A Beauty For The Billionaire

“So I realize now that croque monsieur is a ham and cheese sandwich, but what do you call those potatoes?”

When she turned around this time, her expression relayed nothing of what she might be thinking. She only gazed at him in silence for a minute—a minute where he was surprised to discover he was dying to know what she was thinking. Finally she said, “Pommes frites. The potatoes are called pommes frites.”

“And the green stuff? What was that?”

“Salade de chou.”

“Fancy,” he said. “But wasn’t it really just a ham and cheese sandwich, French fries and coleslaw?”

Her lips, freshly stained with her red lipstick, thinned a little. “To you? Yes. Now if you’ll excuse me, your dessert—”

“Can wait a minute,” he finished. “Sit down. We need to talk.”

She didn’t turn to leave again. But she didn’t sit down, either. Mostly, she just stared at him through slitted eyes over the top of her glasses before pushing them into place again with the back of her hand. He remembered her doing that a couple of times earlier in the day. Maybe with what he was paying her now, she could afford to buy a pair of glasses that fit. Or, you know, eight hundred pairs of glasses that fit. He was paying her an awful lot.

He tried to gentle his tone. “Come on. Sit down. Please,” he added.

“Was there a problem with your dinner?” she asked.

He shook his head. “It was a damned tasty ham and cheese sandwich.”

He thought she would be offended that he relegated her creation—three times now—to something normally bought in a corner deli and wrapped in wax paper. Instead, she replied, “I wanted to break you in slowly. Tomorrow I’m making you pot au feu.”

“Which is?”

“To you? Beef stew.”

“You don’t think much of me or my palate, do you?”

“I have no opinion of either, Mr. Dempsey.”

“Hogan,” he corrected her. Again.

She continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “I just happened to learn a few things about my new employer before starting work for him, and it’s helped me plan menus that would appeal to him. Which was handy since the questionnaire I asked this particular employer to fill out was, shall we say, a bit lean on helpful information in that regard.”

“Shouldn’t I be the one doing that?” he asked. “Researching my potential employee before even offering the position?”

“Did you?” she asked.

He probably should have. But Gus Fiver’s recommendation had been enough for him. Well, that and the fact that stealing her from Anabel would get the latter’s attention.

“Uh...” he said eloquently.

She exhaled a resigned sigh then approached the table and pulled out a chair to fold herself into it, setting his empty plate before her for the time being. “I know you grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Astoria,” she said, “and that you’re so new money, with so much of it, the Secret Service should be crawling into your shorts to make sure you’re not printing the bills yourself. I know you’ve never traveled farther north than New Bedford, Massachusetts, to visit your grandparents or farther south than Ocean City, New Jersey, where you and your parents spent a week every summer at the Coral Sands Motel. I know you excelled at both hockey and football in high school and that you missed out on scholarships for both by this much, so you never went to college. I also know your favorite food is—” at this, she bit back a grimace “—taco meatloaf and that the only alcohol you imbibe is domestic beer. News flash. I will not be making taco meatloaf for you at any time.”

The hell she wouldn’t. Taco meatloaf was awesome. All he said, though, was, “How do you know all that? I mean, yeah, some of that stuff is probably on the internet, but not the stuff about my grandparents and the Coral Sands Motel.”

“I would never pry into anyone’s personal information on the internet or anywhere else,” Chloe said, sounding genuinely stung that he would think otherwise.

“Then how—”

“Anabel told me all that about you after I gave her my two weeks’ notice. I didn’t ask,” she hastened to clarify. “But when she found out it was you who hired me, and when she realized she couldn’t afford to pay me more than you offered me, she became a little...perturbed.”

Hogan grinned. He remembered Anabel perturbed. She never liked it much when she didn’t get her way. “And she thought she could talk you out of coming to work for me by telling you what a mook I am, right?” he asked.

Chloe looked confused. “Mook?”

He chuckled. “Never mind.”

Instead of being offended by what Anabel had told Chloe, Hogan was actually heartened by it, because it meant she remembered him well. It didn’t surprise him she had said what she did. Anabel had never made a secret of her opinion that social divisions existed for a reason and should never be crossed—even if she had crossed them dozens of times to be with him when they were young. It was what she had been raised to believe and was as ingrained a part of her as Hogan’s love for muscle cars was ingrained in him. Her parents, especially her father, had been adamant she would marry a man who was her social and financial equal, to the point that they’d sworn to cut her off socially and financially if she didn’t. The Carlisle money was just that old and sacred. It was the only thing that could come between Hogan and Anabel. She’d made that clear, too. And when she went off to college and started dating a senator’s son, well... Hogan had known it was over between them without her even having to tell him.

Except that she never actually told him it was over between them, and they’d still enjoyed the occasional hookup when she was home from school, in spite of the senator’s son. Over the next few years, though, they finally did drift apart.

But Anabel never told him it was over.

That was why, even after she’d married the senator’s son, Hogan had never stopped hoping that someday things would be different for them. And now his hope had paid off. Literally. The senator’s son was gone, and there was no social or financial divide between him and Anabel anymore. The blood he was born with was just as blue as hers, and the money he’d inherited was just as old and moldy. Maybe he was still feeling his way in a world that was new to him, but he wasn’t on the outside looking in anymore. Hell, he’d just drunk beer from a glass instead of a longneck. That was a major development for him. It wouldn’t be long before he—

“Hang on,” he said. “How does Anabel know I only drink domestic beer? I wasn’t old enough to drink when I was with her.”

“That part I figured out myself,” Chloe said.

“There are some damned fine domestic beers being brewed these days, you know.”

“There are. But what you had tonight was Belgian. Nice, wasn’t it?”

Yeah, okay, it was. He would still be bringing home his Sam Adams on the weekends. So there, Chloe Merlin.

“Is everything you cook French?” he asked. He wasn’t sure why he was prolonging a conversation neither of them seemed to want to have.

“Still angling for that taco meatloaf, are we?” she asked.

“I like pizza, too.”

She flinched, but said nothing.

“And chicken pot pie,” he threw in for good measure.

She expelled another one of those impatient sighs. “Fine. I can alter my menus. Some,” she added meaningfully.

Hogan smiled. Upper hand. He had it. He wondered how long he could keep it.

“But yes, all of what I cook is French.” She looked like she would add more to the comment, but she didn’t.

So he tried a new tack. “Are you a native New Yorker?” Then he remembered she couldn’t be a native New Yorker. She didn’t know what a mook was.

“I was born and raised in New Albany, Indiana,” she told him. Then, because she must have realized he was going to press her for more, she added, with clear reluctance, “I was raised by my grandmother because my parents...um...weren’t able to raise me themselves. Mémée came here as a war bride after World War Two—her parents owned a bistro in Cherbourg—and she was the one who taught me to cook. I got my degree in Culinary Arts from Sullivan University in Louisville, which is a cool city, but the restaurant scene there is hugely competitive, and I wanted to open my own place.”

“So you came to New York, where there’s no competition for that kind of thing at all, huh?” He smiled, but Chloe didn’t smile back.