Love Around the Corner Read online

  “It wasn’t just profits and losses,” Maria acknowledged.

  “Then what?”

  “I’m tired of getting up at three a.m. and driving in from New Jersey to open up.” Maria sighed. “I’m missing my kids growing up because I’m always here. Since Ma’s heart attack, Pops doesn’t want to leave her home all day. She’s going to need a lot of care as she gets older, and now, with the money from the building, we can afford it. Pops can pay off the house and finally slow down. It’s a long list, Gemma. You know how tough business has been lately.”

  It had been tough for Romano’s, but it had been tough for all the other old-timers, too. The neighborhood was changing. The old clientele had largely moved away or died. Hell, even the DiPaolas had fled Carroll Gardens, selling the family house and relocating to Jersey a dozen years ago.

  “I didn’t even know you’d put the building up for sale.”

  “Well, we didn’t. But we got a good offer, and when we thought about it, we decided the time was right.”

  “A good offer? Out of the blue? From who?”

  Just then, she heard Mr. DiPaola, Maria’s dad, laugh from behind the plastic strip curtain that divided the counter from the kitchen in the back of the store. The plastic curtains parted, and Mr. DiPaola, thinner and grayer than he’d been even five years ago, passed through, followed by—

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Brendan Flaherty stopped just on the other side of the swinging plastic strip curtain, a smile slowly growing across his face.

  “Gemma. Nice to see you again. Hi, Kendra.”

  “Hey, Brendan. You’re looking good.”

  “Thanks. You, too.”

  Gemma elbowed her traitorous cousin then turned back to Maria. “Him? You sold the building to him?”

  Maria glanced between Brendan and Gemma. “Well, yeah. His company, anyway.”

  “What are you doing buying the DiPaolas’ building?”

  Again with the maddening smirk. He was wearing a suit again today, dark navy, with an ice blue shirt and dark blue silk tie...every bit of it so crisp he looked like she could cut her finger on him. “That’s what my business does. We buy properties to develop.”

  “Develop?” A haze of red descended over Gemma’s vision at the mention of that dreaded word. Of course, he only came back to Carroll Gardens to wreck it. Like he hadn’t done enough damage to her when he left. Now he had to come back and level everything else she cared about. “I should have known,” she scoffed. “Nothing good could come from you being back here.”

  Before he could open his mouth to spew some smarmy defense she had no interest in hearing, she turned on her heel and stomped out, leaving Kendra, Brendan, and the stunned DiPaolas staring after her.

  Chapter Eleven

  “What the hell is a Gritty anyway?” Dennis groused.

  “I think he’s like a Muppet or something,” Frank replied before taking a swig of his beer.

  “Scariest damned Muppet I ever saw. What kind of a mascot is that?”

  “Do I need to remind you, Dennis, that you root for the Mets?” Gemma set his refilled beer in front of him.

  “And?”

  “Our mascot is a baseball with feet.”

  “Fair point.”

  Halftime ended and the game resumed, drawing Dennis and Frank’s attention back to the TV. Hockey didn’t draw in the customers the way football and baseball did, so business had stayed light tonight. Gemma had chased her father out an hour ago. There was no reason they both had to waste an evening standing behind the bar and staring into space. Dad had Teresa waiting for him, and Gemma just had...well, she had Spudge and the Food Network.

  The door shrieked open, so she plastered on her most welcoming smile and turned to greet the newcomer. Her smile evaporated when she saw who it was.

  “We’re not for sale,” she said flatly.

  Brendan paused just inside the door. “I’m not here to make an offer.”

  “Good.”

  She started wiping down the bar, even though she’d just thoroughly wiped it down not ten minutes earlier, just so she’d have something for her hands to do and someplace for her eyes to rest. Someplace that wasn’t Brendan Flaherty, looking practically edible in a pair of weathered jeans and a white button-down with the sleeves rolled up. The suits were bad enough. Bared forearms were just unfair. His forearms had always had the ability to make her weak in the knees.

  “What do you want, Flaherty?”

  “Just dropped in for a beer, Romano.”

  She flicked a disbelieving look at him. “Here?”

  “Why not here? Hey, Dennis. Hey, Frank.”

  Frank and Dennis swiveled on their stools to greet Brendan, and under the cover of their effusive hellos, he insinuated himself right up onto a bar stool at her bar. Sneaky bastard.

  When Dennis and Frank had finished telling the neighborhood golden boy how much he’d always be welcome to share a pint with them, he finally turned to Gemma.

  “Can I get a Bud Light, Gemma?” Those melted-chocolate eyes locked with hers, daring her to refuse him.

  She should. She should kick his traitorous, faithless ass straight out of her bar. She should tell him to never darken her door again. But Dennis and Frank would ask a million questions, and the gossip would be all over the neighborhood before morning. It wasn’t worth all the drama.

  So instead of telling him to shove his Bud Light someplace interesting, she wordlessly turned on her heel and poured it for him. At least she’d get four bucks out of him for the beer, and she’d enjoy handing off his tip to the next homeless person she passed.

  She half-listened to Dennis and Frank filling him in on all the latest, peppered with some bitching about baseball spring training.

  “All I gotta say is Vargas looked strong in spring training. The Phillies better watch their asses this year,” Frank said, draining his glass. “Can I get a refill, Gemma? And you got any more of that pork stuff hiding in back?”

  “For you, Frank, anytime.” She whisked away his empty glass and plate.

  Brendan was watching her closely as she returned and set Frank’s refilled plate in front of him.

  “Since when did Romano’s start serving food?” he asked.

  “Since never. We’re not a restaurant.”

  “That looks like food to me.”

  “Tastes like it, too,” Frank said, tucking into his second helping. “Nobody in Brooklyn cooks better than our Gemma.”

  Brendan turned his assessing gaze on her. “Is that right?”

  She shrugged dismissively. “I just brought in some leftovers. For friends.”

  Which was a lie. There had been no one home to eat what she’d cooked today. Dennis and Frank were the sole recipients.

  “Smells delicious,” Brendan said, eyeing Frank’s plate.

  “It is,” she replied smugly. “Too bad you’re not a friend.”

  “I am hungry, though,” he said, giving her what she was sure he considered his most winning smile. It was maddeningly effective. “Seems a shame to let the rest of it go to waste.”

  It was a shame, because, as always, she’d cooked like she was still feeding a whole family. The fridge at home was packed with plastic containers full of her leftover food. She just couldn’t help it. Cooking meant cooking for an army.

  “I suppose you want me to feed you, too.” She sighed.

  “I wouldn’t complain if you did.” He grinned.

  She stared him down for another minute. Shameless, hot asshole with his stupid, nuclear missile smile.

  “Ugh, fine,” she huffed. “Just this once.”

  As she stomped into the back room and served up his plate, she wondered what the hell had just gotten into her. She certainly wasn’t harboring any warm, fuzzy feelings toward Brendan, nor was she inte
rested in becoming his “friend.” So why was she feeding the asshole? He didn’t deserve so much as a single word from her, never mind a plate of her food.

  It was pride, she decided, as she dusted the plate with some chopped parsley from a tiny plastic container and grated a little fresh Parmesan over it. She was proud of today’s effort and she’d had nobody to show it off to, except Dennis and Frank. And while they were always appreciative, honestly, they couldn’t tell a delicately seasoned red wine reduction from a jar of gelatinous store-bought gravy.

  Brendan had his titanium watch and his expensive suits and his loads of money to flash around, but Gemma hadn’t arrived at this showdown unarmed. Maybe she never went to college and had no impressive career. Maybe she spent her days pouring beer for geriatric Brooklynites. But her cooking could make grown men cry. How many people could say that?

  A couple of twists of the pepper mill and a quick swipe of a napkin around the rim to tidy up the plating and she was done. If she was attempting to impress him, she was going all in.

  Doing her best to look nonchalant, as if his opinion meant less than nothing to her, she casually slid the plate in front of him on the bar. Brendan looked down at it, eyes wide.

  “You just made this back there?”

  “There’s no kitchen here. I made it at home and kept it warm in back.” Even reheated, it was good, and she knew it.

  She turned her back on him under the pretense of checking the levels in the liquor bottles on the shelf behind the bar, but she watched his face in the big mirror behind the bottles as he cut the first piece of pork and lifted it to his mouth. Gemma suppressed a triumphant smile as he took a bite, froze, and his eyes went wide.

  * * *

  Brendan had eaten in most of the Michelin-starred restaurants in Chicago in his day, and what happened when he took his first bite of Gemma Romano’s food had never happened in any of those fine establishments. His dick twitched.

  He actually had to hold still, not chewing, not swallowing, just tasting and absorbing the shock of awareness that ricocheted through his body. It was a sensory experience one might expect when eating something so sublime, but the rest—the flush, the sudden tightening in his groin—that was not the sort of sensory experience he was used to having during a meal.

  Gemma still stubbornly had her back to him as she tinkered with the liquor bottles on the shelf. As he breathed in and registered all the flavors asserting themselves on his tongue, he let his eyes trace her body, from her shapely calves outlined in a pair of skinny jeans worn like a second skin, to her long satiny dark brown hair, caught back in a ponytail, swinging between her shoulder blades every time she moved. The tight tank top she wore exposed a hell of a lot of skin and left no doubt about the shape of the rest of her.

  In high school, Gemma Romano had been the hottest girl he’d ever laid eyes on in real life. She’d been tall and coltish as a freshman, then all of a sudden, one summer she’d blossomed, turning leggy and sexy and stunning seemingly overnight. He’d been working up the courage to ask her out when her mom got sick and everything had changed.

  The years since then had only made her more beautiful, adding polish to an already-flawless diamond. Fourteen years of experience out in the world and she was still the hottest woman he’d ever met.

  Reluctantly, he tore his eyes away from her. It was the visual of Gemma, combined with her extraordinary food, causing the inconvenient...tightening. That had to be it. Closing his eyes, he focused on what he was eating, on the tastes and textures of everything.

  “Jesus, this is good,” he finally said.

  She turned around with a shrug. “It’s just a riff on saltimbocca.”

  “There’s no ‘just’ about any part of this. What’s in it?”

  If he wasn’t mistaken, he spotted a flare of pride in her expression before she carefully locked it away from him. “Pork tenderloin. I brined it first with some salt and allspice, to hold in the moisture, then I rubbed it with garlic and fresh sage. I used Parma ham instead of prosciutto, the good stuff from Vinelli’s, and layered in some wild mushrooms and fresh spinach.”

  “But the sauce...” Brendan said, taking another bite. “This sauce is like crack.”

  “I deglazed the pan with Marsala wine and finished it with lemon and a disgusting amount of butter. There’s a few other things in there, but that’s the gist of it.”

  “Where the hell did you learn to cook like this? In high school you barely managed opening a jar of pasta sauce.”

  Her eyes cooled slightly at the mention of high school. “I taught myself. I had a family to feed.”

  “You could have fed your family with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Gemma, this is fucking amazing.”

  His compliment clearly unsettled her. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, arms crossed tightly in front of her. He couldn’t help but notice that it caused her breasts to press northward. There was a delectable shadow of cleavage above the scooped neck of her tank. Damn, how he remembered those spectacular breasts.

  “Thank you,” she finally bit out reluctantly.

  He smiled as broadly as he could before taking another bite, reveling in shaking her up. She might be showing him a solid wall of hostility right now, but he’d take that over apathy, or worse, disinterestedness. She was most definitely not apathetic to him. She was bothered. He could work with bothered.

  “So you cook like this every day?” he asked as he polished off the last of his food.

  “Most days.”

  “Great.” Fishing his wallet out of his pocket, he dropped some bills on the bar—far more than he owed for the beer—and slid off his bar stool. “Can’t wait to see what you come up with tomorrow.”

  Gemma’s eyes flared with temper. God, she was gorgeous. “Tomorrow? What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means,” he said, bracing his hands on the bar and leaning closer, “that I’m coming back tomorrow, and I hope you’ll be gracious enough to share your talents with me again. And I’ll be back the day after that, and the day after that, too. Because, Gemma, I’m back, and I’m not going anywhere.”

  She huffed in outrage, tilting her chin up imperiously. “You think I give a shit?”

  He leaned in closer, close enough to note the rapid rise and fall of her chest, the dilation of her pupils, the thrum of her pulse at the base of her neck. “Yeah, I think you do give a shit, even if you wish you didn’t.”

  Then, before she could regroup and come up with another insult to hurl at him, he clapped Frank on the shoulder. “Frank, Dennis, I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”

  He left Gemma staring after him in shock. As he stepped out into the cold, crisp night air, he wondered how long it would take to earn Gemma’s forgiveness. Because if he was going to win her back, her forgiveness was critical. And there was no doubt about it; he fully intended to win back Gemma Romano.

  Chapter Twelve

  John Romano finished closing out a tab for a customer then tossed his towel on the bar. “Gem, I’m going to bring up some more Seagram’s from the basement.”

  “Great. Can you dig out some Dewar’s, too? We’ve got plenty, but it got buried behind the kegs during the last delivery.”

  He waved a hand over his head in acknowledgment as he disappeared through the door to the back.

  “Are you closing out the register yet?” Jess asked from her perch at the corner of the bar. “Then I can include tonight’s receipts in the books.”

  Gemma cast a look around Romano’s, empty except for Willie Fortman, who was nursing his last beer as he watched the end of the Mariners game on TV. He wasn’t spending any more cash tonight, and neither was anyone else. Might as well call it a night so Jess could finish up the month’s bookkeeping and get out of here.

  “Yeah, I’ll close out.” She sighed.

  Maybe at some point they should have up
graded, she thought as she tallied the credit receipts. Then they could compete with all those trendy new places up the street. But turning Romano’s into a wine bar or something just felt wrong. Besides, upgrades cost money and they never had any. Romano’s on its own was just homey and ordinary—exactly the same as it had been when they opened their doors in 1934. They weren’t like the Brooklyn Inn in Brooklyn Heights, with all that gorgeous, dark, hand-carved German woodwork, so impressive that tourists stopped in to see it. And unlike the White Horse Tavern in the city, nobody famous had ever drank themselves to death at Romano’s. The closest Romano’s had ever come to fame was when Sandy Koufax had come in for a drink in 1956, right after he’d been signed to the Brooklyn Dodgers.

  All they had to offer the world was a place to sit, a cold beer, and some friendly conversation. Too bad people didn’t seem to be looking for that anymore.

  She’d just stuffed the cash from the register into the bank bag when Kendra came in.

  “We’re closed,” she called out.

  “Screw you. Family drinks on the house.” Kendra dumped her bag on the bar and wiggled onto a stool.

  “I don’t remember instituting that rule.”

  Kendra pouted dramatically. “Family drinks on the house when they have shitty days.”

  Gemma laughed as she poured her a beer. “What’s the matter? Carlos made you actually earn your paycheck?”

  “Hey, Carlos couldn’t tie his own damned shoes without me. He’s throwing this party for his investors, and of course, every bit of the planning is on me. Today the caterer bailed. I’m so screwed.”

  “Sorry, that sucks.”

  Kendra jolted upright as a light bulb went off. “Hey, why don’t you do it?”

  “Um, because I’m not a caterer?”

  “But you can cook. Honestly, Gem, you’re just as good as some of the pros. Why not?”

  She ticked off the reasons on her fingers. “One, I don’t have a professional kitchen. Two, I don’t have any of the permits. Three, I’m kind of busy running a business.”