Under Her Clothes by Louisa Edwards

Author:Louisa Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2015-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Dinner service that night was brutal. Dominic knew it was his fault—the mood of the kitchen tended to hang on his shoulders, and when he had a bad night, so did everyone else. His staff took their cues from him.

But tonight was something else entirely. Everything that could go wrong, did. Late deliveries from vendors put the prep cooks behind on creating the base sauces and ingredients that stocked the reach-in coolers beneath each cooking station. Manny, who broke down whole sides of beef and pigs into perfect restaurant portions, called in sick and Antonio had to step off the line to do the butchering himself rather than trust it to a less expert chef. Which meant that Dominic had to duck out of his weekly profit-and-loss meeting with Eva Jansen in order to supervise the kitchen personally—which was the last thing he wanted to do.

On some level, Dom knew his only hope of avoiding a ruinous entanglement with Colby St. James was to avoid the man in question. To rebuild his defenses and quiet the panic that had surged into his throat when his brother had taken one look at Colby’s angular, boyish body and pointed features and deduced that he had a crush on Dominic. God help him. What Dominic felt was so much more than a crush. He needed a break.

Fate, it seemed, had other plans.

“No, that’s six shrimp and two scallops,” Manning called, shuffling the tickets with shaking hands. His round face was an unattractive brick red from the welter of heat and confusion the kitchen had descended into.

Despair filled Dominic as the large man who’d been disastrous as pastry chef called back, “Two scallops all day? Or two in addition to the two you ordered a second ago?”

Thank the kitchen gods, he seemed to be much better at cooking fish than he’d been at the raspberry tarts. Dominic had been keeping a mental tally of the orders almost as a reflex, after years of expediting in fast-paced kitchens, and he knew Felix Kerman had the count right. Manning, unfortunately, didn’t seem to.

Grabbing a handful of discarded order tickets off the pass, Manning shot Dominic a fearful glance before rifling through them to try to orient himself on what had been ordered, what had been fired, and what had already gone out. It was unbearable to watch, but Dominic ground down on his molars and tried to stand by as impassively and nonjudgmentally as he could. Of course Manning was a wreck of nerves and stress—he’d had to take his turn expediting with Dominic breathing down his neck instead of with quiet Antonio. Dom knew the kind of vibes he tended to throw off on a good day, and this was nowhere near a good day. He could cut Manning some slack and let the young chef try to recover. That was, after all, the point of this entire exercise.

Still, there was only so far he could let the evening devolve before he

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