Flavor Of The Month (Kiss & Tell Book 2) Read online

  Chubby Chuddy…

  Reilly cringed when she read the headline across the top of a photograph. Damn, she’d thought that was all over with. She dropped her gaze to see which photo they’d gotten of her now. Only the picture wasn’t of her. Rather it was a grainy black-and-white shot of an overweight dark-haired guy.

  “Great. Now they’ve turned me into a transsexual,” she muttered under her breath. She really didn’t know how the real celebrities handled it. The rumors. The innuendo. The out-and-out lies.

  Layla gasped. “Oh, God, Reilly, read the piece for cripe’s sake.”

  She began doing just that.

  Mallory sighed. “Aloud. We have different papers, remember?”

  Reilly looked around, but thankfully no one was within earshot. “Lardo Benardo Loves Chubby…”

  Her voice trailed off as the words registered. Her heart pitched down to her feet then back up again.

  “Give me that,” Mallory said, snatching the paper from her trembling hands. “Popular restaurateur, and celebrity in his own right, Ben Kane of Benardo’s Hideaway shared a secret with this reporter over the holiday weekend. Not only did gorgeous Ben used to be a hundred pounds overweight, he confided to me over coffee and frozen cheesecake he had left over from the late and great Sugar ’n’ Spice pastry shop that he’s fallen madly in love with someone. Someone who’s grown familiar to us over the past week. Reilly Chudowski, once known as Chubby Chuddy and now cleared of any wrongdoing in connection to the fire that destroyed her shop, Sugar ’n’ Spice….”

  Mallory went on, but Reilly wasn’t listening anymore. At least not to her friend’s words. Rather, she was concentrating on the unsteady thrum of her heart. The longing in her stomach. The need that filled her to overflowing.

  “Listen to this,” Layla said, having leaned in closer to Mall. “Since Ben has lately been linked closely to Danish supermodel Heidi Klutzenhoffer, I called to ask her to comment on my piece before it went to press. Her words, verbatim, were, ‘Ben and I were and continue to be nothing but friends. But I suppose I’ll be looking elsewhere for an escort from now on.”’

  Mallory howled with laughter. “The reporter probably gave Heidi a heart attack when she shared Ben’s previous weight problem.”

  Layla picked up the latest copy of the L.A. Monthly and flipped it open. “Hmm…I wonder if this explains Jack’s obvious absence.”

  “What?” Mallory said, craning to get a look.

  Layla held the paper where she couldn’t see it while Reilly tried to keep her swimming head from pulling her under.

  “It’s Jack’s column. And guess what his topic is?” She looked over the paper at Reilly. “Lardo Benardo and Chubby Chuddy.”

  Mallory feigned a shudder. “God, I thought Chubby Chuddy was bad. Rei, Lardo Benardo is far worse, babe.”

  “Listen,” Layla said. “In this la-la-land of coffee enemas and gold-plated vomit sticks, where do two one-time overweight people who both own food businesses that even the most weight-conscious L.A. angel can’t resist, fit in? In this columnist’s humble opinion, they don’t. And they shouldn’t have to either. Because what you have are two unique people who understand what it’s like to be societal outcasts, and have come out of those shadows not only to survive, but thrive. With each other.”

  A sniffling sound made Layla stop and both she and Reilly looked at Mallory, who was balling like a baby.

  “That’s so sweet!”

  “No, it’s not. It’s the truth.”

  The threesome turned to find that Jack had finally made it. In fact, Reilly had the funny feeling that he’d been lurking somewhere within the shop for some time, waiting for the right moment to join them.

  As her throat choked off air, and her eyes burned with the tears Mallory openly shed, Reilly wasn’t all that sure now was the right moment for her.

  “Oh, Reilly,” Mallory was saying, grabbing for her hands where they sat on the table. “I’m so so sorry for everything I said against Ben. I…I…”

  Jack stared at her. “You judged him by appearances, Mall.”

  An earsplitting sob broke from her friend’s mouth, making Reilly start blubbering and Layla look a blink away from joining them.

  “Yes, I did!” Mallory admitted, for the first time looking completely unsure of herself. “Oh, Reilly, can you ever forgive me?”

  Reilly tightly clutched her friend’s hands. “There’s nothing to forgive, Mall. You never said anything that I wasn’t already thinking.”

  “You have my full permission to marry him.”

  Layla finally gave in and joined the hand-holding convention, adding a few of her own tears to the mix. “I’m so glad you two are making up. There were a couple of times when I didn’t think our special friendship would survive your bickering.”

  The words “special friendship” sent them all back to blubbering.

  Jack sighed heavily, then got up from the table. “I need a drink. Anyone else want a coffee?”

  The three women ignored him, talking over one another in an effort to share every fear, every hope, every wistful dream the past few minutes had inspired in them.

  “I’ve got to go,” Reilly said absently.

  Layla and Mallory stared at her.

  Reilly blinked, realizing what she’d said. “I’ve got to go!” she repeated.

  Mallory got up and helped her put her jacket on while Layla hung her purse over her shoulder. Then they were both hugging and kissing her as if they might never see her again. As Reilly ran up to Jack and gave him a quick hug and a heartfelt thank-you then hurried for the door, she wondered if her last words weren’t closer to the truth than she’d realized. Well, the old Reilly was finally gone forever.

  BEN SAT going over the accounts receivable numbers then made a notation in the left-hand margin of the printout. Only it didn’t look right so he used his calculator to go over the numbers again and found his original tally was short two hundred dollars. He erased the notation and wrote a fresh one, wondering if he should check the sum again.

  Truth be told, he was having a hard time concentrating this morning. A full day had passed since he’d met with both the reporter from the L.A. Confidential and with Reilly’s friend, columnist Jack Daniels, to help him in his quest to bring Reilly back into his life.

  No one had known of his past. Not even he and his father ever discussed how large he’d been as a teen. And since his path rarely, if ever, crossed anyone’s he’d known back then, it had been quite some time since he’d even given his former weight a great deal of thought.

  Until he’d seen the fat pictures Johnnie Thunder had sent to the tabloids.

  And he also came to realize a few things about himself. The reason why he was still unmarried and drawn solely to model types before Reilly, was that he had been working out all those years of rejection and shame left over from high school. He had been evening the score, so to speak. And, he supposed, he was still regaining some of that ground when he gave the Confidential reporter Heidi’s number and asked her to call the redhead for a comment. He could have killed himself when Heidi had called the day of the premiere to remind him of their date. With everything going on he’d forgotten to have his publicist call and offer his regrets. So, he’d gone to the premiere, with Heidi sporting a mysterious solitaire diamond ring on her ring finger, and he’d had one of the most miserable times of his life knowing that Reilly would see the pictures and be devastated.

  That’s why he’d derived an evil pleasure out of knowing that Heidi was probably hovering above a toilet now barfing up her orange juice, you know, to make doubly sure that just being near him wouldn’t make her fat.

  Ah, yes, the dreaded fat gene. He’d inherited it. And, so it appeared, had Reilly. And that alone was enough to make those body-conscious people interested in procreating run screaming in the other direction.

  He secretly hoped that every last one of the six kids he and Reilly had inherited the gene, as well. Because in his experience, s
ome of the best people walking the earth were fat people.

  First, of course, he had to convince Reilly to have those kids with him….

  How would she react to the news? Of course there was always the possibility that she’d been so irreversibly scarred by her experience with obesity that she’d run away from him, herself. But if she thought that today’s surprise in the newspapers was something, just wait until she saw what he had planned to run every day until she finally gave in.

  He heard rapid footsteps on the tile outside his office and looked up to find the woman in question pink cheeked and out of breath….

  And grinning from ear to ear.

  “I got here as fast I could,” she whispered.

  Ben briefly closed his eyes, savoring the moment. It had been so hard to wait for her to come back to him. He’d known last week, while sitting outside with Efi in the car watching Reilly return with her friends, that while he’d been willing to push her in the beginning, in order for them to go anywhere from there Reilly would have to seek him out on her own steam. And that the way to go about getting her back couldn’t be anything traditional. She would have been prepared for that. Flowers, candy, repeated phone calls and unexpected visits, she would have been able to reject.

  Reilly was a special woman who needed special attention.

  And he was so relieved he’d been able to give it to her that it was almost impossible to speak.

  Reilly cleared her throat. “You know, you put your entire career as a restaurateur on the line with that little stunt you pulled this morning.”

  Ben pushed from his chair, filled with the urge to pull her into his arms and squeeze her within an inch of her life.

  Instead he stayed put. Reilly had to come to him. Fully.

  “I know,” he said simply.

  Reilly’s brows briefly knit together. “And you were willing to risk that?”

  “To have you standing here in front of me for just one minute?” He slowly nodded. “Yes.”

  “Oh, God.” She rushed into his arms and melted against him. And for the first time since she’d disappeared from his life a week ago, he felt complete again. Whole. Like a lost limb had not only been reconnected but was in full working order.

  He pressed his lips against her sweet-smelling hair, unwilling to let her go for fear that she might run from him again. “Oh, how I’ve missed you Reilly Chudowski.”

  He heard the click of her throat as she swallowed. “All I know is that the only time I don’t obsess about everything is when I’m with you.”

  “So be with me. Always.”

  He heard her quiet laugh, her tight embrace telling him she’d missed him, too.

  “Oh, how am I ever going to be able to trust you?” she whispered.

  “Come to work with me here,” he said.

  She pulled back slightly, giving him a teasing smile. “Why? So I can watch over you?” she asked. “Being faithful isn’t just about the lack of opportunity, Ben.”

  “You’re right, it isn’t. But what you will see is that I only have eyes for you.”

  She pressed her cheek tightly against his chest. “I hate this,” she murmured. “It’s not really a matter of whether I can trust you, is it? I know you haven’t been fooling around. I know it with everything I am. No. This whole…trust issue is really about me. About whether or not I can trust myself to trust you.”

  Ben didn’t have an answer for that one, so he didn’t offer one.

  He heard her deep swallow. “Did they really used to call you Lardo Benardo?”

  He nodded, smoothing her hair back from her face and gazing deep into her eyes. “Yes, they did. And worse.”

  “They used to call me Chubby Chuddy.”

  He smiled at her, seeing the pain still there, shadowing her eyes, though he also saw her characteristic sass. “I know.”

  She hooked her finger inside his shirt between two buttons and gave a tug. “I guess now I know the story behind your interest in my granny panties.”

  Ben began laughing so hard, he was afraid she might take his reaction the wrong way. He was so relieved to find her laughing along with him that he had to lean back against the wall to prop himself up. Then he claimed her mouth with his as if trying to forever brand it with his kiss, his touch, to ruin her for anybody else but him.

  Leaving her mouth briefly, he whispered, “Promise me something, Reilly.”

  “What?”

  “No more secrets.” He kissed her forehead, her temple, her nose. “If anything’s bothering you, if something scares you, come to me. Talk to me.” He licked and nibbled her jawline. “And promise me you’ll never ever run away from me again.”

  “Oh, Ben,” she murmured, hugging him so tightly he couldn’t breathe. “I hate that it took being away from you to figure out that I never want to be without you again.”

  He pulled her back to meet her gaze again. “Promise me.”

  She swallowed hard. “I promise.”

  Ben lifted her up and sat her down on his desk then pushed his office door closed with his foot. That was one promise he was going to make sure both of them were going to keep.

  It was several minutes before they broke from their kiss for air. His shirt hung open, her blouse and bra were pushed up above her breasts and their breathing was so ragged that anyone standing outside the door would think they had a porno video in the tape player.

  Reilly pushed her hair back from her flushed, beautiful face. “Did you mean what you said to Efi in the car last week?”

  Ben searched her eyes and his memory. “Remind me.”

  “That you don’t care if I was fat or even am fat, that you love me just the way I am?”

  He grinned, running his hands up the inside of her thighs and pressing against the crotch of her jeans. “What do you think?”

  She linked her hands behind his head. “I think we should go back to your place and find those granny panties.”

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-6145-1

  FLAVOR OF THE MONTH

  Copyright © 2003 by Lori & Tony Karayianni.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, M3B 3K9, Canada.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

  ® and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.

  Visit us at www.eHarlequin.com