Three Little Words

The woman throwing a hissy fit at the gate had to be Gia Gallo. She looked the part: tall, thin, and in possession of one of those huge, ugly handbags that cost more than most people’s rent.

She was also stunning, but that wasn’t relevant.

Helming a successful Manhattan restaurant in an increasingly hip neighborhood meant that Bennett Buchanan had encountered his share of models. The funny thing about models was that they usually weren’t that good-looking up close. They were all angles and bones and overly exaggerated features that photographed better than they came across in real life.

Gia, though, with her shoulder-length, wavy, honey-brown hair, her heart-shaped face, and her plump pink lips, was almost unnaturally beautiful.

Or she would have been, if she hadn’t been using that gorgeous mouth to yell at the poor beleaguered gate agent who had just announced that their flight to Tampa was canceled.

Bennett didn’t go for entitled. He’d seen enough spoiled princesses in his old-money southern youth to last a lifetime. New York might rub him the wrong way a lot of the time, but one thing it had going for it was that debutantes were few and far between. Or at least their New York equivalent, the society ladies, didn’t make their way up to his little Cajun place in Washington Heights.

“Listen to me,” the bad-tempered beauty said to the gate agent as she held up a garment bag. “This is a wedding dress. It needs to get to Florida now.”

Yep, that was definitely Gia, one of the bridesmaids in his friend Noah’s wedding.

Bennett got up from where he’d been sitting and headed over to the desk to try to run interference.

A second agent had joined the first. He looked as if he had a lower bullshit threshold than his colleague and was rolling in to play the role of Bad Cop Gate Agent. “A bridezilla. My favorite kind of customer,” he said under his breath, but not really, because Bennett, who was still a few feet away, could hear him.

“I am not a bridezilla,” Gia said.

“Honey, that’s what they all say.”

“I am not a bridezilla, because I am not the bride. I am a bridesmaid, though, so if you want to call me a bridesmaidzilla, go right ahead. I will totally own that.” She leaned over—she was taller than both the agents—and got right in the face of the one who’d called her a bridezilla. “This is my friend Wendy’s wedding dress. Actually, it’s her dead mother’s wedding dress. And Wendy? She hasn’t had the easiest time of it. So I have made it my personal mission to make sure her wedding goes off without a hitch. This dress will make it to Florida if I have to walk it there myself.” She sniffed and straightened to her full, imposing height. “And don’t call me honey.”

“Well, you’d better start walking, honey, because they’re about to close the airport.”

“What part of don’t call me—”

“Gia?” Bennett interrupted, pasting on his “the customer is always right” smile. “Are you by chance Wendy’s friend Gia?”

She whirled on him, and she was pissed. Her eyes, a gorgeous amber that reminded him of his nana’s cinnamon pecan shortbread, narrowed. They were topped by long lashes and heavy eyebrows. The powerful brows contrasted sharply with pale, flawless skin marked by two blotches of angry pink in the centers of her cheeks. Jesus Christ, that kind of beauty was a shock to the system, equal parts invigorating and painful, not unlike when you burned yourself in the kitchen in the middle of a manic dinner shift.

“And you are?”

The question dripped with disdain, which was good because it reminded him that the karmic scales tended to balance beauty with sourness. She was like the abominations northerners called peaches: vibrantly pinky yellow and fragrant on the outside, hard and woody and unyielding on the inside.

Still, he would do what he could to rescue these poor gate agents from her clutches. The monster storm bearing down on the eastern seaboard was going to make their lives unpleasant enough without the addition of an indignant model who believed that the laws of nature didn’t apply to her.

He stuck his hand out. “Bennett Buchanan at your service, ma’am.” He let his drawl come on strong. That always charmed people.

Gia was not charmed.

She rolled her eyes.

But she did step away from the counter, enough that the next customer in line took her place.

“You’re Noah’s friend.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t call me ma’am.”

The thing was, he was pissed, too. She wasn’t the only one whose flight had been canceled. She wasn’t even the only one who had been charged with transporting an item essential to the wedding ceremony.

Noah and Wendy had spent the last six months traveling. They had a system in which they jetted to a far-flung locale for two weeks and then spent two weeks at home in Toronto, where Wendy’s aunt was recovering from a car accident and Noah, who was moving to Canada to be with Wendy, was studying to transfer his legal credentials.

It was like a honeymoon in reverse—the final trip would be their wedding in Florida. They’d dropped in to New York a few months ago for dress and ring fittings and had left the properly sized final products in the custody of their friends. He wasn’t really sure why they hadn’t done that stuff in Toronto, but he didn’t ask questions. He did as he was told.

Which meant he had the rings in his pocket. He, however, was not throwing a hissy fit over this fact.

So, yeah, he was pissed.

And cold. So freaking cold.

Top of that list of things about New York that rubbed him the wrong way?

Winter.

You can take the boy out of the South…

Damn, he hadn’t realized how much the idea of getting on that plane and emerging in a few hours into the warm, humid air of a civilized climate had gotten its hooks into him.

But unlike Gia, he was capable of holding his temper when things didn’t go his way. He was an adult. A fact of which he reminded himself as he checked the impulse to start calling her honey-ma’am.

“The wedding isn’t for a week,” he said. “We’ll be able to rebook. Let’s head back to the city, and we can try again when this storm passes. We can share a cab.”

Which was the last thing he wanted to do, but if they were closing the airport, taxis would be in short supply, and Bennett was a nice guy.

Well, okay, he wasn’t a nice guy, but he’d grown adept at faking it. And if he could behave, so could she.

Instead of answering him, Gia elbowed her way back to the counter and started demanding a hotel voucher.

“We don’t give vouchers for weather delays,” the first agent said.

“Good luck finding a hotel room anyway,” said Bad Cop Gate Agent. “Storm of the decade, they’re saying.”

Gia puffed up her chest and opened her mouth. Bennett cringed. What did she think? That they could wave a magic wand and, like Harry Potter, repel the foot of snow that was set to be dumped down on them?

He would just leave her to her little tantrum, then. He could only fake this nice-guy shit for so long.

But before he turned away, something interesting happened. Something subtle that probably no one else noticed. Gia’s body, which had clearly been ramping up to escalate her fight, just sort of…deflated. Her chest sagged as her spine rounded, and her chin came to her chest. He didn’t miss her eyes on the way down. They were filling with tears.

Shit.

When someone needs help, you help. That’s what separates men from monsters.

Chef Lalande’s refrain echoed through Bennett’s brain. His mentor’s mantra was a giant pain in the ass most of the time, but it was the philosophy that had saved Bennett and that Bennett had embraced. Pay it forward and all that.

It wasn’t a philosophy that could be invoked selectively—that was the pain-in-the-ass part. When you changed the kind of person you were, you had to be all in.

“Hey, hey, Gia. It’s going to be okay. I promise.” He moved toward her, compelled to touch her for some insane reason, but he checked the impulse.

“How can you promise that?” The belligerent tone from before was gone, replaced by resignation. “Can you make this plane go?”

“Look.” He pulled a small velvet pouch from his pocket. “I have the rings.” He wasn’t sure what his point was other than that he was on the hook for getting there as much as she was.

Whatever point he was making she ignored anyway. “Can you divert this storm?” She started walking.

He followed. “It can’t snow for a week. Worst thing that happens is we miss a few days of lying on the beach.” Which was a goddamn tragedy—he shivered thinking about heading back out into the winter—but it was what it was.

She started walking faster. She was almost as tall as he was, yet he had to hoof it to keep up with her.

“Can you make a hotel room magically appear in an overbooked New York City?” she snapped as she pulled out her phone. The pissiness from before was creeping back into her voice.

“No,” he said sharply, suddenly done with her—he tried, but even on his best days, he was half the man Chef Lalande was. He wasn’t responsible for this woman. “I can do none of those things.” He stopped walking.

It took a few seconds before she realized he wasn’t with her anymore. She stopped and turned. Looked back at him.

Then she did that deflating thing again. She reminded him of a pizza oven. You opened it and a blast of heat escaped and the temperature inside dropped by several hundred degrees.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t even know why I’m being like this. I’m just so…”

Mean? his mind supplied. Arrogant?

“…hungry.”

He barked a surprised laugh. “Well, ma’am, that I can fix.”

Gia wasn’t really sure why she was letting this man she’d never met before shepherd her out of the airport. Sure, he was Noah’s best friend and former neighbor—Wendy had told her they’d be on the same flight—so he probably wasn’t going to ax-murder her, but was she really going to just let him take her home without even throwing up a pro forma protest?

It was just that she was so tired. God, it felt as if she’d been working for months nonstop. Of course, her last job had only lasted three days, but it had been miserable. It was an editorial shoot, a feature on summer dresses—for Vogue, which was great, because those kinds of jobs were becoming fewer and further between. But damn, it had been a punishing gig. Long days—they were always long, but these had bordered on abusive—and the dress they’d wanted her in was too tight on her ass and she’d had to swap with Lily Alexander, the modeling world’s seventeen-year-old wunderkind. Which had thrown a huge wrench into the proceedings because it had been one of those stupid “dress for your age” features that showed a woman in every decade. So Gia, who’d been cast as the “thirties” model, had to swap with Lily, which meant the “twenties” dress ended up being tea length and the “thirties” dress ended up being strapless, God forbid.

Throw in an extra-bitchy art director and an extra-dickish photographer, and you had a perfect storm of toxicity.

But when you were twenty-nine years old and your job was to be a human coat hanger, you didn’t complain. Not when there were any number of younger, skinnier human coat hangers—witness Lily Alexander and her small-enough ass—nipping at your heels. Many of them would take the laxatives offered by bitchy art directors and the sexual harassment dished out by dickish photographers, too.

Gia had gone right from that horrible job back to her hotel to retrieve Wendy’s wedding dress, which the hotel had been storing for her, and then on to the airport. If only she’d been smart enough to hold on to the room for one more night, just in case.

But she hadn’t been smart enough. So here she was. Instead of on a plane bound to join her best friends at the wedding site, she was on a shuttle to the Newark Airport train station—there were no taxis to be had—with the best man.

She was so hungry.

The other thing she should have been smart enough to do was grab something to eat on their way out of the airport. She could let up on herself a little bit. The job was over, and she’d booked a month off after the wedding. Though maybe she shouldn’t have. It wasn’t as if it were raining high-quality jobs these days.

Regardless, she needed this little problem of hers to stay little. To not become a thing.

While they waited on the platform for a city-bound train, she called last night’s hotel and pleaded her case up to and including the grossest kind of name-dropping, but they were resolute about being full. Several more places said the same thing.

She had options. She could call her agent. He would figure something out. Or she could call any number of models—or bitchy art directors, or dickish photographers—she knew who lived in the city and find somewhere to bunk for the night. But the logistics of it suddenly seemed so incredibly, bone-crushingly daunting.

So instead she was apparently going home with Mr. Mint Juleps and Moonshine here, at least for now.

Bennett Buchanan, though? Seriously? Who named their kid that? Gia was Canadian, so admittedly, her impression of southern American culture was based on Duck Dynasty and the William Faulkner novels she’d read in her one year as a literature major, but this dude, with his drawl and his falsely pretty manners, sounded like he belonged in a rom-com romancing Reese Witherspoon.

He kind of looked like it, too.

He had a ridiculous smile, to begin with. Smug, slightly arrogant, and studded with perfectly straight, sparkly white teeth, it was the kind of smile people in her industry paid big money for. He had short black hair, too, and deep-blue eyes that looked at everything, including her, several seconds longer than seemed necessary.

And the drawl.

Oh, the drawl.

But the world was full of good-looking guys with charm to spare. And Gia had seen a lot of the world, so she could make herself immune to any man, even one whose voice sounded like slightly scratchy honey. Which wasn’t a thing, but whatever.

So, deflector shields engaged, she would go home with Bennett Buchanan long enough to get her bearings and make a plan. She would eat something, because half her problem right now was blood sugar.

She would not sleep with him.

“Put this on.” He shrugged out of his parka and placed it over her shoulders—she had not been prepared for the storm. Then he produced a baggie. It was full of pecans. He opened it and held it out to her.

Her mouth didn’t just water; it did this weird gushing faucet thing. She actually had to sort of suck up a big pool of spit so as not to drool on the floor.

She bit into one, and flavor exploded on her tongue. It was unexpectedly spicy. But after the burn, underneath it, there was something else. A deep, caramelized, smoky sweetness that felt like a reward.

He shook the baggie to indicate that she should take some more.

All right, who was she kidding? She probably would sleep with him. If they were going to be snowed in, what else were they going to do?

“Did you make these?” The baggie, and the absence of an artisanal tin from some SoHo gourmet shop, suggested the answer was yes.

“I did.”

That was…interesting. Reese Witherspoon’s southern rom-com boyfriends usually had monogrammed hankies in their pockets, not pecans.

By the time they reached Penn Station, where they changed to the subway, she’d eaten the whole baggie. Sixty-seven pecans to be precise—she’d counted. A plain pecan contained ten calories, and who knew what was in the magical elixir he’d coated them in.

She refused to think about it. She had some breathing room. She was on vacation.

And she felt better for having eaten.

Because that was how food worked. Your body needed fuel, and food was that fuel.

She almost fell asleep on the subway, lulled by the infusion of calories and the rumbling of the train.

“Next stop is us,” Bennett said, seemingly minutes but actually almost an hour later.

She shook her head to rouse herself as he hoisted his duffel bag onto his shoulder and reached for the handle of her suitcase.

Us.

He hadn’t meant anything by it. In fact, what he had meant was me. Next stop is me.

What must it be like to have a house—or an apartment, or whatever? When Gia was working, she lived out of hotels. When she wasn’t, she went back to her parents’ place or stayed with her friends in Toronto. But that was a far cry from having an apartment you came back to so frequently and repeatedly that the nearest subway stop was “yours.”

They emerged on 181st Street, and holy crap it was snowing.

It hadn’t started yet when they’d left Newark under a white sky—which was why she’d been so annoyed at the airline. Why cancel a flight when there wasn’t a speck of snow on the ground?

As they’d trained in, though, it had started—big, fat flakes falling leisurely against the windows, so pretty that Gia had half wished she could open the window and stick out her tongue to catch them, let the cold, metallic taste of them merge with the spicy sweetness of the pecans. And, judging by how much was accumulated on the sidewalk, it must have really started coming down in earnest while they’d been underground on the long subway ride to Bennett’s.

Gia loved snow. When she was a kid, snow had meant escape. She’d bundle up and go outside, which was one place her mother, ever concerned about ruining her makeup, wouldn’t follow. And when Gia was bundled up, she was just one of the kids. What she looked like didn’t matter—in their small Ontario town, they all wore the same face-concealing uniform of hat and scarf.

So snow lifted her spirits, usually. And this was pretty snow. Clean, insistent, country-like snow. Snow that wasn’t messing around.

She probably would have started twirling like Maria von Trapp: Maria Takes Manhattan Edition if she hadn’t been so worried about getting Wendy’s dress to Florida.

And, you know, if she hadn’t been trailing along behind good ol’ boy Bennett Buchanan.

“Damn, that took forever.” He stopped in front of a restaurant. “You must be starving.”

“I’m sorry I ate all your pecans.”

“Plenty more where they came from.”

She glanced up at an awning bowing under the weight of half a foot of snow. They were at a restaurant called Boudin.

“We don’t have to eat out,” she said. “We can just go to your place.”

As soon as the words left her mouth, she regretted them. She’d only meant that she didn’t need a fancy restaurant meal—she’d be perfectly happy to hit a bodega and hunker down at his place while she called around to figure out where she was going to stay tonight.

Or, you know, decided whether she was going to sleep with him.

Honestly, it was the path of least resistance, and that was usually how it went. Some dude would make advances, and if she had the itch, she would assess suitability. If the guy in question was being too over the top about her beauty, or about the fact that she was a model, she might deflect, but sometimes not, because really, beauty was what she had going for her, and there was no point in pretending otherwise. She had learned her lesson on that front. What do they say? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Gia wasn’t the kind of person who needed to be fooled twice.

But she didn’t want to make it sound like she was entertaining the notion of sleeping with him, so Forget the restaurant; let’s go to your place probably hadn’t been the smartest thing to say.

He didn’t seem to take it the wrong way, though, just held the door open for her and said, “This is my place.”

“Oh. You live here?” She craned her neck—there did appear to be apartments above the retail level.

“Nope, but if you want food, we’re better off here than at my apartment. I think I have tea and mustard in my fridge there, and that’s pretty much it.” When she didn’t answer—she was confused—he said, “Come on. We’re letting the snow in.”

She obeyed, and was hit with a wall of the most wonderful smell. It was some kind of garlicky roasting meat, maybe, mixed with…something kind of herby and green?

A hostess approached. “Welcome to— Chef! I thought you were in Florida!”

Chef.

Ah, everything suddenly made sense. His claim that this was “his place.” The incredible pecans.

“Flight was canceled.” He shoved his bag and Gia’s suitcase to one side of the vestibule. “Can you get one of the guys to take this stuff downstairs?” He took the garment bag Gia had been carrying and handed it to the hostess. “And make sure they hang this up?”

“Sure thing.”

Bennett scanned the room, his eyes moving back and forth like he was reading something that required his utmost concentration. Gia followed his gaze. The place was narrow and deep—home to maybe twenty tables along a banquette that ran along one side of the place as well as a bar. It was dark and cozy, lit only by candles. And that smell. Oh, God, that smell. Gia wanted to bottle it so she could spritz it around at will.

“What the hell is Eddie doing behind the bar?” Bennett called after the retreating hostess.

“Blanca called in sick.” She shot him an anxious look over her shoulder.

“Blanca called in snow, you mean.” His pacifying tone from the airport was gone, replaced by something rigid and sharp and unforgiving. The hostess grimaced, and he waved her on.

“Come on.” He gestured for Gia to follow him into the restaurant’s dim interior. At the bar he pulled out a stool for her. Then, eyeing her handbag, he pulled out another one. “I think that bag is going to need its own stool.”

She shrugged. “I like big bags and I cannot lie.”

The corners of his mouth turned up. She was proud to have made him smile. Which was strange. Usually it was the guy making lame jokes at her.

“Chef?” said the man behind the bar, presumably Eddie. “Oh, thank God. Everyone keeps asking me how oaky the chardonnay is and shit. The only reason I haven’t totally ruined your rep is that it’s pay-what-you-can night, so the bar is lower.”

“The bar is not lower on pay-what-you-can night,” Bennett said sharply, and there was so much barely tethered ire in his voice that Gia winced on the bartender’s behalf.

“Right. Sorry, Chef.”

Bennett walked behind the bar and rolled up his sleeves. “I imagine they’re behind back there without you?”

Eddie nodded.

Bennett sighed and hitched his head toward the rear of the restaurant, which was all the urging Eddie needed to hightail it back to the kitchen.

Then he turned to Gia. “What are you drinking?”

“This is your restaurant,” she said, stating the obvious, because standing behind the bar with a sense of ease that couldn’t be faked, he looked like the king of the castle.

“Yep.” He must have decided he wasn’t going to wait for her drink order, because he reached for a bottle of wine from a rack above the bar and set to work uncorking it.

“I need those juleps, Eddie.” A frazzled-looking server set a piece of paper down on the bar, not realizing Eddie wasn’t bartending anymore. “And two glasses of sauv blanc.”

“You got it.” Bennett set a wineglass in front of Gia and poured a generous amount of ruby liquid into it.

The server looked up, startled. “Chef?”

“Hey, Tosha. We’re a bit behind here, but I’m gonna get us caught up.”

“You’d think we’d be dead in this weather,” Tosha said.