gotten his hair cut before today. It was going to be flopping down onto his forehead all day. After cleaning the sink and counter with a disinfecting wipe, he straightened the hand towels one more time.
He jumped at the rifle-shot sound of the knock on the front door. When he opened it, a plain woman of indeterminate age wearing a Channel Six–logoed Windbreaker stood on the other side.
She extended her right hand. “Major O’Hara? I’m Pricilla Wilson. We spoke on the phone yesterday.”
“Yes. Please come in.” He stepped out of the doorway into the space between his living room and dining area.
The cameraman who’d come with Alaine to the tasting last week entered behind her, pushing a cart piled with equipment cases.
“Can I help with anything?”
The cameraman grunted, which Major took as a no, and Major pointed him toward the kitchen.
“While he sets up the lights and cameras, let’s sit and discuss the plan for today.” Pricilla pulled out one of the chairs and sat at the table, scattering a stack of papers all over it in a matter of seconds. “We’ve got a lot of stuff to film and not a lot of time to do it.”
Eight hours sounded like quite a lot of time to Major.
“The girl doing your hair and makeup will be here in about forty-five minutes—”
“Hey, Priss”—the camera guy came around the corner—“you’d better come look.”
Major followed them but stood in the hallway outside the kitchen, since three people wouldn’t fit.
Pricilla hit a couple of keys on her phone and pressed it to her ear. “Hey, it’s me. We’ve got no joy here.”
Mortification rang in Major’s ears and burned every surface of his body.
“Kitchen’s way too small for the equipment we need for filming.” Pricilla came out of the kitchen to pace the length of the living room. “Of course not. We expected a chef would have at least a decent home kitchen.... You want what?”
She brushed past Major again and pulled the phone away from her ear. “Nelson, pack it all up. We’re going.” Back to the person on the other end of the phone, she said, “Yeah. We’ll see you in about twenty minutes.”
Major followed her back to the dining table, where she scraped up all her papers—and the placemat.
He reached over and rescued the mat. “What’s going on?”
She stuffed the papers into her bag. “We can’t shoot here. Your kitchen’s too small. So we’re taking all this elsewhere.”
“Where?”
“Alaine’s place.”
Major stopped cold. “Where?”
“Alaine Delacroix’s place. She thinks her kitchen will work better, so bring what you might need that she may not have, and let’s get going. We’re on a tight schedule today.” Pricilla turned her back on him and made another phone call.
Major had to wait until Nelson got all of his equipment cases out of the kitchen before he could go in. He looked around for what to take with him and grabbed his knife case right away. No chef ever went anywhere without his knives. But what about everything else? Food processor, blender, steamer, butane warmers...
The whole point of what they were doing today was to familiarize people with stuff they already had in their home kitchens. What better way to do that than in the kitchen of someone who didn’t have professional-quality products? He tucked his knife case into his duffel bag and joined the production assistant and cameraman at the door.
“I’ll follow you over there.” He locked the door behind them and trailed them out to the parking lot where, this time, Nelson accepted his help in loading all of the equipment back into their van.
The van headed toward Old Towne and into an older part of the townhouse development where Forbes lived. Major had looked at a couple of units here when he’d moved back to town, but even though he’d much preferred the kitchens, the price on his condo had been more palatable.
He parked one space away from the van to give them room for taking equipment out, just as a small, sporty Mazda with dark windows pulled into the driveway at the townhouse across the roadway.
Alaine sprang out of the little black car—but if Major hadn’t known she was meeting them here, he might not have recognized her. Dressed in jeans and a black sweater, she wore her hair pulled up at the back of her head haphazardly as if done on the fly, and she didn’t have any makeup on, making her look pale and wan.
“I had a great idea on the way over here.” Alaine jogged across the street to help with equipment. “Hey, Major.”
“Hi, Alaine.”
“What’s this idea?” Pricilla asked.
“Were you working at the Food Network when Gordon Elliott did that show where he went around and dropped in on people and made a meal from whatever they had in their kitchens?”
“That was before my time, but I watched it pretty regularly.” Pricilla heaved a large case onto the cart. “You want him to do something like that?”
Major loved being talked about as if he weren’t standing right there with them.
“Similar idea. What if he were to fix a meal just from whatever I have on hand in my kitchen? He could explain what he’s doing but also go ahead and give recipes and tips and a cooking demonstration along the way.” Alaine finally turned to acknowledge his presence. “What do you think?”
Considering he hadn’t wanted to do this in the first place? “Sounds like it would be better than me trying to demonstrate how different things work or explain what they’re used for.”
“Try to use as much of the stuff that I have in my kitchen as you can—there are a bunch of things in there that I don’t even know what they are. My mom gives me stuff for my kitchen every year on my birthday and at Christmas. I guess she hopes I’ll eventually stop hating to cook and start using all of it.” She wrinkled her nose like Samantha on
He couldn’t help but laugh. Why did everyone he know hate to cook? “I’ll see what I can do. But if you don’t like cooking, am I going to have any ingredients to work with?”
“I went to the grocery store last night. I always have the greatest intentions, but I never follow through. Fortunately, Mama likes my kitchen better than her own, so she usually comes over one night during the week and cooks up a bunch of meals for me.”
Oh, to have a mother who could do stuff like that without burning down the building. “Great. Let’s go see what you have, and I’ll come up with a menu.”
He followed Alaine through the one-car garage—which was empty, so it looked as if she actually used it for her car—up several steps, and into a utility room/pantry. He stopped and looked at the dry goods on the shelves. Flour, sugar, baking powder and soda, spices, dried herbs, canned vegetables and fruits, and cereal—lots of cereal.
Alaine’s cheeks were red when he finished his perusal. “I’m a big cereal-for-supper girl. And breakfast.”
Meredith had been that way, too, until he’d stepped in and started making sure she had decent meals to take home with her every day. “Show me to your kitchen.”
Jealousy struck instantly when he stepped out of the utility room and into the main part of the house. Though not huge, the fact that the kitchen was completely open to the living and dining rooms made it feel huge. And she had upgraded stainless appliances, including a gas stove built into the eat-at island that divided the kitchen from the rest of the space.
“So, Chef, tell me what you think.” Pride laced Alaine’s voice.
“It’s great. I didn’t know any of these units had kitchens like this. The ones I looked at were much smaller and more closed off—they just had pass-through windows.”
“The people who owned this before me completely renovated it based on something they saw on TV. The colors were hideous—tomato red walls and a green tile backsplash so it looked like Christmas all the time—but that was a pretty easy fix. And I got the place for a song—I mean, most buyers can’t stand the fact that the front overlooks a bunch of old, dilapidated warehouses across the highway.”
“But you don’t care about the view?”
