t have time for endearing and poignant. Especially when it was coming from the king of the brown-eyed blonds.

“I just want to know she’s doing okay,” he said. “She and I used to be...friends. A long time ago. I haven’t seen her in a while. Divorce can be tough on a person. I just want to know she’s doing okay,” he repeated.

Oh, God. He was pining for her. It was the way he’d said the word friends. Pining for Anabel Carlisle, a woman who was a nice enough human being, and a decent enough employer, but who was about as deep as an onion skin.

“I suppose she’s doing well enough in light of her...change of circumstances,” Chloe said.

More to put Hogan out of his misery than anything else. Chloe actually didn’t know Anabel that well, in spite of having been in her employ for nearly six months, which was longer than she’d worked for anyone else. Now that she thought about it, though, Anabel was doing better than well enough. Chloe had never seen anyone happier to be divorced.

“Really?” Hogan asked with all the hopeful earnestness of a seventh-grader. Gah. Stop being so charming!

“Really,” she said.

“Is she seeing anyone?”

Next he would be asking her to pass Anabel a note during study hall. “I don’t know,” she said. But because she was certain he would ask anyway, she added, “I never cooked for anyone but her at her home.”

That seemed to hearten him. Yay.

“Now if you’ll excuse me...” She started to call him Mr. Dempsey again, remembered he’d told her to call him Hogan, so decided to call him nothing at all. Strange, since she’d never had trouble before addressing her employers by their first names, even if she didn’t prefer to. “I have a strict schedule I adhere to, and I need to get to work.”

She needed to get to work. Not wanted. Needed. Big difference. As much as Chloe liked to cook, and as much as she wanted to cook, she needed it even more. She hoped she conveyed that to Hogan Dempsey without putting too fine a point on it.

“Okay,” he said with clear reluctance. He probably wanted to pump her for more information about Anabel, but unless his questions were along the lines of how much Anabel liked Chloe’s pistachio financiers, she’d given him all she planned to give.

And, wow, she really wished she’d thought of another way to put that than He probably wanted to pump her.

“If you need anything else,” he said, “or have any questions or anything, I’ll be in my, uh...”

For the first time, he appeared to be unsure of himself. For just the merest of moments, he actually seemed kind of lost. And damned if Chloe didn’t have to stop herself from taking a step forward to physically reach out to him. She knew how it felt to be lost. She hated the thought of anyone feeling that way. But knowing it was Hogan Dempsey who did somehow seemed even worse.

Oh, this was not good.

“House,” he finally finished. “I’ll be in my house.”

She nodded, not trusting herself to say anything. Or do anything, for that matter. Not until he was gone, and she could reboot herself back into the cooking machine she was. The cooking machine she had to be. The one driven only by her senses of taste and smell. Because the ones that dealt with hearing and seeing and, worst of all, feeling—were simply not allowed.

* * *

A ham and cheese sandwich.

Hogan had suspected the dinner Chloe set in front of him before disappearing back into the kitchen without a word was a sandwich, because he was pretty sure there were two slices of bread under the crusty stuff on top that was probably more cheese. But his first bite had cinched it. She’d made him a ham and cheese sandwich. No, maybe the ham wasn’t the Oscar Mayer he’d always bought before he became filthy, stinking rich, and the cheese wasn’t the kind that came in plastic-wrapped individual slices, but croque monsieur was obviously French for ham and cheese sandwich.

Still, it was a damned good ham and cheese sandwich.

For side dishes, there was something that was kind of like French fries—but not really—and something else that was kind of like coleslaw—but not really. Even so, both were also damned good. Actually, they were better than damned good. The dinner Chloe made him was easily the best not-really ham and cheese sandwich, not-really French fries and not-really coleslaw he’d ever eaten. Ah, hell. They were better than all those spot-on things, too. Maybe hiring her would pay off in more ways than just winning back the love of his life. Or, at least, the love of his teens.

Chloe had paired his dinner with a beer that was also surprisingly good, even though he was pretty sure it hadn’t been brewed in Milwaukee. He would have thought her expertise in that area would be more in wine—and it probably was—but it was good to know she had a well-rounded concept of what constituted dinner. Then again, for what he was paying her, he wouldn’t be surprised if she had a well-rounded concept of astrophysics and existentialism, too. She’d even chosen music to go with his meal, and although he’d never really thought jazz was his thing, the mellow strains of sax and piano had been the perfect go-with.

It was a big difference from the way he’d enjoyed dinner before—food that came out of a bag or the microwave, beer that came out of a longneck and some sport on TV. If someone had told Hogan a month ago that he’d be having dinner in a massive dining room at a table for twelve with a view of trees and town houses out his window instead of the neon sign for Taco Taberna across the street, he would have told that person to see a doctor about their hallucinations. He still couldn’t believe this was his life now. He wasn’t sure he ever would.

The moment he laid his fork on his plate, Chloe appeared to remove both from the table and set a cup of coffee in their place. Before she could escape again—somehow it always seemed to Hogan like she was trying to run from him—he stopped her.

“That was delicious,” he said. “Thank you.”

When she turned to face him, she looked surprised by his admission. “Of course it was delicious. It’s my life’s work to make it delicious.” Seemingly as an afterthought, she added, “You’re welcome.”

When she started to turn away, Hogan stopped her again.