AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“And you, Miss Pennington.”
“Laurel, please,” I told him. “Miss Pennington is reserved for the boss.”
Rick laughed at this, and I felt my anxiety ease.
“Luke is quite a good boss,” he said casually. “Though, I hear you’ve had some troubles with him?”
I raised an eyebrow. How could he already know this? However, if he was on good terms with Mr. Delaney, it wasn’t a stretch to think that Mr. Delaney might have complained about me to him. I hadn’t seen anyone else running around the lodge, and I figured that if he had been working here for long, Mr. Delaney probably trusted him with his life. Still, I didn’t like the thought of beginning a job where the boss was already complaining about me to my coworkers.
“Why do you ask?”
“I don’t mean to pry too much, but I know that Luke’s never had a reputation for scaring off staff before. The fact that you two have already had a fight concerns me,” Rick admitted. “Now, I’ll be the first to admit that he’s not the easiest person to get along with in the beginning, but… there’s some good in him if you let him open up to you.”
“He should have thought about that before hiring a professional for a job better suited to a sleep-deprived high schooler,” I snapped.
“I apologize if I hit a nerve.”
I took a deep breath, covering my face with my hands.
“Food is my passion, Rick,” I finally admitted. “To hear Mr. Delaney belittling it because he can’t smell the difference between a bolognese and a marinara is heartbreaking.”
I pushed some of the stray hairs out of my face as I pulled my hands away, hoping that there wasn’t going to be any backlash for admitting this to the other employee. Though wary that he had sought me out in the cold because he wanted to keep the conversation off the record, I did at least restrain myself from moving away from him.
“Luke’s never been a, what would you call it? A foodie?” Rick scrunched his nose up at the word. “He’s always seen food as a way to get the nutrients to survive and that’s it.”
“Caring about nutrition is great, but food is also my art. I’m not asking him to care about it as much as me. I’m just asking for him to let go of the stupid sandwiches for every meal.”
I really did love food – it was my passion and my art. For years, I’d only let myself eat food ‘for the nutrients.’ I’d dropped weight like crazy, and my hair had started falling out in clumps every time I brushed it. Mark had told me he liked me best when I was that skinny, but I wouldn’t go back to living like that if someone paid me a million bucks. When I started letting myself enjoy creating and eating food again, I found my joy again – joy that I now realized had been starved of in my relationship with Mark.
Mark had been angry when I returned to a normal weight, but I felt so full of life every time I created something new in the kitchen.
All I wanted was for Mr. Delaney to let me keep that joy alive in his kitchen.
“Well, I certainly wouldn’t mind an actual meal every now and then,,” Rick chuckled. “But I’d like to ask you one thing. Will you at least give Luke a chance? It takes him longer to open up to new people than some of the locals around, but I chalk that up to his time in the Rangers and how much he saw there.”
I took a step back in surprise. I hadn’t known Mr. Delaney was a veteran. Maybe his stiffness came partially from the things he’d experienced.
“I didn’t know that he served.”
“And you did not hear it from me,” Rick cautioned. “He doesn’t like to share that he’s served, outside of the days when veterans are recognized. It tends to bring out the worst in some people who come here, and for others, they always want to treat him to extravagant dinners. He just wants a chance to enjoy the fishing seasons in peace. Since he doesn’t advertise it, he gets his wish.”
“I’ll do my best not to give you up as my source,” I said.
Rick smiled a little at me.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, Luke’s given me a lengthy list of ingredients, and I need to go see where in the world I can find… nutritional yeast? What the heck is that?” He took a look at the list.
I laughed as I realized what he had in his hands. He may not have enjoyed the fact that I was talking about expanding the menu, but Mr. Delaney must have seen the wisdom in at least listening to the complaints about the lack of choice for medical reasons. I would have hated to have to tell someone that I couldn’t feasibly make them anything in my kitchen because I just didn’t have the ingredients on hand or had cross-contamination to worry about.
“The grocery store might have it, or you may have to special order that from online,” I said. “It’s a vegan substitute that has a sort of cheesy flavor.”
Rick gave me a confused look, but he nodded and then left me on my own.
The conversation with Rick had proven informative. I felt more conflicted about Mr. Delaney now. In culinary school, we had to take a class about meals ready to eat, or MREs, that were served in the military. While they were meant to have a long shelf life and be used in case of emergency or deployment in a bad area, they had been absolutely awful. In my opinion. They had some not-so-simple meals available – such as spaghetti, potatoes, and even some roast beef – but the method of preparation to make them into an MRE had stripped much of the flavor away.
If that had been Mr. Delaney’s source of food for any significant amount of time, I could understand why Mr. Delaney saw food only as a way of getting nutrients, not something to enjoy.
Part of me wondered if I could change this. I knew I was going to try anyway, but part of me wondered if it was a good idea to do so. He had already shown himself to be pretty combative if I pushed against his routines. It might have been smarter to wait and let him see that I knew what I was talking about before trying to cook for him.
