He turned to her. “Ashna?”
A vacuum cleaner started up.
Jaw clenched, she wiped a hand across her face and pressed it into her mouth. Then the most incredulous laugh escaped her. She thought this was funny?
The vacuum turned off and the cleaning crew inspected the floor to make sure all the glass was gone. Tatiana looked remorseful enough as she apologized, but some firm legal-sounding instructions were recited to her.
“Okay, everyone, back to your challenges. We’ve reset the clock. You get thirty minutes from now,” Jonah announced, and the digital timer on the monitor started up. “Make it count.”
Every sign of anything but stubborn purpose vanished from Ashna’s face. “Let’s go,” she said, as though none of what had just happened had happened. As though this weren’t the second time she had flipped that switch like someone who was two entirely different people. Neither of whom Rico recognized.
She snapped her fingers in front of his face. “You have thirty . . . twenty-nine minutes to make churros.” She ran to the overstocked pantry and started pointing at things as she rattled off ingredients.
Whiplash, she was giving him whiplash. He filled his arms. Flour, eggs, cinnamon, brown sugar, confectioners’ sugar, condensed milk.
“I haven’t made churros since culinary school. We’re going to have to wing it.”
He followed her back to their workstation, lost and winded from her mercurial shifts. “Your memory seems just fine.” Obviously, they both remembered more than they wanted to. “I’m sure you’ll remember the recipe.”
For the barest second she stiffened. Then she pulled a napkin from a stack, dabbed the sweat off her forehead, and started to throw out instructions.
“Break four eggs into the mixing bowl and beat them.”
Breaking eggs was exactly what Rico needed, and beating the heck out of something sounded great. “Yes, ma’am.”
He turned the handmixer on and started beating the eggs, the sound was loud enough to keep their conversation private. “Want to tell me what that was about?” he hissed, even as his face stayed genial for the camera.
“Not now. You’ll overbeat the eggs,” she hissed back, refusing to meet his eyes.
He raised the speed, and the noise level. “Not turning it off until you tell me.”
She twisted the napkin in her hand, but she knew him too well to argue. “It feels like an unfair advantage. I don’t like it.” She pointed at the eggs. “That’s enough.”
He turned off the beater.
“Now the water. Two cups. Bring them to a boil.”
He measured water into a pan and put it on the stove without slamming it like he wanted to. They fumed silently as they waited, fake smiles plastered across their faces.
“Now add the sugar.”
“Really? This . . .” He stirred the sugar, then spun the spoon around to encompass her swings from panic to self-possession and then back again, over and over. “This is you”—he clanged the spoon on the pan drowning the rest of his words—“feeling guilty?”
She nodded, indignant as a liar. “Flour. Two cups. Sift it in.”
“Sifter, please,” he shouted, and an intern ran over and found him one. He started sifting, then banged the metal on the pan pretending to get the last bits off. “Bullshit.”
Fresh sweat broke out across her forehead, making the errant strands stick to her skin. “If you don’t start stirring, it will lump up.”
Too late. The whole darned thing was a lump. “Add a little more water and work it loose.” The cameras zoomed in as he furiously worked the gunky mixture. “Who would have thought my training would come in so handy in a kitchen?” he said to the cameras, arm muscles cramping.
The moment they backed off, he looked at her again, slamming the spoon against the edge of the mixing bowl some more. Hopefully, there wasn’t a foul for being too noisy. “Then you shouldn’t have said churros. You should have lied like you’re lying now.” More slamming of the spoon.
“That looks good,” she said, her color high, even as she kept her face calm. “Turn on the handblender, that should work.”
As soon as he started the blender up again she stepped closer to it. “And you shouldn’t have written churros down,” she whispered. “Or broken your promise to keep our past out of this.”
Technically, he hadn’t promised. “Acquiescing to your demands is not the same as making a promise.” He beat the mixture so hard that the clumping water and flour had no choice but to smooth into dough.
“Add the eggs. That should make it easier.”
Right, if only. He added the eggs, glad to run the blender again. “What are you hiding this time, Ashna? You’re not eighteen anymore. When does the hiding stop?”
He turned off the blender but the silence between them felt louder.
Hand shaking, she dabbed her upper lip with the napkin and spoke behind it. “Can we focus on the churros? Please.” There was so much pain in her eyes, and shame, and helplessness. It was the helplessness that was killing her.
And it killed him too. “What next?”
She seemed to swallow a sob and squared her shoulders. “That dough needs to go into a pastry bag and get piped into the fryer. We have ten minutes. You still have doce de leite to make.”
He called for a pastry bag and popped open the can of condensed milk. The old instinct to backtrack with her kicked in, to give her what she wanted, to ease her. He couldn’t bear to see her hurting like this, and that was the truth. Damn it.
“The fryer is hot. Can you fill the pastry bag?” There was relief in her tone, and blind trust that he would do exactly as she asked.
Fortunately, filling the pastry bag wasn’t half as simple as it looked. Piping the churros in long straight lines took far more skill than one might imagine, and focus.
When the first golden brown pastry emerged from the fryer, disbelief, maybe even pride, shone in Ashna’s eyes.
Rico placed the churro on a paper towel, gobsmacked that he’d actually made those.
“You did it,” she said. Something about her smile struck terror in his heart. It was too many things: surprise, even a spark of victory, and God help him, joy. For all her secrets, there was too much he saw. It was this dance that had gotten him into this situation in the first place. Too much knowing. Too much needing to know. He had to find a way to stop it. Because she would always hide. It was what she needed to do. And he was no longer the man who didn’t care what price he had to pay for her to let him in.
Chapter Eighteen
Barely two weeks into the show and there was a wait to get into Curried Dreams.
The overflowing parking lot at lunchtime, the unique buzz of conversation in a full restaurant, people crowding the waiting area, all of it made Ashna feel too close to another time. She almost made her way to Baba’s office to check up on him, and that thought made the walk-in pantry spin around her. She leaned back and rested her head against the wall.
Are you seeing this, Baba? I didn’t fail you. I am not just like my mother.
The knot in her throat that made it hard to breathe would go away in a second. She took long, stretchy breaths. Why did you have to ruin everything, Rico?