CHAPTER SIX
Parker
Kitchen bitch?
That was a new one.
“I don’t know how to respond to that,” I admitted. “That’s the first time anyone has ever called me their bitch, much less their kitchen bitch.”
“Then you’ve been hanging around the wrong people.” Raven’s tone was matter-of-fact.
Wrong people? That depended how quickly or easily I wanted my dick sucked, I guessed.
Like, right now? Raven was the wrong people.
Not that I’d trust her mouth anywhere my dick. She’d probably use her teeth a little too enthusiastically.
Raven grabbed a cloth and wrapped her hand around one of the taps. “Don’t either of you have something to do?”
I blinked and dragged my eyes away from her hand. That was the wrong thing for her to do when I’d just been thinking about my cock. “Did my delivery get here?”
“Five minutes ago. I was going to call you to see where you were. Wes got here just before the delivery and I told him to make sure all the dishes from last night were put away correctly”
I gave her a thumbs up and headed back to the kitchen. After greeting Wes, the twenty-one-year-old recent graduate we’d selected as the best prospect to be the third chef, I headed for the walk-in fridge where he said he’d put the order.
Two hours later, we were done and I sent Wes for his lunch. The dark-haired kid who was all limbs ambled out of the kitchen, inadvertently knocking over a pot of pens on the side table by the door. The sharp clatters of them as they hit the floor reverberated around the kitchen, bouncing off each shiny surface until I winced.
“Sorry, Chef,” he muttered, picking them up and putting them back where they belonged. He disappeared before I could reassure him that it was okay, but I couldn’t lie—if he couldn’t even leave the kitchen without messing something up, would he be able to handle it when it got busy?
It was too late to have those doubts. I had to take a chance on the kid now. With any luck, he’d be one of those guys who was a fucking mess generally, but a whiz when he needed to be.
I retrieved the ingredients for hummus and brought them over to the main counter. My phone was plugged into an outlet on the shelf above my head, and I started my most recent Spotify playlist to counteract the quiet of the kitchen. It only needed the slightest bit of volume since it was so empty.
“Hey.” Raven’s voice came just as the door opened.
I glanced over my shoulder. “What’s up?”
“You sent Wes for lunch?” She cocked her thumb over her shoulder, and I nodded. “You’re not stopping?”
I grabbed the chickpeas. “Nope. Hummus.”
“Yum.” She paused, her tongue flicking across her lips. “When will you be stopping?”
“When I have a chance.”
“Which is...”
“Raven? I’m busy.”
She tutted so loud any disapproving aunt would be impressed. Then, she left. The door slammed behind her, and I shook my head as I threw a few other ingredients in with the chickpeas. The sound of the blending whirring to life with my push of the button drowned out any lingering echo from her annoyed tut.
The last time I’d heard a tut like that was when my grandmother discovered I was going into cooking instead of pursuing what she insisted was a promising football career.
I didn’t count having a two-hundred-and-seventy-pound man ram into you several times a week a “promising career.” A painful one, but not promising.
I killed the blender and, slowly, separated the hummus into tubs and dated each one. I didn’t expect to need a lot, so I hadn’t made a lot, but just in case there was some left over, it would be good tomorrow, too.
I didn’t know what time Raven thought I had. Granted, in almost every restaurant I’d been in, I’d always been told that I worked hours ahead of where I needed to be. I didn’t know how that was such a bad thing—it was how I was so efficient. If I needed something, I knew it would be ready for me, with the exceptions of things like steak that were cooked to order.
I turned my attention to seasoning. Greek food always tasted better when it was seasoned a couple of hours in advance, at least in my opinion. Plus, it was one less thing I’d need to fuck about with later.
Raven walked back in right as I was cutting the pork into chunks. She came up beside me and looked at my board. “Souvlaki?”
“Prep,” I answered simply, cutting the pork. “What are you doing back out here?”
She put a pre-packed sandwich on the counter just out of my reach. “I went to grab lunch. You need to eat. There’s a cafe just down the road that makes these fresh. I took a punt on chicken.” She paused. “Unless you’d rather have beef?”
Any other day, I would have said beef just to piss her off. But, this was unusually thoughtful for her, and I didn’t actually care either way.
“Chicken is great. Thank you.” I shot her a smile as I cut some more pork.
“You’re welcome.” She stepped back. “Do you need anything else?”
“Yeah, can we get some water in the fridge? I asked Wes to come and get you an hour ago but you were...screaming at somebody.” I glanced at her in time to see her cheeks flush.
“Some suppliers are assholes,” is all she said. “I’ll be right back.”
She scuttled out of the kitchen. The second the door closed behind her, I chuckled to myself. Some suppliers were indeed assholes, but did she unleash her temper on them unnecessarily, or did they have it coming to them?
Either way, I made a mental note to use her for any asshole suppliers around here.
I threw the chopped pork chunks into a bowl and washed my hands. The seasoning I needed was sitting on the shelf above me, so I grabbed it, uncapped it, and sprinkled it onto the meat. With one hand, I stuck in and started mixing it all up. I added more seasoning as and when I needed it until I heard the door open again.
“Ugh,” Raven said. “I don’t usually want to eat raw pork, but that smells pretty good.”
I laughed and washed my hands again. “I’d advise against it.”
“Is this enough water?”
I looked over my shoulder. It was a package of twenty bottles, and she was holding it like it was nothing. I expect it would be if you carried that shit every day. “More than. Thanks. Just dump it on the side and I’ll have Wes put it in when he gets back.”
“Nah, I got it.” She opened the smaller fridge a few feet away from me. “How does he seem?”
“Wes?”
She nodded.
“Dunno. I’d have him do some prep when he gets back. I need some fries cutting.”
Raven paused by the fridge door, three bottles in each hand. “Really? You’re gonna make him cut fries?”
“Executive chef privileges.” I grinned and put some clear wrap over the pork to keep it fresh. Carrying it over to the fridge, I said, “Nah, I do it with all new hires, especially if they’re young. I cut one or two potatoes exactly how the fries need to be cut, and how well he copies me is an indication of his ability in general.”
“His ability to what? Slice a fucking potato?”
“Primarily.” I set the bowl on the bottom shelf. “But also to listen to instructions. If I want chunky fries half an inch thick, that’s what I want. Not a quarter-inch or three-quarter-inch. Half an inch. If I want skinny fries two-tenths of an inch, that’s what I want.”
“That’s kind of picky.”
“Picky got me Michelin stars.”
“I don’t know how to argue that point.” She shrugged and finally slipped the bottles into a shelf in the door. “All right, but remember that half-decent kitchen staff are slim pickings around here. If he gives you one three-quarter-inch fry in a batch of half-inch fries, it’s not his fault.”
“Sure it is. He put it in there. He cut it. I didn’t.”
She hits me with a withering look that draws a tiny smile from me. “And men are prone to exaggeration, so your half-inch thick fries are probably not even a quarter.”
“God, I’ve never heard that before.”
“It’s nice to be original.” She grabbed more water bottles.
“I had a woman work for me last year at the restaurant. She constantly told me I got my sizes wrong.” I ran the tap and put the chopping board in the sink. “I put up with it until I told her I had a firm eight inches of my own, so I was pretty sure I was accurate.”
Raven met my eyes with a raise of her eyebrows. “Classic overcompensation.”
“I’d prove you wrong if I didn’t think you’d slice it clean off.”
“It’s always nice to have a healthy dose of fear in my employees.”
“I’m not afraid of you, Raven. I’m afraid of what you could do to my cock. There’s a very big difference.” I shut off the tap and grabbed a towel to dry the board.
“Sorry, I don’t sleep with the staff. They get crazy when you do that.” She paused. “Not that I’ve ever done that.”
“You’ve done that, haven’t you?”
“Accidentally. Honestly, you sleep with a guy once and he thinks you’re in love. I had to fire him because, no matter how pretty he was, he couldn’t make a Screwdriver...And he was a little crazy.”
“You are the authority on crazy.” I flashed her a grin.
“Keep talking, Parker Hamilton.”
“That’s Chef when you’re in my kitchen, thank you.”
“Let me show you all the fucks I give.” Her intense gaze never wavered. “Oh look, I ran out.”
My lips pulled to the side. Fucking hell, she was sass central, wasn’t she? “They must have disappeared to where mine have. Now, thank you for lunch and the water, but get out of my kitchen.”
In a great show of defiance, she opened the fridge and yanked out a bottle of water. It was so petty and childish that laughter bubbled up deep inside me. Both the fridge door and the kitchen door slammed in her wake, because she left in a flash of dark hair, leaving behind such a silence that my music seemed to boom.
I’d forgotten it was on.
I shook my head, ridding it of thoughts of that crazy, sassy woman I worked for, and got back to work.
***
Much to my surprise, Wes was the whizkid I’d dismissed when in the kitchen. He chopped everything to perfection, and his batter for the calamari was pretty damn good. By the time we’d finished serving food, he was practically floating out of the kitchen, and I’d permanently delegated batter-mixing to him.
That was the best thing about being in control.
You got to delegate the shit you hated to others.
I shut off the lights for the kitchen after one last look around and stepped out into the bar. Raven and Sienna were both slammed behind the bar. The girl—I’d already forgotten her name and she’d told me five times—they’d hired to run the food had finished her shift when the kitchen closed forty-five minutes ago, and they were clearly alone.
I took some empty glasses from the table nearest to me and set them on the end of the bar.
“Thank you!” Sienna yelled over the music.
I hadn’t realized it was so loud in the kitchen. Looking around, I saw why. Some of the tables had been cleared and there was now a dance floor at the opposite end of the bar. It was darker than it was the night I came in here, and now I understood why she had fairy lights. The bright-white bulbs she had in place emitted a light pretty close to daylight, and it was just bright enough that the bar was completely illuminated.
It looked even better like this.
“Do you need some help?” I offered.
“No,” Raven shouted just as Sienna shouted, “Yes!”
Both women stopped and looked at each other.
Raven’s eyes seemed bluer in the light as she flitted her gaze between me and Sienna. She held up one finger and then smoothly poured a yellow liquid from the cocktail shaker in her hand into two glasses, filling them halfway up. Seemingly without blinking, she pulled cranberry juice from the fridge and poured, topping them up. The vibrant, red liquid mixed with the sunshiney yellow until the middle strip of the cocktail was a bright orange.
I would never understand how people made those layered cocktails.
It was some mad fucking skill.
She ran the order then, holding two fingers up to her next customer, she slinked past Sienna in the bar and leaned over the edge of it to me. She grabbed my shirt and pulled me into her, putting her mouth right next to my ear. “One of my girls is on vacation in Jamaica and the other called in sick. I’m trying, but we’re running out of glasses. Can you grab all the empty ones and run them through the washer in the kitchen? We have both running and they’re taking forever. I just need them clean.”
“Sure.”
She released me the second the word left my lips, and her hair tickled across my cheek when she turned and called, “Sorry about that! What can I get you, sir?”
She stepped from mild panic into a smooth, calm bartender in a heartbeat.
“Motherfu—”
My hand shot out and grabbed the falling glass before it could drop too far. I winked at Sienna as I handed her the glass. She dipped her head, blushing, and put the glass down to reach for a clean one.
“Thanks!” she called as I put my things just inside the bar.
I smiled and caught Raven’s eye.
Her expression was flat—hard. She dropped her gaze to the back of Sienna’s head before turning away and dropping two shots of spirits into a shaker. I hesitated for a moment, but Sienna hadn’t noticed, and now Raven was busy with the cocktail.
I shook that off like I had so many things Raven and focused on getting the empty glasses. The second time I returned to the bar, Raven whipped a black, circular tray out from the depths of the bar and handed it to me over Sienna’s head. She had a shaker in the other hand and was talking to a customer getting his order as she did it.
Her efficiency was something else. There she was, making one customer’s drink, taking another’s, and making my job a little easier.
Fuck. How did she remember and notice all those things? I was glad I had tickets for customer orders, because my memory was so fucking shit a goldfish could remember stuff better than I could.
Slowly, after weaving my way through bodies and tons of people, I managed to get through to collect all the empty glasses. I took that tray right out to the kitchen dishwasher to put on a quick cycle. Raven’s words about them just needing to be clean ran through my mind, so I ran a sink full of hot water to hand wash some.
I had no fucking idea what I was washing. They were all different shapes and sizes, fucking big, small, round, triangle—you name it, I had it in front of me to wash. I scrubbed each one and drained them until I was done and could hand-dry them. Then, after a wipe of the tray, I took them all right back out to the bar.
“Raven.” I stopped at the door to the bar when I saw she was close to me. “Here.”
She poured tequila into a metal shot measurer and glanced at the tray. “You run out of room?”
“No. They’re clean.”
“How?”
“I used this wonderful creation called my hands.”
“You’re so cocky. Thanks. Two seconds.” She poured some blue and then some yellow liquid into a shaker and then put on the cap. “I need a few of these done. Could you...?”
“You owe me breakfast,” I warned her.
“Fine—whatever.” She shook the shaker with some serious vigor before pouring the now-green liquid into two martini glasses. She garnished each sugar-rimmed glass with a slice of lime. Then, she turned to two girls just feet from me. “Two Panty-Melters for you, ladies. Sixteen dollars, please.”
The blond one handed her a twenty with a wave. “Keep the change. That’s on my boyfriend.”
Raven half-grinned. “Tell him I said thank you and that he’s welcome.”
The girls both giggled as they turned away. I watched them with a slight smile of my own.
“Panty-Melter, huh?” I asked, one eyebrow arched.
“Does what it says on the box,” she defended, holding up her hands. “Two of those suckers and there are some happy boyfriends.”
“Is that the strongest one you have?”
She pulled four martini glasses from the tray and set them on the shelf. “No. The strongest one I have isn’t on the menu. Mostly because the name isn’t exactly...printable.”
I was intrigued. No lie, no way around it, no denial. How could I not be? A name so bad she couldn’t print it? What the hell was she putting in it?
“How do people order it?” I asked, handing her two wine glasses.
“They just...do.”
“So, you’re kind of drug dealing?”
“Not at all. What can I get for you?” she asked a guy who caught her attention with a wave of two fingers.
“Can I get a Makers on the rocks?”
“You sure can.” She whipped a small, square glass from the shelf. “Single?”
“Make it a double.”
She scooped a few ice cubes into the glass and held it up the optic for two shots. “Ten-seventy-five, please.”
The second she had the glass on the bar, his money was in her hand.
“Rest is yours, darlin’.”
“Thank you.” She smiled and ran it through the till, glancing at me. “It’s not on the menu because of its name, but also because it started out as a joke. When I was in school, one of the assignments was to create our own drink. I did it with some friends, and accidentally, the name slipped out of me. They all insisted I submitted that for my drink, but I changed the name and watered it down slightly. Now, if my friends are ever in Florida, they come down just to get that drink. It’s very slowly started to be known amongst the locals here, but many don’t ask for it. The last person to ask was Camille and she passed out ten minutes after she finished her drink.”
My eyebrows shot up. “It’s that strong?”
“Cam isn’t exactly the poster child for holding her liquor. Hold on.”
I waited while she served another three customers.
“Keep it to yourself,” she said out the corner of her mouth, pouring vodka freehand into a glass. “Ryan doesn’t know I have a cocktail so dirty it’s not on my list, and the last thing I want is Yia-Yia asking me what it is.”
But the problem was now, I wanted her grandmother to ask her.
I also wanted to know what it was.
Badly.