Nope.
He didn’t know how I normally dressed for work. Even if he did, so what? Maybe my style was evolving. There was just one kink in this plan. Actually, there were a lot of kinks in the plan starting with the fact that I was more a cynic than seductress and wouldn’t say that my flirting was super polished. I was more straightforward. When I liked a man, I told him.
The biggest issue was that what if he just quit? I would still get fired.
But not even that was my biggest concern. I had one fear that bothered me more than the others. Failure. What if I flirted and he was completely and totally disinterested?
“What if Sean doesn’t think I’m hot?” I asked, then immediately regretted that I’d said that out loud.
“Then Sean is a bigger jerk than we even gave him credit. No straight man will be unmoved by you in those jeans.”
She said it so vehemently I felt compelled to believe her.
“Fine. Here goes nothing, right? It’s just the rest of my career on the line. No pressure at all.”
“You’ve got this.” She gave me a double thumbs up and a wink at the same time.
My butt did look good. I gave it another glance. No more overalls. Time to bring all my assets to the kitchen.
Between my butt and my ability to irritate the hell out of Sean, he’d be losing his cool and screaming blood murder in the kitchen Gordon Ramsey-style in no time flat.
Five
“Hi there,” Isla said, breezing into the kitchen Monday at two.
I turned to greet her and almost dropped the knife I was holding. She was in the tightest jeans I had ever seen in my entire life, outlining every curve of her luscious body. With heels. Both times I had seen her prior to this, she’d been wearing flat boots. Biker boots. “Kick someone’s ass or ride a motorcycle” boot. Why the hell was she wearing heels now, to work?
“Hi,” I said. “How was your weekend?” Be polite. Do not flirt. I’d been reminding myself of that all afternoon. I needed to keep this position. I needed the experience running the kitchen as executive chef so that in a couple of years when I left to open my own restaurant, I would have the confidence and the connections I needed to be a success right out of the gate.
“Hmm,” she said, giving me a small smile. She peeled her scarf off and walked to the storage room, her hips rolling in those tight jeans, her tight ass taunting me.
That was all she said. She didn’t elaborate.
I slammed the side of my knife down onto a clove of garlic with my fist.
When she returned she was humming, looking relaxed.
I knew this mood on a woman. It was obvious to me that her weekend had included getting naked with some lucky bastard. Friday she had been grumpy and sarcastic. Now she had the ease and contentment of someone who had enjoyed multiple orgasms on the days in between. She reached up and pulled her hair up into a ponytail, exposing her belly button. I wanted to dip my tongue into that depression and trail a path with my lips down into her jeans and straight to her warm, wet sex. I wanted to taste her while she moaned my name.
I chopped like the garlic had offended the fuck out of me.
Why did the idea of her getting nailed by a mystery man irritate the hell out of me?
Because I hadn’t been nailing anyone. Nor did I really want to nail anyone else. I wanted to nail her. I’d been alone in my apartment wishing I was at the playground with Isla.
“Prep the rub, please,” I said, striving to sound efficient but not grumpy. I clearly didn’t succeed because she gave me a look.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing. It’s just you sound upset. Is everything okay?” she asked.
Upset? Upset? No. Upset was for wimps. I was frustrated. Sexually and otherwise. I kind of wanted to tell Nico to go fuck himself. That he couldn’t hold Isla’s employment status over me. I was also obsessing about how Isla had responded to me in the hallway. Four months ago. Four fucking months ago and I was obsessing about that kiss.
And I couldn’t even just have sex with her and get over it, because I was her boss.
“Everything is fine. I’m just trying to be professional.” I tossed garlic into a metal bowl and accidentally hit it with the side of my hands. It skittered across the table. I reached out and grabbed it and slammed it back where it belonged.
Isla picked the station across from me to work. She started gathering her spices. “Okay. How was your weekend?”
I was supposed to stand there and watch her work three feet away from me? It was a big kitchen with multiple prep stations. She could have worked anywhere on the line. “My weekend was fine, thank you.”
“Kennedy seemed cute.” Isla gave me a smile.
This didn’t feel right. She’d been so surly with me Friday. She’d either realized her future at Bone was at stake or I was right. She’d gotten laid. Or wait. Maybe it was a trap.
“Yep. She’s very cute.”
“A man babysitting is very sexy,” she commented.
Shit. I slammed my knife down onto the counter. There was no way she could say something like that, in those jeans, and I couldn’t flirt back. It was cruel.
The corner of her mouth turned up in a sly smile.
My eyes narrowed. She was doing it on purpose. She was trying to get under my skin.
“A woman in heels is very sexy. Because then she can look me in the eye when she’s kissing me.” I shouldn’t have said it, but the words were out before I could stop them.
Isla visibly swallowed.
Then she said lightly, “I’ll show you how we usually rub the meat here at Bone, then you can tell me if you’d like me to do anything differently.”
Oh, that wasn’t fucking fair. She wasn’t even trying to be subtle.
My cock didn’t care. I got hard as I stared back at her. Her expression was challenging, her eyes bright with competitiveness. And arousal. She was as attracted to me as I was to her. Obviously, my first reaction was as a man. It was a “fuck yeah, I want to see how the meat rubbing goes.” But that was a dangerous, dark path when we were at work and not alone. Employees milled around, coming in and out of the kitchen. My second response was that as her boss and head chef, I absolutely did need to see how the rub was done, because now it was my name on that spice combination, and the sear.
Both reactions meant I wanted her to show me how she rubbed, but for very different reasons.
“I trust you to rub the meat,” I said, trying to keep my tone neutral. “But yes, I would love to see how you do it.” She could take that however she wanted to take it.
But then Sara, who worked on the line, came into the kitchen and offered to take Isla’s place, which she readily agreed to. Which should have helped, except then I heard her over there laughing with the male servers.
“Taste this,” she said, lifting a piece of ribeye marinated in bourbon to the lips of a server who looked like he was an aspiring underwear model. “It’s as tender as a mother’s love,” she said, giving him a smile.
“That’s so good,” he said, licking his lips. “Juicy.”
Was this the guy who had put that smile on her face today?
“Can the two of you stop flirting and get back to work?” I demanded.
Everything about their exchange annoyed me but I focused entirely on the food in front of me. I wanted to get to know the rest of the staff, while ignoring Isla’s movements. Ignoring the way she laughed, deep and throaty. Ignoring the way she gave encouragement to the staff. Ignoring the way she constantly kept bending over to get a mixing bowl, her curves deliciously outlined in those jeans. Ignoring the desire to kiss her again and take it even further this time.
“Sorry, Chef,” the server said, his face turning red
By the time dinner service was over, I was exhausted from being polite and professional. Not that I usually struggled with those, but with Isla, I wanted something different. I wanted to flirt with her, I wanted to give her a hard time, I wanted to know what the hell she had d
one all weekend long. It was tempting to sit down at the bar after the customers left and have a drink, but I couldn’t do that to the staff. They wanted to go home and relax.
I didn’t necessarily want to go home and be alone, but that’s what I did. I’d been living in my apartment by McCarren Park in Williamsburg for just under a year. I’d decided it was time to upgrade from the rough-around-the-edges place I’d been in for the previous six years. This apartment had very modern finishes, smartphone technology integrated, and amazing amenities, like a rooftop deck, a pool table, and lounge areas if you were entertaining a large group.
Like my brother, I had a large inheritance from our grandmother, but I never touched it. I was saving that for the day I could open my own restaurant. But I had worked hard and gotten to the point where I could indulge in a decent place to lay my head. Plus, the biggest asset the apartment had was a gorgeous modern kitchen. The appliances were standard, but the space was more than adequate.
I went home to my apartment and poured myself a bourbon. Kicking off my shoes, I sat down heavily on my sofa and stared at Isla’s photo on the dating app. I would have expected her to make some kind of snarky comment and not much more. Instead, what she had written was a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald. I read it once, then again out loud.
“I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be.”
Sipping my bourbon, I let it warm me from the inside out. Isla the Intimidator had given a roadmap on how to understand her. The way I interpreted it was that the world might judge her, but that she liked herself. And if a man couldn’t deal with that, he should scroll on past.
It made her dangerously, highly sexy.
Damn it.
The plan had been to concentrate on my new position, not picturing Isla in all the positions I could have her naked body in.
She. Was. Killing. Me.
“What is going on here?” Juan asked, looking back and forth between me and Isla two days later, pausing as he moved past the line. “You guys are being really weird.”
We were on day three of working in the kitchen together and weird didn’t even begin to describe it. We were being unfailingly polite to each other. We were all “Yes, Chef,” “Behind you,” and “That tastes fantastic,” to the point that everyone in the kitchen was eyeing each other with concern. I also had a headache from the tension of trying to be so fucking nice for hours and days on end. It wasn’t like I was a total prick in the kitchen normally but I gave orders and staff followed them. Having to walk on eggshells around Isla was exhausting.
Especially since she seemed to be on this campaign to destroy my peace of mind by showing up for work in a variety of very sexy outfits. Yesterday she had worn a dress that, while loose, was very short, showing off toned thighs that were made for wrapping around a man. A man like me, who was preoccupied as hell with the very idea. Today she was wearing loose pants but with boots that had a hell of a heel and a shirt that had plunging cleavage. Thankfully the view of her firm and high tits had disappeared beneath her chef coat within a few minutes, but I’d seen enough to have the visual stuck in my head all damn night.
No one dressed like that to work in a kitchen. Not in my experience. Given the staff had catcalled her and made comments good-naturedly, it was clear this wasn’t standard dress for her. It was also incredibly dangerous to wear such impractical shoes.
I couldn’t figure out the end game, which was also contributing to my tension. Was she trying to distract me so I’d cut a finger off? It just might work, which was why I had shifted my plating area so that I wasn’t facing her anymore.
She had commented on it but I’d given her some bullshit about not liking the lighting where I had been before.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Juan,” Isla said, voice breezy and unconcerned as she pulled a tenderloin from the oven.
It was a hell of a feat in those heels and caused the fabric of her pants to draw tight across her ass. I looked up at the ceiling and wondered who I could call to meet up with and have sex because I was losing my mind around Isla. I needed a release and fast. Yet, even as I mentally went through my phone for a viable candidate, I wasn’t sure that was the answer. That was just avoiding the real problem, which was that Isla drove me fucking crazy. In every single possible way, she drove me insane.
To the point that everything I did was a challenge. My focus was shit, my blood pressure high, my dick hard.
But I wasn’t about to let her either inadvertently or on purpose destroy this opportunity for me. Hence the painful politeness.
“You both sound like you’re being paid to be nice to each other,” Juan said.
“We are,” I told him dryly.
Isla laughed. She picked up a carving knife. The sight both terrified and turned me on. “That’s very dramatic. Juan, I just think it’s important to start a new working relationship with someone the way you want to continue.” She deftly sliced the sharp knife through the meat.
“So you want it to be weird forever?” he asked, rubbing his hands on a towel tucked into his apron. “Because you’re being totally different.”
The kid was probably twenty at the most, a hard worker, but not a quick thinker. Though obviously observant. “How is Isla being different?” I asked, curious. Aside from not snapping at me constantly, which was what she’d done the first two times she’d met me. But I didn’t know how she had been in the kitchen before I had entered the picture.
“I don’t know,” he said, defaulting to self-preservation.
She shot him a look. “Go ahead. Say what you’re thinking. I won’t be upset.”
That sounded like a trap. But Juan walked right into it.
“You’re usually more, like, efficient. You just do stuff and you’re not like always saying please and whatever like you are now.”
“Maybe I’m trying to ensure positive karma.”
Maybe that was the biggest crock of shit I’d ever heard. Maybe I didn’t know Isla well, but that did not seem like her style.
“Besides,” she said, looking up and giving me a smile. “I like Chef.”
“Okay,” Juan said, sounding very confused.
I eyed her with suspicion.
“You really need to wear nonslip shoes in the kitchen,” I said, feeling like I needed to make a statement about the safety of the staff in general, her in particular. “That’s an order.”
Her smile never wavered.
“Yes, Boss.” Isla had a bowl filled with mango for a chutney. She picked up a piece and bit into it, closing her eyes in ecstasy. “Hmm, this is so good. You should try it.”
Juan left the kitchen. The poor kid looked terrified.
Common sense told me not to go over to where she was standing with the bowl of fruit. I had never been known for taking the safe route. I went over and reached to snag some mango. She pulled the bowl away.
She was playing a game and I didn’t know the rules. But then I decided I wasn’t a rule-follower anyway. I liked to make it up as I went.
“Here, let me get it for you, Chef.” She fished out a piece and held it up to my lips with a mischievous sparkle in her eye.
If she was flirting to fuck with me, which I was almost one hundred percent certain she was doing, it wouldn’t be a hardship for me to do the same.
“Thanks.” I opened my mouth and let her place the mango between my lips. But I captured her wrist with mine to hold her hand there. Her eyes widened as I took both the mango and her finger into my open mouth.
A little gasp escaped her.
The juice of the mango when I bit it ran down over her fingers and I sucked each one, getting all the sweet flavor. It was highly unprofessional and something I had never even been tempted to do at work before. But staring into her eyes, I had been taken back to that moment in the hallway, when our lips had met, and there
had been an explosion between us.
Her eyes darkened with desire. I leaned closer to her.
Then she suddenly seemed to remember where she was because she jerked back so fast she collided with the work station, rattling bowls and knives. “What the hell?” she demanded, but her voice sounded more aroused than aggravated.
“Delicious mango,” I said, and my voice was rough and raw to my own ears.
Sure, I should apologize, but I didn’t think I could say anything without suggesting we go into the storeroom and put our hands all over each other.
Besides, she’d started it. If she couldn’t take it, she shouldn’t dish it out.
Isla picked up the bowl and shoved it at me. “Here, all yours.”
“Thanks.” I gave her a slow smile and put another piece into my mouth. I chewed and made sounds of pleasure. “Mmm.”
She rolled her eyes. “What are your thoughts on the Best of Brooklyn cook-off? I know it's a month away but I know Nico wants to approve a menu soon.”
I had plenty of thoughts about the competition, but in the interest of fostering a better working relationship between us, I wanted to hear her thoughts. “What did you do last year? I don’t want to repeat anything.”
“Last year we did a twist on Tex Mex. Street corn, pork belly fajitas, that kind of thing.”
I nodded, moving in next to her as she sliced the tenderloin. I started making the rub for our smoked brisket. We had a smoker in the back, venting to the alley, and I had to make the rub to start the brisket for overnight smoking. We would slice and serve it tomorrow with our special sauce. “I get that. But I don’t want to be predictable.”
Isla didn’t say anything.
“What?” I asked. “Why are you so quiet all of a sudden?”
She cleared her throat. “Was there a question in your statement? Because I didn’t hear one. Are you asking for my opinion?”
Her flirty facade was slipping just a little. Not a lot, but this Isla felt more familiar than the one who had been pulling a Susie Sunshine routine the last few days.
Who’s The Boss? Page 7
