Summer Desserts

she needed him.
    “If that’s what you want. I’ll call you tonight.”
    Leaning over, she kissed his cheek, then climbed from the car quickly. “Thanks for holding my hand.”

Chapter Ten
    I t was beginning to grate on her nerves. It wasn’t as though Summer didn’t enjoy attention. More than enjoying it, she’d come to expect it as a matter of course in her career. It wasn’t as if she didn’t enjoy being catered to. That was something she’d developed a taste for early on, growing up in households with servants. But as any good cook knows, sugar has to be dispensed with a careful hand.
    Monique had extended her stay a full week, claiming that she couldn’t possibly leave Philadelphia while Summer was still recovering from an injury. The more Summer tried to play down the entire incident of her arm and the stitches, the more Monique looked at her with admiration and concern. The more admiration and concern she received, the more Summer worried about that next visit to the doctor.
    Though it wasn’t in character, Monique had gotten into thehabit of coming by Summer’s office every day with healing cups of tea and bowls of healthy soup—then standing over her daughter until everything was consumed.
    For the first few days, Summer had found it rather sweet—though tea and soup weren’t regulars on her diet. As far as she could remember, Monique had always been loving and certainly kind, but never maternal. For this reason alone, Summer drank the tea, ate the soup and swallowed complaints along with them. But as it continued, and as Monique consistently interrupted the final stages of her planning, Summer began to lose patience. She might have been able to tolerate Monique’s over-reaction and mothering, if it hadn’t been for the same treatment by the kitchen staff, headed by Max.
    She was permitted to do nothing for herself. If she started to brew a pot of coffee, someone was there, taking over, insisting that she sit and rest. Every day at precisely noon, Max himself brought her in a tray with the luncheon speciality of the day. Poached salmon, lobster soufflé, stuffed eggplant. Summer ate—because like her mother, he hovered over her—while she had visions of a bacon double cheeseburger with a generous side order of onion rings.
    Doors were opened for her, concerned looks thrown her way, conciliatory phrases heaped on her until she wanted to scream. Once when she’d been unnerved enough to snap that she had some stitches in her arm, not a terminal illness, she’d been brought yet another soothing cup of tea—with a saucer of plain vanilla cookies.
    They were killing her with kindness.
    Every time she thought she’d reached her limit, Blake managed to level things for her again. He wasn’t callous of herinjury or even unkind, but he certainly wasn’t treating her as though she were the star attraction at a deathbed.
    He had an uncanny instinct for choosing the right time to phone or drop in on the kitchen. He was there, calm when she needed calm, ordered when she yearned for order. He demanded things of her when everyone else insisted she couldn’t lift a finger for herself. When he annoyed her, it was in an entirely different way, a way that tested and stretched her abilities rather than smothered them.
    And with Blake, Summer didn’t have that hampering guilt about letting loose with her temper. She could shout at him knowing she wouldn’t see the bottomless patience in his eyes that she saw in Max’s. She could be unreasonable and not be worried that his feelings would be hurt like her mother’s.
    Without realizing it, she began to see him as a pillar of solidity and sense in a world of nonsense. And, for perhaps the first time in her life, she felt an intrinsic need for that pillar.
    Along with Blake, Summer had her work to keep her temper and her nerve ends under some kind of control. She poured herself into it. There were long sessions with the printer to design the perfect menu—an elegant slate gray with the words COCHARAN HOUSE embossed on the front—thick creamy parchment paper inside listing her final choices in delicate script. Then there were the room service menus that would go into each unit—not quite so luxurious, perhaps, but Summer saw to it that they were distinguished in their own right. She talked for hours with suppliers, haggling, demanding, and enjoying herself more than she would ever have guessed, until she got precisely the terms she wanted.
    It gave