And Grey hadn’t reappeared at all. If I knew him, he’d taken a moment to tuck himself back into his pants and then snuck out the back exit, sidling around his own building to hide in his office so no one would yell at him for sleeping with yet another employee.
Not that ‘sleeping with’ really did it justice, given it could only have lasted all of five minutes. They’d been flirting hard enough in the build-up to get each other riled up. It was quick and dirty, whatever it was. Maybe Drake had sucked Grey off.
I closed my eyes momentarily against the image entering my head and tried to focus on anything other than the way it made jealousy clutch red-hot at my stomach.
It wasn’t hard to find something. I still had dozens of plates to finish, and the service was only just beginning.
“Watch out,” I snapped, as one of Drake’s plates pushed over into my half of the plating station. It was only meant for one person at a time, maybe a sous chef to stand to the side, but with the two of us jostling for Head Chef, we were both using it at once. It only worked when we kept to our own sides.
It worked better when Drake kept to his own end of the kitchen and I took on plating duties for the full service, but apparently, that wasn’t allowed on a day when everything was so much more important.
“Oh, calm down, princess,” Drake said. He was still using that sly, flirtatious tone on me. It made me feel sick, now, knowing what he’d just done. It made me feel stupid. For a short while, I’d started to believe he was flirting with me because he wanted to, not just to put me off my game. “I’m sure you won’t die just because the edge of one plate is out of line.”
“It’s not out of line, it’s on my side,” I snapped at him. “Kit and Beau are serving from your end of the table first, so I need more room. If you’re going too fast to keep up with their pace, you need to stop and work on something else until they’ve cleared some room.” I pushed his plate back over the imagined line that divided the table exactly in half.
Drake stopped dead on what he was doing and looked right at me. I didn’t bother looking up. I had more garnish to put on my risottos.
He moved the plate back, extending a single finger to inch it over the line.
I stopped what I was doing, too, and glared at him.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I snapped.
“Filling my time while I wait for Kit and Nikolai to clear my side of the station,” he said evenly.
“Here they come now,” I said. “Try not to trip and fall on anyone’s lap.”
He tilted his head sharply to the side at me, but I was already looking away and didn’t have time to read his expression. Maybe he had fancy plating to do, and maybe he was quicker at being fancy than I was, but I still had all the other dishes that had been ordered outside of our showcase items. I didn’t have time to mess around.
The kitchen was not a place to be messing around.
Mentally, physically, or otherwise.
“Behind!” Ainslie called out, moving past me to take a ton of dirty dishes from the entrees we’d sent out over to the dishwashing station. Beau was rushing more precisely-cut square vegetable pieces over to Drake. Drake himself had already looked away from me and busied himself on arranging a couple more of his so-called mosaics. Kit and Nikolai seemed to sweep into the kitchen every minute, their feet accelerating as soon as they were through the swinging door and no longer needed to appear calm and measured in front of the customers. Plates passed under my nose and were gone again, some of them even before I had really fully verified to myself that they looked as good as I could make them.
Which, admittedly, was never close to as good as Drake could make them. But it didn’t matter. No matter how many Instagram posts his food inspired, mine had one thing going for it that would guarantee the repeat orders: the taste.
The buttery, white-wine-infused risotto base. The tender poached lobster meat. The luxurious and earthy flavor of the truffle oil drizzled over it all. My dish was the winner. It had to be. There was no amount of visual flash that could replace a dish like this.
“We have a returned plate,” Nikolai announced loudly, bursting back into the kitchen with a dish held high in one hand. Both Drake and I froze, our gazes snapping sharply to him. It was a steak meal – one of the plates Drake had been in charge of. I resisted a smirk. This wasn’t a smirking matter. We prided ourselves here on the low rate of returned plates; getting one back from a customer was a serious event.
“Why would it be sent back?” Drake asked, his eyes narrowed as he examined the approaching steak. “That meat is perfect.”
Nikolai spun the plate around to present it under our noses with a flourish. “Plate is dirty,” he said, his native accent coming more to the fore under his tense mood.
All eyes in the kitchen snapped to the dishwashing nook, even those of us who were at such an angle that we couldn’t actually see Luca. After a long moment, he peered around the corner with wide eyes under his messy hair.
“I’m washing the plates,” he said, as if we were all accusing him of not doing so.
I leaned over the dish in question. Therewasa kind of brown smudge across the edge of the rim on one side. It didn’t appear to be anywhere even close to the actual food, but still – the customer had the right to demand a new plate if this one wasn’t clean.
Drake sighed. “I’ll replate an extra meal,” he said. “Take him one of these first so he doesn’t get even angrier.”
Nikolai switched out the plates and I watched as Drake began to carefully transfer one of the extra prepared steaks to a new, clean plate – checking it first. I looked up and saw Luca still watching us with a worried expression.
“It’s okay,” I told him, shouting over the steam and hustle of the kitchen in his direction. Someone needed to take on the leadership role here since Drake was more interested in his stupid pretty plate than making sure the team was actually working together and staying motivated. “Keep going. It’s a one-off. Just be really thorough with every plate, okay?”
Luca nodded unhappily and his head disappeared back around the bend, and I concentrated back on my own work.
