Can't Stand the Heat - Louisa Edwards [125]
The moment the words were out of her mouth, she cringed, wishing she could call them back.
What a clever negotiating tactic. Insulting and alienating the potential benefactor. Go me. Perhaps next I’ll spit in his drink, then see where the evening takes us from there.
To her very great surprise, however, nothing more extreme than curiosity flashed in Devon’s extraordinary eyes.
“Then is it the other? You’re looking for more dirt on Temple and his pals? I suppose I’d be a natural source, having employed most of them at one time or another.”
“That’s not what I’m after,” Miranda hastened to assure him.
“Good, because I wasn’t planning on telling you anything,” Devon said, pulling his martini closer, “except that Adam Temple was an exemplary employee and one of the best cooks I’ve ever had working for me. He chose his people well; poached most of them from my staff, in fact. Which, by the way, is the quote I’ve given six different newspapers, four magazines, and twenty-five Web sites today.”
Miranda smiled for the first time since staring into Grant’s accusing face. “That lovely loyalty again,” she breathed. “I wasn’t sure it would extend to you, too.” This made her request so much more viable, she wanted to climb up and dance on the bar.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Devon said crossly. “It’s nothing but the truth. I realize you’ve got only a passing acquaintance with the concept.”
Miranda swallowed that down without a flinch, flying on the idea that this might actually work.
“I’m talking about Adam,” she said. “And a favor. Not for me, but for him. To sweeten the deal, let me add that this favor will not only help the Market crew, but it will also cause me considerable personal trouble and humiliation.”
Devon cocked a brow at her and took a maddeningly long sip of his martini.
“Fine,” he said at length. “You’ve got my attention. Tell me what you have in mind.”
THIRTY
How was it that one person being missing from the line for a week threw the whole kitchen into chaos? Adam wondered tiredly as he schlepped up the stairs from his tiny, cluttered office.
He’d slept at the restaurant again, on the narrow couch in his office, after last night’s difficult service. They’d missed Frankie and his irrepressible energy on the grill station.
Adam refused to consider who else he’d missed.
Today will be better, he promised himself. Frankie was due back in the kitchen tonight, healed enough from his brush with death to sling some hash under Adam’s watchful eye. It was a little sooner than the doctor had recommended, and before Frankie received permission to cook, Adam had endured a very uncomfortable conversation with Jess. While both of them danced carefully around the slim, pretty redheaded elephant in the room, he’d sworn to Jess that he’d keep a close eye on Frankie and make sure he wasn’t overdoing it. For a while there, he wondered if he’d have to take out some kind of affidavit signed in blood and notarized by a priest or something. Jess did cave, eventually, to the relief of the whole Market crew.
It had been a weird week.
The first day back was the hardest; Frankie’s conspicuous absence, plus the horror of finding out shit he never wanted to know about his employees. The awkward, embarrassed way people moved around each other, each cook in his own orbit, never touching anyone else. No one made eye contact. Adam became hyperconscious of everyone’s left ears, the shape of their foreheads.
Some of those so-called secrets Miranda had written about were things Adam had known forever, and the rest weren’t exactly a surprise. The fact that Quentin had done time shocked no one; the confirmation that Milo’s family was Family, likewise. Adam had known when Violet got her divorce that it was beyond acrimonious, because one day in the middle of all of it, she’d forgotten to add yeast to a whole batch of bread. When the sad, flat goop refused to rise, she’d broken down and told him all about what a bastard her soon-to-be-ex was.
Frankie