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She frowned and steepled her fingers against the edge of the desk. Losing a best friend must be awful. She couldn’t imagine losing Thea. But it had been three years since Giancarlo had died. Time enough to heal. So why was Matteo so tortured?
Picking up the pencil, Quinn pressed it against her temple. As if questioning her sanity. Because last night, even after Matteo had made it clear women were his anesthesia, that likely any woman would have done in that moment, she’d been tempted to stay. She could have said it had been her human side making a rare appearance. She was afraid it was a whole lot more than that.
She would check on him. Shoving her palms against the desk, she rolled to her feet. She’d stop by the kitchen, see how he was doing, then dress for the chef’s challenge. Not that Thomas was going to need her help. Unlike his counterpart at Le Belle Bleu on the other side of the island, who apparently, from the paperwork, did not have everything running smoothly, Thomas was a genius at running a high-end establishment.
Quinn sighed. Tonight would be fun. Tomorrow, when they did their walk-through, she’d deal with Le Belle Bleu.
Taking a shortcut through the back of the hotel, she stepped into the kitchen. She’d seen grown men reduced to tears in François’s pressure cooker of a production, but there was Matteo, working in a group of a half dozen sous chefs, looking like he’d spent his life there.
She watched, fascinated, as he pulled the pan half off the burner and tossed in four or five herbs. Was there anything the man couldn’t do? And how had she ever pegged him a flirty playboy? He was a brilliant businessman. He also made chef’s whites look outrageously good.
She stepped closer to see what the last sauce was. He gave her an even look. “Quinn.”
“Just wondering what you’re making,” she said brightly. She pointed at the green sauce. “What’s that?”
“An Indian mint sauce.”
“Looks exotic.”
“And I can’t mess it up.” He gave her a dark look. “You’re not supposed to be in here.”
“Just checking to see how you’re doing.”
He threw a couple of drops of hot sauce into the third sauce. “You’re distracting me.”
“How could I be distracting you? I’ve been here two seconds.”
He gave her a deliberate once-over. “Do you really want to know?”
Heat burned a path up to her cheeks. “Not so much.”
His eyes glittered. “François,” he called out, pointing a finger at her. “She needs to go.”
The chef quirked a finger at Quinn. “You know the rules. Out.”
She gave Matteo an outraged look. “That was low, calling in the teacher.”
He added the mushrooms to the hot sauce and shook the pan over the flame. “I want to win. Out.”
Quinn turned around with a huff and left. He wanted to win because he wanted to make Daniel Williams look even more lackluster than he had this morning going through the menus. It had been painful to watch. He was rapidly shifting the tide and he knew it.
She got dressed and greeted the guests and judges with Thomas. The judges spanned everything from a native pop singer who’d made it big on the international music scene, to the prime minister and governor general of the island, to one of St. Lucia’s most celebrated artists.
The evening went smoothly. Dinner was a gastronomic study in perfection, but it was François’s main course—the lamb with Matteo’s green mint sauce that stole the night. Quinn didn’t even need to see a scorecard to know who had won it was so patently obvious from the looks on the judge’s faces.
As the results were being tabulated, the chefs changed and came out to mingle with the crowd. She watched Matteo turn on the charm, drawing the VIPs to him like moths to a flame, including the St. Lucian pop singer, Catrina James, who was beautiful and vibrant in a fire-engine-red dress that showed off her creamy, perfect skin. Quinn had never seen such a chameleon as Matteo. He molded himself into exactly what he needed to be at any given moment. Brilliantly.
He had changed into gray pants and a white shirt, his olive skin darker, swarthier from the hot rays of the Caribbean sun. It made his startling gray eyes stand out even more. Added to the intensity surrounding him, sitting just below the surface. Made him look even more dangerously attractive. If that was possible.
He caught her gaze. She pulled hers resolutely away and sat down at the bar, ordering herself a soda water. She’d been running all night, making sure things went smoothly. Sitting for a couple of minutes and reviewing the itinerary the manager of Le Belle Bleu had sent over for their walk-through tomorrow would be a beautiful thing the way her feet ached.
Matteo slid onto the stool beside her just as the bartender delivered her soda water. The sexy scent of him drifted into her nostrils. Made it hard to concentrate.
“Would you like a drink?”
“Si. That kitchen was smoking hot.”
Not the only smoking hot thing around here, her recalcitrant brain proclaimed. She ordered him the island beer he’d favored at dinner, and turned to him.
“You were brilliant in the kitchen. Is there anything you can’t do?”
He gave her a thoughtful look. “I am hopeless under the hood of a car. Desperately bad at sudoku. And my grammar is sometimes suspect.”
“Shameful.”
“I wasn’t blowing you off, Quinn. It was an act of self-preservation.”
From what? Her stomach did a funny little jump. “How,” she asked deliberately, “are you today?”
He pulled the beer the bartender set down toward him. “I’ll be better tomorrow.”
“Matteo—”
He held up a hand. “How about I ask you a question?”
Quinn surveyed him warily as he took a long swig of his beer. “All right.”
He propped his elbow on the bar and rested his chin in his hand. “What was with the one-year marriage? Most people’s exercise routines last longer than that.”
She felt her face turn into fully petrified papier-mâché. “We were...incompatible.”
He shook his head. “I’m not looking for the press release, Quinn. I’m looking for the truth.”
“That is the truth.” And a million other intricacies she couldn’t even begin to get into.
Matteo looked at her for a long moment, those gunmetal-gray eyes of his seeming to look straight through her. “I think you were too strong a personality for him. He wasn’t man enough to be with you.”
She choked on the sip of wine she’d taken. “That’s a big assumption coming from someone who doesn’t know anything about it.”
His eyes glittered. “I know you, Quinn. You aren’t that hard to figure out.”
She bit into the side of her mouth. “I think Julian would disagree,” she said tightly. “He would tell you I was a boring workaholic who didn’t know how to have fun.”
“Then he’d be as much of a fool as I thought.” His baldly stated words made her heart jump. “Any man with balls would recognize that for the lie it is. There isn’t any part of you that could ever be described as boring, Quinn. As anything but full-on fascinating.”
A flush of warmth swept through her. “You don’t have to feed me compliments, Matteo. I have thick skin.”
“Then you can take me telling you the truth.” He let the loaded statement sit on the air until he was sure he had her full attention. “If we were doing anything but negotiating a ten-million-dollar deal right now, we’d have been in bed together already. And I’d be taking apart the puzzle that is Quinn piece by piece.” His gaze held hers, the intent behind it riveting. “I guarantee you I wouldn’t be bored.”
Her breath caught in her throat. Refused to continue on its way up to her brain where she needed it most.
“You are not a woman to be discarded,” he said harshly. “He was a fool.”
Quinn sat there speechless. Drowning in a new perspective that had never occurred to her before. Had Julian been intimidated by her? Had he tried to hurt her, humiliate her to make himself feel like more of a man? Because she’d been too much of one?
Her world tilted on its axis. Fractured apart as a seismic shift ripped the ground from beneath her feet and set her adrift. She’d spent the past year torturing herself with ways she could have saved her marriage. Ways she could have changed to keep her husband from straying. Allowed her self-confidence to be completely ripped apart when he’d found her wanting every time. When in reality, maybe her marriage had been destined for failure from the start. Because of the man Julian was. Who they both were.
One of the chefs came over and grabbed Matteo for the winner’s announcement. Quinn sat there, head buzzing as she watched him walk away. She had always believed that at the heart of her, she was somehow defective. Her disastrous marriage had only underscored it. What if it wasn’t true? What if her inability to please her husband in bed had been more about him than her?
