Читать книгу Under Her Clothes - Louisa Edwards - Страница 9

Chapter Three

Dominic crossed his arms over his chest and let his gaze go soft focus to take in the entire kitchen. Soaking up the aura of calm competence he insisted on with all his staff, Dom analyzed the movements of his raw recruits.

Instinct told him where every person in the kitchen should be at any given moment, how every station should be working and each chef’s moves choreographed into the high-speed ballet that sent perfect plates out to the dining room. As he’d expected, however, tonight’s chorus line had a few people kicking out of turn. Two of the chef candidates were no more than a beat off the music, a pace behind but picking it up again even as he watched.

The tall, wiry Asian chef—Qui, he remembered—was holding his own while expediting at the pass, staying cool and composed even as one of the chef candidates delivered an incorrect dish and Qui had to sort out the resulting confusion. The guy at the sauce station smirked into his béchamel, and Dominic’s brows lowered. He didn’t stand for in-fighting and back-biting in his kitchen—but maybe in this situation, it was inevitable.

Still scowling, Dom scanned the rest of the kitchen for a good minute before he realized that the reason he hadn’t noticed the fifth and final chef candidate was that Colby St. James had melted seamlessly into the fast-paced swirl of the Maison de Ville kitchen. Every lift of the boy’s leanly muscled arms, every twist of his slim hips, had an economy of motion that spoke of efficiency, confidence and style.

Blood throbbed heavily in Dom’s prick, an unwelcome distraction. But Colby’s grace under the dual pressures of Maison’s dinner rush and the competition went straight to Dominic’s unruly dick.

“Any early predictions, patron?

The low murmur had Dominic glancing down at his trusty second-in-command. Antonio Hernandez was the only one at Maison allowed to call Dom anything other than “Chef.”

Yes.

The internal certainty surprised Dominic. Deliberately ignoring the kitchen action, Dom smiled a brief refusal to commit himself. “Time will tell.”

I certainly haven’t already locked in on the chef I think will be my top pick.

“Patron.” The way Antonio lowered his voice and eyes respectfully drew Dominic’s attention from his battle with denial. “He’s here again. Table twenty-six. Requesting to speak with the chef.”

Marc was here. His younger brother, looking to reconnect, to bring Dom back into the family fold.

It took everything Dominic had not to stiffen, but he kept his back ramrod straight and his shoulders back. Head high.

A kitchen is a battlefield, their father had always said. Your men will not follow a weakling. Show them pride and strength. Never weakness.

Dominic clamped his jaw tight. As the owner of a Michelin-starred restaurant, their father had said a lot of things. Dom had gotten good at ignoring them.

Not seeing or speaking to Edouard Fevre for the past decade or so had helped with that.

“You want me to go, patron?” Antonio squinted out over the kitchen, as if he wanted to give Dominic privacy while he came up with an answer.

The fact that relief was the first emotion to wash over him had Dominic biting out “No. I’ll deal with him” before he had time to overthink it.

Antonio evinced no reaction, merely nodded briskly and went back to overseeing the frantic dinner rush. There was a reason he was Dominic’s favorite.

With impeccable timing, a grease flare skyrocketed over Colby St. James at the grill station, making the short, skinny cooking school grad at the station next to him jump. Colby, however, didn’t even take a step back. Cursing with a vicious precision that would have impressed the most hardened dockworker, St. James ignored the danger of singeing off his own eyebrows to rescue the rib eyes at the back of the grill from charring.

Only when the flare-up had died down and the steaks were all safe at the front of the grill did Colby swipe his forearms over his sweaty forehead. He winced, grimacing down at his arm, before going back to flipping steaks as if he hadn’t noticed the three-inch burn mark turning a more livid red with each passing moment.

Caught between approval of the kid’s stamina and an appalling desire to charge across the kitchen and stick Colby’s arm under cold water and wrap him in icy compresses to stop the burn, Dominic turned on his heel and stalked over to the dining room doors.

The runners stared at him, then shrugged at each other. It wasn’t often that Dominic made the rounds of the dining room; he preferred to command the kitchen himself or to preside from his office desk while dealing with the myriad of tasks that went along with running the city’s top French restaurant.

Ignoring the frisson of whispers and glances from the elegantly dressed diners, Dom stalked between the widely spaced tables with his facial expression set to neutral. All his attention was on the familiar stranger seated alone at the deuce by the front window.

Only eighteen months Dom’s junior, carefree and happy-go-lucky Marc had always seemed even younger. But the mischievous smile Dom remembered was nowhere in sight as Marc leaned back in the soft, upholstered chair and stared out the window at twilit Park Avenue. His carefully composed plate—the duck breast, Dom noted, at perfect medium rare—sat before him, untouched.

A dark shadow of beard roughened Marc’s hard jaw, and the crinkles beside his gray eyes didn’t look like laugh lines. Dominic felt a frown pulling at his own mouth.

What had happened to his brother while Dom wasn’t looking?

As if sensing the presence looming over him, Marc turned from his contemplation of the late-rush-hour crowds of CEOs speeding home in their black chauffeured cars. Blinking up at Dom, he said, “Finally. What does it take to give my compliments to the chef in this dump?”

Dom stiffened, unused to teasing. “It might help if you actually tasted the food,” he pointed out, crossing his arms.

“I don’t have to taste it to know that it’s perfect. You made it.”

The words sounded like a compliment, but there was a twist of bitterness beneath them that plucked at Dom’s patience. “Haven’t we outgrown this rivalry, Marc?”

“We didn’t have time to outgrow it or get over it. You left.”

Guilt soured the back of Dominic’s tongue. “Eva Jansen offered me an opportunity. I had to take it.”

“Even though it meant leaving Paris. Leaving your family.”

A fresh start in a new city and distance from the past—especially his father—had been the main reasons Dom took this job. He hadn’t intended to leave his brother behind, too, at least not completely, but after everything that had happened, it had been easy to let silence take root and grow until it blanketed everything. “If you want to be a great chef, Marc—”

“Oh, yes. S’il te plaît.” One of Marc’s thick, black brows winged up. “Remind me that I could be a great chef, too, if I’d only apply myself. If I had any discipline. If I only wanted it enough...”

Dom clenched his jaw. For some reason, a vision of Colby St. James—scrappy and tough and totally against the rules—rose up before his mind’s eye. “Believe me. It is possible to want this life too much. There are things you should not sacrifice.”

He hadn’t meant to say that, the words peeled from him like the rind from an orange, but for the first time in five years, Dom saw his brother smile. The broad, infectious grin sent a shaft of light down into the darkest parts of Dom’s heart.

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Marc told him. “You should not give up your family.”

That wasn’t what Dom had been referring to, but he liked the look of Marc’s smile too much to correct him. Despite the way their father had occasionally pitted them against one another, Dom’s issues had never truly been with his brother. Which, of course, was what made him the perfect emissary to bring Dom back into the family fold.