“And more sugar than you can shake a stick at, y’all. Oh, that looks about right, I’d say . . .”
“I cook from the heart!”
“Oh, is that it?”
“Yes!” And then her laughter abruptly ended. “I guess we both have our on-air personas, don’t we?”
Max let that register as he sank down onto a stool at the counter.
“Too bad mine isn’t as nice as yours.” All of the joviality was gone, but it was no less comfortable. At least, between the two of them. Within himself he was a lot less comfortable than he had been when they’d just been talking about Hadley. “I don’t know when that started.”
“When what started?”
He sighed. “My persona.”
“Well, I don’t know when it started, either, but it’s not hard to figure out why it stuck around.”
With a helpless shrug, he acknowledged, “Millions of people tuned in every week to see if I’d yell at a cook or curse at a fisherman.”
“Did you ever curse at a fisherman?”
“Quite a few times, yes. But I knew what I was doing. I always knew. It was unscripted television, but I always knew exactly what I was supposed to say. Exactly what I was supposed to do.”
“Same here, y’all. Same here.” She stood behind him and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, and rested her head against his, and Max tensed up, just for a moment. He’d held her body tight to his and kissed her as passionately as he’d ever kissed any woman in his life, but none of it had felt as intimate as her comforting embrace.
He wasn’t sure if he was ready for this. Ready for her. But he had to try.
“Can I be honest?” he asked, knowing that she would be fine with it. Maybe he needed to be asking himself.
“Of course.”
“I did get that waitress’s number.”
Hadley tilted her face to look at him. “What waitress?”
“At the Pancake Pantry. The one I told you I was apologizing to. And I did apologize, by the way. That just . . . wasn’t all.”
She pulled away, and as much as he hated to admit it even to himself, he was glad. He could breathe again. And yet, at the same time, he wanted her arms back around him, making him uncomfortable again.
“I knew it! I . . . I mean, I didn’t care. But I knew it!” She smiled. “Frankly, it just seemed like a very Max Cavanagh sort of move.”
“It was. So was the fact that I never called her.”
She took a deep breath and slowly—carefully, he thought—stepped around to the other side of the counter.
“I don’t date, Max.”
He laughed, until he realized she wasn’t kidding. “What do you mean, you don’t date?”
There wasn’t a single trace of embarrassment or self-doubt on her face. “It’s not that I ever intentionally chose my career over love or romance or any of that. It just kind of happened that way.” She scrunched up her nose and added, “My last relationship was with Stuart.”
“The director!” he exclaimed, proud of himself for remembering. But then understanding began to dawn. “Ah. That explains it.”
“Explains what?”
“Why he hated me from the beginning.”
She laughed so hard she had to hold on to the counter for support. “That wasn’t because of me!” The laughter subsided a touch as she seemed to reconsider. “Well, not just because of me. He had to serve you drinks and clean up the Wagyu beef you threw on the floor!”
He’d thrown Wagyu beef on the floor?
“And sure,” she continued, “he’s protective of me. He’s my closest friend. But we dated in college. For about two months. We weren’t very good as a couple, but we worked together really well. And we’re pretty great as friends.”
Hang on. “You haven’t dated since college?”
She shrugged. “I’ve dated. Not a ton. But no relationships. You, meanwhile . . .”
There it was. The whole “Playboy Gourmet” thing. How could he convince her it wasn’t all as bad as the tabloids made it seem? Hadley hadn’t been in a relationship since college. How many women had he dated and forgotten about since then?
“Ah. Yes. I’ve dated the US women’s soccer team, if certain sources are to be believed.”
“All at once?” she chimed in with a wink.
Max rolled his eyes. “I’m sure that’s some magazine’s version of it. I have been seen with a lot of women, I guess. But . . .” He stuffed his hands in his pockets, and his eyes darted downward, away from hers. What should he say? He was pretty sure he had never talked about his social life with anyone who was actually interested in hearing the truth.
As if reading his thoughts, or at least the uncertainty that was probably etched all over his face, Hadley leaned across the counter, so that her face was below his, and he couldn’t avoid her eyes any longer. “You don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.”
“It’s not that. It’s just . . . I don’t know. It’s just part of this life. There’s an expectation that I’ll walk into an event with a beautiful woman on my arm, so I do. The truth is, nine times out of ten it’s an unofficial business arrangement. They get their name and photo in People or on Page Six, and I get—”
“To be the Playboy Gourmet.”
“Exactly. I usually don’t know those women. I literally don’t know their names sometimes. More often than not, I meet them when I step into the car my manager sends to pick me up. And then the minute we walk into whatever venue we’re going to, they go talk to Leonardo DiCaprio or Andy Cohen, or one of the Desperate Housewives—”
“Do you mean the Real Housewives?” she asked as an impish smile overtook her face. “I mean, maybe they’re snubbing you to go talk to Teri Hatcher . . .”
“Whatever!” He laughed. “The point is, they find someone who’s more interesting than I am.”
“Oh.” She shook her head and waved her hands dismissively. “You are a lot of things, Max Cavanagh. But no one can say you aren’t interesting.”
“At a party, I’m not. I really hate going to those things.”
“Then why do you go?”
Her blunt tone made it perfectly clear that she thought not going was the easy, obvious answer, and he’d just never considered it. And, while his gut reaction was to spurn her simplistic comprehension of it all, he quickly realized that maybe he never had considered it. That realization knocked the wind out of him and took away the certainty with which he’d been about to say, “It’s just what I have to do.”
Instead he murmured, “I don’t know.”
Hadley sighed. “Well, regardless, it’s pretty obvious that we’re very different, you and I.”
He nodded. “We are.”
“And the fact is, if you’d walked into my life and kissed me like that at pretty much any other time in my life, I probably would have been happy pursuing a career making lunches in a school cafeteria. But right now . . .”
He understood what she was saying, like it or not. “But right now, you’re holding on to the brass ring. And everyone likes you better when you don’t like me.”