On the Steamy Side - Louisa Edwards [67]
Surely Devon didn’t intend to try and have a serious discussion here. And yet she realized that some of the half-naked bodies around her were attached to vaguely familiar faces, people she knew from Market. They all looked extremely different without their trim, tidy chef’s whites.
Wild music pounded from a tiny, elevated stage in one corner of the room where a woman with bright orange hair and a sparkly nose ring was wailing into a microphone. Her band was arrayed behind her, and Lilah was surprised to recognize Frankie hunched over a bass guitar and rocking out to the beat. A small but energetic mosh pit seethed around the stage.
Lilah spotted Jess Wake, the server whose station she’d abandoned halfway through her one and only dinner service, sitting at a round table with a dark-haired man she thought she remembered from the Market kitchen. They were talking animatedly, and she wondered how they could hear each other through the din. As she watched, Jess’s gaze wandered from his friend to linger on the band.
Searching the crowd for Devon, Lilah found Grant instead. He’d found a seat well away from the speakers and was glaring morosely into a martini glass half full of disconcertingly blue liquid.
Relieved, Lilah pushed her way through the throng to get to him. “This is quite a scene,” she yelled above the cacophony.
“Lolly!” Grant looked as happy to see her as she was to see him. “Have a seat, sweetie.”
“I can’t, I’ve got to find Devon. He asked me to come so we could talk about Tucker.”
“Right.” Grant was skeptical. “He wants to have a nice little chat at a hundred decibels. I hope you know what you’re getting into.”
Lilah prayed it was too dark to show the uncertainty she knew must be written all over her face. She had no idea what she was getting into, or where it was going, but she’d discovered herself helpless to stop it. “I expected more of a party atmosphere here,” she said, changing the subject gracelessly. “Even considering how loud and crazy it is, no one looks particularly jubilant.”
“We usually come to Chapel to blow off steam after a good service,” Grant said. “When the night goes well, you’re wired, pumped up with energy and adrenaline, so far beyond exhausted that sleep becomes impossible.”
Lilah studied the intense looks on the faces around her. “And if the night goes badly?”
“You get this.” Grant looked like he wanted to make a sweeping arm gesture, but was too bushed to manage it. “All the rowdy, none of the fun. They’re taking out their frustrations and mistakes on the dance floor, our eardrums, and massive amounts of alcohol.”
“So service didn’t go well.”
“It was a fiasco. Starting with Devon’s refusal to serve anything resembling brunch food at brunch and carrying all the way through to his perversion of the regulars’ menu favorites with flavored foams and weird sauce reductions. I’m telling you, Lilah, every third plate was sent back to the kitchen. The line was in chaos, every chef on it was practically in tears. Devon got more and more grim as the night went on, but he never backed down and let the guys start doing what the customers have come to expect from Market—simple food, done superlatively well. I mean, mercy, I know it’s only the second night. But I’m not sure the restaurant can survive much more of this. I’m not sure I can survive it.”
“Sounds like y’all took a good licking tonight,” Lilah said, her heart beating too hard and fast in her chest. The disloyalty of it made her throat ache, but as badly as she felt for poor Grant, all Lilah really wanted to do was find Devon and see how he was doing.
About ready to keel over, she was willing to bet. And covering it with arrogance and cold indifference.
“And what made it worse,” Grant moaned, “was that he was there. Through the whole thing, being all . . .”
“Wait, who?” Lilah was confused. “Devon?”
“No, him!” Grant jerked his head toward the bar. “Christian Colby.”
The way he spat the name, malevolently caressing each syllable, gave Lilah the shivers. “What on earth