Can't Stand the Heat by Louisa Edwards

Author:Louisa Edwards
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Cooks, Restaurateurs, Cooking, Contemporary, Fiction, Romance, Women journalists, General, Cookery, Love stories
ISBN: 9780312356491
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2009-09-01T10:00:00+00:00

Service was a breeze. Okay, fine, more like a gale-force wind, but smoother. And the energy in the kitchen! Adam couldn’t quantify the change, but he felt it. Heard it in the increased communication between cooks as they worked to get their plates up to the pass simultaneously. Tasted it in the silky white-asparagus soup and caramelized fennel jus for the pan-roasted chicken.

Even Miranda seemed less like a stress case than usual. Not that she was ever annoyingly neurotic or anything. Mostly she was a little tightly wound, in an endearing way.

But up at the pass with Adam, instead of working stocks and filling in where needed with Rob Meeks, Miranda nearly bubbled over with good cheer. It was moderately distracting.

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

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