Too Hot to Touch

by Louisa Edwards

  “I’m getting to it! Claire, honestly. Where’s your sense of drama?”

  “You’re confusing me with an Italian. We French value pragmatism above all else. Well, pragmatism and wine. I assume you didn’t bring any of that along with you, either.”

  Eva clapped her hands together. “I was already looking forward to this conversation, but you’re making it extra fun! It’s almost like you know how hard I worked to make this happen.”

  A wave of foreboding enveloped Claire. “What do you mean?”

  “This is going to be the best RSC ever! And all because of me.”

  Merde.

  “What did you do?”

  Eva beamed. “I got Devon Sparks to agree to be a judge!”

  Claire allowed her shoulders to relax marginally. That wasn’t so bad. “Well. It could be worse. He’s an unmitigated ass, but at least he knows food.”

  “Not entirely true,” Eva said. “I’d heard his assness had been mitigated recently by finding true love, or something ridiculous like that. Obviously, I discounted that story as the worst sort of slanderous gossip. And then it turned out to be an actual fact! Devon is off the market, stupid in love, and on our judging panel.”

  “Oh yes, I heard about his new bride. Well, it should make him easier to handle, at any rate. Who else?”

  Eva’s eyes gleamed with unholy joy. “This is the best part. Wait for it—”

  “Eva!”

  “Oh fine. Be that way.” She pouted prettily for a bare instant before the urge to spill got the better of her. “I did it, Claire! I got Kane Slater to agree to be an RSC judge!”

  Just like that, tension yanked Claire’s shoulders back up around her ears. “You what? Eva—this had better be one of your oh-so-droll American witticisms. Ha. Ha.”

  “No! I know it seems too good to be true, but I promise you, I’m not kidding. Kane Slater, the hottest rock star ever to throw an eighteen-course banquet dinner party based on the last meal served aboard the Titanic, is our third judge!”

  Claire grasped the back of Eva’s chair and white-knuckled it before her knees could give out. “A rock star. You could have asked anyone—a food historian, a famous chef, a well-known restaurant critic—and you ask a rock star.”

  “I had to!” Eva widened her eyes until she looked like a cartoon character. “We’ve got to sex up this competition, or die trying. It costs a lot of money to run this show, and Jansen Hospitality can’t foot the entire bill. We need to attract bigger sponsors, with deeper pockets, if we want to pull off the best Rising Star Chef yet!”

  “It’s not a competition, Eva.” Claire rolled her eyes when her friend smirked. “Enough, you know what I mean. Between you and your father—the RSC should not be the latest battleground on which to wage your ongoing campaign for Theo Jansen’s approval.”

  Eva’s red mouth hardened into a flat line. “Look, I know you never cared about having the competition televised, but it’s the next step. I know it. Dad never managed to do it, and when I thought I’d be able to … but now the Cooking Channel execs are balking, saying they’re not sure it’s sexy enough, blah blah. Don’t you see? Kane Slater is my magic fairy dust! Everything he touches turns to sex. It’ll be the best panel ever. You’ll have a blast. How much fun would some crusty old food historian have been, I ask you? Please. I can so see that increasing our market share. Right.”

  “But this is outrageous! You’re risking the reputation of the entire competition by involving this person, who has no credentials and no knowledge—the sponsors might be happy, but what about the chefs who are competing? You ridiculous child, have you thought this through at all?”

  Eva stood, turning on one black stiletto heel to face Claire. Her eyes flashed with something Claire had never seen there before, a determination that made her look older, more serious. “Just because you’ve known me since I was a child doesn’t mean I still am one. My father put the RSC completely in my hands for the first time this year, and I will. Not. Screw. This. Up. And you won’t screw it up for me by acting all stodgy and conservative and horrified, when that isn’t even who you are, anyway.”

  Staring at her young friend, Claire understood immediately that she was in a nonnegotiable situation. Eva had made up her mind and nothing would sway her now.

  Which didn’t mean that Claire was without recourse. She would simply need to bide her time.

  “Fine. I’ll do my best to keep your publicity stunt from doing anything gauche enough to cause irreparable damage to the competition. But you will owe me for dealing with this ludicrous situation—and believe me when I tell you, I will be collecting on that debt.”

  Relief smoothed Eva’s face until she was the same pampered beauty she always appeared to be. Few ever glimpsed the shark skimming along beneath the surface—and usually by then it was too late. “You’re the best. I knew I could count on you! Now I’ve got to dash, I have a lunch meeting at Market in ten, but I promise I’ll give the chef a smooch for you if I see him! And maybe one for me, too. That Adam Temple, yummy. Why is everyone paired off, these days?”

  Eva chattered as she gathered up her things, stuffing a purple silk scarf printed with the address of the original Hermes shop in Paris into her cavernous black-and-white Chanel tote.

  Claire air-kissed her young friend good-bye, one kiss per smooth, powdered cheek, smiled pleasantly, and worried.

  Chapter 8

  Jules was in the zone. Every move she made—bend, open the lowboy, grab ingredients, swirl them into the pan, toss them over the leaping flame with a flick of her wrist—flowed naturally. Her mind was a perfect, beautiful blank, empty of everything but the next order, and the one after that, and the one after that, an endless line of rib eye, mid-well, no mushrooms in the garnish; Brussels sprouts side, heavy on the bacon; two lamb chops, normal; a porterhouse, bloody …

  She dipped and whirled, leaning up to grab a clean sauté pan to reheat the sprouts, and instinctively curved her body inward to avoid Winslow as he spun a set of dirty pans toward the dishwashing station on the back wall.

  Flinging a handful of diced pancetta into the hot pan, she let the heat render some of the fat while she checked on her steaks. The big, heavy porterhouse was giving off enough red juice to let her know it was about done, but the rib eye needed another couple of minutes.

  Spinning the porterhouse onto an individual serving platter spitting with hot butter, she put it up on the pass for a runner to grab and take up to the window, then turned back to her sizzling bacon.

  Jules stirred the bits of salt-cured meat around, then added the baby Brussels sprouts. As she watched them dance in the molten spiced pork fat, she thought about how much she’d hated these vegetables when she was a kid. Her mom had sure never cooked sprouts this way.

  Okay, granted—Victoria Cavanaugh pretty much never cooked at all, if she could talk a man into taking her out instead, but still. Jules was a connoisseur of public school lunches and diner specials, and none of them had made Brussels sprouts like this, either.

  One of the first things Winslow did every day when he got to the restaurant and started to prep for dinner service was to crank the oven up high and roast a big batch of the tiny green orbs. When he spread them out on a hotel pan, they looked like miniature cabbages, their tightly furled leaves shiny with oil.

  When he pulled them out of the oven half an hour later? They were shriveled and golden, the edges of the tender leaves curled and caramelized to a tasty, dark brown crispness.

  He let them cool on the racks, then put them in a container, and when Jules came in to set up her mise en place for the night, she always made sure to keep the sprouts close at hand. They were one of the restaurant’s specialties, and she could count on putting out at least twenty orders of sprouts on a busy night like tonight.

  Thank God for Friday, indeed. It was the one night they could count on doing at least one full turn, fifty covers, and sometimes even more once the posttheater crowd had a chance to make it from Tim
es Square down to Greenwich Village.

  Seasoning the roasted sprouts with salt and pepper, Jules savored the nutty, rich scent rising from the pan as they warmed through. While they got hot, she checked her vinaigrette—a little low—and swiftly added a generous glug of balsamic vinegar and a steady stream of olive oil, whisking like crazy. A sprinkle of chopped fresh herbs from her stash of bowls at the corner of her station, and her stock of vinaigrette was replenished.

  Scraping the sprouts and crispy pancetta into a bowl, Jules drizzled them with the vinaigrette and shook the bowl to make them jump. Since she’d done new vinaigrette for this order, she grabbed a clean tasting spoon and popped one of the sprouts into her mouth.

  The sharp sweetness of the balsamic vinegar burst across her tongue, and as she crunched into the sprout, she took a second to marvel at the way the little vegetable retained its deep caramel flavor and pleasingly burned edges. A warm sauce would’ve turned them into the limp, soggy sprouts of her youth, uninspired and unappetizing. This bright vinaigrette elevated them to another level.

  A quick dash of salt, a few more turns of the pepper grinder, and the sprouts were done.

  “Sprouts up,” she called, shoving the bowl onto the rack, where Emilio, one of the runners, was waiting to carry it up to the front of the kitchen.

  Jules spun around and checked her rib eye again, the noise of the kitchen a soothing background music to her thoughts.

  The kitchen was a living, breathing organism during the rush of dinner service, especially when it was busy like this. Every chef, runner, and dishwasher was a major, life-sustaining organ, all working together to power the beast through the frenetic couple of hours between seven-thirty and nine-thirty, when everyone in Manhattan seemed to get hungry for steak at exactly the same time.

  Jules barely noticed the sweat sticking her shirt to her back and stinging the shallow knife scrape on her knuckles. She was only peripherally aware of Nina bringing tickets up to the pass and handing them to Gus, who called out the orders in the sharp, no-nonsense bark he’d perfected long before Jules ever thought of becoming a chef. She danced with Winslow and Beck as they maneuvered their way around the narrow, heated confines of the kitchen, and she only surfaced long enough to slap Danny a high five when Gus called out, “Last ticket cleared! Danny, they want two crèmes brûlées, and we’re done.”

  The fog of war was slow to clear from Jules’s head; she missed it the instant it was gone.

  Jules found a lot of comfort in the buzz of adrenaline and strain of muscles it took to get through dinner service. Once it was over, all that was left was her life—and she’d rather think about meat temperatures and oil-to-vinegar ratios any day of the week.

  She sighed loudly enough to make Danny raise his brows at her. “What are you mad about? You don’t have to make the last desserts.”

  “Neither do you,” she pointed out as he snagged a couple of white porcelain ovals off the speed rack next to his station.

  “Au contraire,” he replied, waggling his handheld butane torch and flicking the button to make it spark. “The crème might be done, but that sugar topping isn’t going to brûlée itself.”

  With a flourish, he scattered a layer of sugar crystals over the top of the cold vanilla bean custard and bent to direct the blue heat of his torch flame over it in sweeping arcs. Jules watched the white sugar brown and start to bubble, forming a hard, shiny crust that made her itch to grab a spoon and tap hard enough to crack it. She loved crème brûlée; since the first time Danny made it for her, to celebrate turning eighteen and getting hired at Lunden’s for real instead of under the table, she’d asked for it on every birthday.

  Glancing up at her, Danny waved the torch menacingly. “Back off, Cavanaugh. These aren’t for you!”

  “But if I steal one, then dinner service isn’t over,” she said.

  Danny’s eyebrows shot up one more time. “Don’t get greedy, Jules. We had a good night! We should savor those. Or wait—is this about avoiding practice later?”

  Jules made a face, annoyed with herself. Danny handed off the desserts to Emilio, waiting until the runner was halfway to the window before continuing in a low voice. “This is about Max.”

  If it were anyone else, she’d stiffen up, blank her face, shrug her shoulders, and deny everything. But that stuff never worked with Danny; they’d known each other way too long.

  “It’s just a little stressful,” she admitted, “the way your dad hopes Max will be the magic ticket to success, but they never talk about why Max left in the first place. And the look on Gus’s face when you and Max fight. I know there’s some bad blood and hurt feelings on all sides, but you need to suck it up and put it aside. For the good of the team.”

  Wiping down his station with a white side towel, Danny scrubbed harder than necessary at a patch of something sticky and red. “I know,” he said without looking up, “I’m fucking this up for everyone.”

  Guilt scored down Jules’s spine. Danny had a tendency to shoulder burdens that shouldn’t be his to carry alone. “No you’re not. You were hurt when he left, and I remember how hard it was to deal with your parents being so upset about it all the time. I was there.”

  Those first few weeks after she’d moved in with the Lundens had been so strange. Surreal, like a dream where Jules got to live someone else’s life, where she felt safe and cared for and happy and safe, but everyone around her was living under this awful, aching cloud of sadness.

  There was a Max-shaped void in the Lunden family, from that very first night, and Jules had never been able to fill it.

  “It sucked.” Danny’s feeling tone made her want to grin.

  “Big time,” Jules agreed. “But you know, he did come back. When your mom called and said she needed him, he dropped everything and came home. That has to mean something.”

  “Yeah. That Nina Lunden is a force of nature.”

  Jules nodded. “And I bet she’s been on your ass about getting along with your brother, too. It means a lot to her, and to your dad. So maybe you could just, I don’t know, fake it until he leaves again?”

  Danny frowned. “I hate that, too. Weird, huh? It’s hard, so hard to have him home and around all the time. But I hate that he’s not staying.”

  As always when she and Danny did that weird best-friends-forever, same-wavelength thing, Jules got a chill. “I know.”

  “And it sucks to know that he’d probably stick around, if he knew what was up with Dad!” Danny was getting frustrated, running his hands through his hair the way he always did, leaving streaks of sticky cream custard clumping the golden brown tufts together.

  “Yep, sucks,” Jules acknowledged, hardening her heart against the misgivings that arose every time she thought about the secrets they were all keeping from Max. “But it’s for his own good. He’s got that amazing opportunity in Italy. Your dad couldn’t stand to be the reason Max misses out on that.”

  “Well, I could.” Danny set his jaw stubbornly. “I don’t care if that makes me selfish.”

  Warm affection surged through Jules. She tilted her head. “You care. Maybe more than anyone I’ve ever met. And that’s why I love you.”

  Danny gave her that smile, the one that meant friendship and home and family. Slapping him on the back, Jules turned back to the kitchen to oversee the exhausted team as they broke down the dinner service stations and got ready for their nightly RSC practice.

  Jules managed to lose herself in cleaning for a while, but once her station was pristine enough to satisfy the most critical health inspector in Manhattan, she looked up to discover that the entire team was gathered, prepped, and ready to get to work.

  Everyone except Max.

  She caught Gus’s eye, sending him a questioning glance. His mouth was tight, and that vein over his forehead was popping out a little.

  “Damn it, Max,” Danny muttered, starting for the stairs, and Jules caught Gus’s instinctive wince.

  Jules wadded up the dirty towel in
her hand and chucked it toward the laundry bags in the corner.

  “Don’t worry about it, Danny,” she said briskly. “I’ll go get him and tell him it’s time.”

  Time to put aside all this petty bullshit and grow the hell up, she added silently as she headed for the door up to the apartment.

  * * *

  Deep breath in … hold it for one heartbeat … then out again in a slow stream. Gather all the stress and emotion inside yourself into the breath, Max thought, then push it out with the exhalation. Let it go. Just let … it … go …

  Something in his back pocket was digging into his left butt cheek, and his nose itched. Max suppressed a sigh in favor of regulating his breath and doing his damnedest to let it all just fucking go, but it wasn’t working.

  None of the strategies he’d learned for allowing the distractions and tensions of daily life to pass through him were working today. In fact, Max realized, disgusted, he hadn’t been able to get through a single meditation session since he got back to New York.

  Harukai-sensei would beat his ass if he could see Max now.

  A knock on the door startled him out of the lotus position, but his numb right foot caught on his other leg and sent him sprawling to his back on the floor. Smooth.

  His voice hoarse from disuse, Max called out, “Come in.” How long had he been sitting here, failing to surrender to the nothingness of being?

  The door opened to reveal the slim, lightly toned form of the woman who was responsible for a large part of Max’s meditation-blocking distraction.

  “You’re late,” Jules said, staring down at him with her dark blond eyebrows crinkled in confusion. “And you’re on the floor. What are you doing?”

  “Meditating.”

  “Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”

  “No, really,” Max protested, then frowned. “Or, not really, because my meditation attempt was pretty failtastic. Couldn’t focus. Too much on my mind.”