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  There was a note that the pile of small pumpkins in the corner was overstock from a cancelled wedding. The groom had left with his old flame and the restaurant was left with an overabundance of shrimp, asparagus, halibut, dark chocolate, and pumpkins.

  While she couldn’t go back and convince the bride that getting married was a bad idea, she could solve the pumpkins and chocolate problem, that was for sure. Turning to Brandon, she motioned with her fingers. “If you want to eat, wash your hands. You’ll have to earn it.”

  “I thought I already did.” He protested, but his body belied his words, already eagerly getting to his feet.

  Delilah thought better of handing him a large knife. She didn’t think he should be wielding it, especially if he ever realized she was to blame for the fact that the room was still spinning around him just a little. So she gave him a big metal spoon instead.

  She capped the first pumpkin and set Brandon to scraping the insides clean and washing out the seeds. She chopped large cubes of the orange squash and had him feed them into the industrial strength food processor. When the pumpkin was thoroughly pulverized, Delilah picked up a tongue depressor from a steel canister and tasted it before expertly tossing the taster stick into the trash.

  Handing him a new large spoon, she told him to move the mixture into a steel bowl and laughed when he mimicked her motions, picking up a wooden stick and licking off the orange mash. He made the worst face. “That doesn’t taste right. Isn’t it supposed to be sweeter?”

  “No, silly, it’s squash. We have to add sugar and cream and spices.”

  Together they poured in huge quantities of vanilla, molasses, brown sugar and sorghum honey. She had him grate nutmeg into the mix, which he agreed to only after he had examined the acorn-looking nuts thoroughly. Most people had never seen nutmeg except as a pulverized powder from a can, and Mr. Video-games was no exception.

  When the batter was ready, she began ladling it into individual ceramic baking dishes and popping them into the oven. Brandon, with nothing to keep him busy, placed his hands on either side of his hips, where he leaned against the counter. Something about the way he stood there, the way he commanded the space around him, made her wish she had another night with him. But wasn’t that the whole point? She couldn’t handle another night. Certainly not with a man who’d had his tongue loosened and yet was still polite and sweet and occasionally shooting her those wicked grins.

  Delilah had no idea how the half-spell would change his normal behavior, but she did know that she hadn’t done anything strong enough to make him cluck like a chicken or do anything he wouldn’t normally do. She couldn’t make a complete ass into Prince Charming. Aside from being a little pushy, he was fun and funny and sweet and a little silly. There was no way she’d survive another night without getting attached, and she knew from experience that would be bad. So she had to get him out of here. Even if she was having fun.

  She reminded herself that she’d likely be fired if she were caught.

  Turning, she gave him a new set of instructions. “Get down that big pot, and pull out that bin of sugar.”

  Like a kid, he eagerly went about each task. Even when she taught him to weigh the sugar, he did the work carefully. She made him do it in small batches, keeping him busy measuring and dumping it into the pot.

  It didn’t matter how much sugar was in the pot at all. Only that he didn’t see as she added a little extra honey and the lavender ashes to the last dish of pumpkin. She pushed it to the front corner of the oven before shutting the door.

  She then wet the sugar in the pot and had him stir it while it heated into goo. When it hit thread stage she pulled the pot off the flame and attempted to teach him how to make doodads.

  “What?” He leaned a little too close for her sanity and she tried to take a step back.

  “Doodads. Those crispy sugar-art things that come on your dessert.” She couldn’t help it. She wound up grinning. Then laughing full out, when he was forced to eat the vast majority of the designs he had poured simply to hide the evidence. He shoved three of them in her mouth after she insulted their looks.

  She smelled the pumpkin cakes hitting their peak and pulled them from the oven, showing him how they had each risen to the point just before the surface cracked, then slapped at his hand as he made a motion to grab one. “We aren’t done.”

  She made him watch while she whisked eggs and cooked heavy cream into pastry custard. She added a shot of Kahlua and handed him a taster stick. When it hit his tongue, he moaned, much as he had only five hours before. She tried to ignore his look of ecstasy as his green eyes rolled back before he tossed the stick into the trash and reached for another.

  Delilah made him hold the pastry bag while she filled it. She fitted it with a needle-like tip and amazed him as she injected the cream into the center of each cake, taking advantage of the holes that had formed while it baked. At last she handed him the needle to hold, and he made her laugh again as he mimicked injecting the cream directly into his veins. She formed her hands around his, showing him how to inject the cream. She let him do two of the cakes, one of which was his with the lavender baked in.

  She whipped fresh cream and piped it on top of one of the cakes, grating more nutmeg shavings across the top and sticking a doodad in to finish it off. Carefully she added two apple shavings and three raspberries to a plate and set the whole concoction on a pedestal that she then covered with a glass dome.

  “Noooo!” Brandon wailed. “It’s for display?”

  He drooled at the pretty little cake behind the glass, and Delilah couldn’t help the chuckle that surfaced. “That one is so the staff knows how to present it. They add all the whipped cream and garnish when it’s ordered.” She used a black china marker on the glass dome to label the parts.

  Still Brandon looked bereft. Good.

  She smiled at him, even though it made her feel a little hollow inside. Maybe he didn’t deserve this, but she was committed.

  Here goes nothing. “You want one?”

  “You have to ask?”

  So she made two, hers and the lavender cake. She dolled them up with toppings and added the last survivors of his mutant doodad collection. Then she handed him a spoon.

  While she carefully ate her cake and licked whipped cream off the spoon, she watched as he savored each bite. If he tasted the lavender, then he didn’t realize it wasn’t supposed to be there. Baked in, with all that sugar like it was, he probably couldn’t tell. Which was just as good.

  He ate each last bite, before he looked out the window to see the sun start to lighten the sky. Then he cocked his head at her as though he wanted to ask a question but it had slipped his mind.

  “Come on.” She took his hand and led him out the back door. Pressing a quick kiss to his lips, she whispered “forget”.

  Chapter 3

  Light streamed in through the windows at an odd angle, startling him from a very deep sleep. His head was muzzy and his vision was strangely sideways. Odd noises, like digital bird sounds, flitted beyond the edge of his grasp. It took a few moments to gather the off-kilter sensations together into a full picture.

  Brandon realized he was lying on his couch—poorly. One leg hung off the side, and his head was resting on the arm, his neck at an odd and painful angle. He was still in yesterday’s clothes. He didn’t remember yesterday ending, only that he and Dan had taken the very smooth-talking Richard Cain out for beers.

  So it had to be the next day.

  Something about the light still bothered him, until he looked over his shoulder to the microwave display in his kitchen, one of the few clocks he had in his house. 12:14.

  Holy Crap! He sprung up. It was noon. That explained why the light was so bright. Why the angle seemed so odd. It was hours past when he should have been up. Past when he should have been at work.

  The chirping sound called his attention back to the sleek black and silver state-of-the-art phone. Caller ID showed it was his partner calling—pro
bably wondering where the hell he was. Pushing the ‘talk’ button, Brandon sank down on the sofa in a seated position—the way the makers had intended it to be used.

  “Hi, Dan.” He croaked from beneath the hand he was rubbing across his face. He could hear the sounds of the office in the background.

  Dan just laughed. “I didn’t expect you to be in early, but seriously, bud, we have to head out of here in an hour. I called twice already and was about to come peel your sorry ass off the floor.”

  Brandon groaned. “You waited until noon?”

  Another laugh came across the line. “Well, you left with that blonde last night. I figured you might need a while to recuperate.”

  “Hmph. Try ‘resuscitate’.” His throat felt like he’d swallowed his t-shirt. Dirty.

  “That good?” No chuckle this time.

  Brandon groaned soul-deep in his chest. “I wouldn’t know. I don’t remember any of it.”

  “Really?” There was no more laughter from Dan. That alone told Brandon that the situation was possibly more serious than he’d thought.

  He took stock and started talking. “I don’t feel hung-over. Not like I did when I drank too much in college. No headache, no upset stomach. But I’m not right.”

  Dan’s voice was suddenly louder and the background noise disappeared—he’d taken off the speaker phone. “And you don’t remember? I mean, she was hot, and she walked you right out of that bar.”

  Brandon searched the corners of his brain. He remembered telling Richard to back off from someone. He remembered going to the bar for more beer. “The three of us sat in a booth together. I ordered more beer . . . . After that, I’m pulling a blank.”

  “You’re obviously at your place, since I called on the land-line.” Brandon could hear the thoughts churning through Dan’s mind. “I’m guessing you would have noticed if your kidneys were missing.”

  That opened his eyes. Just for safe measure, and because he did feel odd, Brandon checked. Then breathed a little easier. “No, I didn’t wake up in a tub of ice.”

  “Did you check your wallet?”

  “Crap!”

  Brandon dropped the phone to the wood floor for once not caring if he marred it. He’d been had. He knew it.

  But his fingers found his wallet in his back pocket. Quickly he thumbed through it—his driver’s license and credit cards were exactly where they were supposed to be. With a sigh, he scooped the phone off the floor. “It’s all here.”

  “All of it?”

  For the next five minutes he and Dan discussed the contents of his wallet and decided that he had to call all his cards and make sure she hadn’t copied the numbers and used them over the phone or something. He didn’t carry his social security card in his wallet, thankfully.

  Eventually, Dan sighed. “Is there anything else you can remember? Anything weird? Some clue?”

  Brandon thought for a moment, then sniffed the air. “I smell pumpkin.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “No. I smell pumpkin.” He walked around the small house sniffing. First the kitchen, although he didn’t—couldn’t—cook so that wasn’t really logical, then his bedroom. It took a few more tries before he found the source. “It’s me. My clothes smell like pie.”

  Dan groaned. “Don’t call your credit cards. You weren’t robbed. You probably have a brain tumor.”

  Finally, Brandon found some humor in the situation. He replied in his best Arnold Schwarzenegger voice, “It’s not a tumor.”

  Dan didn’t laugh. “Look, you shouldn’t drive. Just get dressed. I’ll come get you for the meeting.”

  There was a click on the line as Dan hung up.

  Gently setting the receiver back in the cradle, Brandon set about gathering all the cards and money he’d spilled from his wallet. The lingering scent of pumpkin pie followed him until he peeled his clothes and climbed into the shower.

  Chapter 4

  Delilah stripped the bed a little more furiously than necessary. She was tired as hell.

  Well, duh, she thought, she’d hardly slept last night. And when she had, there’d been a man in her bed. It turned out that just having a warm male body beside her brought back all sorts of unhappy memories. During the day she recalled flashes of bad dreams she’d had the night before.

  So, no bar prowling tonight. She arrived home just after eleven and decided it was time for a good night’s sleep. Only, when she climbed under the covers, her eyes refused to close and her brain churned.

  Still early in the day, the light was pouring in through the cracks around the blinds. Faint noises came from the apartment just on the other side of her wall. Scents of Brandon and sex had lingered in the fine weave of the cotton. When she finally started to drift off, she got hot and bothered. And that just bothered her. The man wasn’t even here, and he was still getting to her. That wasn’t good.

  After an hour of suffering, she gave up. She peeled the bed linens and walked down the hallway to the laundry room to wash him away.

  Forty minutes after that, she decided that she should have just thrown the bedclothes in the hamper and put on her old sheets. It was her stubbornness that had led her to want to sleep on the Egyptian cotton with only the smell of fabric softener. And that was the problem with the community laundry room: once you started, you were committed.

  So she sat in her living room waiting on the washing machine and pondering her ability to cast a ‘forget’ spell on herself. Eventually she decided against it, realizing that she’d likely just forget her laundry and lose her expensive sheets to a greedy neighbor. Also, if anything went wrong she’d never remember what she’d done, so she’d have no clue how to fix it.

  Bummer.

  She walked down the hall and transferred the sheets to the dryer and dried them on ‘low.’ It was kindest to the cotton, but today the extra time was unkind to her. She wound up watching infomercials to stay awake and before she knew it she had spent some of her savings and a Showtime Rotisserie was on its way to her doorstep. She almost called back and cancelled the order, but that would be too much trouble. It wasn’t about the money, she had backup money. She had no intention of ever touching it, but it was there.

  Later, she finally got the fresh sheets on her bed and fell into a deep and blissful sleep, only to have her alarm go off in the middle of the night, yanking her from some seriously wicked dreams involving pumpkin cakes and pastry cream and, of course, Brandon.

  Delilah fought the urge to call in sick—which was really just cruel when she considered that the executive chef/owner had likely only gone to bed about two hours earlier. When she hired on, they’d asked if she called in sick a lot. In two and a half years she hadn’t once. So she wasn’t going to start now. Certainly not over a man she knew for a fact wouldn’t recognize her on the street.

  Pulling on her checked pants, she thought about how he had blinked his eyes just outside the door to the restaurant. He’d looked confused for a moment, then pulled out a tiny, fancy cell phone and called a cab. She’d heard the car pull up and peeked out the window to see Brandon glancing at the buildings all around him. From the alley, in the dark, the place looked deserted. He had to have wondered what the hell he was doing there. But he wouldn’t even remember that later. He wouldn’t be able to trace a path back to her.

  Determined to wash him from her brain, Delilah pulled the hair tie from her pocket. The blue rose. She stuffed them there when the jackets came back from the dry cleaners. One time, early on, she’d showed up to work without a hair net.

  Once.

  Now she had a spare in her tiny cubby in the office and one stuffed into the pocket of each clean chef jacket in her closet. Concentrating on her reflection, she pulled up the blonde loops of her hair, brushing it back, over and over until the ponytail was smooth.

  Her husband had always raved about her hair. And she’d loved that he loved it. He’d commented on it. Stroked it. Admired it. Right up until the day he’d died.

 
Delilah didn’t think so much of it anymore. Her long hair was just something frivolous and probably not as beautiful as he’d said. Now it was just something to tuck out of the way into the pretty little net attached to the large turquoise fabric rose.

  With her jacket draped over her arm, she headed down the hall to the garage and pulled out into the still of night.

  Street lamps spilled light across the sidewalks, illuminating the pinkish stars set into the concrete. People walked down Hollywood Boulevard or lingered under the lights, even at this hour. Still, you could tell it was two-thirty in the morning, because there were less of them, and more of the people who were there were in pairs or were trying to be.

  In the dark, it was easier to see that the streets actually did sparkle. Leave it to Hollywood to sprinkle their asphalt with glitter. But she liked it. It was exactly what she needed. Exactly where she fit in. All show and magick, with little requirement for substance.

  Her work was only eight blocks away, but she always drove. Things might look tame on the main streets, but you didn’t want to walk down LA’s back roads in the middle of the night. All of the city was like that, the neighborhood could change drastically from one block to the next. The section where she worked was only one street off a bad neighborhood, but here the front of the trendy restaurant matched the surroundings, glass and chrome melded into art that cared only just slightly for function. The bright sign was left on all night, the waste of electricity justified as an advertising cost.

  The alley was a different story, cinderblock and brick that bore stains. The pavement did not glitter back here. Not that Delilah felt threatened in any way, but the alley was definitely the ‘back lot.’ In several hours, the delivery bay would welcome trucks bearing common fish with exotic names, fresh produce from the farms just beyond the city’s borders, and once a week huge bags of flours and grains.

  Delilah pulled into a spot that wouldn’t hinder the trucks from either getting into the alley or backing up to the loading bay. That meant that she was behind the salon next door, which was often as far as her tired feet could make it by the end of a shift. Setting the parking break, she climbed out, shut the door, and clocked in. This morning’s note asked her to test her ability against a delivery of puff pastry and blackberries.