On a Roll

by Beth Bolden

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Food Truck Warriors

  Beth's Books

  About Beth

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Two years ago

  There was nothing Gabriel Moretti enjoyed more than the squeaky-clean, sparkling-with-possibilities, fresh-start feeling of every food truck season. He stood back and admired the new sign emblazoned on the side of the truck. It read, in a fun bright green script, On a Roll, which was not only an adorable name that totally referenced the mobility of his truck, but his specialty. He’d originally begun with his nonna’s famous meatball and red sauce recipes, and then boosted his popularity by putting everything together on one, soft, garlic butter-slathered Italian roll.

  Nonna’s Kitchen on Wheels had been a perfectly serviceable name, especially when he’d still been a Southern California spinoff of his family’s famous chain of Italian restaurants in Napa. But the meatball sub had become famous last season, and he’d spent the short Los Angeles off-season prepping for a new name that matched his bestselling item.

  Truthfully, there was barely an off-season in LA. The weather made food trucks viable most of the year, but a lot of trucks took Thanksgiving through February off—the first big food festival officially kicking off the new season each year.

  “Hey, Gabe. That looks real good.”

  Gabriel looked up and saw Tony Blake, both a friend and fellow food truck owner, standing, arms crossed over his chest, admiring the new logo on the shiny stainless steel side of the truck.

  “Thanks,” Gabriel said. He was trying very hard not to be overly proud of himself. But he was. His family had all said this food truck thing was never going to work out, not for him anyway. “People want to eat at a table with a knife and fork,” his oldest brother, Luca, had insisted. “They don’t want to chase a truck around.”

  Gabriel had never been prouder than when he mailed a check to Luca, paying off almost all of his family’s investment from the last season’s profits.

  No—that was not completely accurate.

  He’d never been happier. Because the food truck doing well and not only supporting him, but allowing him to put money into the bank? It meant he could stay down in Los Angeles and away from all his mouthy, interfering, and unbelievably nosy family.

  Gabriel loved each and every one of them, but they were a hell of a lot easier to deal with when they were several hundred miles away.

  “I think changing your name was a great idea,” Tony said, meandering closer as Gabriel put the finishing buff on the already shiny side of the truck. “But you might want to rethink what you’re changing it to.”

  “What?” Gabriel glanced up. “What are you talking about? This name is perfect.”

  But Tony just shrugged. The concerned look in his blue eyes was a lot more worrying than his casual attitude. “Maybe if you don’t mind sharing a name with another truck.” Tony pointed across the busy festival lot, to where trucks were parked on the other side. And sure enough, to Gabriel’s incredulity, there was a food truck—shining white, with a crisp red logo painted on it—that proclaimed that it was also On a Roll.

  “What?” Gabriel gaped. “That’s not . . . I mean, I did the research. I spent months finalizing the name!”

  Tony shrugged again. “At least you guys are serving two very different things.”

  That did not make Gabriel feel any better. He still felt like marching right over to the other truck and giving them a piece of his mind. After all, he’d done meticulous Google searches, making sure that there were no other trucks with that name in the Los Angeles area. When he’d looked into it, there hadn’t even been any trucks in California with the name he’d eventually settled on.

  And yet, there one stood. Taunting Gabriel with its fresh paint and bright red logo.

  “What are they even serving?” Gabriel asked, filling his voice with scorn so that Tony wouldn’t hear the disappointment. He’d worked so hard last year, and even during the off-season, when a lot of food truck owners actually managed a vacation. He’d done it all so he could say proudly that he’d succeeded where his family had expected that he’d fail. He’d done it for space and for self-respect, and he’d gone into this season with so much hope and optimism that he’d felt like the sky was the limit.

  Well, the sky was looking a hell of a lot closer to the ground now.

  “Looks like some kind of healthy crap,” Tony said. “Wraps? Something like that. Dairy-free. Vegan? God only knows.”

  “So he likes vegetables?” Gabriel would have to be living under a rock not to know that the hottest trend was food trucks that served food you didn’t feel guilty eating.

  He liked vegetables just fine—as long as they were cooked into his meatballs with lots of butter and cheese.

  “That’s probably a good guess,” Tony said. “We could go over there and find out?”

  “I have stuff to do. Sauce to finish. Meatballs to cook.” Gabriel shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. “Maybe I’ll go over there after the dinner rush is through and do some reconnaissance.”

  “Yeah”—Tony nodded—“might be better to be less confrontational about it.” Which was laughable, because Tony was one of the most hot-headed people that Gabriel had ever met. And he was Italian.

  Tony wandered off, losing interest, the way he probably assumed Gabriel was doing, back towards the food truck he co-owned with his brother, Wyatt.

  But Gabriel was definitely not smart enough to leave well enough alone. He already knew that basically nothing was going to prevent him from going over there right now, but he hadn’t wanted to do it with Tony looking over his shoulder, cataloging every word of the exchange for juicy gossip later.

  Tossing his cleaning rag into the truck, Gabriel stomped over to where the copycat truck sat.

  It was only a third of the size of Gabriel’s own, barely big enough for one person. And that person poked his head out of the front window just as Gabriel arrived.

  The opening salvo Gabriel had been preparing as he stormed over died in his throat.

  The guy was young. Maybe even younger than Gabriel. And he was goddamn adorable.

  Dark blond hair, shaggy and in need of a trim fell over one grayish-blue eye. The guy’s nose wrinkled, his forehead crinkling cutely as he regarded Gabriel.

  “I’m afraid we’re not open yet,” the guy said. “But if you’re hungry, I’m sure I can find you something.”

  He was also nice.

  Gabriel did not want him to be nice. He wanted him to be rude and bossy and just as fucking pissed off as Gabriel was.

  “Hi,” he said shortly. “I’m good, thanks. But you might want to consider changing the name of your truck.”

  “The name?”

  Gabriel had never found confusion on any single creature to be so goddamn appealing. Somehow this guy managed it. While also, simultaneously, being an enormous pain in Gabriel’s ass.

  “Yes,” Gabriel said, none-too-patiently. “The name. You know, the exact name that you copied from me.”

  That last part was technically not true. They’d both probably done their research off-season, and figured they were in the clear. But Gabriel had a feeling that this guy was soft (a
nd new, if he was going by the look of the brand-new truck and the fact that Gabe had never seen him around before), and he could get under his skin and get him to change his name more easily if he came out swinging.

  “I didn’t copy my truck’s name from anyone,” the guy said primly. But with an undertone of steel that belied all that adorable confusion.

  Had Gabriel read him wrong? He decided he didn’t care, and forged ahead, recklessly.

  “Yet, somehow we have the exact same name,” Gabriel said, pointing across the worn grassy field to his own truck, slightly less shiny in the morning sunlight but still his.

  “Oh, look at that,” the guy said. Unconcerned. “Well, I hope there won’t be any confusion.”

  “There won’t be,” Gabriel said between clenched teeth, “because you’ll be changing your truck’s name. Tomorrow.”

  “Really?” The guy looked skeptical. “I really don’t have plans to change it, especially since this is the first day.”

  “It’s your first day?” Gabriel said. Not that it hadn’t been obvious from the pristine truck. There wasn’t even any mud on the tires, for god’s sake.

  The man’s eyes narrowed. “You know it’s my first day, which is why you’re over here, trying to bully me into changing my name. Well, I won’t. So you might as well save your breath.”

  Gabriel flinched, like he’d just been punched in the face. He had not expected that. Not from the guy who was still smiling at him so sweetly.

  “This isn’t over,” Gabriel said.

  “I expected that it wasn’t,” the guy said firmly. “I’m not exactly thrilled either, I’ll have you know. First day out, and already someone making trouble for me.”

  “Making . . .” Gabriel wondered when he’d lost control of the conversation. Maybe . . . maybe he’d never been in charge of it in the first place. He’d just thought he was.

  “Making trouble,” the guy confirmed with a sharp nod. “And no, I appreciate your concern, and I share it, but I won’t be changing my name. Goodbye.”

  And before Gabriel could argue, the blond man had turned around, clearly done with the conversation, and with him.

  That stung.

  However, Gabriel had no intention of taking any of it lying down.

  ———

  The next time he ran into the blond guy with the identical name, it was a week later, and Gabriel had discovered a few things about the copycat.

  1) He was not only new to the food truck scene, he was new to Los Angeles. Nobody Gabriel talked to had ever heard of him before. And thanks to being friends with Tony and his brother, Wyatt, Gabriel knew or knew of a whole lot of people.

  2) The wrong version of On a Roll already had five reviews on Yelp, and a 4.9 rating.

  3) One person had already confused the two trucks, because one of those reviews was his.

  4) The guy’s name was Sean Cooper.

  5) Gabriel had already spent more time obsessing about Sean than he was willing to admit to anyone. He’d found the copycat’s Twitter account and Instagram and had proceeded to follow both, only to tweet himself that if you wanted the real On a Roll in LA, you had to come see him.

  Sean, annoyingly, had not responded to the bait.

  “You should just change your name back,” Tony said, as Gabriel stirred his tomato sauce, AKA his nonna’s “gravy,” in the enormous pot on the back of the stove.

  “I do not want to change my name back,” Gabriel said between clenched teeth. “I asked you if you had any advice. That’s not advice. That’s a knife in the back.”

  “Hey!” Tony said in mock outrage. “That’s not fair. I’m trying to help here.”

  “What you’re trying to do is take his side,” Gabriel muttered. “He’s been here a week, and already everyone likes him better.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” Tony argued.

  “I saw him having a real friendly chat with Ash,” Gabriel said. Ash was his friend. Ash should be on his side. But instead, Ash had been talking and laughing between lunch and dinner with Sean.

  And it was definitely not because Ren, his cousin who helped him at the truck, had proclaimed them a “cute new couple.” No sirree, he was definitely not jealous. No way. Yes, Sean might be a little cute, a fact that Ren had pointed out half a dozen times already, until Gabriel had really wished that he could fire him. But Lorenzo was his cousin, and Ren’s dad, Stefano—his father’s younger brother—would never forgive him. And Luca? Luca, his oldest brother and officially now the head of the family since his parents had retired, would be down in LA in a flash, and the last thing Gabriel wanted was to deal with Luca’s profound inflexibility.

  Okay, Luca was now the second to the last thing Gabriel wanted to deal with. The first? Definitely Sean Cooper. Sean was a complete asshole, even if he was an inadvertent one, and he was going to change his mind. Gabriel was going to make sure of it.

  “Ash was trying to be welcoming and nice,” Tony said. “You know, after someone marched over to Sean’s truck and tried to intimidate him when he said he wouldn’t.”

  Gabriel refused to feel guilty. “You’re just disappointed you weren’t present for said intimidation.”

  “It’s alright,” Tony said. “Maureen, who runs the fish and chips truck? She was parked right next door and heard everything.”

  Gabriel grimaced. “Of course she did.”

  “Hey, if you’re going to be weirdly threatening just because the guy’s got the same name as yours, you’re gonna have to expect everyone to be talking about it.”

  “I wasn’t . . .” Okay, he might have been. But who could blame him?

  “Listen,” Tony interrupted him. “You’re the more established guy on the circuit. You had a lot of success last year. You put a lot of time and effort and money into rebranding. Maybe if he was also selling Italian sandwiches, make a big deal out of this, but now? You gotta let it go.”

  There was no way Gabriel was letting it go.

  “I just wanted to say that,” Tony said, before shoving his hands in his pockets and wandering off.

  Gabriel had five minutes alone with his sauce, before Ren showed up.

  Ren was, to put it mildly, a complete pain in Gabriel’s ass.

  He was still not over the fact that along with the investment his family had made in the food truck, they’d also decided that if Gabriel was going to strike out on his own, he might as well take the most annoying member of the family with him.

  Lorenzo Moretti—or Ren, as his family and friends called him—sauntered in, an innocent smile on his face that didn’t fool Gabriel for a hot second. In his experience, Ren was a complete and total brat, and wouldn’t know innocence if it came up and bit him.

  “I saw your friend outside,” Ren said, leaning against the back counter.

  Gabriel was not stupid enough to think that Ren meant Tony. Especially because if he’d been referring to Tony, he’d have said something like, your really hot friend who I’d love to hook up with. When they’d started the season, Gabriel had thought that was the most difficult situation he’d have to deal with: Ren and his endless crush on Tony.

  “Your blond friend,” Ren added slyly. “He looked like he missed you.”

  “Like a hole in the head, probably,” Gabriel muttered. “I didn’t realize he was going to be here today. He wasn’t on the list they released a month ago.”

  “New and exciting truck? Yeah, I’m sure they added him after,” Ren said, opening the tiny closet in the front of the truck and pulling out his navy blue apron, emblazoned with the new logo that Gabriel had spent so many hours laboring over.

  Gabriel made a face.

  “He might be new, but he’s not exciting,” Gabriel insisted.

  Ren shot him a pitying look. “You just keep telling yourself that.”

  “I am,” Gabriel said. “And I’m also going to figure out a way to convince him to change the name of his truck. We can’t both be On a Roll. What if someone has a hankering for a real
ly good meatball sub, and then they accidentally head to his truck and end up with a mouthful of weeds? That’s a problem.”

  “It’s not just weeds,” Ren sniffed.

  “Oh, so you’re an expert on his menu now, huh?” Gabriel asked. Of course Ren had tried the competition. He’d sampled the food—and flirted—with nearly every truck owner they’d ever run into. At least all the queer male ones.

  “He’s cute,” Ren said. “Maybe not as cute as Tony, but he’d do in a pinch.”

  “I didn’t think blonds were your type,” Gabriel said, rolling his eyes.

  “They’re not, but he gets under your skin, so I’d be happy to make an exception.”

  “Ugh,” Gabriel complained. “You suck.”

  “Yes, yes, I do, and really well too,” Ren teased.

  “Ew.”

  “So that’s a no, you don’t want me to hook up with the cute copycat and use my extensive persuasive powers to convince him to change his name?” Ren raised an eyebrow. “I thought you’d jump at that chance.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Gabriel said. The only thing that would be worse than Sean existing, would be Sean hooking up with his cousin.

  “Okay,” Ren said, laughing. “Fair enough.”

  “What I need you to do is get the caprese stuff prepped, and the veggies prepped. I’m going to make meatballs in a few.”

  “Veg is already done,” Ren said. “I finished it already.”

  The only other reason why Gabriel continually resisted his urge to fire Ren—other than a fierce need to avoid his elder brother—was that Ren, when he put his mind to it, was actually fairly efficient.

  He did spend more time flirting than taking orders, sometimes, but he was good with prep. Quick and kept his head down. Most of the time, anyway.

  “Oh good,” Gabriel said. He turned off the burner under the sauce.

  “You’re leaving?” Ren raised an eyebrow. “I thought you were making meatballs.”

  “I am. I’m . . . I have something I need to do first.”

  “Go badger the poor copycat?”

  “No,” Gabriel insisted. Yes.

  “Alright, then. Have fun,” Ren said with a smirk.

  It was not fun, Gabriel thought as he walked across the field to where the bright white and red logo of Sean’s truck was calling him like a beacon. It was a necessary action, born of frustration and annoyance.