Spicing It Up. Tanya Michaels

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      An appetizer is the first impression—that simple yet delicious moment when your eyes meet across the room and zing!

      Six months later

      THE PROBLEM WITH temporary insanity is that it’s temporary. Eventually it wears off and you’re left with “What have I done?” Such was the case with me this fine afternoon in mid-January.

      Spicy Seas was closed on Tuesdays, so I sat in the empty tavern where Amanda worked. Since the bar didn’t open until happy hour and the early-shift waitress had called in sick, the place was deserted except for me, Amanda and a hunky bar-back named Todd. They were setting up for this evening’s business, and I was swiveling listlessly on one of the stools lined up at the polished teak counter that ran the length of the wall. I glanced past Amanda, a shag-cut strawberry-blonde since Christmas, to the mirrored paneling, trying to reconcile my reflection with the author of the sexy book that would be on shelves at the beginning of February.

      What I saw was a woman with stick-straight, shoulder-length hair, a bulky blue cable-knit sweater, and a disbelieving look in her puppy-dog brown eyes.

      You’d think I would have adjusted by now to Hargrave NonFiction’s remarkably fast decision to buy Six Course Seduction—once I’d given them the hook they’d needed, they’d jumped on the idea and rushed it into production to get it out for Valentine’s Day marketing. The sale hadn’t quite seemed real when I’d fielded the call from my editor saying they wanted to contract the cookbook and a follow-up, but I’d started to believe it was going to happen after I’d flown to New York in the fall to discuss the release and promotion schedule. However, any adjustment I’d finally made to impending publication, or to my book’s racy new subtitle, had been rendered null and void by the arrival of the dust jacket this morning.

      Six Course Seduction: From Hors D’Oeuvres to Orgasm. The cover was currently tucked in the manila folder I’d brought with me, but the image lingered like a visual aftertaste.

      While Amanda sliced limes behind the bar, I mulled over Miriam Scott printed in immediate large-font proximity to the word orgasm. Though I was panicking in reserved silence, my feelings must have been clear in my expression. Or dazed lack thereof.

      “You’re overreacting,” Amanda chided. “I kind of like it.”

      “Your name won’t be on it.” I clutched the folder closer to me as if Todd might have X-ray vision.

      I had known the publisher would go with a provocative cover, of course. Provocation was the entire point of the chattier revised version, at least as far as marketing was concerned. But not even my editor, Joan, calling to say, “Now, Miriam, don’t freak out,” had prevented my freaking out.

      Against the scarlet background was a neck to mid-thigh photograph of a curvy and airbrushed nude woman. In place of the slim black censor bars you would see on network television, there were a couple of strategically located food items—luckily nothing as cliché and truck-stop stripper as a whipped-cream bikini. The pictures were starker and more suited to my hot recipes. For instance, the single digitally enlarged habanero serving as a fig leaf. If it had been even a millimeter to the left or right, they would have to sell my book in a plastic wrapper.

      I sighed. “You don’t look at it and think, porno with peppers?”

      At Amanda’s snort of laughter, Todd paused in his trek to the back storage room for more ice, sending a brief worshipful glance over his broad shoulder. She ignored the adoring expression, much as she had the other nine million I’d witnessed in the month he’d worked here.

      “It’s not pornographic,” she said when we were alone. “I thought the picture had an artistic simplicity. There are people who would pay good money to hang that in their homes.”

      “Yeah, but there are people who like instant mashed potatoes, too.” No accounting for taste.

      She rolled her eyes, handing me a stack of napkins. “Here, make yourself useful.”

      I began restocking the clustered metal holders Todd would place on the tables throughout the bar’s large one-room interior. Maybe Amanda was right about the artwork being tasteful, excuse the pun. The sensuality in the picture could be viewed as understated…in a bright red, naked kind of way.

      “What did you think the book was going to look like?” Amanda asked reasonably.

      I ran a hand through my hair. “I hadn’t got that far yet.” Some days, I couldn’t even believe what I’d written, much less imagine it in bookstores across the country.

      Ever since I’d received the call that my recipes would be published—actively promoted, according to the in-house publicist scheduling my upcoming appearances—I’d waffled between pride and the fear that no one in the restaurant community would take me seriously again. Which would be a real problem if the escalating tension at work led to my looking for a new job. Trevor and I had not transitioned well from lovers to platonic employee and employer. We had, however, mastered the intricacies of platonic employee and horse’s rear end.

      Maybe I should quit, but head-chef jobs don’t drop into a woman’s lap. And why the hell should I walk away when I’d invested as much as he had in the restaurant? Granted, not in the monetary sense, but in more personal ways. I just hadn’t anticipated his recent petty acts of emotional sabotage and passive-aggressiveness.

      Now that he no longer had any input on the cookbook, he’d done his best to distance himself from the project. After he’d heard about the racy concept through the industry grapevine, he’d assured me—wearing his best Poor Baby face—that my culinary skills were enough to gain back my reputation if the book flopped and made me a laughingstock. In front of my kitchen crew, he treated me with exaggerated courtesy, giving others the impression that I might still be grief-stricken by his defection and should be handled with kid gloves, which undermined my authority. And he was dating a young blond chef who had worked at a Charleston inn until the place had been mismanaged into a temporary closing, due to reopen in the spring. Clearly Blondie had the image Trevor sought for his love life…and maybe in his restaurant?

      “Miriam? Are you aware you’re grinding your teeth?” Amanda asked.

      I stopped abruptly. “Sorry. Thinking about Trevor has that effect.”

      Amanda set down her knife, her gaze as sharp as the blade. “Why are you even wasting thoughts on that cad? I know I don’t have a lot of experience with sustained relationships, but you can’t tell me there was anything there worth missing.”

      “No, that’s definitely not the problem.” Miss him? Ha! The more I was around him and his current attitude, the more I wondered how I had allowed myself to go out with him in the first place. It was like looking back on some flavorless, overprocessed, disgustingly fatty junk food you prized as a kid that would turn your stomach if you tried it as an adult.

      “So what’s up, then?” Amanda prompted. “Come on, talk to me. It’s what people do in bars.”

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