Laurie Tomlinson - With No Reservations

Judging by the rumpled T-shirt and sweatpants, that’s exactly what he’d been doing. “Well, don’t let me intrude on your beauty sleep, Neighbors. Because you need a lot of it.”

Maddie snatched her ball and pushed it against Jake’s leg. She’d given up on Cooper ages ago.

“Who’s the girl?” Jake bent and scratched Maddie’s ears.

Cooper shrugged. “Someone my mom recommended to help promote the restaurant.”

“Yeah?” Jake leaned forward on the desk for a closer look. “How’s that been going?”

Cooper sighed and picked up one of the proofs, extending it toward his roommate. “It’s going, I guess.”

His roommate’s face was unreadable as he scanned the brochure. But Cooper was pretty sure he saw him wince. “Why don’t you see if this woman...” He waved a finger at the computer screen.

“Sloane.”

“Sloane. Why don’t you see if she can help? I mean, these are good and everything, but her style seems more up your alley, you know?”

Cooper nodded, trying to reconcile the hot mess of a girl he’d met at the restaurant—she’d wiped her silverware, for crying out loud!—with the spirited image she conveyed on her website.

Once Jake had left to run some errands, Cooper opened his browser and dug deeper.

So, her thing was mise en place. The recipe prep. Neat piles of ingredients staged so they were appealing to the eye. He got that about Sloane, in the way she’d rearranged things and seemed to have a particular order as she sampled his food at the restaurant.

She was an interesting girl—feisty, even. And she certainly wasn’t lacking in the looks department. The head shot on the website header affirmed that. Her shiny blond hair was pulled to one side, full lips parted like she was about to say something to the person taking the picture. The light pink of her sweater highlighted something younger, an almost playful vibe. Totally different than the guarded professional he’d met. A black apron with her Mise en Place logo accentuated her figure, petite and curvy. Trim, but healthy enough to show she wasn’t the kind of woman who only ate birdseed and water. He could appreciate a woman who didn’t refuse a fluffy, buttery roll or two when the bread basket was passed around. Life was too short for that.

Cooper rested his chin in his hand and scrolled to her most recent post, a recipe for pumpkin spice cake doughnuts prepared two ways. Some were sprinkled with a spiced sugar concoction and the others were drizzled with a multilayered vanilla bean glaze.

He did a double take and leaned close to the computer to make sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks when he saw that her post had over two hundred comments. And he could see why.

Sloane’s images were gorgeous. From the assembled ingredients to the close-up of the baked, spongy center. And the final product arranged in a doughnut pyramid, shot on a vintage sherbet-colored cake stand against a wood pallet backdrop.

Jake was right. This was what he wanted for Simone. Charming, rustic, cozy, mouth-watering. Just like he promised the real Simone it would be.

Maybe his mother’s instincts were spot-on and Sloane could do his restaurant promo justice.

There it was. A glimmer of hope where he’d had nothing a minute before. He had to talk to her. He scrolled through his inbox, scanning the names for one that might have her contact information. “There you are.” Finally. He tapped the numbers into his phone.

It wasn’t until it rang that something twinged in the pit of his stomach. The warning sign that perhaps he should have thought this through a little better.

She answered as he was clearing his throat.

“Sloane, it’s Cooper.” Silence. “From Simone?” It felt good to say that out loud.

“Right, right.” Her tone remained flat, all business. “What can I do for you?”

He cleared his throat again, replaying their last meeting. Did he do something to offend her? He couldn’t remember. But that didn’t matter. Even if she never wanted to work with him again, it was time to lay it all on the line.

“I need you.”

* * *

“THANK YOU SO much for coming on such short notice.” It was the third time Cooper had said it, but he didn’t care.

He picked up the last box from the trunk of the black Lincoln Town Car that had brought Sloane to the restaurant.

“Careful with that one,” she warned him, looping one forearm through the handle of a reusable bag and bunching the brown cotton of her skirt in the other to protect it from the wild winds. “Thanks, Henry,” she called to the uniformed driver.

What was up with the car service? Maybe hers was in the shop or something. But that wasn’t important right now. The fact that she was there to save his bacon was all that mattered.

Cooper set the last box on the stainless steel prep area of the kitchen with the rest of Sloane’s impressive assortment as she began opening containers and lifting a menagerie of items from them—plates, stands, serving dishes, ceramic spoons of inviting colors and textures.

“Where do you find all of this stuff?”

At first, Sloane ignored him, her eyes sweeping back and forth between the props. She shook her head, and the focus returned to her eyes. “eBay, mostly. Online shops. May I see the food you prepared for this shoot?” Quick. Impersonal. Proper.

“Um, yeah.” He ran a hand through his short curls. “It’s right over here.”

Cooper watched as Sloane inspected the dishes he’d made for her to photograph. Her expression didn’t look promising—somewhere between fierce concentration and measured grimace.

“Okay. I can work with this,” she finally pronounced. Without a word of explanation, she picked up three of the plates and whisked them from the kitchen to the café.

Cooper followed suit with the rest of the plates but stopped when he saw Sloane moving from table to table, inspecting each surface. What was she looking for? Crumbs or something?

“The lighting is best right here.” Sloane framed a patch of light on one of the front tables with cupped hands. “But we don’t have much time.”

“Just tell me what you need me to do.”

Sloane looked up at him. For a moment, he saw a flicker of warmth in her blue-gray eyes that jolted him enough to raise the hair on his arms. And then it was gone.

He stood at a distance, nibbling the thumbnail of one hand. Watching as Sloane moved in silence, transferring food to her dishes, expertly molding and reshaping with silverware, dabbing crumbs and smudges from immaculate surfaces. Adjusting her camera and snapping photographs from every angle imaginable.

Food styling had never been Cooper’s thing in culinary school. But this took it to a whole new level. Precise. Methodical. What Sloane was doing was an exact science she could write the book on.

She didn’t acknowledge him again until the very last shot when she looked up and, after a fleeting blink of confusion, seemed to remember that he was there.

“You don’t happen to have milk here, do you? Or cream? And a tall glass?”

Cooper saw where she was going with this and jogged to the kitchen. The milk may have been a day or two expired, but its only purpose in life was to look good next to a molten chocolate cake.

That, it could do.

Right as Sloane had the shot lined up, something occurred to Cooper. “Wait. Just a minute.”

He hurried into the kitchen, opening drawers and slamming them, upending packing materials and dishes until he found a plastic bag and tore it apart with his teeth on his way back into the dining room. He placed the teal-striped straw he’d gotten from a vendor in the glass of milk and stood behind Sloane to survey it from her vantage point.

She whipped around, a glimmer of life in the wide blue-gray eyes he now noticed were rimmed with brown. “You’re a genius!”