He laughs, a low, broken sound that still manages to be pretty. “You ask the impossible and then make it sound like a reasonable errand.”
“It’s a gift,” I say, and roll my sleeves to my elbows because I want my hands free of pretense. “One more thing.”
“Mm?”
“When I say it’s my kitchen, I mean it. The rules—my rules—are the laws of this land. No meetings in the walk-in. No messages sent in bread baskets. No men with guns leaning on my sink like it’s a bar. If you want to talk business, you do it on the gravel, not on my floor.”
He nods once, the way men do when a priest has told them a truth they already knew and had hoped to circumvent. “And you?” he asks, not unkindly. “You stay out of my wars.”
“I stay out of your wars,” I say, “until they walk into my kitchen.”
We hold each other’s gaze in the dim and the quiet and the old wood and the modern steel, and for a second the long, ugly highway between us feels like a bridge lit from below.
Morning finds me back at the restaurant with a clipboard and a temper that wants to work, not glare. The dish pit steams. The mixer hums. Siobhan arrives with knives already honed and an apron folded small enough to slip into a pocket. “You look good here,” she says, too lightly, like she’s rehearsed the line. “Like you’ve always been here.”
“Then stop looking and grab a board,” I say, but I smile because her speed is a comfort and I am only human.
For hours we move the way we used to. She catches the pot before it boils over without being asked, I taste her beurre blanc and lift two grains of salt from the dish and drop them in, she slides me the pan just as I reach for it. We make a stack of test plates and call in the dish guy and the server to eat because food that doesn’t feed staff will never feed a city.
At four, Declan appears in the side door like a weather system. No entourage. No coat. Just the clean, dark line of him and that expression that says he has already seen every exit and still came in through the one that makes my pulse pick up.
“You’re early,” I say, not looking up from the bowl I’m whisking.
“You’re late to let me in,” he says, and leans his shoulder to the jamb as if the door might try to run.
“Get out of my kitchen.” I slide the bowl hard onto the counter so it rings. The ring pleases me.
He doesn’t move. Of course he doesn’t. “I came to see if you needed anything.”
“I need you outside,” I say, and the bowl sings again when I lift it and set it down harder. “I need space. I need calm. I need you to stop bringing thunder with your boots.”
“Is that a yes to the extra cold storage?” he asks mildly, and I narrow my eyes.
“No to the storage,” I say. “Yes to fewer O’Connells in my doorway.”
The air between us tightens, then holds. He steps in anyway, two paces, not much on a map, a mile in here. Siobhan freezes one station over, knife still in her hand, her gaze flicking between us like a metronome finding double time.
“I gave you a place to build,” he says, low.
“You gave me a key,” I say, lower. “I’m the one building.”
“Is that really true?” he asks, very quiet, as if he’s testing wire.
“It is,” I snap. “And it will keep being true as long as you don’t mistake proximity for ownership. Now—get out of my kitchen.”
He doesn’t. He moves in that measured way of his until he’s close enough I can see the gold flecks around his iris, close enough the memory of his mouth hits me like a spice I wasn’t ready for. “No,” he says, and it isn’t arrogant, not tonight. It’shonest. It’s a man saying he can’t obey this single command because his body has already decided otherwise.
Anger and hunger are cousins too. I slam the mixing bowl down so hard the whisk gives a shocked little squeal. Siobhan flinches. Declan doesn’t. He steps right into the heat I’m throwing and I step forward to meet it, and the whole room seems to hold its breath.
“Out,” I say again.
“No,” he repeats, softer, and that’s when my temper, which has always been attached to my mouth and my hands like a well-trained dog, slips its leash.
I grab his lapels and yank him down, and my mouth finds his with the kind of accuracy that makes destiny look lazy. His breath punches out against my tongue. The metal bowl rocks on the counter and the whisk clatters and something in me that has been running since the day I watched him pull a trigger stops so fast it almost hurts.
He catches me, of course he does, one hand at my waist, the other braced on the bench to keep us both upright, and the kiss turns fast and furious and shaking, all salt and heat and things we shouldn’t say while the ovens are lit. He tastes like honey and whiskey and the hour before a storm. I bite his lower lip because I can, and he answers with a sound that goes straight to every place I have banned from public view.
“Chef,” Siobhan says behind me, voice thin, and I pull back just enough to breathe without letting go of his coat.
