Ever since then, Emma couldn’t remember not being on a diet. Food restriction and exercise were as much a part of her life as Sunday brunch with her parents.
She picked up her fork and small talk commenced again, mostly centering on how good Steven had
looked last week when her father took care of some business with him. Her parents still fawned all over her ex-husband, and Emma sat as still as a rock, taking the familiar family scene in, not saying a word (no one expected her to, anyway).
Yet, at the same time, she wasn’t really seeing her parents. Wasn’t really listening to what they were saying. Because suddenly, Emma couldn’t suffer through one more Sunday brunch. Not without rocking the boat at least once in her life.
Feeling reckless, she said, “The funniest thing happened to me at the reunion last night,” she began, waiting for her parents to ask her to tell them more. But it was as if she hadn’t even spoken. Her mother got up to refill her father’s wineglass and he started another boring tale about golfing with some old cronies from work.
How long had she been living like this? With no one paying the least bit of attention to what she had to say? Dozens of Sunday brunches blurred before her, all exactly the same. With Emma playing the part of the quiet, good girl, who never did or said anything to upset anyone.
Well, not this time.
“I hooked up with an old boyfriend by the lake,” she stated, knowing that this would have to get her parents’ attention.
But again, it was as if she hadn’t spoken.
Spying the bottle of ranch dressing on the table that only her father was permitted to eat, she picked it up and doused her salad with it. Spearing several leaves completely covered with the goopy dressing, she shoved them into her mouth.
Her mother turned to her then, noticing her presence for the first time in minutes. Emma knew then that while she might be invisible to her parents, Jane’s “fat” radar could catch anything.
But Emma had already hit her limit. “Excuse me,” she said to no one in particular as she got up from the table.
Walter continued eating his roast, carefully cutting bitesized pieces off with his knife and fork, chewing them with great concentration, then starting all over again.
The pinprick of pain turned into a bullet hole in Emma’s heart. Being with Jason, even if just for one fleeting night, had brought her this vision, this ability to see so many things she wished she could ignore.
She hadn’t been just content with Jason. She’d been ecstatic. Full of passion. And delight. And life.
And fear. So much fear of doing the wrong thing. Of disappointing everyone. And losing their love.
“Good-bye,” she said quietly. Thankfully, no one followed her out to the car. She hadn’t thought they would, of course, given that the roast would just get colder.
Emma drove away, in no particular direction, gulping air into her lungs. Drowning, she always felt like she was drowning in her parents’ house. She remembered the summer she was thirteen and it felt like a watermelon was crushing her rib cage, all day, all night. She woke up gasping for breath, weighed down by the expectations of her parents, of their world, to forgo a messy adolescence. To be the perfect young lady. Now here she was, thirty-two years old, and she might as well be thirteen again for all that had changed.
Change. She had to make a change. And Emma knew exactly what she had to do. Exactly who she had to run to.
Jason. She had to see Jason again.
Just one more time.
She knew he might reject her. But for the first time in her life, Emma wasn’t going to back down from a challenge.
She was going to drive ninety minutes to Napa to beg Jason for forgiveness. To ask him if they could start over.
Emma was thoroughly sick of her boring, whitewashed life. And if, along the way, she happened to make her parents angry enough to notice her existence, well, that would be a bonus, wouldn’t it?
It was now or never.
And Emma was choosing now.
Six
What’s your problem, boss?”
Jason didn’t bother acknowledging his souschef’s question as he lifted his cleaver and hacked through a thick chicken bone, dispassionately splitting it in two clean halves. But Rocco was undeterred.
“I’ve never seen you get so twisted up over a woman,” Rocco said, a note of laughter embedded in his words.
Jason carefully laid the cleaver down. “What makes you think my mood has anything to do with a
woman?”
Jason was a fair boss, a phenomenal restaurateur, but never a man you could push around. Anyone else in the kitchen would have backed down. But not Rocco. They’d worked together for too many years, outrun too many fires while watching each other’s backs. In truth, they were far more like brothers than boss and employee.
“Remember that summer I met you when you were washing dishes at that fleapit Mexican place in San Francisco? Must have been ten years ago. And that pretty little blonde came looking for you. You look the same now as you did then. Like you’ve been marinating in raw sewage.”
“I’m good,” Jason ground out before walking out of the kitchen into the back alley. He sat down on an upside down milk crate and stared out at what had to be the best, and most unexpected, behind-the-restaurant view in the world: a lush vineyard.
The best decision he’d ever made had been moving to Napa Valley to open his first restaurant. Cravings had taken off faster than Jason could have ever imagined. A four-star review in theNew York Times coupled with positive online commentary from Thomas Keller, who owned one of the world’s best
restaurants, The French Laundry, in nearby Yountville, had turned Jason into an overnight superstar.
His worst decision…hunting Emma down at the reunion. And then kissing her and touching her and
slipping inside her wet heat.
If he’d been smart, he would have left well enough alone. Shit, if he’d been really smart he never would have talked to her that first day of freshman year when she looked so scared. And so stunning she took his breath away.
“Hey, boss.” Rocco stuck his head into the alley. “Someone’s here to see you.”
Emma. By the bemused tone of Rocco’s voice, it had to be Emma. A part of him couldn’t believe that she’d actually have the nerve to come to Napa, to his restaurant. But the other part—the stupid part—
wanted it to be her.
Something simmered deep in Jason’s gut. Lust and irritation warred with one another. Funny how one bad decision just kept coming back to bite a guy in the ass.