I grinned.
He looked away and back to the food, which I was pretty sure was down to the fact that he didn’t want me to see how he couldn’t help smiling in response.
“This is so dumb,” he said, after a few more minutes. “Are you sure Grey is going to go for this?”
“Grey isn’t going to have a choice,” I said. I’d had a word with him already and made myself absolutely clear. Contract or no contract, I could still walk out again, and everyone else would walk with me. If he wanted this to work out, he needed to honor the offer he’d made – forallmembers of our team.
And that included Drake.
“For fuck’s sake,” Drake snarled. He dropped a piping bag on the counter and glowered down at a cake he’d decorated with uneven frosting. “This isn’t working.”
“You’re new at this, and you’ve only made one mistake,” I said. “That’s notnotworking.”
“One?” he exclaimed. He gestured to the row of cupcakes I was putting the finishing touches on.
They seemed fine to me, but I looked at them again through Drake’s eyes – the eyes of a chef who wanted perfection. And, okay, they weren’t perfect. Some of them drooped a little to the left or the right, and they didn’t have that same shine of precision that Drake’s work normally did.
But…
“They look about as good as what I could do,” I said. “And I’ve got two working hands.”
Drake scowled. “That doesn’t make me feel better.”
“It should.” I put down the tweezers I was using to add small edible decorations on top of the frosting. “Remember, this is just for a year. After the first few months, when you’ve healed a little more, I’ll let you unstrap your arm and have a hand free to steady your tools. At the end of the year, if your wrist is truly better, you can start strengthening it again until you’re using it as your main hand. A year of your life isn’t going to be all that long when you look back from the end of it. Just a blip.”
Drake sighed, but he picked up the bag again and carried on piping.
“This one’s great,” I said, picking it up and turning it, admiring how straight the piping was along the edge.
Drake eyed me sideways, a pleased look flitting across his mouth for a moment, but he said nothing. His hand stayed busy on the next one.
I looked at the tray of cupcakes. I hoped we were actually going to be able to sell them. It wasn’t the usual sort of dessert that we offered, but I’d figured it would be a good way to train Drake’s left hand back towards plating work, and I’d asked Kit to write it on the board as tonight’s Chef’s Special.
“How’s rehab going?” I asked. Drake had mentioned something about going to his first session – we’d had to delay this planned start until this morning since he’d had his appointment yesterday afternoon.
“It’s hard,” Drake said. I was struck by his honesty. The Drake that was trying to take my job from under me would have said something teasing or mocking, diverting the attention away from any kind of struggle he might have been having to throw me off. “It hurts, and I didn’t see any improvement at all in the session yesterday. The physio told me it’s going to take a long time. He works with top athletes, usually, and he said he’s seen worse injuries, but not by much.”
“Just don’t push it too hard,” I said mildly. “I’m here to take up the slack on your right side for as long as you need it. Take it easy and heal.”
He glanced my way again, and this time our eyes met; a little heat came to both of our faces.
The door from the parking lot clattered open and there was a general shuffling noise as Ainslie battered his way into the kitchen, stomping snow off his boots and taking off his coat to hang it up. He froze when he saw us both standing at the plating station, then slowly approached as though he was afraid he might scare Drake off.
“Uh, hi,” he said. He made wide eyes at me, questioning eyes.Is he back?
“Hi,” Drake said. He only looked up briefly. “We’re just finding out if I can still chef anymore.”
I’d filled everyone in during last night’s service. About Drake’s surgery, about my idea for how we could work together, and about the fact that he wasn’t fully convinced. I knew the rest of the team wanted him to come back just as much as I did.
Well, maybe notquiteas much. But I had ulterior motives that had nothing to do with the kitchen.
Luca, Kit, and Nikolai all filed through the kitchen, either on their way to work or to begin work there, and all of them pretended not to stare at Drake while very much staring at him and his work. I had to shoo Kit away, getting a stuck-out tongue for my trouble. The new line chef, Brendan, was the last to arrive for the day; thankfully, I’d already trained him up on the specific rules of our kitchen enough that he needed no oversight.
I didn’t know how Grey had done it, but he’d actually hired someone with some decent cooking experience. Probably because, for the first time, he wasn’t hiring with his dick.
Finally, when we were sitting down for family dinner, Grey walked in to join us.
There was a beat when he looked at Drake and Drake looked back at him. For a moment, an irrational fear seized my chestthat Grey was going to tell him that he wasn’t hired back after all – that a chef whose dominant hand had to be strapped to his chest for half a year wasn’t welcome in a working kitchen.
