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fritters with bacon and maple syrup.
    Jill grinned and when she saw Cole at his station furiously chopping onions and sweet peppers and yes, milking the corn cob for all its sweet opaque juice, her heart gave a little tug.
    That was more than a bit unsettling, but no time for that now …

    She raced to the pantry, dodging her least favourite camera man, Don, who always seemed to be in the way. Grabbing flour and bacon and sugar and all that stuff she turned and raced back.
    Again her eyes shot to Cole and he glanced up just in time to give her a half grin with that lush mouth of his. She remembered kissing it, and how it felt on her skin … her hair … her pussy. 
    That tug of lust yanked hard in her pelvis and tummy and she shook her head. But oddly, instead of distracting her from her mission, it seemed to fuel her.
    Go figure. 
    ‘Forty minutes left, Chefs,’ Kat said and Jill kicked it into high gear. Setting the corn she’d shaved from the cob down in a pan with sizzling bacon. She too did her best to milk as much of the sugary white liquid from the ear of corn as she could manage. 
    While that was all happy in the pan and the corn started to caramelise, she whipped up her batter using some club soda to make it extra fluffy. 
    And then it was a blur. Putting sweet sugary corn and excellent, crispy smoked bacon in batter and frying up corn fritters. Locating and plating the individual servings of good Vermont maple syrup. Arranging her fluffy corn fritters on a plate. 
    But she’d never sampled and as she raced to the pantry looking for confectioner’s sugar to give the slightest dusting on the red plate, she banged into Cole.
    ‘How ya doing, Calvert?’ he asked. He pressed so close to her she was sure only she could hear.
    ‘You tell me,’ she said and popped a bit of fritter in his mouth. Her tongue felt a bit too big and her heart a bit too light when she said, ‘Taste it.’
    The night before came back in a flood of very intense and dirty mental images and he smiled, sucking her finger gently as she withdrew her hand. ‘Sweet, buttery, light, sensual … perfect,’ he said.
    God but that man fucked with her head. ‘Good luck,’ she whispered. And then, ‘I’m rooting for you.’
    He was startled, she could tell, and so was she, so she turned hurriedly to get back to her station even as Kat crowed, ‘One minute, Chefs!’
    When the buzzer sounded, Jill realised that her heart was racing. But it didn’t seem to be from the cooking. It was more because she could feel the phantom tug of his mouth on her index finger. The heated velvet kiss of his tongue on her flesh. So when the judges gave a few comments for the viewers, she barely heard a word.
    And then it was back to the pantry to wait.
    *      *      *
    She couldn’t focus. She couldn’t do anything. Ginger was tapping her poor leg up and down and up and down. Cole was the picture of calm but for his fingers. They swirled patterns and circles and lines on the leg of his jeans. 
    He looked at her and winked and she felt herself flush from brow to breast. Good Lord. She needed to move. And she needed to be away from the cameras for like … four seconds. Which meant one thing as the camera men took a short break to grab a drink. The contestants weren’t the only ones who had to wait many boring hours until deliberation. 
    She stood, brushed imaginary whatever off her pants and went down the short hall to the bathroom.
    She shut the door giving herself a moment to breathe and just one single moment to worry. The worry and anxiety and fear simmered in her and turned to a good raging boil. But only for a moment.
    ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ She stared at herself in the mirror and assessed what she saw. Her dark hair was braided in two thick plaits to keep it out of the way. The camera make-up seemed surreal in the bathroom light but it wasn’t too terrible. They simply made her look natural and not ‘done up’. Her