“Insane,” Carl, our full-time dishwasher—or Dishy, as Wilder dubbed him—agrees, rubbing his puffed out stomach through his white tee shirt.
My staff are traitors.
Every single one of them.
“For real?” Wilder asks, looking from person to person, where we are all standing around the line. “You’re not bullshittin’ me?”
Gripping my Diet Coke so hard it’s about to geyser out of the can, my jaw nearly pops open at the chorus of “no”s that echo off the PVC-paneled walls and assault my ears. Not with the volume, with the sentiment. Like this new menu he’s prepared for today’s tasting is justsomuch better than what Samuel and I had planned.
“Absolutely not pullin’ your leg, Chef. This is next level,” Samuel tells him.
Fucking traitors, I tell ya.
The man worked for my father for decades! Where is his loyalty to the family?
“How about you, Boss?” Wilder’s midnight eyes fucking sparkle beneath the LED lighting as he calls me out in front of our entire staff, front and back of house.
“Get you some, Lexi!” Wanda hollers from across the kitchen, Tracy nodding in encouragement.
“There’s no way it’sthatgood,” I grumble, mostly to pity nods and unspokenyou’ll sees from the rest.
“You’ll never know unless you open your mouth and taste it for yourself.” The twisted grin Wilder shoots me does nothing to lower my rising blood pressure, and the table beneath my grip is at risk now.
“You sure are funny, Chef,” Wanda says, a single puff of a chuckle on the tail of her words.
One by one he’s won over every single employee of Heights Bites these past couple of weeks since he arrived.
It’s been infuriating to watch.
Overhauling the kitchen protocols, prepping the new menu, setting up the back of the house for optimal flow during production hours, organizing our inventory, working out our weekly orders from suppliers, and even planting his own herbs right in my sacred garden.
“Tell us again,” Dishy demands, nodding with his chin at Wilder. “Why’s that sauce so good, Chef?”
The New Yorker rubs his hands together, grin on his face that looks like it doesn’t quite belong there. Then again, nothing about this man seems to belong. “Clean, high-quality ingredients—nothing from a plastic jar—herbs I grew in the boss’s garden just a few blocks from here, and they’re all made with love. You can taste the difference, right?”
The resounding nods all around me are the last straw.
“Wait until the boss lets me put some of my own dishes on the menu. These were just the upgrades to the original menu.”
That irritating crooked grin of his is back, and he pairs it with a wink that seems tied directly to my heart rate. The scar in his brow twitches as his dark eyebrows waggle.
Even the silver chain he always wears around his neck seems to be goading me.
It’s time to pop this sandwich artist’s ego.
Stabbing the reddish steak through the darker crust seared along the top, I make sure to get as little sauce as possible on the bite just to piss him off before jabbing it in my mouth as fast as my arm allows.
Colors explode across my tongue.
Like seeing harmonies, or smelling sounds.
It makes no sense how flavorful this one single bite is.
My palate begs for more of that sauce—the delicious herbaceous tang of it teases, invites my other senses to come out and play—and I lock my knees so they don’t buckle and give me away. I curse my ten-second-ago self for only getting a drop of that sauce on the corner of my bite.
I would swim in that sauce if Wilder weren’t looking. Might do lines of it off the counter when his back is turned.
With every cell under my control, I pull my face into a frown and shrug a shoulder.
