On the Steamy Side - Louisa Edwards [37]
It was bad enough to have a customer send a steak back to the kitchen to be refired because it wasn’t done to the right temperature—but to have a whole table send back all four entrees because they flat-out hated the food? Devon wanted to throw up.
Instead, he yelled. And yelled some more. At Lilah Jane, no less, who was so completely out of her depth here, it made his lungs hurt just to look at her. And to top it off, he’d shown some of his jealousy over Grant and just what exactly the handsome restaurant manager wanted from Lilah.
Anyway, what was he thinking, wasting time on front-of-house stuff in the first place?
He refused to acknowledge that if it were anyone else, he’d have fired her instantly, dinner rush or no dinner rush.
“I’m sorry, what did you just say?” Lilah pulled herself up, as regal as a queen, and gave Devon the kind of stare he hadn’t seen since Principal Dryden threw him out of assembly for clowning around.
“You heard me. No more plates on the floor,” he told her, already softening his voice. Christ, he was such a sucker. Those big green eyes, though, damn. But she didn’t look as if she took this quite seriously enough. Raising his brows, Devon delivered his final shot: “And I don’t care if you have to leave your shirt as collateral, the next time a table tries to give you their order, you promise them you’ll be right back and go get Jess.”
That got her. Lilah’s cheeks blazed and her mouth opened but no sound came out.
“That’s the thing about an open kitchen,” Devon said, tilting his chin toward the open pass through to the dining room. “Not only can they see in, I can see out.”
As if on cue, Grant appeared on the other side of the window.
Every muscle in Devon’s body clenched. Here was Lilah’s knight in shining armor, come to rescue her from the evil bastard executive chef. The thought burned going down like a gulp of straight chili juice.
Devon pointed at the manager and ground out, “If you’re here to tell me to keep it down because the customers are complaining, then I’m here to tell you what the goddamn customers can do with their bitching. They tune in to see me scream at cooks every week, they can damn well sit through one evening of it at Market.”
“Lord, how I wish the only problem were the nastiness of your mouth combined with your startling lung capacity,” Grant moaned. The blond man was actually wringing his hands in distress, Devon noted with a sinking sensation.
“It better not be about your gal pal, either, because she had it coming and I still went easy on her,” he said, ignoring the gasp of outrage from behind him and wiping a spill of sauce from the edge of a white bowl holding a quivering morel custard on a bed of lemon-scented asparagus. He spun the bowl onto the server’s tray and barked over his shoulder, “Where’s the goddamn endive salad? The custard is ready to go.”
“Coming up behind you, Chef,” panted the Italian kid who’d held Frankie back before.
“Nowhere near good enough,” Devon spat at him, snatching the plate from his hands. “It’s a salad, you idiot, not open-heart surgery. Be faster.” Turning back to the server, Devon shouted, “What are you waiting for? Go!”
“Chef.” Grant was practically vibrating with the urgency of his message. “Please.”
The front of the house was as big a mess as the kitchen, Devon knew. Five minutes into service, Grant had appeared at the pass to let Devon know that Samara, the lovely and exotic bartender who delighted guests waiting for their tables with her blend of charm and expertly made cocktails, had called in sick. And it was the kind of sickness she’d diagnosed with a little white plastic stick and was going to take nine months to recover from.
Devon cursed like a drunken frat boy when Frankie couldn’t rustle up a last-minute replacement, and told Grant to have the servers mix the drinks for their tables. He sure as shit couldn’t spare anyone from the kitchen. They’d figure out how to replace