King of the Kitchen (17 page)

They’d worked with Andre for their first challenge dishes, and Beck had figured that was going to be par for the course. He didn’t mind—not exactly. He’d gotten everything he’d wanted menuwise last week, and Andre was letting them have a lot of leeway, if Duncan’s bacon foam was any indication.

“So we really do get autonomy? I figured after the first show Christian would start poking around, now he’s back in the studio.” He knew he sounded earnest, but he didn’t care. This was a big opportunity for him, and Beck was afraid Christian was going to pull it out from underneath him at the last minute.

“You really do. That was the one change Duncan made to the contract, you know. He had it written in that you both had free rein on the recipes and preparation of the food.” She hopped down from his desk and gave him a serious look. “He had Campbell go over it with him to make sure everything was fair, and Campbell said that was Duncan’s own suggestion. He said you seemed excited about the opportunity, and he wanted to make sure if he signed on, you got to do your own thing, so to speak.”

Duncan was scarily perceptive. And Beck found himself grateful for that at the moment. He couldn’t believe Christian had signed off on that contract rider. “That’s surprising.”

“That he cared enough to make sure you got what you wanted, or that Christian let him?” She shrugged. “He took the contract to Bob. He’s technically the boss around here. It was a done deal by the time it came across my father’s desk.”

Beck winced. “That’s going to be fun.”

“Oh, I’ve already gotten an earful, but I told him when he pitched this idea that Duncan is a live wire. He’s getting his just desserts as far as I’m concerned. I hope Duncan turns everything on its head.”

She had been fighting for quite a while to get Beck more editorial control on the show, and he appreciated it. It wasn’t purely family loyalty, either. As the show’s marketing director, she kept a close eye on the demographics and audience feedback, and for the last year it had been pulling in the direction of a different type of food and atmosphere. Christian had pushed back against that forcefully, but maybe things were starting to change.

“Be careful what you wish for,” he warned. Duncan seemed to be good at causing chaos.

“Right now I wish you’d get over yourself and ask him out. You two would be cute together.”

“The only thing I know about his personal life is that he’s always unattached. He usually brings a friend instead of a date to all the industry parties he attends. I have no idea what he’s like when he’s dating someone, or if he even dates.” Beck picked his pen back up and started doodling in the margins of his notebook. “And I’m not looking for anything right now, Lindsay. I have the restaurant—”

“You’re always going to have a restaurant or a show or a whatever,” she said dismissively. “The great thing about Duncan is that he’ll actually understand when you cancel dates because a sous-chef is out sick or a menu needs to be revamped. It won’t be like the others.”

Beck had a history of choosing poorly when it came to relationships. He’d only had a few serious ones, but they’d all ended badly because he was too focused on his career to be fully present with a partner. That wasn’t likely to change anytime soon. Beck’s career was important to him. But Lindsay was right; that might be something Duncan would understand. At the very least, he wouldn’t complain when Beck used him as a sounding board for new recipes.

“Maybe.”

Lindsay seemed to sense she wasn’t getting anything else out of him because she left shortly after that without any more haranguing. Beck figured it was his cue to head down to the test kitchens. He’d put it off long enough. He had to leave for Brix in a few hours; if he didn’t get some time in now, he wouldn’t be starting until tomorrow.

Duncan was still there when he walked in. He’d set up on the right side of the room, and Andre was there helping him. Though from the looks of things, Duncan didn’t need any assistance. Andre was perched on a stool next to the counter, and Duncan was giving him a crash course in something.

Beck had been planning to dive into his own recipe testing, but he was too curious about what Duncan was doing with a large stockpot and a strange black device.

“It’s not as impressive with asparagus as it is with, say, a chicken breast, but you get the idea,” Duncan was saying as Beck made his way over.

The water in the pot was roiling, and Beck could see a temperature gauge on the black thing partially submerged in it. “Is that a portable sous vide?” He’d never seen anything like it.

“Yeah, isn’t it cool?” Duncan beamed. “It’s an immersion circulator. It’s not quite as powerful as a traditional sous vide, but it gets the job done. Especially if we’re talking small batches instead of commercial quantity.”

“And you carry it with you?”

Duncan grinned and patted the satchel propped up against the wall at the back of the stainless-steel countertop. Beck cringed at having it so close to the food prep; it was unsanitary. Beck was surprised Andre had allowed it. They were every bit as meticulous in the test kitchens as Beck was in the restaurants. Then again, it was pushed back and out of the prep space. He should give Duncan more credit than that. He was well trained enough he wouldn’t introduce something that couldn’t be sterilized into his actual workspace.

“I almost always carry it with my knives. You never know when you’re going to need to sous vide something. Case in point,” he said, nodding toward the pot.

“What exactly are you making?”

“Eh, I don’t know. Usually I’d wing something like this, but Andre needs a detailed plan from me to make the television magic happen,” Duncan said with a shrug.

The transitions that looked effortless on television were actually the product of a lot of carefully orchestrated hard work. Recipes had to be broken down into stages so the audience could follow along, but prepped enough that there were no awkward pauses while something cooked. They’d barely touched the surface of how the prep kitchen worked when he and Duncan had been setting up for the episode Duncan had guest hosted. That had been setting up recipes and figuring out which of Duncan’s tricks could be replicated in a home kitchen. It had been tame compared to what they’d be asking the prep cooks to do now that Duncan wasn’t limited to the kind of ingredients and equipment a home cook would have.

Not that Beck didn’t have every confidence it could be done. Andre’s staff was very good at figuring out which parts of a recipe were crucial for viewers to see. Sometimes they made dozens of prop dishes to show the various stages of cooking. They’d make Duncan’s recipes work, though it was definitely going to be harder than usual.

Duncan’s reluctance to plan out his dialogue put a major wrench in things. The prep staff used the script to figure out the pacing of the food, which told them how many of the steps they had time to showcase and how many different prop dishes they’d need along the way. If Duncan went way off script, that would mess things up for them. What looked like magic when the show was edited and aired was actually a lot of painstaking work.

The thought of being in front of the camera without scripted dialogue made Beck’s neck prickle with nervous sweat. The shows weren’t going to be live, but time in the studio cost money, and the producers were sticklers for getting things done in as few takes as possible. It took a lot of work to reset a scene—the entire
mise en place
had to be redone, as well as any prop dishes that had been used in it. It was why they were so meticulous about their prep and action scripting.

“Hey, it’ll be fine,” Duncan said, and some of the tension spreading through Beck’s shoulders eased. “Did Lindsay tell you I’m not going to let them script our dialog again? I kept missing cues.”

“It’ll get easier.”

“It will, in that it won’t be happening again.” He shook his head. “Bob signed off on the no dialogue thing. But he said I have to meet with the writers to talk about pacing and what kinds of things I should be talking about. Why do they have to meet so early, though? I thought writers were supposed to be nocturnal, like chefs. You people and your morning meetings are going to kill me. I don’t know how you do it all the time.”

Beck smiled. “A lot of caffeine.” And the occasional nap in his office, but he didn’t want Andre to know that.

“Dude, I’ve already had so much today I’m practically vibrating,” Duncan said. “Honestly, we’re trying the sous vide because I’m afraid I’d chop off a finger if I tried any knife work.”

Beck cringed at that lovely image. He liked Duncan’s fingers where they were.

“Well, I’m here now. I’ll be happy to pitch in with any knife work you need done,” Beck said. He had an urge to swoop in and press a quick kiss to the side of Duncan’s mouth, but he stopped himself. This entire thing felt domestic, but it was a sham. They weren’t cooking dinner together in Beck’s kitchen—they were at work. And they weren’t dating, anyway. It had merely been a casual thing to blow off some steam.

Duncan threw him a flat look. “Don’t you need to be working on your own recipe?”

It had been what he’d come down to do, but standing around with Duncan was more interesting. He was so different from Beck, and that was attractive.

“I’ll spend some time on it later if we get a lull at Brix. I probably don’t have enough time to get too far into it here anyway.” Which was true. He was thinking about roasting the asparagus, which would take more time than he had at the moment.

“All right,” Duncan said with an easy grin. “Andre, thanks for showing me the ropes, man.” Duncan held out his hand and shook Andre’s, and Andre gave Beck a hearty pat on the back and a wink as he excused himself.

“So now you’ve got me all to yourself in this cavernous kitchen,” Duncan said, waving his spoon around, “what’s up?”

Beck busied himself with clearing the mess on the counters. “Lindsay said you had a wager for me?” he said, changing the subject.

“Ah, yes. The public challenge is fun and all, but we’re both kind of winners because at the end of the day, our charities are getting money no matter what. So how about we have a personal wager, too, to make it interesting?”

“Winning isn’t interesting enough on its own?”

“Nah. I’d rather wager sexual favors,” Duncan joked, and Beck felt his face flush. Honestly, he hadn’t blushed this much since middle school. “No, really? Wait. Wait. I was kidding, but I can totally not be kidding. Are you up for that?”

He shouldn’t be. Hadn’t he just given himself a pep talk about getting over this crush? No-strings-attached sex was not going to help with that.

“Against my better judgment, yes,” Beck said gruffly. Goddamn it.

“I’ll take it,” Duncan said, and he surprised Beck by leaning in and kissing him before zipping back to the stove to tend to whatever he had going there.

Beck was reeling from the light contact. It had been over almost as soon as it had begun, but it was different and more intimate than any kiss Beck had shared with anyone before. He wasn’t used to teasing, soft touches like that. Or being kissed with no warning. It made his lips tingle.

“So how are we doing this?” Duncan asked as he took his place in front of the range again and checked the sous vide. “Winner chooses the favor?”

Beck felt dazed.

“Winner picks the activity,” Beck said.

“Deal. Loser can’t complain, though. I don’t want you whining while I’m blowing your mind a second time.”

He was in so far over his head with this. The right thing to do would be to tell Duncan he’d changed his mind and extricate himself now. They could bet money, or a meal at a fancy restaurant. Or even some humiliatingly public boon, like posing in front of the Bean wearing a suit made out of lettuce or something. Anything that didn’t pull Beck further into Duncan’s orbit.

He could say no. It would be the smart thing to do.

He always did the smart thing.

Usually.

“Deal,” Beck said before he could talk himself out of it. Fuck everything. He’d deal with his hypothetical broken heart later. Odds were good Duncan would piss him off enough in the interim that his crush took care of itself, and then the bet would be casual sex, nothing more.

Chapter ELEVEN

“SO THE
food for the switch-outs is in the warmer, which is right under the counter,” Beck said for the fourth time, and Duncan wanted to scream in frustration.

“Yes. The food is in the warmer. The teleprompters are beside the cameras with the script. We face the camera with the light on it. Look up when I talk. Don’t let my body block my hands when I’m demonstrating. I’ve got it, Beck. I’ve done this before, remember?”

Beck had been hovering for the last hour, giving tips about how to talk to the camera and how to follow the cues from the cameramen and the director. It had been cute at first, but now it was driving Duncan crazy.

“Yes, but when you did it before, we had a fucking script,” Beck growled. He sighed, forcing himself to calm down. “I just want it to go smoothly.”

The spike of irritation Duncan had felt during Beck’s condescending lecture seeped out of him when he saw the small frown on Beck’s face.

Duncan clucked his tongue. “Hey, I know. It’ll be fine. Rehearsals went well, didn’t they?”

They had. It was killing Duncan to keep getting up early every day, but he’d been in the studio at six yesterday morning to do a run-through of the show. There had been a few snafus with the pacing, but he’d worked with the scriptwriters and the producers yesterday, and Duncan was confident he could pull it off today.

“Rolling in five,” someone called from off set. Duncan felt a wave of nerves crash through him, making his muscles tense and his stomach flutter.

It didn’t help that Christian was sitting to the left of the main camera, watching everything with a smug look. Duncan wished he could ask him to leave; having him there was disconcerting.

Duncan felt a hand graze his lower back and disappear. “Ignore him,” Beck said quietly. “Pretend you’re talking to a group of people who are touring your kitchen or something.”