Read All Fired Up (Kate Meader) for Free Online Page B

Target dreck.
    “It didn’t take him long to get his feet under the table,” she said on exiting the luxurious comfort of her closet. “I can’t believe Jack would be on board. Isn’t he worried about me corrupting poor, innocent Shane?” She tackled the next bag, extracting a slender box that held Chinese slippers in a lovely shade of pomegranate with silver-bound jewels sewn into the shimmering fabric.
    “I can handle Jack. You’re going to have to tell me what happened some time. Did you turn Shane down?” Lili raised a dark brow and pushed back her voluminous shock of hair. “Oh God, did he turn you down?”
    Cara could feel the imminent eye roll but she managed to suppress it. “Nothing happened, Lili.”
    “Did you scare him off? You are sort of scary.”
    “You mean I’m a bitch.” Cara knew exactly what her coworkers and select members of her family thought of her. “Lemon Tart,” the brigade at Sarriette called her, though they probably didn’t realize that she embraced the moniker. So apt, a light-as-air confection with an acerbic bite. Not part of the kitchen or waitstaff, her status apart was compounded by her aloof manner and her rejection of practically every request for a date.
    Practically. Jeremy, Shane’s predecessor at the pastry station, had widened his puppy dog eyes and she’d taken him for a quick turn to stretch her legs. Her first date since she had returned to Chicago six months ago. He had been solicitous, polite, as interesting as wood paneling, and finally wet-eyed when, at the end of the night, she told him thanks, but no thanks. A month later, he was gone, leaving behind an open position for pastry chef and a sticky rumor that she had taken immense pleasure in punching holes in his heart with her four-inch spiked heels. Lemon Tart’s reputation had been set like a Jell-O mold, reinforcing what everyone thought they knew about her.
    Snooty Cara who won’t join the brigade’s meal before service because eating with the plebs was so beneath her. Hard-as-her-manicured-nails Cara, so focused on her career that she barely came home to see her mother while she battled cancer. Never mind that the thought of eating with others turned her stomach to knots of fear and her mother’s frail, gaunt form served as too potent a reminder of Cara’s mistreatment of her own body. Breaking free of other people’s misconceptions was harder than it looked.
    She flipped on a smile for her sister’s benefit. “That’s what people think of me, isn’t it? I’m a bitch.” She tried to take pleasure in the word, but it got clogged in her throat.
    Lili’s eyes softened. “No, I mean that you can be a bit intimidating to guys. Maybe Shane’s not your type, too nice for you.”
    “Hmph. He’s not so nice. I can’t believe you’re falling for all that leprechaun and shillelagh crap from Mr. Just-off-the-boat.”
    Lili scooped up a throw pillow from the bed and picked at a stray thread. “He seems like the kind of guy who’d romance a girl,” she continued as if Cara hadn’t spoken. “Give her flowers. Wine and dine her. Hold her hand. Yeah, much too nice for you.”
    “Clearly,” Cara muttered as she walked back into the closet to deposit her slippers safely in plastic shoe boxes. Of course Shane was too nice for her. She knew it as surely as she knew she hated lasagna and she didn’t need to have it drilled into her skull by her loved-up sister.
    “That’s what I would normally have thought,” Lili threw out, the words muted in the layers of plush fabric draping her closet rails. Cara was just about to ask for clarification when a shadow fell across the doorway. Lili with arms folded beneath her pin-up breasts, cocking one of her rounded hips. Willing away her envy of Lili’s amazing figure, Cara tried to focus on what her sister was yammering on about.
    “He seems like the kind of guy who’d hold hands on a first date.”
    “What are you getting at?”
    “Oh, nothing.”