underneath the slick exterior the old Rob was all still there.
She could see it in the way he walked. The swagger. The attitude and that arrogant lift of his head that made him look like a captain of some sailing ship, looking out over the ocean for pirate ships loaded with treasure.
He had not changed that much since their last meeting almost three years earlier.
When he had fired her from her very first catering job.
Just thinking about that day was enough for an ice cube large enough to sink the Titanic to form in the pit of her stomach.
She had only been working as an apprentice in the Beresford hotel kitchen for three months when the mighty Rob Beresford had burst into the kitchen and demanded that the idiot who had made the chocolate dessert go out into the dining room and apologise in person to the diner on his table who had almost broken his teeth on the rock-hard pastry he had just been served.
Apparently Rob had been totally humiliated and embarrassed. So he’d needed a scapegoat to blame for the screw-up.
In one glance the head pastry chef had nodded in her direction and the next thing she’d known Rob had grabbed the front of her chef’s coat and used it to haul her up to his face so close that she could feel his hot, angry, brutal breath on her cheek. His anger and recrimination had been spat out in the words that would be burnt into her heart and her mind for the rest of her career.
‘Get out of my kitchen and back to your finishing school, you pathetic excuse for a chef. You don’t have what it takes to be in this business so leave now and save us all a lot of wasted time. Nobody humiliates me and gets away with it.’
Then he’d flung his hands back from her jacket so quickly that she had almost fallen and had had to grab hold of the steel workbench as Rob had stabbed the air. ‘I don’t want to see you here tomorrow. Got it?’
Oh, she’d got it, all right. She’d understood perfectly how unfair and how prejudiced these chefs were. She had waited until the sous chefs had stopped fawning at him and plated up new desserts before slipping out to grab her coat and escape from the back door before the pastry chef, skanky Debra, who had been so drunk that she could barely stand never mind make decent pâté sucrée that evening, could say another word.
From that moment she had vowed to be her own boss. No matter what.
Which begged the question...what was he doing here tonight? In an art gallery of all places? Buying art for the restaurants? That was possible, but not fine art. No, it was much more likely that there was someone in the room who could advance his career in some way.
See and be seen was Rob Beresford’s motto. It always had been, and from what she had seen of him in the press and TV, nothing had changed. And if he had to pretend to have some knowledge of the pieces, well, that was a small price for his personal advancement.
The humiliating thing was he did not seem to have recognised her. She had been consigned to the box where all of the other sacked apprentices went to be forgotten. And she had absolutely no intention of reminding him.
Lottie ran one hand over the back of her neck to lift her hair away from her suddenly burning skin as a flash of anger shot through her.
Rob’s powerful, low voice seemed to resonate inside her head and a whole flutter of butterflies came to life in her stomach.
His presence filled the space between them and she felt crowded out, squeezed between the ivory-painted wall and the bench. Last time he had towered over her, his eyes like burning lasers, and she refused to let that happen again.
Not going to happen. This time she was the one who glared at him face-to-face.
Hard angles defined his jawline and cheekbones but they only made the lushness of his full mouth even more pronounced.
At some point his nose had been broken, creating a definite twist just below the bridge. Thank heaven for that.
Otherwise this Rob Beresford had all the credentials for being even more gorgeous than the last time that they had met.
As Rob reached for a champagne flute the fine fabric of his shirt stretched over the valleys and mounds of his chest muscles, which came from a lifetime of hard work rather than lifting weights in a city gym. There really was no justice—that a man who could create dishes as he could was good-looking, too.
Shame that he knew it.
In one smooth movement he pushed the sleeve of his designer dinner jacket farther up his left arm, revealing a curving, dark tattoo that ran up from his wrist. It seemed to match the design that peeked out in the deep V of the crisp white dinner shirt he was wearing unbuttoned. No tie.
For a tiny fraction of a second Lottie wondered what the rest of the design looked like on that powerful chest. Then she pushed the thought away. Body art on a chef? Oh, that made perfect sense...not.
Typical exhibitionist. Just one more way to draw attention to himself.
In the small world of high-level cooking it would be impossible not to run into Rob Beresford at the many chef award ceremonies where she was with the lesser mortals sitting in the back row.
And of course there was his TV show. It took guts to walk into a strange kitchen and tell the chef that the way they had been running their restaurant needed to be turned around and he had all the answers.
The TV audience could not get enough of the fireworks and tears and family trauma that came with having a complete stranger telling you how to run your life after years and years of working day and night. It had to be the third or fourth season. Why did these places apply? Madness. She certainly would never do it.
He was precisely the kind of man she had come to despise for the games that he liked to play with other people’s lives. Pushing them around. Uncaring and selfish.
Harsh? Maybe. But true all the same.
What had she promised herself the day she walked out of the bank? No more lies. No more kidding yourself. No more second best. And no more putting up with other people’s games.
Rob Beresford was a player.
And she had no intention of being part of his little game.
Then he lifted his head and looked at her. No. More than that. He seemed to be studying her. She had been expecting those famous piercing cobalt-blue eyes to give her the beauty-parade head-to-toe assessment.
He didn’t. His gaze was locked on to her face as though he was searching for something, and finding it. Because one corner of his mouth turned up into just the hint of a smile, which only drew her attention to that kissable mouth.
‘I think we have met before somewhere, but I am embarrassed to say that I have forgotten your name. Can you help?’
His voice was hot chocolate sauce on top of the best butterscotch ice cream and had all the potential to make her silly girl heart spin just fast enough to make breathing a challenge. More American than it used to be but that was hardly surprising. In fact, if anything, that trace of an accent only added to the allure.
Could she what? Oh, was that the best he could do? Try and make her feel guilty for causing him embarrassment?
She
