Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(14)

Granted, he’d only had the chance to pitch for the job because Mrs. Raje was Ashna’s aunt, but turning the meeting into a gig had been all him. During the tasting, Mrs. Raje had done what most health-conscious women do, taken a small nibble of his gelato, meaning to simply taste it. After scraping the bottom of the bowl less than five minutes later, she had told him that she couldn’t remember the last time she had finished an entire serving of dessert. Then she had offered him the job.

Now he needed to make sure he got all her jobs going forward. He placed the heavy-bottomed pan on the stove. All that remained for him to do tonight was turn out a perfect salted caramel, and nothing had ever stopped DJ from doing that before.





Chapter Four


When the choice was between a spectacular butt and food, Trisha, naturally, chose food. If she stood around waiting for Nisha to finish being the perfect daughter and sister and chat up every single guest who so much as looked in her direction, Trisha might starve to death. Now that her brain had acknowledged her hunger, it was starting to feel a distinct dearth of oxygen from lack of nutrition.

How much of an irony would it be to die of starvation the day she had made history? Not that anyone in her family would know that she had made history if she did die. Not one!

Hell if she cared! She was thirty-two years old, and perfectly capable of understanding that her work was its own validation. A spasm cramped her heart at the memory of the hours she had spent mapping Emma’s tumor to feed the calculations into the robot, and that moment of absolute exhilaration when she had known exactly how she was going to remove an astrocytoma wrapped around the optic nerves that no other surgeon would even think of touching. This was true love, how she felt about her work. And she needed nothing more.

She wandered through the main kitchen, which was as pristine as it always was, made her way down the long corridor to the working kitchen in the back of the house, and pushed through the heavy swing door. If this had been just a family gathering and her grandma had been down here running the show, Aji would have put a plate of food aside for Trisha, knowing how hungry she would be.

Maybe she should go back up and tell Aji about the grant. She would care.

Her stomach groaned again, and seriously, she was this close to fainting. The fact that she hated kitchens made things worse. Especially when the kitchen looked like this—a million ingredients and dishes strewn about the endless granite surfaces. Nonetheless, she soldiered on.

On the stove sat a huge pot with a clear lid that looked promising, but it was too close to another pot on an open flame. She looked around for help.

For all the cooking paraphernalia lying in wait of something, there wasn’t a soul here tending to it all. Who left something thick and molten bubbling on a stove unattended? Carefully reaching past it, she lifted the lid of the other dish and found pure white, long-grained rice mixed with green peas and bright orange carrots. The intoxicating smell jabbed her straight in the olfactory cortex. Drool gushed into her mouth.

“May I help you?”

She jumped. And dropped the lid.

It slammed into the bubbling pot, making the thing teeter on its side.

Trisha stumbled back, trying to get away from the splash of molten liquid.

The man in a white chef’s jacket who had just scared the living crap out of her dived at the careening pot and saved it from crashing to the ground.

“Bloody hell!” he snapped, completely ignoring the fact that she had almost just had her toes burned off. “What do you think you’re doing? Who the hell let you into my kitchen?”

Her heart slammed in her chest. “Excuse me?” Was he actually yelling at her? As though she were some sort of deviant child? And since when was this his kitchen? This was her damn home!

“You almost tipped over my caramel. My caramel! It’s my pièce de résistance,” he said in a tone no one had ever taken with her.

Who the hell said things like “pièce de résistance,” that too in perfect French? But his voice was so enraged she almost took a step back.

Almost, because, it was her damn home! “Maybe you should not have left it unattended then,” she said icily.

His skin flushed red. He swallowed and ground his jaw. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have. I apologize.” Anger flashed in his eyes, and not a trace of apology. “To be fair, I wasn’t exactly expecting anyone to be snooping around my food and tipping over my pots the moment I stepped away for one bloody second.”

“I was not snooping.” Were they really having this conversation? “You startled me and almost burned me.”

He had started to turn away, but he spun back around at that. “All you had to do was set the pot straight and no one would have been burned.” He enunciated each word with exaggerated calm.

If one more person spoke to her today like she was an imbecile, she was going to wring someone’s neck! “Set it straight? You wanted me to touch a boiling pot? Do you have any idea what these hands are worth?”

His eyebrows rose in disbelief, as though the words she had said were somehow incomprehensible. He raised both hands, done with this conversation. Then he turned off the stove with more of that exaggerated calm, walked to the sink, and stuck his hands under running water.

Shit.

He had just set the pot straight with his bare hands.

“Are you okay?” Trisha asked, her annoyance slipping a bit.