Place cream cheese, ⅔ cup sugar, ½ cup sour cream, and orange peel in food processor. Cover and process about 3 minutes or until smooth. Add eggs. Cover and process until well blended. Spread over crust.
Bake 1 hour 20 minutes, or until center is set. Cool on wire rack for 15 minutes. Using spatula around edges to loosen, remove side of pan.
Refrigerate uncovered 3 hours or until chilled, then cover and continue refrigerating at least 4 hours, but not longer than 48 hours.
Mix ½ cup sour cream and 2 tablespoons sugar and spread over top of cheesecake. Top with fresh fruit and crystallized ginger. Store uneaten portion covered with foil in fridge.
TWELVE
BIANCA
Though I wanted to turn and bolt, I didn’t. The man had paid me an obscene amount of money for this job, after all. And I was a professional. I wouldn’t embarrass him in front of all his guests by refusing his request.
Also, I was intrigued by this new Jackson, this well-dressed stranger who spoke so eloquently about honor and selflessness and used words like please.
I didn’t think that word was in his vocabulary.
So it was with curiosity—and a healthy dose of embarrassment—that I walked around the perimeter of the tables and climbed the few stairs to the stage.
Then shock took over as Jackson wound his arm around my shoulders, pulled me against his side, and smiled down at me. I was too busy trying not to keel over in surprise to pay much attention to how perfectly I fit under his arm, how snugly I nestled against the solid bulk of his body.
How hard he was, all over.
I’m definitely hallucinating. Or Jackson Boudreaux has a twin no one knows about.
A twin that had three long, thin, mysterious scars on the right side of his face that his beard had been hiding.
“Pretend like you don’t hate me, and smile,” he said, his jaw barely moving, his lips stretched tight over his teeth. “Please.”
There’s that word again. I’m as lost as last year’s Easter egg. Am I on camera?
Expecting to see myself on a prank video sometime in the near future, I smiled.
Satisfied, Jackson turned back to the audience. “I discovered the magic of Bianca Hardwick’s cuisine when I visited her restaurant in the French Quarter. The food was so good I stayed all night and tried everything on the menu—”
“Maybe it wasn’t the food you stayed for!” shouted someone from the audience, then whistled, one of those catcalls boys lean out of car windows to deliver as you walk down the street.
Three hundred people laughed. My face went molten hot.
Jackson chuckled. His arm squeezed tighter around my shoulders. He said, “Well. Maybe for the first hour it was for the food.”
Who is this chuckler? I thought wildly, my heart galloping but the rest of me frozen stiff. This crowd pleaser? This . . . flirt?
At that moment, he tilted his head and sent me a sly wink.
He winked.
From my peripheral vision, I saw several camera flashes. Sweet Georgia Brown, I was being photographed grinning at Jackson Boudreaux like the village idiot.
I looked back out at the faceless crowd. Cold sweat trickled down between my shoulder blades. My smile stayed plastered firmly in place.
Jackson said, “I want y’all to visit Bianca’s in the Quarter before month’s end. Will you do that for me?”
The crowd made more noise. Jackson nodded, and then he said some other things I was too discombobulated to recall. Then a man came onstage and shook Jackson’s hand, and Jackson led me off by the arm, smiling and waving good-bye to the crowd.
The moment we were out of earshot of any guests, he dropped my arm and snapped, “You can stop smiling now, for Christ’s sake!”
“Oh thank heavens,” I said sarcastically. “For a minute there I thought I was living in an alternate universe where you actually had a good side.”
He swung around and stood in front of me. We were outside the tent, off to the side of one of the openings where waiters were still coming and going, glaring at each other in cold semidarkness while the auction began inside.
He snapped, “You’re right. I don’t have a good side. The person I was in there is a fabrication, the Jackson Boudreaux who likes people and enjoys the spotlight and feels right at home in a fucking penguin suit.” He ripped off his bowtie and threw it to the ground. “But that guy knows how to work a crowd and raise money by the fuckload for a charity that helps a lot of soldiers in need.”
He stepped closer and growled, “And that guy is willing to do whatever’s necessary to keep his end of a bargain with you and promote your restaurant and act like we’re on good terms, even when it’s painfully fucking obvious you’d rather be pushed off a building than have my arm around your shoulders!”