house in Ocean City, New Jersey.” He added his ring finger—damned significant, now that he thought about it—to the others. “And number three…” He smiled. “Number three, Anabel Carlisle. Of the Park Avenue Carlisles.”
“You’re my new chef?”
Hogan eyed the young woman in his kitchen—his massive, white-enamel-and-blue-Italian-tile kitchen that would have taken up two full bays in his garage—with much suspicion. Chloe Merlin didn’t look like she was big enough to use blunt-tip scissors, let alone wield a butcher knife. She couldn’t be more than five-four in her plastic red clogs—Hogan knew this, because she stood nearly a foot shorter than him—and she was swallowed by her oversize white chef’s jacket and the baggy pants splattered with red chili peppers.
It was her gigantic glasses, he decided. Black-rimmed and obviously a men’s style, they overwhelmed her features, making her green eyes appear huge. Or maybe it was the way her white-blond hair was piled haphazardly on top of her head as if she’d just grabbed it in two fists and tied it there without even looking to see what she was doing. Or it could be the red lipstick. It was the only makeup she wore, as if she’d filched it from her mother’s purse to experiment with. She just looked so…so damned…
Ah, hell. Adorable. She looked adorable. And Hogan hated even thinking that word in his head.
Chloe Merlin was supposed to be his secret weapon in the winning of Anabel Carlisle of the Park Avenue Carlisles. But seeing her now, he wondered if she could even help him win bingo night at the Queensboro Elks Lodge. She had one hand wrapped around the handle of a duffel bag and the other steadying what looked like a battered leather bedroll under her arm—except it was too skinny to be a bedroll. Sitting beside her on the kitchen island was a gigantic wooden box filled with plants of varying shapes and sizes that he was going to go out on a limb and guess were herbs or something. All of the items in question were completely out of proportion to the rest of her. She just seemed…off. As if she’d been dragged here from another dimension and was still trying to adjust to some new laws of physics.
“How old are you?” he asked before he could stop himself.
“Why do you want to know?” she shot back. “It’s against the law for you to consider my age as a prerequisite of employment. I could report you to the EEOC. Not the best way to start my first day of work.”
He was about to tell her it could be her last day of work, too, if she was going to be like that, but she must have realized what he was thinking and intercepted.
“If you fire me now, after asking me a question like that, I could sue you. You wouldn’t have a legal leg to stand on.”
Wow. Big chip for such a little shoulder.
“I’m curious,” he said. Which he realized was true. There was just something about her that made a person feel curious.
Her enormous glasses had slipped down on her nose, so she pushed them up again with the back of her hand. “I’m twenty-eight,” she said. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
Chloe Merlin must be a hell of a cook. ’Cause there was no way she’d become the most sought-after personal chef on Park Avenue as a result of her charming personality. But to Hogan’s new social circle, she was its latest, and most exclusive, status symbol.
After he’d told Gus Fiver his reasons for wanting to “buy” Anabel that first day in his garage—man, had that been three weeks ago?—the attorney had given him some helpful information. Gus was acquainted with the Carlisles and knew Anabel was the current employer of one Chloe Merlin, personal chef to the rich and famous. In fact, she was such a great chef that, ever since her arrival on the New York scene five years ago, she’d been constantly hired away from one wealthy employer to another, always getting a substantial pay increase in the bargain. Poaching Chloe from whoever employed her was a favorite pastime of the Park Avenue crowd, Gus had said, and Anabel Carlisle was, as of five months prior, the most recent victor in the game. If Hogan was in the market for someone to cook for him—and hey, who wasn’t?—then hiring Chloe away from Anabel would get the latter’s attention and give him a legitimate reason to reenter her life.
Looking at the chef now, however, Hogan was beginning to wonder if maybe Park Avenue’s real favorite pastime was yanking the chain of the new guy, and Gus Fiver was the current victor in that game. It had cost him a fortune to hire Chloe, and some of her conditions of employment were ridiculous. Not to mention she looked a little…quirky. Hogan hated quirky.
“If you want to eat tonight, you should show me my room,” she told him in that same cool, shoulder-chip voice. “Your kitchen will be adequate for my needs, but I need to get to work. Croque monsieur won’t make itself, you know.”
Croque monsieur, Hogan repeated to himself. Though not with the flawless French accent she’d used. What the hell was croque monsieur? Was he going to be paying her a boatload of money to cook him things he didn’t even like? Because he’d be fine with a ham and cheese sandwich.
Then the other part of her statement registered. The kitchen was adequate? Was she serious? She could feed Liechtenstein in this kitchen. Hell, Liechtenstein could eat off the floor of this kitchen. She could bake Liechtenstein a soufflé the size of Switzerland in one oven while she broiled them an entire swordfish in the other. Hogan had barely been able to find her in here after Mrs. Hennessey, his inherited housekeeper, told him his new chef was waiting for him.
Adequate. Right.
“Your room is, uh… It’s, um…”
He halted. His grandfather’s Lenox Hill town house was big enough to qualify for statehood, and he’d just moved himself into it yesterday. He barely knew where his own room was. Mrs. Hennessey went home at the end of the workday, but she’d assured him there were “suitable quarters” for an employee here. She’d even shown him the room, and he’d thought it was pretty damned suitable. But he couldn’t remember now if it was on the fourth floor or the fifth. Depended on whether his room was on the third floor or the fourth.
“Your room is upstairs,” he finally said, sidestepping the problem for a few minutes. He’d recognize the floor when he got there. Probably. “Follow me.”
Surprisingly, she did without hesitation, leaving behind her leather bedroll-looking thing and her gigantic box of plants—that last probably to arrange later under the trio of huge windows on the far side of the room. They strode out of the second-floor kitchen and into a gallery overflowing with photos and paintings of people Hogan figured must be blood relations. Beyond the gallery was the formal dining room, which he had yet to enter.
He led Chloe up a wide, semicircular staircase that landed on each floor—there was an elevator in the house, too, but the stairs were less trouble—until they reached the third level, then the fourth, where he was pretty sure his room was. Yep. Fourth floor was his. He recognized the massive, mahogany-paneled den. Then up another flight to the fifth, and top, floor, which housed a wide sitting area flanked by two more bedrooms that each had connecting bathrooms bigger than the living room of his old apartment over the garage.
Like he said, pretty damned suitable.
“This is your room,” he told Chloe. He gestured toward the one on the right after remembering that was the one Mrs. Hennessey had shown him, telling him it was the bigger of the two and had
