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Opposites Attract: The complete box set

Page 67

by Higginson, Rachel


  He paused to take a breath and I decided to put the poor guy out of his misery. “Got it. I’ll be on my game tonight. Don’t worry about a thing.” I took a step back toward the door, ready to escape the awkward tension between us. It was thick and tangling and I wanted to pick a fight with him if only to put us back in neutral territory. But that would be antithetical to my goal. Instead, I reached for the door handle.

  “That’s great, but not what I meant exactly.” His gaze darted to his computer and then his hands, then to the ceiling, and finally back to me. “This isn’t easy for me…”

  “You already said that,” I reminded him in a deceptively gentle voice. Sharp, biting nerves gnawed through me and my guts started churning with the burn of anger. Was he going to fire me? Was this the end of my career altogether? I mean, we fought and bickered, and sometimes I made jokes at his expense, but he couldn’t fire me over all that nonsense… could he? I was a good chef, damn it. The best in his kitchen. If he even tried to—

  He rubbed a hand over his face again and mumbled, “Right,” into his palm. All at once, as if he’d made some kind of internal decision, he dropped his hand and sat up straighter. “I need you to babysit me tonight. Okay?”

  The anger dissipated just like that and startled confusion stepped in. “Babysit you?”

  “I’m not sleeping well, okay? If I get to bed at a decent time I can manage a few hours off and on which has been enough so far. But I was here so late last night that by the time I got home I couldn’t even manage that. I’m worried what that will mean for my performance tonight, and with the review, I’m worried that…” His eyes turned pleading and hopeful. “Can you make sure I don’t send anything stupid out? I need you to keep me focused.”

  “Why me?” The question came out as a whisper.

  “Because you’ll tell me the truth. You won’t bullshit me because you’re afraid of me.”

  “I am afraid of you.” Another sentence I hadn’t meant to say out loud.

  “Yeah, but not in the ways that matter.” A ghost of a smile lifted one side of his mouth. “Keep me on my game tonight, Kaya. Don’t let me fuck up.”

  I was flabbergasted. And that wasn’t a word I used often. Or ever. However, this moment called for it. Flabbergasted. Completely. Totally. Wholeheartedly.

  He wanted me to keep an eye on him? He wanted me to micromanage him?

  My first thought, and I wasn’t proud of this, was why should I? What had he ever done for me that warranted this kindness? But I quickly stomped it down and banished it completely.

  I wasn’t a horrible person. Sure, maybe I had a “save yourself” mentality most of the time, but it wasn’t something I advertised or wanted to be known for. Of course, I would help Wyatt and do whatever it took to keep this kitchen the highest rated in the city.

  At least until I ran my very own.

  Wyatt’s performance reflected on me. And on the giant off chance that I didn’t get Sarita, I might want to apply for a job elsewhere. I would need a good track record to get me into a kitchen as good as Lilou.

  Besides, this might also come in handy for leverage. I had already decided to get on Wyatt’s good side, to do whatever it took to get his recommendation. This was a first step toward that goal.

  But again, my mouth detached from my brain and I blurted, “Why aren’t you sleeping?”

  He rubbed his eyes with balled fists as if the very mention of sleep made him feel tired. “I don’t know. I’ve never been awesome at it. But it’s been worse lately.”

  I wanted to ask if it was because of his executive chef promotion, but I managed to hold my tongue. Sighing deeply, I said, “You can count on me tonight. I’ll be the first to tell you when you’ve screwed up.” I smiled, hoping it added levity to the truth in my words.

  His mouth moved, forming a small smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I knew I could count on you to nag me.”

  My smile turned fake as his words rubbed at the bad blood between us. “Remember that you asked for it this time.”

  He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk and craning his neck toward me. “Don’t let me fire you tonight.”

  I set my hands on his desk and mimicked his position. “I’d like to see you try.”

  This time his smile was real. It appeared at the exact moment his gaze dropped to my boobs that were pushed up accidentally for his viewing pleasure. Shit.

  His eyes returned to mine a second later and I wondered if he had even meant to look. Maybe it was a guy reflex. Maybe I shouldn’t be throwing my boobs in his face to begin with.

  Either way, I couldn’t help but enjoy the pink tinge to his cheeks and the stalwart way he refocused on my face. “Don’t tempt me,” he muttered. I had to press my lips together to hide my smile when his eyes widened at his own words.

  I stood up, taking the temptation away from him. And then the devil entered my body. My eyelids drooped, and I took a slow, flirty step backwards. “No promises.”

  Without another glance back, I fled from the office and found sanctuary in the kitchen. My cheeks blazed with embarrassment and incredulity at my behavior. Who was I? And why was I flirting with Wyatt of all people?

  Vera was obviously some kind of witch.

  Or maybe that’s exactly how desperate for human interaction I was.

  My fingers itched to text Nolan. But that wasn’t human interaction either. That was a bad habit I had already kicked. There was no sense in reopening that gaping wound.

  “Hey, what did Wyatt want?” Dillon asked as I buttoned up my chef’s jacket next to her prep work.

  “Work stuff,” I mumbled absently. “Hey, can you set me up?”

  She put her knife down and turned slowly to face me. “What?”

  Her open assessment of my out of the blue question made my cheeks burn a brighter red. I immediately reached for my apron in my purse and busied myself with tying it around my waist. “I think it would be fun. Do you feel weird about it? Is it weird that I asked? Just ignore me. It’s fine. I’ll join Tinder or something.”

  “Oh my God,” she laughed. “Don’t join Tinder! At least not yet.” Her eyes sparkled as she rubbed her hands together. “This is going to be so much fun!”

  Oh, no. What had I done. I pointed my finger at her. “No weirdos.”

  She waggled her eyebrows. “Obviously.”

  “And nobody in the food industry.” I glanced around the kitchen and noticed everyone pretending not to listen to us. Gossips. All of them. Plus, I’d already dipped my toes in these waters and no thank you. After Nolan, I’d made several bad mistakes around this kitchen. It wasn’t an experience I wanted to repeat. “I don’t want to date another chef.”

  Rolling her eyes, she went back to chopping. “I’m not a total idiot. Nobody wants to date a chef. We’re all egomaniacs that work the absolute worst hours. You have to date from the outside because they don’t know any better. You have to trick them.”

  I blinked at my friend. “Are you serious?”

  She lifted her head and seemed to realize she’d said something she hadn’t meant to. “I mean, not like really trick them. But you should probably leave all the details about your career and ambition out of the conversation for a while. In my experience, when they find out how much you work and then you tell them you’re hoping for a promotion, so you can work more, they tend to run away like frightened kittens.”

  I felt a pang of sympathy for my friend. She was a catch, damn it. Super smart, super talented and super hot, she was like the holy Trinity of dream girls. She shouldn’t have to hide who she was or what she wanted out of life just to get a second date.

  Plus, that was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. My career and ambition made me who I was. It would be one of the first things I talked about. To know what I wanted in life was to know me. At least in part.

  And I knew that to be true for Dillon too. She acted like she didn’t care, but she was a shark in the kitchen. She didn’t put up with
bullshit, she was the fastest learner I had ever met, and I knew she was doing whatever it took to earn one of Ezra’s kitchens by rightful skill, and not only because she was his sister.

  But this also put her late-night activities into new perspective for me. I had been worried about her approach to dating because I thought she was worth more than random one-night stands. But maybe there was a deeper issue at work. Maybe it was harder for her to find someone than I realized.

  Which sucked for me. If gorgeous, perfect Dillon struggled to find someone, I was screwed.

  And not in the fun way.

  “Are you looking for a date, Kaya? I’ll go out with you, chica,” Endo called from across the kitchen.

  When I turned to look at him, he made kissy noises at me.

  I rolled my eyes at him but laughed anyway. “Thank you, Endo. But I’m terrified of Maria, so I’m politely declining.”

  Endo’s twinkling brown eyes turned serious. “As you should be. That woman is muy loco. I love her, you know, but she would probably take a baseball bat to your car.”

  “Have you seen her car?” Dillon asked Endo. “I don’t think you’d be able to tell the difference.”

  I punched her in the shoulder. “We can’t all drive a Lexus, richy-rich.”

  She was unapologetic. “No, I guess we can’t.”

  Wyatt walked in the kitchen and the joking stopped. We stood up straighter, we straightened our chef coats, we stopped throwing barbs. It was a switch that was thrown the second the title of executive chef showed up.

  Even if we didn’t all respect Wyatt the way we did Killian, the title would forever command our better behavior and obedience. When Wyatt stepped up as executive chef, we swallowed our protests and hurt feelings. We forgot about the times we’d seen Wyatt screw up and the years of growth we’d spent alongside him. He was chef now. And we worked for him and to please him.

  He walked to the center of the kitchen and clapped his hands together. We gathered around him, as was our daily routine, and waited for instructions.

  Usually I tolerated his pep talks and suffered through his reprimands. He didn’t detail everything that was expected of us tonight, but he also took the opportunity to critique our previous night’s performance. And Wyatt could come across harshly.

  Killian too. But Killian was also such a legend that it somehow made it more tolerable. Wyatt brought out the worst in me—which was probably why we clashed so often. Also, because he was nitpicky and severe. The rational side of my brain argued that he was still making a name for himself and therefore had to be those things. He was still trying to prove himself.

  But I rarely listened to the rational part of my brain. Mostly, I told her to shut up so the bitchy side of me could play.

  Today was different though. Wyatt stood in the middle of us and I could see how exhausted he was, the toll the job had started to take on him. His eyes were bloodshot and sunken. His face seemed thinner and haunted. His hands had a tremor that I hadn’t noticed until after he’d confessed his insomnia and I’d looked closer at him.

  My heart lurched in sympathy. I was literally always annoyed with how hard he was trying. I found his efforts to live up to Killian obnoxious and tedious, especially when he blamed mistakes on me. But maybe my criticism of him wasn’t fair.

  Wyatt was given the chance of a lifetime. He ran one of the best kitchens in the region, an award-winning kitchen that he’d earned by right of being Killian’s second in command. Of course, the weight of his burden would be heavy, of course he would struggle to hold it and carry it and live up to it.

  I resolved to treat him with more grace in the future. He had a hard job, and someday, hopefully when I stepped into a similar position in my own kitchen, my staff would treat me with grace as well.

  Seven hours later during the middle of service, I felt differently.

  “What is this?” he demanded in the same tone I imagined the devil used when his evil minions disappointed him. “This is crap, Kaya! You’re better than this. Do it again.”

  “It’s fucking perfect, Wyatt. You’re wrong.”

  “It’s too dark. It looks burned to hell. I’m not sending it out.”

  I swallowed thirty synonyms for asshole and decided this was not the fight I wanted to lose my career over. But he was an asshole!

  “That’s golden brown,” I argued, waving my hand at the duck breast I’d pan seared to perfection.

  “It’s overcooked,” he growled. “Our tables deserve better. Do it again.”

  Cognizant of the entire kitchen watching our exchange, I leaned forward and dropped my voice. “You asked for my help tonight. Remember?”

  He dipped his head down, crowding me with the entirety of his body. “That’s why I need you to do it again,” he snarled. “I would do it myself if I fucking could.”

  The world disappeared behind a curtain of red and all I saw was this arrogant chef I wanted to kick in the shins. I opened my mouth to scream at him, but he pressed his hand against my lips before I could make a sound. Ignoring the hate lasers I was shooting out of my eyes, he leaned even closer, dropped his voice to a whisper and pleaded, “Please, Kaya.”

  It was the stupid please that disarmed me. And the matching tremor of his voice and hand. Son of a bitch. I hated this man, I reminded myself. He annoyed the ever-loving hell out of me and treated me like I was less than. The duck was fucking perfect, but he’d said please, so I would reluctantly redo my perfect duck. Goddamn him.

  But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to fight back. Faster than I could talk myself out of it, I opened my mouth and bit his fingers. He pulled back, shaking them out. Our shocked expressions had to mimic each other.

  Oh, my god. I just bit my boss!

  I turned around to run away, possibly out of the building altogether, maybe even the city, when his hand at my waist stopped me. His mouth moved next to my ear and I felt his lips brush against the sensitive flesh of my earlobe.

  His words were steel, gritty, deadly serious, but I could barely focus on them with the press of his hot hand against my waist and his impossibly soft lips against my ear. “Careful, Ky,” he warned in a deep, throaty voice. “I bite back.”

  He let me go or I escaped, I would never know which of us moved first. But we sprang apart like cymbals after they’d crashed together in a symphony-ending crescendo and staunchly ignored the open-mouth staring of our coworkers. I doubted they’d overheard him whispering in my ear, but they saw it happen.

  The next time I brought him the duck breast it was unarguably perfect.

  He didn’t comment. And I didn’t comment. And the duck went out and the diner didn’t comment. At least not negatively.

  I was determined to totally focus on my job for the rest of the night and completely forget about the weirdly hot moment between us in the middle of the kitchen and the frantic butterflies still swarming around in my stomach.

  My resolve lasted for all of twenty minutes when he found a problem with my filet. I decided that I was safe to hate him all over again.

  Five

  A week later, an incessant buzzing woke me from the deepest sleep. I groped the other side of my gigantic bed in search of it. The last remnants of my dream flickered in and out of my consciousness. Fingers in my mouth. Biting, but not in a mean way… A hand at my waist… under my shirt… sliding up toward my breasts… then changing direction and heading to an even better place…

  The buzzing stopped and started again. I woke up all the way this time realizing the vibration was my cell phone.

  Growling at the king-size bed that seemed a little ridiculous for a single girl, I finally cracked open my eyes and found the damn thing buried in my pillows. I’d forgotten to charge it. Crap.

  That’s what I got for falling asleep reading on my Kindle app. This bed was one of my few big indulgences. I was a wild sleeper and sometimes even this king didn’t feel big enough. But I preferred to fall asleep in the very center and unfortunately my charging cord d
idn’t reach this far.

  Hopefully whoever had decided to disturb me at the ungodly hour of eight-thirty in the morning didn’t need more than eleven percent of my cell battery to convey their message.

  “Hello?” I asked, sounding like an eighty-year-old chain smoker.

  “Uh, can I speak to Kaya, please?”

  The voice sounded vaguely familiar, but since coffee wasn’t in play yet my brain wasn’t up to the task of figuring out who it belonged to. “This is her.”

  “Oh my God, Kaya?”

  “Uh, yes.”

  The voice burst into laughter. “I thought you were a man! Did I wake you up?”

  I pushed up on my elbow and tried to decode what was happening on the other end of the phone. “Yeah, you did wake me up.” I yawned, opening my mouth as widely as humanly possible and asked, “What guy?”

  “I’m so sorry, but I seriously thought a man had answered the phone. Like maybe you had an overnight guest and he’d answered your phone.”

  Not an awesome way to start a Friday morning. “Who is this?”

  “Vera.”

  Vera? Why was Vera calling me? More importantly, why was she waking me up with insults?

  I yawned again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I didn’t realize it was so early. Between taking shifts at Sarita and working to open our restaurant, I literally never know what time it is anymore. Unfortunately, I’m awake all the time.”

  “That sounds rough.” I did my best to sound sympathetic, but I didn’t know if I pulled it off.

  “And you don’t sound like a man,” she added quickly. “Your morning voice just surprised me.”

  Clearing my throat, I gave her a break. “No, I get it. I have the worst morning voice.” And morning breath come to think of it. I stretched my legs, pointing my toes and working out the kinks in my muscles from last night’s late shift.

  “I do too,” she said quickly. “I blame the kitchen. All those flames and smoked meat. It can’t be good for us.”

 

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