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I still remembered Cal sitting with those saltines at my kitchen table, acting a fool because she didn’t like the way the salt clung to her fingers. Rhy was right. The woman was barely civilized. I had no business thinking about her, let alone pining after her. Was she even a woman? She was still acting like a child. She needed a babysitter, not a boyfriend. And I wasn’t interested in either position.
“Enough,” I barked out. “I’m at no risk of liking Calla Litvin again. Not from afar and definitely not up close. You’re wasting your breath talking about her. You have twenty-four hours to find us two new servers.” I rapped my knuckles on the bar. “Get your ass in gear.”
Rhyland downed the rest of his beer, heaving out a sigh. “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.”
I flipped him the bird, trekking my way to the kitchen. “No fraternizing with the patrons!” I called out, as I did every night.
“No promises,” he called back, as he did every night too.
The evening couldn’t get worse if a meteor landed directly on my fucking head.
I was wrong.
The evening got worse.
Exponentially so and at a plane-crashing speed. Hot mess would be putting it mildly.
On the outside, it looked normal. Expensive utensils clinked in harmony; chatter rustled through the aromatic air. There was laughter, hushed conversations, and upholstered chairs scraping softly. The kitchen sweltered, the scents of sweet marjoram, thyme, and rosemary clinging to my nostrils. I loved the sensory overload that came with helming a restaurant. The fast-paced culture of it. It drowned out my fucked-up thoughts and forced me to focus on the here and now. And there were a lot of fucked-up thoughts, courtesy of my messy childhood.
Our normal ratio was one server for every three tables. This service, it was one server for every six. Considering we had a ten-course prix fixe menu, availability was nonexistent. And the patrons were pissed. Rightly so.
Tables had to wait up to twenty minutes between dishes, and the flustered servers were so overworked, one had spilled red wine over someone’s Dior dress, and another had stepped over a customer’s casted foot. My chef de partie had decided now was a good time to have a mental breakdown because a customer had insulted his scallop caviar tartare, and the kitchen porter had thrown a tantrum after Rhy had asked her to serve beverages for the night.
Overall, if I could erase this entire day from my memory bank, I would, and pay handsomely for the pleasure.
“Chef!” The maître d’ popped her head into my kitchen. A twentysomething Swiftie with blond side bangs and bright red lips.
“No,” I said automatically.
She cringed, about to shrivel into her face.
“What is it, Katie?” Taylor, my sous-chef, spun on his heel, giving her his full attention. He was a good-looking kid. Tall, Black, tatted, with hazel eyes that made every female staffer swoon whenever he was nearby.
“There’s a VIP customer who wishes to speak to Chef,” she said sheepishly.
“No,” I reiterated, chopping celery at the speed of light.
“Yes.” Rhy zipped into the kitchen, bypassing the maître d’. “People come here to get a glimpse of the famous Chef Casablancas. You need to make an appearance anyway. You do every night.”
I put the knife down. We stared each other down. I knew he was right. I hated people, but I loved my career. If parading myself around like a zoo animal meant getting patrons more hyped for my next culinary venture, it was no skin off my back.
“Fine.” I slapped the swinging doors of the kitchen open, prowling to the dining area. “Can tonight get any fucking worse?”
“Absolutely,” Rhyland said ardently, high on my misery. He joined me as we sliced through the white-clothed tables and candlelit chandeliers. “Wait till you see who wants to have a word with you.”
That got me intrigued. It couldn’t be Cal. First of all, she wasn’t a VIP. Second, she was too broke to afford a glass of water in my establishment, let alone eat an entire meal. Third, even if she had all the funds in the world, she still had the palate of a toddler. Her taste in food—if you could even call it that—was deplorable. She lived on a steady diet of corn dogs, Pop-Tarts, and Sour Patch Kids. She would eat her own foot on national television before willingly tasting an ortolan.
We approached a square table of what seemed to be a couple on a date. The first person appeared harmless enough—blond, leggy, the too-short-to-be-a-model type, in a dress that could moonlight as a sports bra, it was so short. Then my eyes landed on the man sitting in front of her.
Kieran Carmichael.
A privileged piece of shit whose daddy owned the one and only department store in town. The human answer to smegma.
I had suffered through twelve years of school with this prick. We were bitter rivals. Both jocks, both popular, both wanting to piss on each other’s territory. Ran in the same circles, dated the same girls.
Kieran’s favorite hobby used to be telling me I stank of the fish my fisherman dad sold to his father every day, and I’d enjoyed reminding him he had less personality than a stop sign. Ordinarily speaking, I would put a hole through someone’s face if they bothered me and move on with my life, but Kieran was a different breed. His family had power and influence. I had known if I’d messed up his face, my father would have been out of a job, and then there’d be no dinner on the Casablancas table. So I’d sucked it up. Braved twelve years of digs and bullshit.
Now my family no longer depended on his, and it was game on. Two decades’ worth of anger seared through my guts, lava bubbling in my veins. “Thought you said a VIP wanted to see me.” I eyeballed the maître d’ next to me, arching a brow.
