What I Did for Love (Wynette, Texas #5)(69)

“I’m counting on you to help make sure I get some time alone with her.” He took in her lemon and artichoke centerpiece. “See if you can find a florist. I’ll hire a bartender and someone to wait tables. And we need to get a real chef in here.”

She held up her hand. “Stop right there. No florist, no bartender, and Chaz is making do-it-yourself kebabs. Chicken, beef, and scallops.”

“Are you crazy? We can’t serve Rory Keene kebabs.”

“You’ll have to trust me. Remember, I have a purely selfish interest in convincing Rory to back your project. If you screw this up for me…”

“Georgie, I told you. Helene has to be cast—”

“Leave me alone. I have things to do.” Mainly she had to help him convince Rory that he was the person to make the film. If Rory saw how well he could behave these days, she might forget his past idiocy.

Unlike Georgie, who couldn’t forget a thing.

After he left, she busied herself setting candles around the veranda, but eventually she couldn’t resist grabbing her video camera. Today of all days, she should leave Chaz alone, but what had begun as a whim was turning into an obsession. In addition to her fascination with Chaz, she was also falling in love with the whole process of recording other people’s lives. She’d never imagined how absorbing standing behind a camera instead of in front of one could be.

She found Chaz in the kitchen making a ginger-garlic marinade. When she spotted Georgie, she slammed her chef’s knife down on some garlic cloves. “Get that camera out of here.”

“You won’t let me help. I’m bored.” She panned around the kitchen, taking in the well-organized chaos.

“Go film the cleaning people. You seem to have all kinds of fun doing that.”

Did Georgie hear a note of jealousy? “I like talking to them. Soledad—she’s the tall, pretty one—sends most of her money back to her mother in Mexico, so she has to live with her sister. There are six of them in a one-bedroom apartment. Can you imagine?”

Chaz rocked the blade over the garlic. “Big deal. At least she’s not sleeping on the streets.”

Georgie’s skin prickled. “Like you did?”

Chaz dipped her head. “I never told you that.”

“You told me about the accident and that you got fired after you broke your hand.” Georgie zoomed in. “I know your money was stolen. It’s a fairly obvious conclusion.”

“There are a lot of kids on the streets. It wasn’t a big deal.”

“Still…It had to be especially hard for you. All that mess and no way to clean it up.”

“I handled it. Now get out. I mean it, Georgie. I have to concentrate.”

Georgie should leave, but the turbulent emotions bubbling behind Chaz’s tough facade had drawn her in from the beginning, and somehow the camera demanded she record it. She shifted her questioning. “Does fixing dinner for more than one person make you nervous?”

“I fix dinner for more than one person practically every night.” She tossed the chopped garlic in a bowl with some peeled ginger. “I feed you, don’t I?”

“But you don’t put your heart into it. I swear, Chaz, even your desserts taste bitter.”

Chaz’s head shot up. “That’s a crappy thing to say.”

“Just a personal observation. Bram loves your cooking, and so does Meg. But then you seem to like Meg.”

Chaz pressed her lips tight. Her blade moved faster.

Georgie stepped to the end of the counter. “You’d better watch yourself. Great cooks know that extraordinary food is about more than mixing ingredients. Who you are as a person—how you feel about other people—shows up in what you create.”

The rhythm of Chaz’s chopping slowed. “I don’t believe that.”

Georgie told herself to let it go, but she couldn’t, not with the camera in her hands, not when this seemed so right. A wave of compassion overcame her, along with an odd sense of understanding. She and Chaz had each found her own way of coping with a world over which they seemed to have little control. “Then why do your desserts taste so bitter?” she said softly. “Is it really me you hate…or is it yourself?”

Chaz dropped her knife and stared into the camera, her black-rimmed eyes wide.

“Leave her alone, Georgie.” Bram spoke sharply from the doorway. “Take your camera and leave her alone.”

Chaz turned on him. “You told her!”

Bram came into the room. “I haven’t told her anything.”

“She knows! You told her!”

Chaz’s anger and self-hatred were visceral, and Georgie wanted to understand it. She wanted to film it as a testament to all the young girls consumed by their own pain. Except she had no right to invade her privacy like this, and she made herself—forced herself—to lower the camera.

“She doesn’t know anything you haven’t told her with your big mouth,” Bram said.

Once again Georgie ordered herself to leave, but her feet weren’t moving. Instead, she said, “I know you’re not the only girl who’s come to L.A. and done what she had to so she could survive.”

Chaz’s hands curled into fists. “I wasn’t a whore. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? I was some kind of crack whore!”