Chapter Nine
Once outside, Stacy stopped, closed her eyes, and took a giant breath in an attempt to calm the earthquake seizing her insides.
It had taken everything in her not to bolt forward from her seat when she saw him stand and stagger. She’d had to physically restrain herself from her natural instinct to offer whatever kind of comfort she could, knowing if she did, he’d most likely explode at her.
It was obvious he was suffering. The death grip he had on the console proved it. How he managed to contain himself and not let anyone else see the torture he was going through was amazing, and proved to her once again just what a control freak he was.
She had to admit she admired him for it.
The offer of the water and the lie she’d told him to go along with it had served its purpose well. He’d have soon as bit off her head than accept anything that would help if it made him look weak in her eyes.
Proud man.
Too proud for his own good.
Considering how she could help him without him knowing it, she moved back to the set and informed the judges of Nikko’s imminent arrival.
She made the rounds of each chef, saying a few encouraging words and speaking with their individual producers. The contestants were standing around in a cluster, talking over the first challenge and evaluating one another’s prowess—or lack of it—with the butchering. All but Riley. He stood alone at his station, quietly cleaning it of the bones and detritus of the challenge.
“You don’t have to do that,” Stacy told him. “We have a cleanup crew who’ll take care of setting everything to rights again.”
With a careless shrug, Riley rinsed his knives in the attached sink. “I like cleaning up. Especially my knives. I don’t like anyone else touching them.”
Stacy’s smile was quick and understanding. “I get that. My cousin Kandy has this knife set she bought when she was in China a few years ago. When she showed it off she wouldn’t let anyone touch it.” She laughed at the memory. “She told us that she wanted the knives only to recognize her juju and no one else’s.” With a shake of her head, she added, “Chefs and their knives. They’re like an appendage for you guys.”
“And some of us have bigger…knives than others,” Clay Burbank said from behind her. “And we know how to use them to maximum potential.”
“Yeah,” Damon Rodriquez said, rubbing his hands together and winking at her. “My knife skills are legendary among my fans.”
“Why do I get the feeling they’re not really talking about knives?” Dorinda Katay asked.
Stacy rolled her eyes. When the laughter died down, she said, “Because they’re not.”
Nikko arrived on set and went directly to the judges, so she moved toward them.
“His was by far the best of the bunch,” Jade was saying to the two men as Stacy silently sidled up to the trio.
“I agree. The kid has talent,” Dan said. “For someone his age, it’s impressive.”
“So, MacNeill is your number-one pick?” Nikko asked.
When the judges nodded, Stacy felt a surge of pride swell through her.
“Who’s on the bottom?” he asked.
The least expert chef to perform the butchering task was open for a bit of debate between the judges. After parrying back and forth a few times, Nikko forced them to make a choice, telling them they were wasting time. They did, but neither looked altogether happy with the decision.
“Okay, so when they’re back at their stations you divulge the next challenge. Got it?”
Roth nodded and Jade gave him a bored, “Yes, of course.”
Nikko turned to move back to the tent, Stacy right behind him when he turned back, adding, “And try to get it all on the first take this time, Jade. The crew needs to break for lunch.”
Stacy didn’t know what she was more surprised at: Nikko’s snide request of his star judge or the said judge’s openmouthed, silent response.
When Dan Roth caught her eye and grinned widely behind his costar’s back, Stacy lowered her head and bit down on the inside of her lip. If she hadn’t been looking down, she would have noticed Nikko stop. But she hadn’t been looking where she was going and, subsequently, barreled right into him.
She would have ricocheted back and fallen from connecting with the solid wall of his chest as she hit, if he hadn’t thrust his hands forward and grabbed her upper arms to prevent it.
Like a blast from a stun gun—quick, sharp, and penetrating—she felt the heat of his touch burn through her blouse and sear straight through her skin.
Numbed, she dropped her tablet, her hands incapable of holding onto it. They splayed, open-palmed, and sought purchase by grasping his elbows and clutching.
“Steady,” he commanded.
Stacy felt anything but. Words wouldn’t form correctly in her mind. All logical, rational thought had flown the moment the warmth of his hands seeped through the fabric of her blouse. It was as if she’d walked into an oven, the temperature set to broil.
His long fingers squeezed once, twice, then tugged her in closer.
Stacy couldn’t decide which was more intense: the heat in his eyes or the natural warmth radiating from his body.
“I’m—I’m sorry. I didn’t—I wasn’t…I—Sorry.” She tried to pull from his grasp, but he wouldn’t let go.
As earlier when she’d caught him staring at her, she once again felt the mesmerizing pull of his gaze and was powerless to look away.
And for some inexplicable reason found she didn’t want to.
The little shards of amber floating among the cognac color of his irises were lighter and brighter than she remembered. They looked like a wolf’s eyes, and, just like a wolf, their stare was predatory, alpha, and hypnotic.
“Nikko? We’re all set to start up again,” Todd called from the doorway of the production trailer.
Without looking away from her, he called back, “Be right in.” He still hadn’t let go of her arms.
From deep down, as deep as she could reach, Stacy grappled for calm. She watched him watch her while she took a solid, full breath in, then relaxed it out.
“I’m sorry,” she said when she trusted her voice wouldn’t betray her again. “I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going.”
She shifted back, away from him, but he kept his hands around her.
This close she could read the exhaustion floating in his eyes and his determination to ignore it.
This close she could see the fine, subtle lines fanning out from the corners of his eyes as he narrowed them at her.
This close she could reach out and smooth the corrugations grooving down from his mouth to his rock-solid jaw. That she wanted to do just that, to offer him any comfort she could, to soothe the pain he tried so valiantly to keep hidden, stunned her beyond all thought.
Nikko Stamp was not a man who would ever tolerate being comforted or coddled.
Why, then, did she think it was exactly what he needed?
“I’m okay now,” she told him and tried to move back again.
This time he let her go.
The tablet had fallen between them and when she bent to retrieve it, she took in another deep breath.
Coming upright, she adjusted her glasses, which had gone askew when she bent over.
“Was there something you wanted me to do?” she asked, making her features as blank and as relaxed as she could.
Confusion crept across his face.
“You stopped and turned,” she clarified. “I thought you wanted to tell me something.”
His brows pulled tightly together, his eyes going flat and hard.
“Yeah.” His voice dropped to the temperature of flash-frozen ice. “Make sure Jade’s up to speed the next time we film. Light a fire under her producer or manage her yourself, if you have to. I don’t care, but do whatever you have to do to ensure we don’t waste time on piss-poor preparation again like we did this morning. Got it?”
With her insides shaking like just-set Jell-O, Stacy bit her tongue and nodded.
* * * *
“Melora?” Nikko called when he got back to the cabin. “Where are you?”
“Where I always am,” the girl shouted back. “Purgatory. Or as you call it, your office.”
He should have called her on the snippy response, but Nikko couldn’t summon up enough parental discipline to do so.
The morning’s filming had gone overtime into the lunch hour, mostly due to Jade Quartermaine’s continued incompetence. She’d flubbed the next challenge guidelines three times before Nikko had exploded and ordered Dan Roth to read the teleprompter instead.
Jade had been furious and spitting nails, threatening to walk off the set if she weren’t given another chance. With exhausted reluctance, Nikko had acquiesced and she’d finally gotten the lines timed perfectly.
At any other time during any other production he wouldn’t have been as furious about the messed-up schedule. But this production was different. This time, he had Melora to think about.
As he told the crew to break for an hour and a half, he once again questioned his decision to be the one responsible for Melora’s eating schedule. It would have been so much easier if he’d brought along a personal chef. Then, he’d have been able to just be Melora’s watchdog.
The therapist had made point after point about how Melora was using her anorexia as a way of grieving over her mother’s loss, as a way of establishing some kind of order in her chaotic life, and as a means to deal with her abandonment issues regarding her frequently absent father. If he’d assigned someone else to cook for her, the therapist felt it would distance father and daughter even more. By cooking for her, sharing the meal, and then spending the aftertime together, she’d felt Melora would come to realize how much Nikko truly loved her, wanted her healthy, and wanted her in his life.
But, Jesus, he was tired. Even though he’d shared custody with Flannery, Melora had spent the majority of her time with her mother because Nikko’s filming schedules hadn’t been conducive to having a child around. All that had changed the moment Flannery died and he’d been thrown into the quagmire of single parent to a damaged and grieving teenager.
A teenager who was looking at him with a murderous and mutinous glare in her eyes at the moment.
“You’re late,” she said, bony arms folded across her tiny chest. “I’ve been sitting here for, like hours, bored out of my gourd and withering away with”—she flapped a hand in the air with a dramatic flourish—“ennui.”
Nikko stopped walking toward the kitchen, turned, and cocked an eyebrow at her. “Ennui? That’s a new word for you.” He struggled to keep the humor from his voice. Melora had inherited more than just her looks from her actress-mother.
“It was a vocab word for one of the dumb books I’ve been assigned to read for the summer. The title of it should be Dumb and Dull.”
She followed him into the kitchen and plopped down into one of chairs.
“Did you do anything else this morning aside from read?” He pulled out whole-wheat bread, slices of cheese, and a tub of soft butter.
While he set some of the butter to melt in the frying pan, he spread some more on to one side of the bread, slipped a few pieces of cheese on the unoiled side, and then slapped another slice of bread over that.
“I started the report I’m being tortured to write for Dumb and Dull. I had to print it out, like, in pen, because, Hello! My laptop is still being held hostage. It would be, like, so much easier if I could, you know, type.”
Nikko tucked his tongue into the side of his cheek. “I read somewhere that writing things out in longhand makes you remember them better.”
“I so do not want to remember this book. Ever.”
“Did you do anything else?”
“Took a walk,” she said.
“Did you bring your camera? Take some pictures?”
“Yeah.”
When she offered nothing further, he glanced over at her. She was slumped over the table, her head resting against one flattened palm, her lips pressed together. His heart sighed for her.
“I’m sorry I was late getting back.” He flipped the sandwiches over. “Filming went over and it wasn’t…prudent…to stop until we were done.”
She lifted her head and nailed him with her own version of a steely-eyed stare. “Prudent? And you had the nerve to, like, diss ennui?”
His smile came quick and free as he pulled the grilled-cheese sandwiches onto plates.
“Feel free to use it in your report if it’ll help.”
She rose and pulled two bottles of water from the refrigerator. “The only thing that will help is if, like, I didn’t have to read the book in the first place. It’s so bad they didn’t even, like, make a movie of it. It would have tanked, big-time, you know?”
Nikko watched as she took a large gulp of the water, swallowed, and then took another chug.
It was a control mechanism for getting full fast, without food. She could claim she wasn’t hungry and refuse to eat. He knew as much from the therapist. What he didn’t know was how to effectively address it without her getting upset. If he told her to eat, she’d rebel and refuse to. If he ignored her not eating, she’d continue to do so and starve herself.
He took a bite of his own sandwich, realizing for the first time how truly hungry he was.
“This is good,” he said nonchalantly and took a sip of his own water. “Good old-fashioned comfort food.”
She peered over the expanse of the table at him, a questioning look on her face. “What do you need to be comforted about?”
“You’d be surprised, kid.”
“Try me.”
Nikko shocked himself by considering it. She was neither a child nor an adult, and as such, her opinions on, and experiences with life, were still made mostly from an emotional basis. She’d never worked; never known what it was to deal with deadlines, unions, and project problems.
But she had lived with her mother and if there was one thing Nikko knew, Flannery, born actress that she was, had shown Melora firsthand what it was like living with a mercurial personality who worked in a fast-paced and often fickle industry, and all the drama that followed it.
So he took a step of faith and shared the morning problems.
“Mama always claimed Jade Quartermaine was a spoiled, self-absorbed bitch,” Melora said.
Before Nikko thought to scold her, he stopped. After delivering her opinion, she’d picked up the sandwich and taken a huge bite. While she chewed with more enthusiasm than he’d seen in a while, she looked over at him and added, “She thought Jade was gonna, like, make a play for you a few years back when you were working on that totally lame food-travel show together. I told Mama if you hooked up with Jade I was gonna, like, spurn you ’til the end of time.”
Nikko swallowed, surprised when he didn’t choke on the bread and his daughter’s perspicacious statement.
The program he’d directed Jade in had been trying. She’d been rude to the cast and crew, often showing up late without an excuse and, like today, unprepared. At one point Nikko had threatened to walk out if she didn’t start acting like a professional and do her job.
Jade had tried—unsuccessfully— to seduce him after that and he’d always wondered if she’d done it because she truly wanted him as a lover or because she saw it as a way to wrangle herself out of the corner she’d painted herself into.
Melora finished half the sandwich before taking another chug of water from the bottle and finishing it.
“I’m full,” she said, tapping the bottle down on the table and staring straight at him, as if waiting for him to argue with her about it.
Nikko wanted to. He wanted to point out she still had an entire other half to eat, but remembered what the therapist had said about choosing his battles wisely.
He wiped his mouth with his napkin and nodded instead. “I’ll wrap that up for you and stick it in the fridge in case you want something before dinner—”
“I won’t.”
“—because dinner will be a little later than usual. Remember, we’re dining in the mess hall along with the judges and the ranch hands tonight, for the first challenge.”
Melora rolled her eyes and for a moment looked so much like her mother Nikko had to take a breath to steady himself. In a few more years, when maturity filled out her face and she settled into her features, Melora was going to be a beautiful woman, just like her mother. The thought caused him no small amount of worry.
“Do I have to, you know, eat everything the chefs serve? Because I won’t.” She shook her head in the defiant way he’d become used to, pushed back in the chair, and folded her arms across her torso again.
He reached deep for calm. “No, Melly, you don’t. The only ones who really need to take a bite of everything are the judges and the ranch hands, because they’ll be voting. You can eat whatever you want.”
“Then why do I even have to go? Can’t I just stay here, alone? Nothing will happen to me.”
“We’ve been over this, kid.” Nikko shook his head. “I’m in charge of the show and I need to be there. And since it’s dinner, and we agreed we’d spend every meal together, that means you go where I go.”
“I hate eating in front of other people.”
The whine in her voice grated on his already frazzled nerves.
“It makes me feel so…so…ugh!” She threw up her hands.
“No one is going to be watching you eat.”
Just me.
“Everyone’s attention will be on the chefs and the judges’ reactions to the dishes they’re served,” he told her.
“You don’t know that. Not for sure. People stare at me all the time around here because they know I’m your daughter. I hate being on display.”
“You won’t be on display. Stop being so dramatic.”
“I’m not. Listen, can’t you let Stacy be in charge instead? Have her, like, oversee everything instead of you?”
“What? Where did that come from? No. No, she can’t.”
“Why not? Isn’t she, like, your number two? Although that’s a ridiculously gross thing to call someone. I think—”
“Melora—”
“Or let me sit with her, then. She’s cool. She’s nice. She’s normal. She won’t”—she flapped her hand in the air again—“hover, or watch and evaluate everything I put in my mouth. Let me stay with her while you work. She’s—”
“Enough.”
Melora’s mouth slammed shut and a pink tinge flushed down her face from the tips of her ears to her chin.
Nikko placed his hands, palms flat, on the table and counted to five in his head.
Stacy’s name had brought the woman to mind when he’d been trying to forget her very existence. Forget the way her beautiful, bright eyes had dilated under her glasses when his hands went around her arms. Forget the way her naked mouth had turned wet and plump when she’d run her tongue across it as she’d stared up at him. Forget the way he’d gone as hard as stone in a heartbeat when he saw the pulse pounding at her neck and realized how close he’d come to putting his mouth over it.
Christ. When was the last time a woman had stirred his body and engaged his mind like this one had? Not since before the accident for sure, and even further back than that, if he was being truthful.
He’d been annoyed to have her thrust upon him by the network and had been purposefully rude and obnoxious in the hope of sending her packing. In the next breath, he remembered the sense of comfort he’d felt when she was nearby, as if having her around him somehow calmed and soothed his tension away.
Nikko shook his head to clear it. He had enough to worry about with the show and getting his daughter healthy, to stop and engage in frivolous thoughts about a woman who wouldn’t even smile at him.
He looked across the table at his daughter. “She’ll be working the same way I will, and she probably won’t even sit down to eat.”
The teen slumped back in the chair, her arms still crossed over her chest, and heaved a dramatic sigh.
Nikko took a moment before speaking. Yelling was the wrong way to deal with his daughter, he knew that. In a much more controlled tone, he said, “This is my job, Melora. It’s my show and that means I need to be present during every facet of it. Working and overseeing everything. Me. Not a producer.”
“But—”
“No. No buts. Or any other arguments. This subject is closed. Do you understand me? Closed.”
He rose from the table, grabbed both their plates, and brought them to the sink. He hated that he couldn’t just let her be and not have to worry that if left alone she’d spend the evening trying to purge the small amount she’d eaten.
“I’ll wash them,” Melora said in a soft voice shouting with contrition from behind him. “It’s my turn.”
He took a deep breath before shifting out of the way and turned around.
One look at her sad and miserable expression and his heart shattered.
Again, that she was neither adult nor child, broke through him. With a gentle yank on her emaciated arm he pulled her into a hug, settling her head on his shoulder.
As his hands rubbed down her back and skimmed across the spiny protrusions of her spinal column, worry flooded through him.
“I love you, Melora. More than anything. You know that, right?”
“I know.” She’d shifted her head, buried her face against his shoulder, her response muffled by his shirt. “Love you too.”
“I just want you to be happy. And healthy,” he added.
“I’m trying.” He felt the sigh, deep and troubled, expel from her.
He kissed the top of her head. “I know, kid. I know you are. We’ll figure it all out. You and me.”
“Promise?” When she sniffed he hugged her a little tighter.
“Promise.”