Southern Charm & Second Chances

by Nancy Robards Thompson

  An odd kind of clench-and-release sensation made her belly feel molten-hot and tingle all the way down to her lady parts, which were stretching and yawning as though they were waking up after a deep winter’s nap.

  That long winter had lasted nearly an entire year after she and Guillermo had broken up—shortly after Liam had fired her. In fact, she’d been out late with Guillermo the night before she’d been fired. He’d complained that he’d felt neglected—further proof that people who didn’t work in restaurants didn’t understand what taxing, backbreaking work it was. He’d whined, she’d indulged him and had been bone tired when she’d arrived to work her shift the next day—the fateful day that Eduardo Sanchez had paid a surprise visit to La Bula. And the rest was history.

  It wasn’t really Guillermo’s fault. Jane was a big girl and had the power to say yes or no. She’d made her choices and had suffered the consequences. Because of that and the move back to Savannah, it had been a long, dry season.

  But sex and one-night stands were the last thing she needed to be thinking about right now. If this was going to work, she could not lose focus every time Liam walked into the room—or popped into her head unbidden. That was unprofessional and a ticket to the express lane to getting fired—again.

  She reminded herself that thoughts like this had distracted her the last time she’d made a colossal mistake. And that mistake had cost her her job the first time. Now she had a second chance and she wasn’t going to squander it.

  She redirected her focus as she gathered the dough into a ball and punched it down before she started the kneading process all over again, digging the heel of her right hand into the dough, focusing on pressing, stretch and turning. Pressing, stretch and turning. Pressing, stretch and—

  Over the music, she thought she heard a noise coming from the vicinity of the back door. She stopped working the bread and muted her music. Maybe it was just the background instruments?

  No. There it was again.

  She hadn’t checked to make sure the back door was locked. She hadn’t even thought about it, she’d been so eager to get to work. She’d worked late before, sometimes staying in the Wila kitchen until the wee hours of the morning. There were no windows and the room was walled off from the dining room so that passersby on the street who might look in the windows wouldn’t be able to see a light on in the back.

  There was the noise again.

  This time the sound was unmistakably the back door shutting.

  Her heart thudded. She glanced around, looking for a knife or anything she could use to defend herself.

  She was grabbing her phone and preparing to make a run for the front door in the dining room when someone called out, “Hello? Who’s here?”

  Liam emerged from the hall that led to the back door.

  “It’s me,” she said. “It’s Jane.”

  Liam flinched.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. “You scared me to death.”

  “You scared me, too.” He sounded annoyed. “I didn’t expect anyone to still be here. Why are you here?”

  Mild annoyance bit at her, chasing away the lingering traces of fear—and attraction. She gave him a pointed look and gestured to the bread dough on the table.

  As Liam started moving her way, she bent into her bread work. The dough was ready to rest and rise. Just to make sure, she gathered it into a ball and tested its elasticity by picking it up and slamming it into the floured marble work surface.

  “Remind me not to make you mad,” Liam said.

  She meant to laugh, but it came out more like a snort.

  She infused just enough sweetness into her voice. “Don’t say you weren’t warned, chef.”

  His lips twisted into something that resembled a lopsided smile. For the first time since he’d arrived, he looked almost relaxed.

  Almost.

  She covered the dough ball in olive oil, put it in a bowl and shielded it with plastic wrap so that it could rise.

  Liam peered into the bowl. “What are you working on?”

  “A new savory bread recipe I came up with.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “It’s a beer bread with a blend of herbs and cheese that I’m in the process of perfecting.”

  “That’s why I smell beer. I thought maybe I’d driven you to drink.”

  He said the words with a straight face, but Jane gathered this was his attempt at showing that he had a sense of humor.

  Two could play that game.

  “Apparently, you have.” She picked up the bottle, held it up to him in a toast and sipped.

  “Mind if I join you?” he said.

  “That means you’re staying a while?” she asked.

  “Unless I’m intruding.”

  “Of course not. It’s your place.” She motioned for him to follow her. “Come with me and I’ll show you Charles’s food and beverage sign-out system.”

  At the pantry, he stopped at the door and, with one hand holding it open, he motioned for her to go first. If she hadn’t been distracted by his good manners, she would’ve reminded him to make sure the doorstop was in place so the door didn’t—

  The door slammed shut.

  * * *

  “No!” Jane lunged toward the pantry door, but it was too late.

  “Crap,” Liam said. “I forgot about the door. But surely there’s a way out of here.” His hand moved to try the door handle, but in the dim light of the single-bulb fixture, he could see there was no doorknob.

  He could also see Jane’s stunned face.

  Liam took his phone out of his back pocket and switched on the flashlight function to get a better look. There was a borehole where the knob inside the pantry should’ve been. Liam could see the exposed hardware and the engaged latch mechanism.

  He hooked his fingers in the hole and rattled the door, but it didn’t give. He tried to turn the latch manually, to no avail.

  “Don’t waste your time,” Jane said. “We’re not getting out of here until someone opens the door from the other side. You might want to call someone. Maybe Charles?”

  Liam muttered a string of oaths under his breath. “This is crazy. This is a safety hazard. Why would you not fix a broken door that can trap people inside?”

  “Are you asking me personally?” Jane’s voice was cool but her words were biting. “If you are, you should know that I missed the lesson on replacing door hardware when I was in culinary school. That’s why I told you that you needed to be careful.”

  It had been a long day and he wasn’t focused. That’s why he’d come back to the restaurant, where he’d planned on soaking up the solitude and ironing out the plan for the new menu. He hadn’t planned on running into anyone, much less Jane.

  Especially not Jane, after he’d overheard her discussion with her friend.

  Now, here they were, trapped together in a spot that was a little cozier than he’d ever intended to find himself in with Jane Clark.

  She was still wearing that tank top.

  He forced himself to not look at her. Instead, he trained his gaze on his phone.

  After switching off the flashlight function, he found Charles’s number in his Contacts. He pushed the button to call him—Charles would never let him live this down. That was for sure.

  Liam held the phone up to his ear, mentally composing what he was going to say as he waited for the call to go through. But a moment later, nothing happened. The call hadn’t gone through.

  When Liam looked at the phone screen, it was black. He tapped it. Nothing. Finally, after pressing and holding the button that was supposed to reset the phone didn’t work, he realized that his battery was dead.

  He had been going at such a hectic pace today, he hadn’t found a phone charger after his mission to buy one had been thwarted when he’d encountered Jane and her girlfriend
in the alleyway.

  He murmured another string of colorful words.

  “What’s wrong?” Jane asked.

  Liam held up his dead phone. “The battery died.”

  “Are you kidding me?” she said.

  “Do you have your phone?” he asked.

  “No. My phone is on my workstation. Great. You do realize everyone is off until Monday, right?”

  “I was trying not to think about that.”

  “And this comes from the guy who doesn’t give others second chances.”

  He was stunned silent. At a complete loss for words. She was right, of course. What could he say since he had clearly put his own glass house on full display?

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said that. It was uncalled for.”

  “No, you’re right. I got us into this situation after you had given me due warning. I’ll figure some way to get us out of here. There has to be a way out of here.”

  The last thing he needed was for one of the staffers to come in and find him trapped in the pantry with the pastry chef. That was not a good look or a good tone to set on the first day of training.

  He rattled the door again, tried turning the mechanism harder this time, but neither worked.

  “Let’s chill out for a minute and think about this,” Jane said to his back. “Sit down and have a beer.”

  He turned around and she was standing there holding two beers, one arm outstretched to him as if it was a peace offering.

  She really was a good sport. He’d fired her and now he’d gotten the two of them locked in the pantry at the worst possible time. She was offering him a beer and a calm demeanor.

  If the situation had been reversed, he would’ve been a raving lunatic. Why was it suddenly feeling as if Jane Clark was here to teach him a lesson about being a decent human being?

  He accepted the beer. “Thanks. And sorry.”

  She lowered herself onto a large sack of flour and patted the seat next to her.

  “Might as well sit here,” she said. “Best seat in the house. Or at least the only semi-comfortable one.”

  Liam hesitated a moment, during which he considered sitting on the hard floor. But even he, who sometimes had a difficult time picking up on subtleties, realized in the nick of time that would look like a jerk move. He joined her on the flour sack.

  “Can I ask you a question?” she said.

  “Sure.” He took a long pull of his beer and waited for her to fire.

  “Why do you have such a hard time with people making mistakes?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t have a hard time with it because you do. It’s obvious. That was evident the moment I heard you talking to Bruce. Because I screwed up one time, you were ready to crucify me. Or worse yet, fire me.”

  Liam shrugged. So now she wanted to talk about this. He had gotten the distinct impression that she was avoiding rehashing what had happened that night at La Bula at all costs.

  “Admit it,” she said. “If Charles hadn’t put the mandate in place that you had to give everyone a chance to prove themselves, you would’ve let me go without even giving me the benefit of the doubt.”

  He had been willing to put the issue behind them without discussing it, but if she wanted to reopen it, it was her choice.

  “In all fairness, you have to admit you didn’t make a simple, run-of-the-mill mistake the night I fired you. You oversalted—Actually, oversalted isn’t even the word for it. That rum baba tasted like you’d plated a slice of the Dead Sea. And you served it. To a food critic. Why did you do that? Were you trying to ruin me? Because that’s what it seemed like from my angle.”

  “Of course I wasn’t trying to ruin you. I nearly ruined my own career. Why would I do something like that on purpose?”

  “That’s almost as good a question as why you would serve Dead Sea Rum Baba to Eduardo Sanchez. What happened, Jane? I admit I didn’t give you a chance to explain yourself that night because I was furious. I was too concerned about trying to keep Sanchez from panning La Bula in his magazine. But I’m curious. I’d really like to know. What happened?”

  She stared at her hands for a moment then took a long, contemplative drink of her beer before she looked at him.

  “Truth?” she asked.

  “Always,” Liam answered.

  “I wasn’t the one who made the rum baba recipe that night. It was Kayla—was that her name? She was new and it was my fault for trusting her with the baking that early in the game. And, more than that, it was my fault for not tasting every single batch of cakes she’d mixed up. Based on the way the cake tasted, I figured she had accidentally mixed up the salt and sugar. But I learned that after the fact.

  “We were in such a frenzy that night because we were shorthanded. We were totally in the weeds and then, when Sanchez came in, everything went from crazy to uproar.”

  She shrugged. “In a nutshell, that’s what happened. It was the costliest lesson I’ve ever learned. But you can bet I’ve never made that mistake again.” She pinned him with a pointed look.

  “Yet, you took the blame.”

  “When it all came down to it, it was my fault. I was Kayla’s supervisor. Just as the mistake reflected poorly on La Bula as a whole, not an individual pastry chef or assistant, the mistake in the pastry department was on my head. I had to own it. There was no sense in throwing Kayla under the bus.”

  Liam laughed. “Oh, so you left me with a pastry assistant who didn’t know the difference between salt and sugar. That sounds like the ultimate revenge.”

  Jane laughed, too. “You know, I never really thought of it that way. Makes me feel a little better.”

  She had a sense of humor, this one. One thing he’d learned about Jane was that she didn’t seem like the vindictive type. However, he had noticed that she had a stubborn streak.

  “The only reason I’m bringing this up is that we find ourselves working together again—”

  “Oh, does that mean I’m hired?” She smiled and he almost hated to ruin the moment, but he needed to get this out.

  “I guess time will tell, but in the meantime, I seem to remember that night at La Bula, I had scheduled another person, but you took it upon yourself to give him the night off. We ended up being short-staffed and that’s why we were in the weeds. I hope that won’t be a problem if we do end up working together again.”

  Jane’s brow knit and then her face softened. “I remember that. And you’re right. Jonah Smith, my first assistant, had asked for the night off and I gave it to him. I mean I know Kayla was new, but it was a Tuesday night. I don’t know if you remember this, but you had been on me about budget—actually, not me specifically. You’d been after everyone to be conscious of cutting costs. I thought that was a good way to cut back and help Jonah out at the same time.”

  “I had scheduled him, but you thought you knew better than I did, huh?”

  She shrugged and in that instant, he learned something else about her—she was a perfectionist. She hated to be wrong. Of course, she seemed to think she knew what was best, when experience had proved that wasn’t always the case. He had to admit that ballsy streak of hers was sexy—er, attractive—in strictly a boss-employee way.

  Sleeping with my boss. Her words echoed in his head and he blinked them away.

  “In the future, if it ever comes down to a situation like that, just ask me, okay? In all honesty, it was a typical Tuesday night—as far as we knew—before all hell broke loose. If you had asked me if Jonah could’ve had the night off, I probably would’ve done the same thing. I would’ve let him. And, if you had asked me, then the blame would’ve been on me, not on you. Do we have a deal?”

  “Deal.” She held up her fist and they bumped to seal the deal.

  Her touch slammed into him. Even though it was just a plat
onic fist bump, he felt a zing when their skin connected. It was probably just the beer. He’d been so busy he hadn’t had a chance to eat a full meal. Tasting the various dishes that the staff had cooked up tonight had taken the edge off his hunger. Until now. He was ravenous. That was the only explanation for feeling buzzed after one beer.

  He set his bottle down.

  “Want another one?” Jane asked.

  She was on her feet before he could answer. As she stood, the side of her body brushed against his and her scent lingered. She smelled good—like vanilla and cinnamon and something vaguely floral—even after working such a long day.

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” she said over her shoulder. “I’m saying this because I guess I have nothing to lose. You might fire me at the end of the month, but you might not, and if you don’t, at least we will understand each other better. I promise you I will not always approach everything with the attitude that I’m the only one who knows what’s best, if you will be more open to giving second chances.”

  He opened his mouth to say something but she turned around and held up her hand.

  “Let me finish, please. If people think they can’t make mistakes, you’re never going to get the best out of anyone. If you approach it with the attitude of only new mistakes, you’ll have the best restaurant in Savannah. I guarantee it. Because the staff will be willing to step outside the box. They will be willing to try new things, and then, if it doesn’t work, they know not to make the same mistake again, but to try again and make it better.”

  As she handed him the beer, her words resonated down to his core. She was sharp. He knew she was right, but it wasn’t that easy.

  “Point taken. And the bit about you not always thinking you know what’s best. Does that apply to your rum baba, too?”

  “I wasn’t the one who made the Dead Sea Rum Baba,” she said.

  “That’s not the recipe I was talking about.”

  “Which one? The one you tasted yesterday?”

  He nodded.

  “What’s wrong with my rum baba?” she asked as she lowered herself back down onto the large sack of flour. “People love my rum baba. In fact, it’s the same rum baba I used to fix when I worked at La Bula. You didn’t complain about it then.”