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“For a master chef, your favorite food seems pretty simple.”
“Simple is always the best way to cook.
” He pulled the veal out of the brown wrapping and let it rest on a plate.
“Cooking is easy.” He dropped the beans into a colander. “It’s everything else that’s tough.”
“Like…”
He sighed. She wanted personal information again. He just wasn’t sure of how personal he wanted to get. “Like…everything. Relationships, running a business.” He looked up into her eyes. She was always so inviting, even when they weren’t wrapped in each other’s arms. “Relationships.”
She laughed. “You said that one already.”
“It’s the toughest and hardest for me.”
Despite his hesitance, disclosing information to Carson wasn’t as difficult as he wanted it to be. It was as if his subconscious knew he didn’t have to play everything so close to the hip with her.
She tucked her hair behind her ear. “I understand. Women can be…tough to interpret.”
“It’s not just women. In fact that’s the easiest one of all because I don’t have to have a relationship with them. I can keep it casual, where everyone knows where they stand.”
He liked it that way. Or so he thought. With Carson, he didn’t want casual. He wanted her with him, cooking, laughing, bickering, sparring. Oddly enough, she fit into the world he had built around him.
The realization was almost overwhelming. He pushed it aside, focusing instead on the task at hand—chopping his fresh rosemary.
“The hard relationships are my brothers, my mother, trying to figure out which foster parents were the real deal.” He stopped the knife but didn’t look up. “For the record, most of them were not.”
“I could see how that would skew your view of things.”
“It took me a long time to trust Vivian and by the time I did, she’d brought home Cole and Finn and the dynamic completely changed…again.”
“You were afraid she wasn’t going to love you anymore.”
He shrugged. “But that never happened. We did everything as a family and Vivian made sure to spend an equal amount of time alone with all of us.”
“Do you know why she didn’t have children of her own?”
“She couldn’t. All the money in the world at her fingertips and it couldn’t buy the one thing she wanted most in the world.”
Sometimes he felt guilty that such a wonderful woman had been saddled with a son like him—that she would have preferred to have a child of her own flesh and blood. Someone that was a mixture of both her and Arnold, her husband that had passed before she’d decided to foster him and his brothers. But she reassured him every day with her support and love. Up until that time, even his biological parents hadn’t been capable of showing that kind of love.
“So that’s my story.” It was a lot more than he had planned on disclosing. “And now that I know your secrets, I understand the architecture dream.”
She shrugged. “That is the dream.” She didn’t sound very convincing.
“You don’t love it?”
He didn’t know what he would do if he couldn’t cook anymore. If the restaurant business was not a part of his life.
“On the contrary, I do love it.” Her thumbnail picked at the counter top. “It’s just not fun anymore.”
He cocked his head waiting for her to elaborate. Finally, she let out a deep breath and continued. “Working for my father is stressful, demanding. I have huge shoes to fill which he reminds me of every day. Not to mention the fact that nothing I do is ever good enough.”
“How can that be? I’ve seen your work.” He opened his arms and motioned to the restaurant. “You’re very good.”
She shrugged. A tiny smile curving at the side of her lip. “Thanks. But it’s not only my father.” She sighed. Her body language screamed discomfort. “You remember Martin Connelly, the right-hand man I mentioned?”
Neil nodded.
