Can't Stand the Heat - Louisa Edwards [74]
Make that maximally distracting, he thought, as she reached across Adam to place a newly sauced and dressed chicken entrée on the waiting tray. Her sweetly rounded upper arm brushed his chest and Adam felt the jolt zing from his nipple straight to his cock. Fucking ridiculous.
Kinda like the way he probably looked, standing motionless at the pass while both Miranda and the waiter—Christ, it’s her kid brother—waited for him to release the tray.
What table is this?
“Table twenty-eight, go,” he pulled out of his ass, and the kid went. So his voice was a little hoarse, who’d notice in all the commotion, right?
“Are you okay?” Miranda asked, all wide-eyed concern. She even put her dainty little hand on his bicep, which, okay. So not helping the situation with Adam Jr.
“Fine,” he croaked. “Ahem. Good job on the plates. You’ve got a real touch for it, they look excellent.”
Score! Pretty pink suffused her cheeks. “It’s fun,” she said, ducking her head a bit. “It feels artistic, like painting or something. That probably sounds lame to you.”
“No, no. Not at all. I don’t like to think of myself as an artist—in my experience, chefs who talk about food as art are all douches—but presentation on the plate is highly key. You experience food through all your senses, which is what makes it so powerful. How it looks is your very first sensual contact with it, so it’s gotta look perfect. Enticing. And there’s definitely a kind of artistry to that.”
“Do you ever worry . . . ?” She paused and pursed her lips.
“What?” he prompted her, wanting to take advantage of this short, unexpected lull between tables to talk to Miranda as much as possible. Working the pass with her was exhilarating, but not so much with the communication and getting to know each other.
Something Adam found himself unexpectedly but completely interested in.
“Well,” she said reluctantly. “You use the word ‘perfect’ quite a bit—doesn’t it ever bother you that perfection is ultimately unattainable? As a goal, it’s not very practical.”
That’s my little pragmatist, he thought fondly. He knew better than to say it out loud—outside his head, it was sure to sound patronizing.
“I guess you’re right,” he said instead. “But perfection isn’t really my goal.”
“No?”
“Nah.” He grinned at her, aware with his sixth sense, his kitchen sense, that the cooks were about to start running hot vegetables and meat up to the pass for plating.
“Perfection isn’t the goal—the pursuit of perfection, though.” Adam reached for words, wanting her to understand. “Striving for perfection, to be better all the time, to be flawless; that’s the goal.”
She looked utterly bewildered for a moment, which was such an adorable look on her that he almost lost the thread of the conversation for a minute before her brow cleared.
“I get it,” Miranda said, like she’d just unraveled the Fibonacci sequence or something.
“You do?”
She nodded. “Perfection isn’t your goal; ceaseless struggle is your goal. Never losing the drive to be perfect is your goal. And taking it all seriously—like you said that first night, it’s always life-or-death to you.”
Miranda was maybe the most brilliant person Adam had ever known. “That’s it exactly,” he crowed. “I think I’m gonna keep you around to write the Market mission statement and stuff. You put it all into words so much better than I do.”
“That’s my job.”
The reminder sobered him and he paused to search her face. Miranda usually sort of seized up when she talked about her work, like it stressed her out even to think about it. Not that she ever liked to discuss personal things. But tonight she mentioned her job with a funny little half-smile that Adam couldn’t read at all.
He puzzled for a moment, unease filling him. He’d made his peace with the idea that she was writing a book about him, mostly by putting the entire issue out of his mind. But there were moments when he couldn’t ignore that it made him nervous. He’d bared his soul to Miranda lots of times, but there was still so much he didn’t know about her.
This wasn’t the moment for angsty soul-searching, though.