On the Steamy Side - Louisa Edwards [43]
The worst service of his entire life was over, and all Devon could feel was a numb dread that it was only the first night of a full two weeks of torture.
All around him, cooks were cleaning up their stations in morose silence. Devon watched them mopping up spills and shuffling leftovers into the walk-in coolers and knew he ought to say something. Anything. About how tonight sucked ass, but tomorrow was a brand-new day. Blah blah blah.
Instead, he forced his hands up to the buttons on his soiled, stained chef’s jacket and started working toward freeing himself from the thing. He imagined once he got it off his shoulders it would feel like being released from a straitjacket.
He wanted, desperately, to go to Chapel and get obliterated. Shrugging out of the jacket, he happened to look up and catch Frankie’s baleful eye. Yeah, the Chapel plan wasn’t going to happen. Frankie’s punk band was playing on the bar’s dingy stage later that night; with a single glance, the sous chef made it clear Devon wasn’t wanted.
A perverse desire to thrust himself into unwelcoming company almost sparked Devon’s natural defiance, but he shrugged it off. Devon didn’t like to admit mistakes; he hadn’t gotten where he was today by being liberal with apologies. But he was honest with himself, always, and he knew the lion’s share of the blame for tonight’s debacle rested squarely on his shoulders.
Not only had he introduced new menu items at the last second, as if he were running a challenge on a reality TV show rather than a restaurant kitchen, but he’d let his personal life throw him into the biggest tailspin imaginable.
The image he’d been trying, with varying degrees of success, to suppress all night came shooting back to the forefront of his mind.
Tucker. His son. Standing right in front of him, looking up at Devon like he was some guy off the street.
Devon barely recalled a word of his exchange with the police officer who’d brought Tucker in. He counted it as a minor victory that he seemed to have carried on a coherent conversation when his mind was filled with nothing but static. From the moment it became clear that Heather was asking him to take Tucker—Jesus, what the hell kind of trouble was she in, anyway? She swore she’d never do this—Devon’s feet had felt nailed to the floor, his mouth coated in super-glue, his brain stuffed with buzzing cotton.
And it had taken the worst busgirl in the history of the restaurant business to break him out of the trance.
Remembering the stricken look on Lilah Jane’s face when she realized she’d just inserted herself into Devon’s fucked-up family politics, he had to smile. Fuck it all, he hoped no one ever knew how close he’d come to bending her over his arm and kissing her senseless for that little bit of meddling.
The woman was a breath of sweet, fresh, uncomplicated air in the restrictive, claustrophobic prison that was Devon’s life.
And if that was dramatic, so the fuck what? He was a celebrity, damn it, he was supposed to diva it up whenever possible.
The kitchen had emptied while he’d been ruminating, and Devon frowned. Where the hell was Lilah, anyway? He thought she’d bring the kid—Tucker, he reminded himself with a reluctant smile—into the kitchen once service was over. Maybe she didn’t know what time it was.
Thinking perhaps she’d gotten Tucker to sleep on the couch in the office downstairs, Devon balled up his dirty jacket and threw it on the pile of crusty brown kitchen towels for the night porter to deal with, and headed for the door that hid the stairs to the lower level.
Thoughts of Lilah and sleep in the same brain space reminded Devon to congratulate himself on how handily he’d removed Lilah Jane Tunkle from the roster of restaurant employees, making her fair game for seduction.
Fine, if you wanted to be a stickler about it, she’d still be working for Devon when she became Tucker’s nanny, but that was a short-term gig, and besides, Devon had never made any hard