Snap out of it, Lexie. Head in the game.
Number three hit the tabletop with a thud, spinning in lopsided circles for a few seconds. Clearly Tom hadn’t thought much of it either.
The fourth sauce vaulted them from the farm team straight to the big leagues. The bottle promised a “venomous extract,” and once she’d chewed enough to bring the flavor into contact with her taste buds, she did indeed feel as if she’d been snake-bit. Her mouth watered, which was no big deal, but her eyes watered, too, and Tom noticed and smiled again, damn him. Lexie drew a deep breath into her lungs, her sinuses as roomy as they’d ever been, and swallowed the tasty, fiery lump. Pointing her finger, she dispatched the bottle with a silent bam. She even managed to count to ten before picking up her beer and draining what was left of it in five long swallows.
Your turn, cowboy.
After the snake-bite chip passed into his mouth, depositing a bit of salt at one corner of his lips, she waited for Tom to faint, flap his hand in front of his face, turn red, something, but he ate it as impassively as if it had been covered in cheese. His eyes didn’t even water. Possibly his nostrils flared slightly, but that could just as easily have been her imagination. And once he’d swallowed the chip, he pursed his lips, scratched his chin thoughtfully, and reached for another one. If they’d been speaking to each other, he’d have said “Mmm” as the second chip loaded with snake sauce made its way into his mouth. Instead, he said it with his eyes. Mmm.
He was mocking her. He knocked the bottle down.
Number five promised enough heat to burn the paint off a Sherman tank. The first four sauces had awakened her senses, and now as Lexie dressed her chip she felt curiously switched on, aware of the conversations taking place at the tables around them and the cool, smooth feel of the glass bottle under her fingertips, the smell of onions on a grill back in the kitchen, and the scent of Tom across the table, all clean sweat and woodsy soap and something spicy that made her want to lean over and breathe him in while she licked that stray grain of salt off the corner of his mouth. Weren’t chili peppers an aphrodisiac? Was that why she was finding this whole exchange positively titillating?
Hard to say. Doesn’t matter. Focus on the chip, girl.
The paint-stripper sauce was incendiary. As soon as it touched her tongue, she broke out in a sweat, sucking air into her lungs and squirming in her seat while she chewed, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of squealing Omigod omigod omigod, even though she wanted to. She did bounce up and down in the booth a little bit, but only because she’d have passed out otherwise. Chew, chew, chew. Jeezy Pete, this was the world’s largest chip, how many more times was she going to have to chew the freaking thing before she could swallow it? Breathe in, breathe out, chew some more, and … there. She got it down. With both hands flat on the table and her eyelids squeezed shut, she focused on breathing and counted to twenty.
When she opened her eyes again, Tom caught her expression and burst out laughing. It was a low, rumbling laugh, as dead sexy as the rest of him. Yum. In a remarkably kind gesture under the circumstances, he passed his beer across the table to her. Lexie grabbed at it gratefully and knocked it back, a smile on her face as her mouth wrapped around the lip of the bottle where his tongue had recently been. She killed the beer, shot the paint-stripping sauce, and waited for Tom to take his turn. Her chest was heaving, her skin flushed, but she’d eaten the chip without saying a word, so she was still a contender.
Tom signaled the waitress, who brought them another round along with their burritos.
They ignored the food, both knowing the unwritten rules of this challenge forbade recreational eating until the contest had come to an end. Solemn as a gravedigger, Tom sauced up his chip and ate it. She waited. At first, nothing. Seriously? Nothing? He wasn’t going to react at all? But then she looked closer and recognized what was happening. Tom had turned to stone. His jaw was moving, his nostrils definitely flaring this time, but every other part of him had gone rigid, his biceps drawn taut and his fingers clamped tight around the edge of the table. He was in agony.
And forgive her for being a sadist, but it was sexy as all get-out. While Tom fought to keep his reaction on a tight leash, sweat beading at his temples, all she could think about was how much fun she’d be having if she were the one doing the torturing, how fantastic it would feel to push this man right past the bounds of his self-control. This was what Tom would look like right before he came. Yum.
He swallowed, and this time he did reach for his beer, drinking about half of it in one go. Then he flicked the paint-stripper sauce onto the table to join its fallen compatriots, leaving two men standing.
With growing apprehension, Lexie picked up Steve’s Ultra Hot Death Sauce. If the label spoke the truth, this stuff was eight hundred times hotter than a jalapeño. That was a lot of hot. But Tom was over there—rather a lot of hot himself—and he was smirking at her again, and she’d be damned if she’d back down now.
Lexie had a hard time getting the Death Sauce out of the bottle, and in the end she had to hand her chip to Tom and make him hold it while she whacked the glass with the heel of her hand. The result was a larger-than-strictly-necessary glob of hot sauce on the chip, but she forged ahead. Surely an extra eighth of a teaspoon wasn’t going to decide her fate. Tom fed the chip directly into her mouth, his dark eyes positively dancing with amusement.
As soon as the sauce hit her tongue, her taste buds dropped dead. You’d think that would be a good thing, but it didn’t make any difference, because on their way out those taste buds had rung the alarm, and now every nerve ending in her body was positively writhing in pain. Somewhere in the vicinity of her brain stem, a siren was going off so loudly she thought it might deafen her. Tears streaked down her face as she flapped her arms up and down helplessly like a giant flightless bird. Nose running, mouth full of napalm, she looked over at Tom. He was watching her closely, and his hand covered the bottom half of his face in a completely vain effort to conceal how very entertaining he found her predicament.
And she still hadn’t managed to start chewing.
All of her senses now pulled it together to deliver one urgent message: Spit it out spit it out spit it out spit it out!
No way was she spitting it out.
Eyes locked on Tom, Lexie took a deep breath, pinched her nostrils shut, and ground the chip to pulp between her molars. When she swallowed, the Death Sauce bolus incinerated her throat and blazed a trail toward her intestines, finally settling into position near her lungs, where it continued to send out steady licks of flame despite her attempts to douse it with the rest of her beer and a full glass of water.
It was now abundantly clear that this hot sauce duel was the stupidest idea she’d ever had. On the plus side, it was Tom’s turn. She drew her six-shooter on the Death Sauce bottle, curled her lip in disdain, and plugged it full of lead.
Tom had relaxed back in the booth, arms spread out along the top of the seat in a posture of sated sensuality. He couldn’t seem to stop smiling. Every time his face returned to neutral, his eyes sparked with a memory—presumably unflattering to Lexie—and his lips slowly curved their way upward again, his teeth peeking out, the laugh lines around his eyes crinkling. It was almost worth having choked down the Sterno chip to see him so happy for a change. Which was crazy, because she didn’t even like the guy, right?
Right. And now he was going to pay for mocking her. Leaning forward, she pushed the Death Sauce toward him.
Tom shook his head. “Oh no. I’m not eating that. I’m stubborn, but I’m not stupid.” He stuck his hand out. “You win. Well played, Marshall.”
“What?” Her voice came out a raspy croak. “You can’t quit now. It’s your turn!” She wasn’t ready to declare victory, not until Tom was brought to his knees. If he refused to eat the Death Sauce, he would be ending the contest on his own terms, which was the same as winning. True, she had him talking again. But he still had taste buds, which hardly seemed fair.
“I’m withdrawing,” he replied smoothly. Taking back his hand unshaken, he set the bottle of Death Sauce back in the caddy and picked up the seventh and final selection, Steve’s Stronger Than Death Hot Sauce. “I’ll eat this instead. It’s tasty.” And then he slid his plate over from the edge of the table, dispensed a small puddle of hot sauce onto the edge, dipped the corner of his burrito into it, and started to eat, his appetite apparently as healthy as ever.
“But that one’s supposed to be worse!”
“Nah, it’s all smoke and mirrors. Number six was the real killer.”
Lexie glared at him. “You knew.”