Fire Me Up

by Kimberly Kincaid

  Nick Brennan had none of the typical big-and-mean of other bouncers—in fact, with his lean, lanky build and classic dark-haired, darker-eyed good looks, at first Teagan had pegged him for a nice, average guy with a nice, average job having a nice, average life.

  And then she saw him handle himself, along with two drunk, mouthy college students, in the bar, and that impression disappeared faster than she could say Muhammad Ali. In the year and a half Brennan had worked at the Double Shot, Teagan had seen him hold his own in just about every scuffle, even when it was two on one.

  Perfect, really, considering she was about to ask him to serve copious amounts of liquor to everyone in a fifty-foot radius.

  “Brennan, I’ve got to put you behind the wood tonight, starting now. We’re also cutting the menu to apps only for the rest of the night. Can you grab both waitresses on your way back and let them know?” They usually served their full menu until eleven on Friday nights, but it was going to be hard enough to get by as it was. They might take a little cut in cash-in for the night, but so be it. Right now, Teagan just needed to survive.

  Brennan’s eyes glittered black with surprise, and he pushed off from his wooden stool to move with her toward the back of the room. “I can do the bar, no problem, but the food thing’s gonna be an issue.”

  A frustrated sound emerged from her throat. The food thing was already an issue, for God’s sake. How much worse could it get than the dishwasher and the kitchen-phobe trying to cook their way out of a paper bag during the busiest shift of the week?

  “If anyone gets pissy about it, just come get me.” Teagan turned to race back to the kitchen to make sure poor Jesse had at least figured out how to drop those wings into the fryer when Brennan’s words stopped her cold.

  “Okay, but you might want to save yourself some time and check out six and fourteen.” He jutted his chin toward the heart of the dining room, and what was left of Teagan’s composure did a triple-pretzel. Tables six and fourteen were their two biggest, each one seating up to ten people.

  And both of them were freshly filled to maximum capacity. With big guys, each of whom looked like he could eat a rhinoceros for breakfast.

  Teagan looked up just in time to overhear the only waitress currently on the floor say, “Wow, y’all look hungry! I highly recommend Lou’s burgers. They’re the best in two counties.”

  “Oh God.” She was toast.

  “They came in a couple of minutes ago, from the baseball game in Riverside. Thought you’d be happy to see the business since we’ve been pretty slow lately.” Brennan slid her a sympathetic look before narrowing his glance in obvious concern. “Is there some kind of problem in the kitchen?”

  “Well, that all depends.” She jammed her eyes shut over the hot tears threatening to form there. She hadn’t cried in years, damn it. “You wouldn’t happen to have secret cooking skills I don’t know about, would you?”

  Brennan stared at her through the soft, gold light spilling down from the brass lantern fixtures, music pulsing around them in an ironically business-as-usual manner. “Hell, Teagan. What happened to Lou?”

  “He quit. And before you ask, the day cook’s gone too, and my father’s sick. I don’t have anybody to call in, and I don’t know anyone who can cook.” Her voice wavered at the gravity of saying it out loud. “So if you have any brilliant ideas, now’s the time to trot them out, Brennan.”

  But the response didn’t come from the shell-shocked-looking bouncer. It came from the shadows behind him.

  “I know how you can fix your problem, Red. But you aren’t going to like it.”

  Chapter Seven

  Even though every fiber of his better judgment screamed at him to shut up, Adrian shoved it aside. There were conservatively a million reasons he should haul himself right back out the door, but as he looked at Teagan, her wide, whiskey-colored stare so utterly desperate, those reasons took a backseat to one simple truth.

  She had a kitchen that needed a chef. And he was a chef who needed a kitchen. The sanity-sucking walls of his apartment would be there tomorrow, and he’d have plenty of time to stare at them and heal, or whatever it was he was supposed to be doing. But for tonight, he could escape, and help Teagan while he was at it.

  If she’d let him.

  “You know this guy?” The wiry, dark-haired bouncer next to Teagan gave him a lingering up-and-down that broadcast his disdain, but Adrian didn’t flinch.

  “Uh, yeah.” Teagan blinked as if she’d just arrived in the conversation, nodding quickly. “Long story. Look, I appreciate your offer, but your arm is in a couple pieces too many to run a kitchen, isn’t it?”

  His muscles tightened against the canvas sling holding his livelihood captive, but he still didn’t back down. “No more than your kitchen is short a couple of people to make it run, from the sound of things. I might be a little worse for wear, but it looks like I’m the only chef you’ve got.”

  The bouncer’s brow popped into a shadowy arc. “You’re a chef?”

  Adrian answered in a singular nod before swinging his gaze to Teagan, whose matching nod confirmed what he’d said.

  “Still. With that injury, you can’t cook,” she said, her voice layered over with both finality and regret.

  “No. But I know how to run a kitchen, and your arms work perfectly fine, don’t they?”

  Her lips parted, marking her shock. As much as he hated it, he couldn’t help her by cooking. But he wasn’t useless, either.

  He needed to stay busy. He needed a kitchen.

  “Okay,” Teagan agreed, her surprise replaced by cool, calculated focus. “Here’s what we’re going to do. Brennan, Annabelle is covering the bar right now, but she’s got tables waiting for her, and we’re about to be slammed. I need you to take care of the bar and anything going down in the front of the house. Fake it if you have to. I’ll take the kitchen with Jesse and Adrian.”

  The guy flicked a hard glance at Adrian, eyes full of doubt as they landed on his cast. “You serious with this, Teagan? It seems like a pretty big liability.”

  Adrian shifted his body just enough to make his irritation clear—he could do more with one finger than this guy could do unimpaired, for Chrissake—and Teagan’s hand shot out to press against the center of his upper chest.

  “Not the way we’re going to do it.” She pinned each of them with a look that mentally tacked on so knock it off before kicking herself into motion. She headed to the back of the dining room, giving them both no choice but to shut up and follow, and damn, her walk was full of purpose.

  And her ass was sheer perfection in those low-slung jeans.

  The bouncer shook his head as they reached the bar, muttering something that sounded suspiciously like “I hope you know what you’re doing” before leaning in to take a drink order from a curvy blonde. Teagan didn’t waste any time before aiming herself at the wood-paneled swinging door leading to what had to be the kitchen, and Adrian kept up with her, stride for stride.

  “Thanks.” The word spilled out with the breath he just realized he’d been clutching in his lungs, and hell if that didn’t make him sound totally desperate.

  She tossed her next words over her shoulder, auburn ponytail snapping around her face as she crossed the slick kitchen tiles beneath their feet. “Don’t thank me yet. Brennan’s right. The fact that you’re off the books is a liability enough. Add that injury to the equation, and I’m earning health and labor violations like merit badges if you so much as boil water.”

  Unease flared deep in his belly. “I can still help you.”

  Teagan jammed to a halt at the mouth of a rectangular galley-style kitchen, where two six-burner cooktops flanked a large, open grill along the far wall. A long, double-sided workstation bisected the narrow room lengthwise, and it looked for all the world like the entire place had exploded. Tickets curled from the printer over the stainless steel workstation in a foot-long coil, and a guy wearing a high and tight crew cut and a stone-cold expression raced b
etween the walk-in at the opposite end of the room and the grill currently belching up an ominous cloud of black smoke.

  “I sure as hell hope so,” Teagan said with a frown. “Because I’ll be honest. You don’t have much to work with.”

  Adrian’s unease switched over to full-on doubt as Crew Cut jumped to avoid getting roasted by a flare-up on the grill, and the motion sent one of the burgers he’d been trying to flip skittering to the floor.

  Teagan winced, but gave the guy a tiny, reassuring nod before turning back Adrian’s way. “Are you still in?”

  He opened his mouth to argue with her, to tell her he could at least manage something other than the sidelines, but the vibrating pain running the length of his arm snagged his attention. He couldn’t even open a package of crackers without agonizing fanfare. As much as he despised it, Teagan was right.

  Walking her through this was the best option, and from the look on her face, it was the only way she wasn’t going to show him the door.

  “Yeah, I’m in. But you’re going to have to do what I tell you, no questions asked, if you want this to work. Be sure you’re good with it.”

  She didn’t even blink, and God, her tenacity was hot as hell. “I am.”

  His eyes landed on the guy running in circles by the grill, trying to coax burgers from briquettes. “You, too?”

  He nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  Well, that was a new one. “What’s your name, slick?”

  The guy practically stood at attention, straightening to an impressive six-foot-one. “Jesse Oliver.”

  Adrian narrowed his eyes on the darkly smoldering grates, shaking his head. “Okay, Jesse. Start with the tickets, in order. Let’s see what we’re dealing with.”

  Jesse rattled off the string of orders with efficiency, but man, it was a hell of a list. Adrian took two steps toward the grill on autopilot before jerking his feet to a halt. Oh hell, this really was going to take everything he had.

  “Okay. Pass that spatula over to Red here and grab me a copy of your menu. I’m a chef, not a mind reader. You got someone on dishes in the back?” He craned his neck toward the open-air dry racks of various pots and pans marking the alcove at the rear of the room next to the walk-in. A good dishwasher was worth his weight in gold, especially when things got slammed.

  “That would be Jesse,” Teagan said, putting a death grip on the spatula as she took the offered utensil from the guy’s hand.

  “Of course it would.” How ironic that his sanity would be saved for the night by such an epic train wreck. “Jesse, go back and give me a baseline on the dishes. We can’t plate on nothing. Run whatever you can in thirty seconds and get back up here with that menu.”

  Adrian jerked his chin at the grill, his brain pulling priorities into place and searching for order in all the chaos. First things first. “Okay, Red, go ahead and waste those hockey pucks and get new burgers fired on the fly.”

  Teagan hitched into motion, awkwardly scraping the char-grilled offenders to the trash and scooping their floor-bound counterpart from the thick black floor mats to join them. “Now what?”

  Adrian bit back his frustration and shifted against his pain-in-the-ass sling. He could’ve had new burgers on those grates twice by now, and he prickled with the desire to set his hands . . . hand . . . whatever would do the trick without making him scream . . . into gear and just do it.

  But the look on Teagan’s face reminded him that was a one-way ticket home, so he gritted out, “Just what I said. New burgers, ASAP. If the guy who left you in this jam has more than half a brain, they’re premade and labeled. Check your lowboy.”

  “My what?”

  “The refrigerator at your knees. And wear gloves, unless you want to get up close and personal with E. coli.”

  Jesse reappeared in the kitchen with the menu, and Adrian gave it a quick skim as he put the guy on fryer duty. The kitchen was as well-stocked as could be expected for a Friday night, although they’d likely cut it close with those two ten-tops about to put orders in. At least the menu was fairly straightforward. It’d been a while since Adrian had gone the greasy spoon route, but as long as no one ordered anything totally off the wall, they’d manage.

  “Aha!” Teagan popped up from the lowboy with a half-sheet pan of premade burger patties in her hands. “These, right?”

  Lord. It was a wonder this woman didn’t starve to death. “Yeah. Go.” He watched as she wrestled with the plastic wrap, finally managing to get all three burgers on the hissing grill. She peeled off both gloves with a well-practiced yank before white-knuckling the oversized spatula and setting her unwavering gaze on the grates.

  “They’re not gonna break into a dance routine, so go ahead and make yourself useful while they cook.” He blew out a breath. Doing six things at once was Cooking 101, for God’s sake, and they were way too jammed up for her to do one thing at a time.

  But she hesitated. “You want me to just . . . leave them here?”

  “It’s called multitasking, sweetheart. Make it your friend.” Adrian paused to bark a couple directives at Jesse as the guy brought up a basket full of wings, golden-brown and sizzling from the fryer.

  Teagan set her mouth into a mulish line. “I know how to multitask.”

  “Then put your money where your mouth is and show me,” he said, firmly in kitchen-mode. “You can start by getting that tray covered up and back into the lowboy. I wasn’t kidding about E. coli.”

  For a second, she looked like she was about to light him up like the Fourth of July, and under other circumstances, he might deserve it. But that old adage about not being able to stand the heat rang true. Taking things personally in the kitchen would only nail up your coffin nice and tight.

  Teagan bit her bottom lip hard enough to leave a crescent-shaped indentation on the soft, pink skin as she rewrapped the half sheet and replaced it in the lowboy. “Look, where I come from, if I turn my back on something, it usually codes. Or performs an unassisted shoulder reduction.” She leveled an obvious stare at his sling, and yeah, touché. “So I’ll do what you tell me to if it’ll get me through this, but you’re going to have to tell me everything. Unless that’s too much for you.”

  The challenge in her eyes, coupled with the determination to take care of things no matter the cost, gave him an instant hard-on. He cocked his head at her, working up a slow grin. “You’re going to get what you want. Just be sure you want what you’re going to get.”

  Her grip on the spatula went thermonuclear, and she met his stare head-on. “Ready when you are, Superman.”

  The printout box on the shelf above her station whirred to life, spitting out a fat ribbon of paper without pause, and despite the total insanity of it, a hard shot of energy zinged through his veins.

  “Well, then, flip those burgers so we can get to it. You’ve got a lot of multitasking to do.”

  The next hour and a half ran by in a blurry series of slow and awkward prep to plate, but other than a couple of scrapped orders and dropped items, they didn’t run into anything disastrous enough to sink them. Teagan’s kitchen skills were pretty freaking abysmal, all elbows and stress and wasted movement, and he’d had to fight that overwhelming urge to relieve her of her spatula more than once.

  But besides the fact that all that movement would’ve reduced his torso to Silly Putty, it also would’ve earned him a one-way ticket out of Dodge. Spending these few hours in Teagan’s kitchen, while unorthodox as hell, really had saved him from losing his marbles tonight. She’d let him stay even though she probably shouldn’t have, and he’d owed it to her to keep his word and stay on the sidelines.

  Man, he hated the sidelines.

  “Please tell me that was the last order for the night.” Teagan groaned, her eyes trailing the waitress who’d just snapped up two plates from the hot window. Even Jesse, whose emotions seemed to run from poker-faced to impassive, let some hope flicker across his face at her words, and Adrian had to admit, he, too, was glad they were finally on th
e downswing.

  “You tell me, Red.” His arm smarted like a sonofabitch, and the rest of him wasn’t far behind. Still, whether or not they were done wasn’t his call to make.

  Her brows snapped together, and the coppery wisps of hair that had jogged free of her ponytail fluttered over her confused stare. “Huh?”

  “Chef decides when the kitchen’s closed.”

  “Okay.” Teagan extended the word as if it were a question. “You’re the chef.”

  He shook his head. “Not tonight, I’m not. You were on the grill. It’s your call.”

  “Oh.” She split a startled look between him and Jesse. “Well, I guess if there are no more orders in, then yeah. The kitchen’s, um, closed.”

  Good thing, because the place looked like a culinary Jackson Pollock. On crack.

  Adrian exhaled, long and slow. “You ever break down the back of the house before?”

  “Not really, no. Lou and my father usually do it.”

  Jesse stepped up, speaking for the first time in easily an hour. “I’ve seen them break it down. And I can start running the dishes, which is half of it.”

  “That’s definitely a start,” Adrian said, watching the guy head toward the back of the kitchen. Without warning, his stomach let out a wail, reminding him that he’d been long overdue for sustenance when he’d walked in here two hours ago. The thought of eating had quickly been pushed to the back burner at the prospect of helping Teagan in the kitchen, but rather than idling at overdue, now his hunger had reached total foreclosure.

  And it was enough to make his legs unsteady.

  Teagan’s eyes narrowed on him, and he braced for impact. “You must be exhausted. And starving. Did they give you a ’script for pain?”

  He got halfway through his shrug before he remembered the gesture was a bad idea. “Yeah, but I haven’t taken it in a while.”