Scrumptious (5 page)

“Trust has nothing to do with it.” She’d left three desserts in the wait station, but Eric and Shane still weren’t speaking to her.

“Maybe not, but Olivia asked for my help, Marlene. This place needs another chef, and I’m here, ready, and able to work. What happened between us last night has nothing to do with Chameleon. Can we call it even and get on with the job, for Olivia’s sake?” he asked.

She faced the table, taking deep breaths to control her fury. How dare he speak to her in that reasonable tone of voice and suggest she didn’t have her best friend’s back? That’s why she was here, wasn’t it? To help Olivia run the restaurant? She had put up with a lot to repay the debt she owed Olivia and her family.

She began to wrap her double batch of tart dough into neat, flat disks while he watched, making the bakeshop feel even smaller than usual. When she was finished, she put the dough in the freezer, then wiped her hands on a damp side towel. She folded it into a perfect square and placed it on the table. “Shall we get started on the prep list?”

Joe stood to his full height, towering over her, no longer affecting his indolent pose against the refrigerator. “Not until you answer me.” His voice was stern.

She shrugged. “We don’t need your help, Joe.”

“Olivia says you do. No offense, but if you’re the only one in her corner, I can see why. I’d be pretty damn pissed at someone who encouraged the waiters to screw up service
—
for any reason. Count yourself lucky I didn’t squeal on
you
, little girl. I’m very good at what I do, and I think you know it now, since you got yourself such an excellent demonstration of my abilities this afternoon. You can’t scare me away with a grill pile-up. Why don’t you just relax and let me help out around here until Olivia can find another chef?”

She ignored him and reached under the table for a cutting board.

When she straightened, Joe put his hand on her arm and turned her around to face him. His lazy smile pulled her in for a sucker punch. “Admit it, sugar, you don’t have a problem with me in a professional capacity. You’re just mad because I didn’t spend the night with you.”

For a brief second, Marly imagined grabbing her French knife from the table and whipping it into the center of his forehead. It gave her satisfaction while she considered his words, which hit too close to home. She already regretted her impulsive action, but she didn’t want to admit it yet. At least not to him. She closed her eyes briefly. “Shit,” she sighed.

“Yep.” She could hear the smug grin in his voice.

“I’m not apologizing,” she warned, addressing his chest.

“You don’t have to. I’m not apologizing either,” he said. “We’ve both got our reasons, but we have to be able to work together. Let’s keep the personal stuff out of it. I’ve heard a lot of nice things about you, and I’d like to believe they’re true.” He held out a hand, palm up. “Friends?”

The fact that he was handling her made the situation even more annoying, but he had a point. She’d behaved like a twit. She took his hand, stifling a sigh as his rough palm slid over hers. Lust zinged through her. His other hand reached out to clasp her forearm, raising goose bumps she hoped he couldn’t feel. Not fair, just not fair. Her libido didn’t seem to register the fact that he wasn’t interested, which was going to make the next two weeks challenging.

She shook her hand free of his, deciding to at least try to save face. If she couldn’t control her inconvenient physical response to his hot body, maybe she could disguise it a little, set up a smoke screen. She raised her eyes to meet his. “Since we’re getting things off our chests, I may have given you the wrong impression last night. I don’t usually come on so strong,” she lied. “Martini madness I guess. It won’t happen again, especially since we’ll be working together. As friends,” she added. “Your virtue will be safe from me, I promise.”

“Yeah?” He raised his eyebrows.

“Absolutely.”

Joe flashed that wicked grin and chuckled. “For the record, I don’t believe you.”

Her jaw dropped and she sagged against the table, pretending to be crushed by his lack of faith, but really giving herself a moment to recover. She clapped a hand to her forehead in mock disbelief. “Now you’re flirting with me? Jesus, your timing sucks.”

He laughed again and dropped a cutting board next to hers on the table. “What’s on the prep list?” he asked.

“Mirepoix for more veal stock, sliced onions and peppers, mashed potatoes, polenta, and rosemary red sauce.” She grinned. “Oh, and you need more steaks.”

“This place needs a prep cook.”

“You’re looking at her.” And he was, damn it, looking at her in a way that made her remember how his lips had felt speaking to hers last night. Her mouth watered, but it had nothing to do with her hangover this time. She had to force herself to breathe slowly. She could feel her heart hammering in her chest, and her cheeks felt hot. She was never going to make it through two weeks with him if she went up in flames every time he smiled and his eyes got all crinkly.

For whatever reason, he wasn’t interested in her. She wasn’t interested either. Okay, so that was a lie. She was definitely interested, but Joe was, by her own declaration, totally off limits now. Even if she wanted him. Which she didn’t.

Right.

The hubbub of the kitchen swirled around them. The dish machine roared faintly in the background. Waiters traded insults. Dishes clanked into bus tubs. Her sauces bubbled slowly, like her thoughts. Time to get back to work. If Joe could prep as well as he could cook, then she might even get out of here early today.

She turned and saw he was smiling at her. “Do you really want to know why I left your apartment last night?” he asked with a teasing grin that almost took her out at the knees.

“Nope.” She left him at the table and headed for the walk-in. No way was she continuing this “about last night” conversation. She was pretty good at denial, but she wasn’t a masochist. If he was just joking around, she wasn’t interested in hearing what he had to say. If he was serious, then she really didn’t want to hear it. The subject was closed.

He followed her. The walk-in refrigerator door swung shut behind them, making the forty-degree air feel like a sauna to her.

Joe stretched to hand her the bin she couldn’t quite reach and told her anyway. “I’m reforming, and I didn’t want you to take advantage of me.”

She thrust the bin of carrots and celery back into his arms. She batted her eyelashes at him. He wanted to play? Fine, she’d play. “Thanks, I really appreciated that. I’ll have you know I’ve never taken advantage of an unwilling man.”

“Really? That’s not what I hear. The bartender last night said you’re a real heartbreaker.”

“Johnny? He should talk. You should see what he gets up to in
his
spare time. Anyway, who cares? Olivia said you’ve left a trail of broken hearts across the lower half of this country,” she retorted. “You good old boys invented the double standard, buddy.”

Joe raised his eyebrows, so she continued. “You want every woman you meet to be a virgin, right up to the minute you get her to bed. Then you want her to work your pole like a professional. I don’t play those games. I know what I want, and nine times out of ten I get it. You just happened to be number ten.”

The walk-in was definitely too small and too hot. She kicked the steel door open and walked back to the prep table, grabbing a bin of onions on the way.

Joe followed her, seemingly oblivious to her growing irritation. “Number ten, huh? There were more than nine other guys staring at your ass in the bar last night. Don’t sell yourself short, sugar.”

Her hackles rose again. What was he trying to imply? She decided to ignore the bait. “Large dice, please,” she said, pointing at the carrots and celery.

He nodded and began to chop. “How’d you get started at Chameleon, anyway?”

The change of subject caught her off guard. Marlene took a deep breath. Calm, calm. That was a fair question. “Olivia and I went to high school together. She brought me home, and her mom gave me a job.” That was the short version.

The long version was more complicated.

She had been sobbing in the chemistry lab after school when Olivia had found her. It was her fourteenth birthday, the day her father had left for good. When Olivia heard that, she had insisted Marlene come to her parents’ restaurant with her. The minute the screen door had slammed behind her, she was hooked. The kitchen was noisy. People were swearing. It smelled like wet noodles, garlic, and hot grease. She had never been in such a wild place.

That first day, Mr. Marconi had shoved a huge bowl of spaghetti and meatballs at her. He had a sharp face. His cheekbones were stark slashes above his hollow cheeks. His chin was pointy, and his nose was hooked, but under his heavy, dark brows, his eyes flashed a warm green, like Olivia’s.

She had tried to play it cool, but her mouth was watering. That spaghetti had never been anywhere near a can. “It’s okay. I’ll get something at home,” she had mumbled.

Mr. Marconi winked at her and took a big bite out of the enormous sandwich sitting on his cutting board. A piece of steak fell out onto the mats at his feet. He frowned and nudged the meat under the table with the toe of his black boot.

“Eat.”

She ate. The sauce had a woodsy flavor and sweet, brown bits she would later learn were currants. It was the best thing she had ever tasted. After that first night, she didn’t resist, and the entire Marconi family had swept her under its generous, Old World wing. She learned the secret of that rosemary sauce and all the other sauces from Mr. Marconi. She learned the rhythm of the kitchen from him too: how long to leave a steak on the fire for a perfect medium rare, how to get a twelve-top into the window, hot and on time. At his elbow, Marlene learned how to get prepped for a busy dinner service, specials and all, and still have time to meet with the servers and feed her own body before the doors opened for service.

Grandma Marconi had welcomed her in the bakeshop too. When Nonna got too tired to spend so much time on her feet, Marlene had learned the secrets of butter, sugar, eggs, and flour from her, while Olivia stayed on the line to help her father. When the mixers whirled, Marlene could still hear a soft, Italian accent in her ear. She could still feel Nonna’s hand, knuckles swollen with arthritis, guide her own when she folded stiff egg whites into cake batter. Every time she smelled chocolate, she thanked Nonna for teaching her its pleasures. Her heart was on the hot line, but she had a gift for the sweet stuff too, and that gift allowed her to stay at Chameleon when Olivia brought Keith home.

Marlene realized Joe was waiting for her to go on. “I like cooking,” she said finally. “It isn’t rocket science, and I’m good at it.”

“You’ve worked on the line, right?” His knife moved quickly but with absolute control through the pile of peeled carrots, reducing them to equally-sized pieces, hands so sure of his knife, he barely even glanced down at them. He kept his eyes on her.

“Of course.” She kept pace with him, evenly dicing onions to complete the mirepoix.

“How come you aren’t up there now?”

“There’s plenty for me to do back here.” She paused to pour oil into a large roasting pan.

“I’ll do that.” He took the pan from her and tucked it into the oven.

“If I need help, I’ll ask for it,” she growled.

“I doubt that.” Her disgusted look was lost on him as he began dismantling celery. “In fact, you seem like a lone ranger around here, baking, prepping, messing around with service. Chameleon needs teamwork, sugar.” She couldn’t even begin to imagine where he was going with this. “I’m not a bad guy to work for
—
”

Her knife hand froze halfway through an onion. She left it sticking there and spun to face Joe, her hands on her hips. “Hold it right there, cheffie boy. I don’t work for you. I work for Olivia. I do a lot of things around here because there isn’t anybody else who can do the job right.” She ignored the gibe about this afternoon’s mischief because he had a valid point. “I can’t deny we need more working bodies around here, and if one of them has to be you, so be it, but you are not my boss. You keep that straight, and we’ll get along just fine.” She turned back to the vegetables.

Why was it every guy who walked into a professional kitchen thought he could do a better job than the women? Joe was just like every other hot shit Culinary Arts chef who liked to strut down the line. Just like Keith. There was no way she was going to take orders from Joe, even for a minute, never mind for two weeks. She was damn good at her job, and she didn’t need him telling her how to do it. Teamwork her ass.

Joe stepped aside as Marlene pulled the hot pan out of the oven and swept the onions, carrots, and celery into the pan. He didn’t blink as she shook the vegetables around in the sizzling oil and shoved the pan back into the oven, wisely staying out of her way.

She shut the oven door and looked at him. “By the way, I set Olivia straight about what happened last night. You didn’t have to lie for my sake.”

“Oh, right.” He glanced away from her. “I didn’t do that for you.”

She shrugged. “No worries. I’m delighted to forget everything that happened after I popped the cap off that last beer, trust me.”

He looked disappointed. “Does that mean you won’t be quoting any
Top
Gun
for me?”

“I’ll peel the potatoes if you promise not to mention that again.”

He shook his head. “No way. I have some particular favorites from that movie. In fact, if we don’t get a move on, we won’t be ready for dinner. You could say, ‘We have a need, a need for
—
’”

“Stop it!” She laughed in spite of herself. He was an arrogant prick, but at least he had a sense of humor. She picked up a red pepper and began to chop. Joe started on the green ones. If he were a woman, she would probably like him in spite of his gigantic ego. Her grin slipped off her face.

Oh hell. No way. She did.

Maybe she
was
a masochist.

Joe left the bakeshop and returned to the line after the peppers were sliced. Chameleon was slamming busy that night, and he had a ton of station prep to knock out before dinner service. Lunch had wiped out his backups, even though the grill station had been stocked at the beginning of service. He made a mental note to ask Olivia who had been working the grill. He wanted to thank whoever it was for setting him up so well.

He and Olivia had hauled ass through lunch service. Well, Joe had hauled ass, thanks to Marlene’s little joke. After the initial crazy rush, Olivia had relaxed and begun to trust him. He had caught her openly grinning as he sweated over the grill. What kind of a Svengali waiter could talk an entire table into ordering steaks at lunch? Joe set up a cutting board and began to clean monkfish for his special.

He had noticed a curious dynamic in the kitchen. Chameleon was majorly understaffed, but everyone worked together to get the job done, a very unusual phenomenon in a professional kitchen. Usually, the front of the house and the back of the house fought like cats and dogs. The waiters complained that their food was slow, and the cooks were always pissed off because the waiters were raking in the tips while they did all the work.

Within the kitchen itself, there was a hierarchy too, with the prep cook being lowest on the totem pole and the sauté chef the highest. Joe hadn’t ever worked in a kitchen where the first waiter off the floor was put to work picking chicken carcasses and the pastry chef made the veal demi. Now that he had given it some thought, he had really put his foot in his mouth about that whole teamwork thing. This kitchen ran like a clock.

After watching Marlene cook all afternoon in spite of her hangover, he probably owed her an apology too. What the hell had gotten into him this afternoon? He had intended to clear the air between them so that he could do the job he had promised to do. He wasn’t sure how he had ended up alternately flirting with her and fighting with her for two hours when he should have been up here filling six pans with all the ingredients he’d need for dinner service.

She clearly had the prep under control, and the cooler was full of the amazing desserts he’d seen sailing out into the dining room during lunch. She was right: she hadn’t needed his help with the prep list, but he’d stuck around to enjoy the economy of her motions as she banged out the work. Each task rolled into the next in a seamless progression until everything was cut, then cooked, cooled, labeled, and stored. He had a bad feeling he knew who to thank for the well-prepped grill station today.

Joe heard the screen door open and looked up from the monkfish tail. Every time he had heard the back door open today, he’d expected it to be Keith, arriving for work as scheduled. Evidence of his half-assed work ethic was obvious all over the kitchen: waxy, black grime mopped into the corners of the hot line; unlabeled, undated containers in the walk-in. From the dust on top of some of the number ten cans in dry storage, Keith hadn’t been real interested in proper rotation either. Joe couldn’t wait to rub his face in the fact that he’d been replaced.

The back door opened again. Closed. This time, he was not disappointed. He heard Keith greet Kevin, the dishwasher, and he tensed.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Keith stepped out of the dish room and strode down the front of line.

“Working.” He smiled tightly, enjoying Keith’s instant rage.

“That’s my fish, Rafferty. Get your hands off it.”

“You ordered monkfish? I’m surprised you could even identify it. A man who can’t tell his wife’s pussy from a bit of strange can’t be trusted to identify decent fish, that’s for sure.”

“You’re not the only expert on pussy around here.”

“Guess not.” Joe put his knife down and wiped his hands on a side towel. “You better scram before Olivia sees you. She’s been making some pretty interesting suggestions about how to amputate your nuts.”

Keith recoiled. “This is my restaurant too. I’m working tonight. I’m not going anywhere,” he retorted.

Joe stepped out from behind the line. “Yeah, you are. It seems Chameleon is in the market for a new chef. This time, Olivia’s looking for someone who can actually do the job, not just the female employees.” He blocked the hallway to the office and the bakeshop.

“Move it, Rafferty. As soon as I find Olivia, you’re out of here. She’ll forgive me. She always does.”

“Not this time.” Olivia spoke from the hall behind Joe.

“Hey, baby! Don’t tell me you actually hired this joker?” Keith’s abrupt switch to charm made Joe grit his teeth. Chicks actually fell for that shit? Olivia stepped forward until she stood next to him. Just for kicks, he slung a tight arm around her waist. Her face was drawn, and her eyes were hard as she spoke. Her body was rigid against his side. “Joe’s done more work in one day, than you’ve done all month. Get out, Keith. You’ve already used every second chance you had here.”

Keith glared at them, giving up the act. “I see how things are. I should have figured you’d show up sooner or later, Rafferty. Sloppy seconds the best you can do these days?” he sneered.

“Don’t give me an excuse to fuck up that pretty-boy face, Watson. It’s the only thing you’ve got going for you now.”

Keith’s cheeks flushed. He took a step forward.

Come
on, come on, hit me
, Joe thought, getting ready. He’d let Keith get in one good punch, and then he’d take him out back and work him over against the brick wall.

Keith turned toward Olivia instead. “Don’t expect much from her, Rafferty. She’s like ice in the sack.”

“You can’t melt ice with a limp torch, Keith,” Olivia pointed out.

The mulish expression on Keith’s face reminded Joe of the way his cousin’s kids looked when they were seeing just how far they could push their mother before she lost her temper and applied a smackdown. He lifted his chin. “I want to get my knives out of the office.”

“Be my guest,” Olivia said. “You want a towel to get the dust off of them? Don’t take too long. If you aren’t out of here in five minutes, I’m calling the police.”

Keith shouldered past them. Joe gave him a healthy shove in the direction he was going, hoping Keith would turn around and give him another chance. “You want me to go with him?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Just tell me when he leaves, okay? I’ll be up front.”

Joe returned to the monkfish tails and picked up his blade.

“And Joe?” Olivia’s voice was quiet.

He looked up.

“Don’t ever refer to fish and my pussy in the same sentence. Got it?”

He nodded, chuckling. He had wondered if she’d heard that.

She rolled her eyes and went through the swinging door into the dining room. “Get him out of here, cowboy.”

***

Marlene heard a noise behind her. She glanced up from the potatoes in time to see Keith duck into the office. She nicked her little finger with the swivel-headed peeler. “Damn.” She dropped the potato and the peeler into the five gallon bucket of water and raced to the office door.

Locked.

She found Joe on the line, wrist-deep in monkfish, the nastiest bottom-dweller ever to hit the restaurants. “Does Olivia know Keith just locked himself in the office?”

“Locked, huh? He’s got about two minutes before I haul his ass out of there.”

“Can I watch?” she asked.

“Let’s go, sugar.”

The office door was wide open and the back room was empty and still when they reached the back.

“Maybe he went out the front,” Joe said, heading in that direction.

“I’ll check the back.”

In the dish room, Marlene saw crusted-over sauté pans full of dried-out sauce and half-sheet pans piled every which way. Tea bags, sugar packets, and straws swirled in the clogged drain. The stainless steel sink was full of milky water, ice cubes, globs of swollen noodles, and sogged-out bread crusts. There were so many dishes piled up, there was no room to make room. But no sign of Keith.

“Holy shit, this place is a friggin’ mess! Where’s
Kevin
?” Marlene yelled to make herself heard in the wait station.

Shane came over to peer at the unscraped, unstacked dish mess, then ducked back down the hall as Joe and Olivia walked quickly through the narrow aisle between the reach-in cooler and the front of the line. When Shane got a safe distance away from the dish room, he called over his shoulder, “I just heard Keith tell Kevin he’d give him a hundred bucks to walk out.”

“Fuck.” Olivia said what Marlene was thinking.

Joe laughed. “You’ve got to give him credit for imagination. That’s a good one.”

“Where’d he get the hundred bucks?” Olivia wondered out loud.

“Probably out of your safe, kiddo. You really should have let me go with him,” Joe said.

“That’s it. I’m getting a restraining order.” Olivia stomped out of the dish room.

“Hey, that doesn’t get you out of KP!” Joe yelled after her.

Marlene and Joe locked eyes.

“I was pulling worms out of monkfish when Keith got here,” Joe said. “Ladies choice: dish or fish?”

“I’ll run the plates through,” she said reluctantly.

“Sissy.”

“There is no way in hell I’m cleaning up this whole mess though. Jacques is looking for overtime. He’ll come in a little early. I’m going home to take a nice, hot bubble bath, and pretend this day never happened.” She attacked the dishes with savage force.

“Uh-oh.”

“What now?”

“Marly?”

“What?” This time with force and impatience. She had a lot of dishes to do and her headache was coming back.

“Have you lost that lovin’ feeling?” Joe’s light blue eyes danced above the barest curve of his full lips.

“Fuck off. I hope the worms bite you.”

“They’re dead.”

“Too bad.” Marlene didn’t pause until she could hear that Joe was all the way back in his station on the line. Still, that was just on the other side of the dish room wall, and she could hear him humming the tune to “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” the bar pickup song from the
Top
Gun
soundtrack.

Sense memory flooded her body and Marlene felt it again, his lips, their kiss. Perfect.

She must have imagined it, or better yet, it was an alcohol-induced hallucination. She put her palms on the raised rim of the stainless steel table to support her weak knees. When the heat waves didn’t subside, she gritted her teeth and threw herself into scrubbing a stockpot. She’d wash every pot in the kitchen if it would cleanse her traitorous memory of Joe’s amazing lips.

She set the pot in a rack and pulled her cell phone out of her pocket to dial the night dishwasher. Jacques was happy to come in early, thank God, although it still took her forever to get out of the kitchen. It always did. There were so many details to be communicated, so many racks to check and things to label before she left for the day. Since Olivia was on the phone with her lawyer, Marlene had to answer Joe’s questions and deal with the waiters too. Would this day never end? By the time she reached home, she was ready to collapse.

She dragged herself into the bathroom and poured a more than generous amount of bubble bath into the steaming torrent of hot water. “Ahhh,” she sighed, easing into the water. Tears pricked her eyes as her muscles relaxed, telling her just how tightly she’d been wound all day.

Her telephone was ringing, but there was no way she was going to get out of the tub until her churning brain slowed down. The answering machine caught the call, and she heard her mother’s bright voice. “Hi, baby, it’s Mom. I’m home tonight. Give me a call if you want me to do your hair. I brought foil home from work. Love you.”

Marlene’s desperate desire to crawl into bed had dissolved in the bathwater. She was too wired to sleep, and it was only seven o’clock. A night with her mom and some new highlights sounded like the perfect antidote to her crappy day. She shifted to keep her hair dry, glad she had put it up before she climbed into the tub.

Just as she rose from the tub, someone started banging on her back door. No peace for the wicked, it seemed. “Hang on,” she yelled, toweling off and pulling on a robe. She was not surprised to see Danny on her back step, looking for all the world like a deer standing in the middle of the road staring at a semi-truck. “Oh, for God’s sake, get that look off your face. Get in here.” She opened the door and gestured at her fridge. “Have a beer if you want. I’m going to get dressed.”

“Not on my account, I hope,” he said, hopeful invitation shining in his glossy brown eyes. She looked at him for a moment and thought about it. He was really cute, with his long, dark blond hair loose around his face, and his beat-up jeans and worn T-shirt emphasizing the strength of his tight and toned body. Even though summer had just begun, he was tan, probably because he had skipped work and spent the day in the sun. God, he was such a puppy. The five-year difference in their ages yawned wide, and she didn’t feel her usual desire to press herself against his warmth.

She shook her head in exasperation. “Do we have to go through this again?”

“Hey, hope springs eternal. I figure if I keep coming around, one of these days you’ll decide to keep me.”

“That’s not the way I operate, Danny. You know that.” He was fun and they were friends, but she’d never led him to expect more than that.

He ducked his head. “You mad at me about last night?”

“No, I’m not mad at you, Danny boy. Hang on. I’ll be right back.” He headed for the fridge, and she went into her bedroom to pull on jeans and a black tank top. She ignored his admiring gaze when she returned to the kitchen. No, she wasn’t mad at him, but she wasn’t going to encourage him either.

He lowered the beer bottle from his lips. “So, who was the guy on your roof last night? Weren’t you at the bar with him too?” Jealousy and curiosity deepened his voice.

“It would serve you right if I said none of your business, but he’s filling in at Chameleon until Olivia can find somebody to replace Keith. You’ll meet him tomorrow.” It wasn’t the truth he was seeking, but it was pertinent information.

“Replace Keith?”

“Where have you been? Under a rock? Wait, don’t answer that.” She knew where he’d been last night at least. “We found Keith and Nikki getting it on in dry storage. Olivia kicked him out. Fired him too. Frankly, I’m not sure working with Joe is any better, but at least he can cook.”