It clearly meant nothing.
He was worked up and angry, and he was probably hopped up on painkillers – if that really was what they were – and therefore not in his right mind. As soon as we’d kissed, he had realized his mistake and walked away from me with a growl.
The kiss was nothing.
But it was everything.
I resisted the urge to touch my lips with my fingers like a schoolgirl, like I had just been kissed for the first time. I kept my head down and walked to my station, noticing from the corner of my eye that Drake was already at his with his hands busy. He was back to work.Straightback to work. He didn’t need any time to process what had just happened.
Because it meant nothing.
But it meanteverything.
I tried to ignore the pounding of my heart as I grabbed my list of tasks for the day, neatly written out the night before on a sheet of paper I had clipped to the front of the board I liked tocarry around. Underneath it were the order forms I needed to fill out and the list of bookings we already had for tonight – which wasn’t much help in predicting what we would need to make, but since this stupid contest had I started, I liked to keep an eye out for returning customers and see if they had previously ordered my lobster risotto.
I couldn’t understand a word of the list. It was like it was written in Latin. I recognized the letters, sure, but the language itself was nothing to me.
I looked at my hand where it held the clipboard. Was that my hand?
Everything felt different.
It was like the world had tilted on its axis and tipped me into an alternate dimension. One that was familiar enough to our own that I could pretend I belonged here, but different enough that I was completely out of my depth.
I needed to cut some pastry.
I took the cutter and the tray of dough I’d already made and patted it down, cutting out a serrated circle. I lifted it up. The pastry I’d cut stayed within the cutter, not dropping out like it was supposed to. I stared at it. I took a knife and pushed it out and it dropped down onto the counter with a softplop.
Or was I supposed to cut the strawberries first?
I picked one up and sliced it down the middle. My hands didn’t feel like my own. There was a moment when I didn’t realize, and then –
“Ouch!” I hissed, recognizing belatedly that the red liquid around the strawberry wasn’t juice. I’d cut the end of my finger.
“Chef?” Ainslie said, materializing at my side so quickly I almost jumped. Had he been in the kitchen this whole time? He lookedat my finger, swore, and grabbed a box of blue band-aids out from a lower shelf. Before I could even figure out what was happening, he’d ripped one out of the paper packaging and slicked it down over the cut, making me wince.
I looked up. Drake was watching me with wide eyes and an open mouth, his hands not moving. Our eyes met for the briefest moment and then he was looking down, swallowing hard and cutting whatever he was cutting on the board in front of him again.
I looked down again. The sight of my blood on the counter had me coming back into myself, although everything still felt off-kilter and I had a feeling it would for a while. I glanced at the to-do list. It made sense now. I wasn’t even supposed to be working with the strawberries for another hour.
“Grey hasn’t come back in?” I murmured out of the side of my mouth to Ainslie. I didn’t want anyone else to overhear us. Correction: I didn’t want Drake to hear me.
“Not yet,” he said, shaking his head. He sighed. “I really hope he changes his mind. Luca’s a good guy.”
I nodded. “I think we all feel that way.”
But Grey didn’t return to the kitchen before service began, and once it did, things got hectic fast. I was off my game, and maybe it was my imagination, but I thought Drake was slower than usual, too. Maybe that had nothing to do with me. Maybe he really was in pain, and now that I’d brought it up, he didn’t want to be seen taking any more painkillers. Maybe Beau was being loyal and not helping him as much as usual since Drake had shown he wasn’t a member of the team.
Right. He’d let us down over Luca. That was still true. I couldn’t allow a kiss to knock that truth out of my head.
Even if it had been a mind-blowing kind of kiss.
“I have an order, and you’re not going to like it,” Nikolai said, coming into the kitchen with a slip of paper between his hands – a page from his order notebook.
I narrowed my eyes. “Why?” I couldn’t think of many reasons that I would be unhappy with a customer placing an order. Maybe if they wanted me to go across to another restaurant and get the food there because ours wasn’t good enough, but I doubted Nik would have taken the order in that case.
“It’s the guy who complained about the dishes,” Nikolai said. His mouth was a flat line of displeasure. “He wants the risotto this time.”
“My risotto?”
