Chapter Eight
“Charlie, do it again.”
My coworker cursed under his breath, calling me a dirty name I couldn’t make out. I could have guessed though. I figured it landed somewhere in the general vicinity of body parts used to degrade women.
I rolled my eyes. I wasn’t going to let him get away with being a crybaby. I’d stupidly made the mistake of sleeping with the idiot a while back. We’d gone out after an epically long shift and gin was involved. One bad decision led to the next… I woke up the next morning with a killer hangover and buyer’s remorse. He was a nice enough guy, but so not for me. “Your asparagus is charred to hell and you’ve murdered that egg.”
The poached egg over crispy, lemon asparagus was one of Wyatt’s original ideas and it was freaking fantastic. I mean, as hard as it was for me to give Wyatt a compliment, I had to admit it was the best asparagus I had ever tasted.
And Charlie was doing a bang-up job of making sure nobody else shared my opinion.
“Fucking hell, Kaya,” he continued to grumble.
“I’m saving your ass,” I reminded him. Lifting my gaze off the filet in my pan, I stared him down. “Or did you want to hear it from Wyatt instead?”
Half his mouth twitched into a smile. “You’re as bad as he is.”
I wrinkled my nose, hating and loving the comparison all at once. “Don’t be gross.” I threw my elbow toward his grill top. “And fucking pay attention or you’re going to burn it again.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he mumbled but turned back to his food.
On instinct, I glanced back and caught Wyatt staring at us with that signature glare of his. He was either pissed at Charlie for messing up the asparagus for the third time tonight or at me for getting in Charlie’s business.
Our gazes clashed together, fire flaming between us. Nope, he was definitely pissed at me. He probably wanted the chance to scream at Charlie and I’d taken it away from him.
Suddenly, the strangest thing happened. A shadow of a smile passed over his lips. He wasn’t glaring at me. He was smiling at me!
Nerves bubbled in my stomach at the same time my bones turned to liquid. I quickly turned around and tried to forget that look, that exact expression. I’d seen Wyatt smile before. Once or twice. Maybe. But that wasn’t a normal smile. That was sex and sin and very dirty things.
Steak, Kaya. Pay attention to the steak.
It would be a miracle if I didn’t ruin this poor filet. And it was wagyu. I’d be damned before I burned wagyu. I needed to focus.
And not worry about Wyatt.
Yeah, right.
I had been telling myself that for two days now. It wasn’t working.
My lips still burned where our mouths had touched on Wednesday. I had stopped calling it a kiss sometime yesterday, at like the twenty-four-hour obsession mark. It wasn’t a kiss. Kisses were warm and gentle and lovely.
No, Wyatt hadn’t kissed me.
He’d branded me.
I knew that to be true, because I could still feel the outline of his lips on mine and the heat of his body pressed into me. The gentle touch of his tongue. The riot of butterflies that migrated through me from head to toe every time I thought about it was unforgettable.
Kisses didn’t leave me so disoriented. Kisses were ordinary. Or at best they were nice.
Only nice.
Clearly Wyatt had done something more than kiss me, something wholly irreversible. Now I was stuck with the memory of his touch for the rest of my life.
Bastard.
“Did you read the review?” Charlie asked in a low voice when he plated the now perfect asparagus.
“Which one?” The Daily Durham review had come out last week. They’d raved about Wyatt’s successful takeover and seamless transition. Lilou had been hailed as better than ever. They had been especially impressed with Wyatt’s new dishes and couldn’t wait to see what else was going to come from “Durham’s rising star.”
In a strange turn of events, Wyatt had seemed ignited by the review, instead of pacified by it. He was more desperate than ever to make changes to the menu and improve nightly service. I’d walked in on him yesterday when he’d been on the phone with Ezra, fighting over yet another menu change that Wyatt wanted to make. I could only imagine what another review would do to his already feverish pace.
Rebecca Jones had stopped by a couple of nights ago, but she would visit the restaurant a few more times before she wrote anything up. She never reviewed after her first stop.
“The one on Episessed.” Charlie paused to listen to Wyatt’s latest callouts. “It came out this morning.”
I read Episessed like every other foodie in the region, but I only checked it every so often. They didn’t post every day, so I usually caught up on the weekends.
Dread curdled in my stomach. I glanced at Wyatt. His back was to me again, his hands splayed on the counter in front of him. His arms were locked, forcing his shoulders to stiffen, and his head was bowed over order tickets.
God, it was unfair how sexy he was.
That was it. Right there. My hottest fantasy. Not that it was necessarily Wyatt. But a chef that looked like him and commanded a kitchen like he did and stood like that. And also sounded like him. And talked like him. And had an ass like him. Yes, please.
Of course, I was referring to a totally different human. That other person in my fantasy. Not Wyatt. Obviously.
“You should read it,” Charlie coaxed.
The dread came spilling back in full force. If it was bad, we were all going to suffer. As we should. They could give Wyatt as many exaggerated honors as they wanted to, but he couldn’t run this kitchen by himself. Still… I wasn’t sure if he could handle it emotionally if it was negative. He didn’t seem to be the most stable person lately.
I tore my eyes from Wyatt and focused on Charlie. “Is it bad?”
He smirked. “You might think so.”
Glaring at him, I began plating the slices of wagyu filet over a bed of crispy jicama and sweet potato frites with a side of glazed green beans topped with roasted pistachios.
Wiping the edges of the dish with a towel, I focused more on the plate in front of me than on the annoying cook to my left. “Are you going to tell me what it says?”
“Just read it, Swift.”
Holy hell, he was annoying. I couldn’t tell if he was taunting me or preparing me. But his suggestion was on my mind as I carried my plate over to Wyatt.
I set it in front of him and ran my lip ring back and forth in my teeth while he inspected my handiwork. “The filet looks okay.”
“It’s perfect.”
“Did you do the green beans?”
“Those are all Benny.”
“Hmph.”
He started wiping the edge that I’d already cleaned off. It wasn’t worth saying anything. This was his way.
Usually I would have retreated to the fire by now, but I had a break in orders and the Episessed review was on my brain. I cocked my hip out to rest against the counter. Wyatt gave me a side glance but remained focused on the dish going out.
“I heard a rumor that Episessed reviewed Lilou today.”
He smiled at the filet and my heart kicked with that same obnoxious pitter-patter his smiles always caused. “They did.”
“The review was a good one?”
He turned his head, that smile still lifting the corners of his too wide mouth. “It was.”
Something tugged at my guts, warning me it wasn’t all good. Not if Charlie was all but daring me to read it. “Congratulations,” I told him, but to be honest, it lacked all the congratulatory feelings.
He didn’t say thank you. A normal person would have said thank you. But Wyatt wasn’t normal.
Instead, he made a humming noise and then called for a server. The steak went out of the kitchen next to seared rabbit with pancetta and truffle tortellini. My stomach growled at the smell of some of the best food this city had to offer.
“You can take a break,” Wyatt murmured in a low rumble of a voice.
I blinked at him again. “What?”
His gaze dropped briefly to my stomach before he turned back to an order of risotto that had been placed in front of him. “If you’re hungry. You can take a break.”
Was this a trick? “I don’t usually get hungry while I’m cooking. I don’t know why I am tonight.”
He turned to look at me again, hitting me full force with those dark, mysterious brown eyes. “Really? I find that I’m always hungry in this kitchen.”
It was a normal sentence. Totally normal. And yet there was a tone to it that made my knees shake and my belly pool with heat.
Was that an innuendo?
No way.
Not in the middle of dinner service…
I found myself staring at him, held prisoner by his hot chocolate gaze and the mystery swimming in the depths there. My mouth was suddenly very dry, and I licked my lips desperately to find relief. His eyes dropped to follow the movement and my breath caught in my chest.
What was wrong with him? This was craziness. He had officially lost his mind.
And the worst part was the confusion. We were in totally uncharted territory and I had no idea how to read him. Was there something going on with him? Between us? Or was I totally reading into stupid little things because I was completely overworked and lonely and secretly, very, very secretly crushing on him?
Leaning closer I caught his scent. He smelled like the kitchen. Fire and herbs and citrus. But there was something beyond the food, something manlier… something so totally consumed with testosterone, my delicate lady parts nearly swooned. “We need to talk.”
One of his eyebrows lifted. “Now?”
I shook my head, trying to get my thoughts straight. “No, obviously not now.”
He smiled slowly. “Later then.”
“Tonight.”
His chin bobbed up and down. “Okay, tonight. Come find me.”
I turned around and suppressed a scream. There was something about the way he demanded very obvious things that made the hairs on the back of my neck bristle. Obviously, I would find him later and I would talk to him. Those were my ideas. And somehow, he stole the credit because he said them in that authoritative way of his.
Okay, now I was getting irritated with stupid things. Which meant I was nervous. Why was I nervous to talk to my boss? The guy I couldn’t stand?
I shouldn’t be. This was dumb. I was dumb.
Argh! I blamed all of this on Wyatt. He was the problem. Actually, that was an understatement.
He was the sum total of my problems.
I had work to do, but I couldn’t resist the temptation of nabbing my phone out of my apron to quickly pull up the Episessed review. It took the next thirty minutes to read it between dishes, but I managed to get to the end eventually.
I looked over at Charlie. “Son of a bitch.”
He cackled. The asshole cackled. “It’s a good review for Lilou.”
His neutral statement made me want to punch him in the throat. “Yeah, if you’re Wyatt Shaw.”
He leaned closer, so no one would overhear us. “My favorite part was when they asked him who he could rely on in the kitchen and he said his instincts.”
My Santoku knife was sitting where I sliced the filet. I resisted, barely, the urge to grab it and throw it across the kitchen. “He’s such a dickhead.”
Charlie laughed harder.
“He didn’t have to say my name.” I tried to sound at least mildly humble. Even if my insides were boiling. “He could have credited all of us. He could have said we didn’t flinch with the regime change. We gave him the respect he was due right out of the gate. He could have mentioned us—a general, they’re all amazing.”
Charlie sobered some, his smile turning confused. “Would you?”
I rolled my eyes. That was a stupid question. “Of course, I would! If I ran a kitchen like this, I wouldn’t need to claim all the glory for myself. The food speaks for itself.”
He shrugged. “That’s the difference between men and women.”
It was my turn to be confused. “What does that mean?”
“Men don’t like to share. Women lack the bloodthirsty gene.”
“Not true,” I disagreed immediately. “I’m plenty bloodthirsty.” My fists clenched thinking about Sarita. I was really fucking bloodthirsty. “But I also know how to appreciate the people that have helped get me to where I’m at.”
“So you would thank me in an interview?”
I shook my head. “Not you. You haven’t helped me get anywhere. But I would credit Dillon. And… other people.” I meant Vera, but I couldn’t exactly admit that to Charlie.
“Are the other people women?”
I didn’t like his point, but I nodded.
“Okay, so fine, maybe it’s a different kind of bloodthirsty,” Charlie decided.
I stared at him. “Are you calling me sexist?”
“You said the word.”
I snorted. I couldn’t tell if he was serious. “Hey, at least I wouldn’t credit my instincts.”
“That’s not sexist,” Charlie pointed out. “That’s selfishness. They’re not the same thing.”
“Okay, fine. You have a point.” Although it killed me to admit it. “With this one thing. But the kitchen is one of the most sexist industries in the country. You have to admit that.”
He shrugged. “Maybe. But also, maybe we’re all more like Wyatt than like you. Maybe we’re not being sexist. Maybe we’re only looking out for ourselves.”
“And the catcalls from the line? The crude comments whenever I take off my coat?”
His embarrassed smile added points to my side of the argument. “Again, you’re painting those things in a bad light. We’re appreciating the opposite sex. We can’t help it if you’re nice to look at.”
I rolled my eyes and turned back to my station. There it was. Point proven.
But maybe he also had a point. I had assumed that the men in this kitchen and in all kitchens didn’t take me seriously because I was a woman. But maybe it was less about me. Maybe it wasn’t about me at all.
It wasn’t that they didn’t take me seriously, it was that they were more competitive. In like a savage way. It wasn’t only me they wanted to discount, but every single potential threat, men and women alike.
And maybe that was still what Wyatt was doing. Even though he’d made it. He was the alpha. The top dog. He still couldn’t let go of his instincts to fight, to keep his job.
Maybe.
Although that was a very generous point of view and I still wanted to punch him.
We were definitely talking later. I had so much to say.
And he had no clue what was coming.