King of the Kitchen (3 page)

“Duncan.”

He blew out a frustrated breath and shook his head. He was done with this conversation.

He looked over at his mom. “Do you really have to ask?”

Duncan bit his tongue to keep from saying more. His true irritation lay with Vincent, not his mother. She didn’t deserve his anger, but the more she pushed, the harder it was to remember that.

His mother clucked her tongue, making the same disappointed noise that had always had him cowering as a child when he’d come home with a bad report card or tales of getting punished for fighting on the playground.

“Don’t shake your head at me, Duncan. You and your father both have a stubborn streak a mile wide and enough pride to sink a ship.” She sighed, and Duncan felt his anger burn off as guilt replaced it. His mother looked tired and upset, which was the last thing he wanted. “At least let him pull some strings for you and get you in somewhere on a full-time basis, even if it’s not at one of his restaurants. You know he’d do that for you.”

“I’ll have dinner with him this week so we can talk,” Duncan promised.

His mother’s face brightened, but Duncan put his hand up, stopping her before she could comment. “Not to accept his job offer. To explain in no uncertain terms why I’m
not
accepting the offer. Again. I want to do this on my own, Ma. I don’t want to get a job because I’m Vincent Walters’s son. I want to get a job because I’m a talented chef with great ideas. I don’t want to be indebted to him for anything.”

His mother started setting the table, her gaze lingering on Duncan as she laid out the plates and cutlery. Duncan had spent his entire childhood, save the summers he’d been forced to live with Vincent, in this house. He knew every nook and cranny, and he knew his mother did too. Both of them could move around the small kitchen with their eyes closed and not make a single misstep. He was usually grateful for their ability to work together in the tiny space, but at the moment, Duncan felt a bit hunted as his mother’s eyes penned him in.

“I know I did you a disservice by not pushing the issue and forcing Vincent to be more active in your life when you were little, Duncan,” she said, and Duncan tried to protest. They’d had this conversation before too, and he’d made it abundantly clear he didn’t blame her. Duncan placed the blame for his strained relationship with his father solely at Vincent’s feet, and he refused to believe the choices his mother had made had been the wrong ones.

“Can we not, Ma?”

She ignored him, pressing on with another speech Duncan practically knew by rote.

“I did, and every day that becomes clearer. I thought I was doing the right thing for both of you. You’re the two men I love most in this world, and I wanted to make both of you happy. Vincent would have stayed if I’d asked him to. I know he would have. He would have done right by us. But he was already a rising star by then, and I couldn’t let him give that up for us, like I couldn’t force myself to go live in that godforsaken city both of you seem to love so much. I wasn’t enough for you while you were growing up. I know you feel like you don’t need a father in your life. I think you’re wrong on that count, but it doesn’t matter.”

Duncan’s expression was stony as he flipped the chicken in the pan. This argument was unwinnable, and he knew it. He chose to disengage instead, centering all of his focus on the task in front of him. He could feel his mother’s gaze on his back as he cooked, but he ignored it. The silence was deafening, making the sizzle of the chicken in the pan seem abnormally loud, and he could practically feel the hurt radiating off his mother the longer he went without responding. Still, the silent treatment, no matter how immature for a grown man to employ, was a better option than voicing what was actually on his mind.

His father’s pride in Duncan’s accomplishments was more professional than paternal, and it left Duncan cold. Duncan was content with floating at the moment, filling in here and there at friends’ restaurants, though he’d have to buckle down and find something more permanent soon. He’d had a few short-term contracts, and they lasted anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. It was a fun way to travel and catch up with old acquaintances he’d worked with over the years, and it calmed both the wanderlust and urge to be back in the kitchen that had driven him out of research and development. Why would he give that up to work for a father he could barely stand?

His mother switched tactics, and Duncan had to suppress a groan when he saw her start to warm up to her topic. “Can’t you think of him as a restaurateur instead of your father? You know him, Duncan. Would he be offering you this position if it was purely nepotism? He loves his restaurants, and he takes his career very seriously. He wouldn’t be so excited to have you join him if he didn’t think you’d earned the job on your own merits.”

Duncan had made no secret of his plan to leave the kitchen and go work for a corporation after graduation. The entire purpose of getting a food science degree had always been to work as a food chemist in a large commercial food company’s research and development department. Vincent had taken the news that Duncan was going to take a spot at Kraft Foods with grim resignation, and at first life had been good. Duncan had gone to work every day, donned his lab coat, and experimented with compounds designed to mimic the taste of natural ingredients, prolong the shelf life of foods and whatever else was necessary to make packaged foods more appealing and shelf stable.

And he’d hated it. The science had been thrilling, but it had nothing on the sweaty, adrenaline-filled atmosphere of a restaurant kitchen.

After more than four years of spending his vacations working in upscale restaurants in Chicago and New York as a guest chef and sneaking onto the roster to spend his weekends cooking for twelve hours a day at the Sunrise Cafe—showing up to the research lab exhausted and stressed on Monday morning—Duncan had finally admitted corporate food science wasn’t for him, and quit his job.

John had taken over the Sunrise Cafe the previous year when his mom retired, and he’d offered Duncan a job as a full-time line cook. As much as he loved working with John, slinging eggs and hash wasn’t going to be a long-term solution. So he was putting himself out there, flitting from kitchen to kitchen on short-term contracts, letting the chefs he’d worked with in the past know he was on the market again, so to speak, and looking for a kitchen to call his own. Still fitting in a few shifts at the Sunrise Cafe, of course, because there was something almost Zen-like and soothing about zoning out and frying egg after egg to order. At least, that was the case for Duncan.

Vincent, of course, took Duncan quitting his research job to mean Duncan was ready to “come home,” as he liked to say, and start getting serious about taking over the Walters restaurant empire. Naturally, Duncan told him he could take his offer straight to hell, and he’d been repeating that for the entire time since he’d hung up his lab coat and started kitchen hopping.

It was getting harder and harder to turn his offers down, and Duncan hated that most of all. The hiatus he’d taken from professional kitchens while he worked in the lab wasn’t a problem. The culinary arts was not an industry that changed rapidly. His skills were still sharp, and he still had a keen eye for trends and pairings. No, it was his “love ’em and leave ’em” reputation in the kitchen that preceded him, and big name restaurants seemed to have decided that while he was fun to date, he wasn’t long-term material.

Duncan was having a great time kitchen surfing, but it wasn’t a sustainable career option. He needed to find a real job, and soon. Between his student loans and the rent on the apartment that had sat empty for much of the time he’d been traveling, he was in debt up to his ears. A steady paycheck would be quite welcome right about now.

Not that he’d told his mother that. She’d guilt him into taking Vincent’s generous six-figure offer, and then he’d be even more miserable.

He forced himself to smile and dished up a serving of chicken, ignoring the concerned look on his mother’s face.

“Do you want to eat in here?” He nodded toward the table in the corner. The banquette needed to be reupholstered, stuffing spilling out of a long tear that had started as a series of pinpricks when he’d poked his fork into it in elementary school.

Meals had always been eaten at the table when he was a kid. His mother used the time to talk to him about his day and grill him about homework. Now she used meal times to prod him about his father and his career, and he just wasn’t up for it tonight.

His exhaustion must have been written all over his face, because his mother took pity on him. “Your show’s about to come on. Why don’t we take this into the living room, just this once?”

Duncan rolled his eyes. “It’s not my show, Mom. It’s just a show that I sometimes watch.”

His mother’s lips twitched. “A show you sometimes watch, huh? Is that why you refuse to let me delete them off my TiVo until you’ve had a chance to see them?”

That was just because he didn’t have cable. “Not all of them.”

She gave him a knowing look and put her plate down on the coffee table. “Well, your man Beck has been hosting more and more often, and it’s filling up my list. Soon you’re going to have to start deleting some of the earlier ones because I’m not letting your obsession keep me from DVRing
Law and Order
.”

“Lies and slander,” he mumbled as he picked up the remote control. There were six new
King of the Kitchen
episodes in the queue, and from the descriptions it looked like Beck had hosted four of them. “I just like his dedication to using fresh ingredients.”

And the way his ass looked in his well-cut suits, but he wasn’t about to point that out. From the snicker his defense earned from his mother, he figured she already knew.

Chapter TWO

“TUNE IN
next week, when Christian will be back and we’ll have a special guest chef who will be showing us how she makes her signature pasta. Trust me, it’s delicious. If you haven’t had the opportunity to eat at one of Glenda Abram’s restaurants, you’re missing out. But don’t worry, we’ve got you covered here on
King of the Kitchen
. We’ll get the inside track on how Glenda has captured the nation’s heart with her pasta and learn how you can make it in your own kitchen.

“I’m Beck Douglas, and thanks for inviting us into your kitchen today!”

Beck grinned at the camera, his lips curving up into the carefully practiced boyish smile that had made him a hit in households across the country. He kept his face relaxed and his eyes trained on the large placard bearing the countdown, sited behind the camera. Beck waited a full three beats after it reached zero and the red light on the camera clicked off, before slumping against the counter. Within seconds, he lost both his smile and the high-energy enthusiasm that was his trademark on the show.

“You went a little over on the intro today.”

Beck didn’t open his eyes, his resigned posture unchanged. “We had an advertiser pull a spot at the last minute, so I had an extra thirty seconds to fill.”

“Who pulled?” The sharp edge to Christian’s voice left little doubt someone was going to be out of a job by the end of the day, and Beck privately wished it could be him. He knew better, though. Christian was grooming him to take over the empire, as he had been for the last ten years. Lindsay had been the obvious choice for mogul-in-training, but she was an absolute disaster in the kitchen. Beck was Christian’s nephew, and he’d inherited the position of Christian’s protégé. It was awesome and terrible at the same time because Beck loved cooking. He was lukewarm about being in front of the camera, but he did love having the chance to teach people how to create amazing food in their home kitchens.

He hated the trendy food his uncle made him cook. But Christian would never stand for Beck quitting, and what’s more, Beck wouldn’t dream of it outside of his own silent fantasies. At the end of the day, he was exactly where he wanted to be, even if it came at the cost of a little bit more of his soul dying every time he had to cook something with aioli.

“Agneau,” Beck said, keeping his voice level. He knew why the spot had been pulled. He’d even warned the advertising department it might happen, and he’d prepared to cover the time by rehearsing an extended show intro.

For most television personalities, successfully being the host of a live show was due to a combination of hard work and natural talent. Beck had no natural on-screen charm, so he had to work doubly hard for his success. No viewer would ever guess that every bit of Beck’s carefree, easy demeanor on the show was scripted, or that for every five minutes of on-screen time, Beck spent about an hour preparing. He worked with a team of writers to preplan jokes and asides, and he spent ages over a range in the cramped test kitchen, perfecting recipes with the development team and learning how to make them effortlessly.

“Did they say why? Agneau has been an advertiser with the show since the beginning.”

Beck’s eyes slid open, and he stared at Christian with disbelief. “Are you really asking me that? How could they
not
pull after what Felix Cartwright said during his guest spot last week?”

Christian scowled. “That throw-away comment about GMOs?”

“Of course ‘that throw-away comment about GMOs.’ Genetically modified organisms are a hot topic right now, and Agneau has a huge contract with Monsanto. Most of the corn in the processed food Agneau produces is genetically modified.”

One of the things Beck hated about working on the show—and there were many—was being forced to play nice with food distributors he’d never use personally. Agneau had been a sponsor of
King of the Kitchen
way back in the days when Christian was the little-known host of a local cooking show in upstate New York, some twenty years ago. Christian always made a point of using Agneau brand dried pasta on the show, as well as other boxed or canned ingredients that never showed up in his pantry at home. Beck’s uncle was the ultimate food snob personally, but professionally he was happy to put his face on pretty much any product that offered a high enough fee for endorsement.