Espresso Shot

“Well, I wouldn’t blame you. She’s been chewing my ear off about it, too. For months.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay...”

I moved back to the espresso machine, unlocked the portafilter handle, dumped the packed cake of grounds into the under-counter garbage, then moved to rinse the filter in the small sink. The mochaccino order appeared to be my last of the evening. Gardner Evans was due to relieve me any minute, and most of the twenty marble-topped cafe tables were empty, which was typical for a Monday evening in April. The tourists wouldn’t start flowing back into the historic district for at least another month.

“Anyway,” I told Matt, “all of us have enough to do this week to keep us out of trouble. You’ve got your pals flying here from every country of the coffee belt, don’t you?”

“Practically. They’ll be arriving all week, but I’ll see most of them as a group on Thursday.”

“At your mother’s luncheon?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re going to have a bachelor party with them, too, right?”

“A bachelor party?” Matt snorted. “She would murder me if I had a bachelor party! Didn’t I mention that?”

“She who? Your mother?”

“My bride-to-be.”

“Breanne would murder you? Just for having a bachelor party?”

Matt slipped off his exquisite Armani blazer and laid it carefully on the high bar chair next to him. As he rolled up his sleeves, my gaze drifted up his tanned, sculpted forearms to the open neck of his fashionably tie-free dress shirt.

For as long as I’d known him, Matteo Allegro had been his own man, a hiking-booted, extreme sports-loving explorer. Ever since his involvement with Breanne, however, I swear my ex had been fitted with an invisible collar and leash (compliments of some name designer, of course).

“You want a double, right?” I said, moving back to the espresso machine.

“Single.”

“But you usually have a doppio espresso at this hour.”

“Single. That’s what I want.”

“O-kay,” I said.

I ran the burr grinder, which I’d set up earlier with some very special beans, and wondered if a drink order could be Freudian. “Set me straight here. If ‘what Breanne doesn’t know won’t hurt her’ when it comes to your bedding down upstairs, then why don’t you feel the same way about a bachelor party with your buddies?”

“Because what Breanne doesn’t know will become known if paparazzi take embarrassing photos of the thing and post them on the Net. Or worse, sell them to ‘Gotham Gossip.’ ”

“Oh, I see. So it’s more like what Randall Knox doesn’t know won’t hurt her?”

“Right again.”

Knox was the New York Journal’s new “Gotham Gossip” column editor. I’d never met the man, but Tucker Burton, my actor/playwright assistant manager with an unhealthy appetite for celebrity prattle, had warned me already about the guy’s rep:

“Knox is wired into this town, Clare. They say he has tentacles running around every New York inside track. And when those slithery limbs retract, look out!”

“Look out?” I said. “For what?”

“Bombshells, sweetie. Usually scandalous, always readable!”

“Damn the man,” Matt muttered. “Did you know Breanne has some sort of history with him?”

“History?” I said. “What do you mean, history? Were they lovers?”

“No. Bree says their relationship was professional. That’s all I know. That’s all she’ll tell me. Either way, the prick’s only too happy to publish dirt on her—”

“Or you,” I noted.

Matt shook his head. “You don’t know the half of it...”

“What do you mean? Are you talking about that snarky item Knox published on Joy?”

Our daughter had been arrested for a terrible crime a few months back. When the news broke, there was enough dirt to fill ten pages, let alone a single gossip feature. Strangely, however, Randall Knox spent some of those precious column inches pretzeling his report so he could embarrass Breanne, and even Matt, whom he described not as an international coffee broker but as “Breanne Summour’s flavor of the month.”

“It has nothing to do with that item on Joy,” Matt assured me. Then he sighed and ran a hand through his short, dark Caesar. “I don’t want to alarm you or anything—”

Few things alarmed me more than my ex saying, “I don’t want to alarm you.”

“—but Knox has got some photographer trailing me around the city, waiting for me to do something embarrassing. Breanne saw the man stalking me one night. She knows he works for Knox.”

“What?!”

Matt lowered his voice. “It’s one of the reasons I’m bunking with you, if you want to know the truth. This is my place of business, so my being here is nothing unusual. All I have to do at the end of the night is take the back stairs up to the apartment, and I’ll have my privacy.”

“And I thought you were ducking a fat hotel bill.”

“Well, that, too, honestly.”

“So what does this photographer of Knox’s think he’s going to get by following you around?”

Matt sighed. “He snapped me just the other day, picking up a magazine from a newsstand.”

“So?”

“So, it was Maxim.”

I rolled my eyes. “Big deal.”

“I know. It’s ridiculous, right?”

“Your picking up a lads’ magazine is not scandalous behavior. Thousands of men do the same thing every day!”

“I know, but you see my problem, don’t you? I could stay in a hotel, but then some pretty young thing might ask me for directions or the time of day near my room door or the elevators that go up to my room, and bam, a photo’s snapped, a suggestive caption’s written, and my wedding’s off.”

I frowned. “Matt, if you’re really on solid ground with Breanne, one stupid photo in a tabloid shouldn’t change it.”

“Forget it, Clare. You just don’t understand.”

“Apparently not.”

I turned my attention back to pulling Matt’s shot—something I did understand, thank you very much. After dosing and tamping the fragrant black sand into the portafilter, I locked the handle, pressed the Go button, and began to monitor the extraction process. As high-pressure steam released oils from the finely ground beans, I began to feel better. The aromatics were soothing. They were also very different from the caramelized earthiness of our regular house roast. Sweet and light, these very special beans flaunted naked floral notes, and (to my olfactory nerves, anyway) traces of jasmine, honey, and bergamot.

Within twenty-five seconds, the potable perfume was nearly finished oozing out of the machine’s spout, a fine-looking crema topping it off like a perfectly pulled dark beer. I stopped the pull, placed the Village Blend demitasse on its matching saucer, and slid the single shot across the blueberry marble counter.

Matt regarded his shot. “Where’s my lemon twist?”

I smiled. “You won’t need it.”

The espresso method actually wasn’t the best way to serve these particular beans. A French pressed or brewed method would have been better at bringing out the amazing flavor characteristics in the single-origin cherries. (And since we’d finally invested in two $11,000 Clover machines for the shop, I could have perfectly brewed Matt a single cup.) But I couldn’t resist the surprise factor.

Matt gave me a skeptical look until he sniffed his drink. Then one dark eyebrow rose. “This isn’t our house espresso roast.”