He hadn’t been planning to come back to Palo Alto tonight, but his old drinking buddies had been hassling him for months to show up at the reunion. “The three of us are the reigning heroes of our graduation class,” was what they kept telling him. “It’s up to us to do a victory round, to show all those chicks with their noses in the air what they could have had.”
Jason had never thought about it exactly like that, but yeah, he supposed they had a point. None of them had hung out with the jocks, the sorority girls. They hadn’t been the big brains or future Olympic champions. Just a crew of good guys, tough guys who knew that they weren’t going back to where they came from. Each and every one of them had made a name for themselves in atypical ways, not by any means your average Stanford graduate who becomes an investment banker.
Rick Stodler had created an international construction empire. Ace McKinty had turned his flying lessons into one of the hottest low-cost airlines in the country. And Jason, well, he was proud of everything he’d accomplished. Damn proud.
He’d left Stanford as a poor kid who’d earned a fancy Economics degree on scholarship and had returned a multimillionaire. A world-famous chef. ANew York Times bestselling cookbook author. And the
recipient ofPeople magazine’s Sexiest Bachelor of the Year Award. Two years running.
The moment he walked into the Stanford Faculty Club, he saw that Rick and Ace were right about the hero thing. Women surrounded him, phone numbers were pressed into his palms, slid into the pockets of his slacks.
His buddies waved him over and as he made his way across the room, Jason fought the urge to scan the room for Emma. He planned on looking laid-back, completely at ease when she saw him. Only half there, he’d settled into a conversation on great Thai restaurants in the city when a stacked redhead rubbed her tits against his arm and handed him a beer.
“Jason,” she said, her tongue coming out to lick the corner of her lips like a viper, “I can’t believe it’s been this long.”
“Did we have a class together?”
She pouted and it wasn’t a pretty look for a woman in her thirties, especially when she’d had a boatload of collagen injected into her lips. She reminded him of the trout he had on special at the restaurant last week.
She walked her fingers up his arm. “How could you forget our science labs in Chem 101?” She raised her voice in the gathering crowd to stake her claim. “Just you and me in a deserted lab, late at night. Up to all sorts of naughty things.”
Despite his act, Jason knew exactly who she was. Alicia Haynes, head of the Pi Phi sorority. One of the girls who had been too busy running after the frat boys and the jocks and the heirs to notice a boy on scholarship. She had made his freshman year chemistry class a living hell, all because he’d been unfortunate enough to land her as a lab partner.
Taking a long swig of his beer, Jason nodded. Her eyes perked up as she waited for him to fall into her ready arms. “Sorry,” he said, “don’t remember,” pausing just long enough to see her deflate like a punctured blow-up doll.
After the way Rick and Ace had built things up, Jason had expected to feel some sort of triumph about returning to Stanford as the poor-boy-who-made-real-good. But frankly, after his run-in with Alicia, he realized he didn’t really feel anything either way.
Then again, hadn’t he known that none of this was about some girl in his chemistry lab who hadn’t given him the time of day?
This was about Emma.
And after ten long years of keeping his distance, of making sure he wouldn’t run into her under any circumstances, he knew the time had come to face his past.
To face the one woman he’d truly loved. And could never have.
He could feel her in the room. A decade might have passed, but her power over him was stronger than ever.
He couldn’t put it off any longer. He knew that. But this time, he decided, he wasn’t going to let her get the best of him. He’d had too many women, been in and out of too many beds to let one little slip of a girl wreck his life again.
Tonight, he would finally show her that even though she’d yanked his heart out of his chest in college, he’d had no trouble forgetting all about her. And moving on with his life.
Just like she had.
After issuing his buddies a blanket invitation to drop by his restaurant soon, regardless of the fact that the reservation book was full four months out, he headed for the bar. The room was crowded, but every nerve in his body was alive.
Slowly scanning the room for his quarry, he saw her. Sitting in the corner with Kate, her loud, opinionated best friend. As strange a pair today as they were in college.
Kate stepped away from the table, and when Emma’s ice blue eyes connected with his, Jason
unexpectedly lost his breath. She was even more beautiful now than she had been in college. Thin, far too thin, and as prim and proper as a nun, but the raw need in her eyes drew him to her like a moth to a flame.
Ten years had passed since that day in the quad when he’d caught her swapping spit with Steven
Cartwright. Jason had fooled himself into believing she saw past his poor boy, country roots. He’d loved her so much he’d ignored all the signs. Not being invited to lunch with her parents after that first, disastrous meal where he used the dessert fork instead of the salad fork. Not knowing anything about polo horses or real estate or yachts. He’d invited Emma into his world—his family had easily welcomed her into their fray—but she hadn’t wanted him in hers.
Still, wanting to be with her was instinctual. Like jumping out of a tenth-story window of a building on fire. And just as dangerous. For ten years he’d steered clear of her, turned down every alumni event invitation on the off chance that she might be there. He hadn’t wanted to see if he still needed her more than he needed to breathe.
He was sick of hiding from her. Sick of letting her think that she’d won. He hadn’t come here with a big plan. Frankly, he still didn’t have one. For all he knew the best thing to do was get the hell out of here, head back to Napa, try and forget all about her again. All he had to do was get in his car, get on the freeway, and head north.
And then what? He would slide into his plush king bed knowing that he was too much of a wimp to face her, that’s what. A self-made, multimillionaire, world-famous chef wimp.
Forget that.
It was time to take care of unfinished business. Namely, proving to himself that Emma didn’t have a hold over him anymore. And then he’d head back to his fields of Chardonnay and give 100 percent focus to the only thing that really mattered: Good food.