An opening in the back right corner must lead to the dry-goods pantry, where things like sugar, flour, honey, and rice lived, and the walk-in coolers that housed eggs, milk, proteins, and veg.
Three of the Lunden’s Tavern kitchen could fit in the main room alone, easy. Maybe four if you counted the pantry and walk-in areas.
Danny’s guys, used to the complicated choreography of moving with one another in the cramped confines of a Manhattan restaurant kitchen, weren’t going to know what to do with all the extra elbow room. He worried that it would be a major stumbling block. He worried that they’d get lost, lose their drive and intensity, in the open air of the high-ceilinged room.
But most of all, he worried that the unblinking lens of the video camera glaring from the front of the room would spell disaster.
So much could go wrong. Danny pressed his lips together and rolled his shoulders, cracking the tension from his neck. He’d just have to make sure to keep everyone together, pointed in the right direction, and going strong. The same thing he did every night at dinner service back home, basically, only this time in front of three renowned celebrity judges, a camera crew, and the woman whose flashing gray eyes and delicate floral scent haunted him.
That perfume she wore was the only delicate thing about her, Danny mused, finally letting his gaze fall on the one person he’d been studiously avoiding ever since entering the room.
Eva Jansen stood at the front of the kitchen in deep consultation with a schlubby guy with a mustache, wearing a wrinkled short-sleeved button down, and a headset. She’d already been here when the teams started filing into the competition kitchen, giving marching orders to that slight, willowy assistant of hers, Drew something with the black-rimmed Ray-Ban glasses and even blacker hair.
Danny remembered Drew from the regional finals, because Win had struck up a friendship with the guy. Maybe more than a friendship, Danny remembered thinking, although Win denied it now, said it was all casual, just for fun, shrug, no Big deal.
Eyes sliding from assistant to boss, Danny watched the way Eva moved, purposeful and powerful in a dress red enough—and tight enough—to stop the traffic on Michigan Avenue.
With the memory of that superheated kiss playing through his mind, Danny had a hard time understanding how to turn anything that felt like this into casual fun.
Fun? Hell yes. Casual? Not unless the definition had recently expanded to include the unquenchable desire for more—more touch, more kisses, more skin, more breathy little noises panted in his ear. More of Eva.
And that was exactly the problem, wasn’t it? Danny had no idea how to be casual, but he suspected that when it came to matters of the bedroom, Eva “The Diva” Jansen was rarely anything but.
Not that she looked all that casual at the moment. That body-skimming dress was cinched in with a shiny black belt that matched her shiny black shoes with the pointy toes and even pointier heel. With her glossy dark hair and flawless face, she looked ready for that camera to zoom in on her at any second.
Although she should probably take a minute to replace the aggravated scowl with one of those big, toothy smiles people on TV were so fond of. She had nice teeth, Danny had reason to know.
He didn’t have time to consider what might be going on with the television guy to put that wrinkle between her perfectly arched brows, because at that moment Max reached the conclusion of his motivational rah-rahing, and Danny had to tune back in long enough to clap him on the back and shake hands with everyone.
“Yeah, what he said,” Danny put in, with a wide smile. “We rock. We got this. Let’s go out there and show them New York City is home to the best chefs in the world!”
Max blinked. “Or … I could’ve saved my breath with the ten-minute cheerleading session and just gone with that. Thanks, Danny.”
“But it’s not in the bag yet,” Jules warned. Always a worrier, his Jules, Danny thought fondly, before Max looped an arm over her shoulders and Danny remembered, oh yeah, she wasn’t really his Jules anymore. Not that she ever had been.
“Aw, Jules,” Winslow whined, nearly levitating out of his sneakers with excitement. “I’m all pumped now, can’t we save the reality check for later, after we kick some ass?” Danny shot him a tense, narrow look, prompting Win to hold his hands up in surrender and add, “Culinarily speaking, of course. Metaphorical, hypothetical, allegorical ass. Whatever—not the real deal. Because fighting is all kinds of wrong and violence solves nothing, and all that jazz.”
Danny relaxed back onto his heels, glad Win remembered their little chat from the night before. It was one thing to defend his guys against outsiders, but when it came right down to it Danny wasn’t putting up with any nonsense that might get them kicked out. He just couldn’t have it. And now both Beck and Win understood why.
“No, reality can’t wait,” Jules said, impatience in every line of her tall, athletic body. “This is the big times, and we’re up against the best of the best from around the country. Come on, what do we know about them?”
Under normal circumstances, Jules Cavanaugh would’ve made sure the Lunden’s team did a background check on its competitors that would rival the best FBI profilers. She’d always been a big believer in knowledge as a source of power; she loved information, learning knew things, and putting them to good use.
In the weeks since the Lunden’s crew had been named the East Coast Team, however, she’d fallen down on the job a little. If Danny were forced to guess—and if it weren’t a gag-inducing image—he’d have to say that his old friend was probably learning a lot of new stuff and putting it to use. It was just that she was mostly learning new ways to make Max even more ridiculously smitten than he already was.
Ever since the other chef contestants had been announced, Danny had intended to look up more about them than the widely publicized names of the restaurants they hailed from, but in the frantic rush to get Lunden’s Tavern staffed for the absence of its core group of chefs, there hadn’t been time.
Family lore held that Max had inherited their father, Gus’s, passion and drive, while Danny took after their mother, Nina, whose infallible judgment about people made her the family’s de facto head of hiring.
With Max and Jules distracted, Gus out of commission after recent heart surgery, and Nina spending more time than usual taking care of him—to the extent the grouchy bastard would let her—most of the prep for this adventure had fallen to Danny.
Yeah. Even in his head it sounded like a lame excuse for not knowing more about the chefs they were about to pit their skills against.
Shame licking at his insides, Danny scrutinized the other teams arrayed against the rows of tables.
“The row behind us has got to be the Southwest Team,” Win muttered out of the corner of his mouth, eyeing the colorfully striped fabric of their knife rolls and the sun baked tan of their skin.
Danny nodded in agreement. “All I know is that their restaurant’s called Maize, they’re from Santa Fe, and Paulina Santiago is the head chef.”
The only woman on the Southwest Team was short and plump, with a pleasant, round face and kind eyes at odds with the battle-scarred thickness of her broad fingers as they competently arranged her knives along the side of her cutting board.
In a sudden flash, Danny wondered if this was the woman whose name Beck had been unable to bear hearing trash-talked by Ryan Larousse. But a quick study of Beck’s dark, impassive face made Danny think Paulina Santiago wasn’t the reason behind the fight. Although, the way Beck stood, with his feet apart and his arms crossed, he did sort of appear to be bracing for impact.
“I know the guy heading up Team South,” Max said, nodding at a tall, lanky chef with a buzzed head and striking blue eyes standing two rows back. “Ike Bryar. He’s fierce, I went up against him once in a head-to-head at the Edinburgh Food and Wine Festival. Good guy. Good knife skills.”
In kitchen lingo, that was almost redundant.
Danny considered the other players on the sou
thern squad. Couldn’t be anyone on that team who’d lit that fire under Beck—no female chefs filled out their ranks.
The fourth row of tables, in front of the bored, leaning Midwest crew, was empty.
“Guess the West Coasties are late,” Jules observed. She had her eyes on the wall clock ticking down the minutes to eight am, their appointed kitchen call time, so she missed Beck’s minute flinch.
But Danny’d been watching for it, hard enough and close enough that he jumped like a popcorn kernel hitting a hot pan when it happened.
Okay, he told himself. Calm down. This is good. Now at least you know what direction the storm is rolling in from.
He snuck a peek at Eva Jansen, who was also watching the clock. Making a little pout with her mouth—Jesus, was that the best she could do with a frown on those plumply curved lips of hers?—she checked the time against the slim watch on her wrist.
The click of her heels was muffled against the cork flooring as she strode to the center of the oasis of empty kitchen space between the camera and the chefs’ tables.
“Does anyone know where the West Coast Team might be?”
A nasty chorus of laughs from the back of the room had Danny tensing right along with Beck and Winslow.
“Maybe their team captain had a … rough night.”
Danny didn’t need to turn around to know that sly, insinuating voice belonged to Ryan Larousse. For one thing, he slurred the p in captain a little, as if his mouth were too sore to make the sound properly.
For another, he’d seen that exact same look of exasperated impatience on Eva’s face when she was dealing with her star chef yesterday.
Instead of addressing Larousse, however, she put her hands on her hips and scanned the room. “Does anyone have anything useful to contribute?”
A clatter at the kitchen door had every eye—including the camera—turning to catch the entrance of a ragtag band of chefs unlike any Danny had ever encountered.
Most kitchen crews were rough around the edges. They tended to be made up of outsiders and outcasts, people who didn’t make good office drones and didn’t care too much about conforming to “normal.” Of the chef contestants standing in the Limestone kitchen at that very moment, at least ninety percent of them sported body art of some kind.
This new group? Put them all to shame.
Clearly they’d never met a tattoo or a piercing they didn’t like, but even more than that, they gave off an almost palpable air of different.
From the lean, whippy Asian guy with orangey red dreadlocks down to his waist, to the gypsy-skirted, bangle-ankleted strawberry blonde with the killer curves filling out a faded blue T-shirt emblazoned with a stylized crying sun and the word sublime, they didn’t look like anyone Danny knew.
And coming from New York City, he thought he’d met all kinds.
“I’m so sorry we’re running behind,” Strawberry said, hurrying toward Eva with her hands outstretched. “It’s totally my fault. I slept right through the alarm on my phone—I must’ve been exhausted!”
A loud, derisive laugh shot from the back of the room, and Danny put a cautionary hand on Beck’s arm, just in case.
“I take it that’s her,” he said under his breath.
Beck didn’t answer, but the granite tension of the muscles under Danny’s palm spoke for him.
Confusion crumpled Strawberry’s pretty face for a moment as she sought the source of the cruel laughter, but that sunny smile came back out when Eva distracted her with a bright, “Don’t worry, you’re not too late at all! Nothing officially starts until eight o’clock. And the judges aren’t even here yet!”
With a quick, warning glance at Danny, Eva took the woman’s arm and started to lead her, and her band of misfits, to the open row.
I’ve got it under control, Danny tried to tell her with his eyes, something in his chest warming at this moment of silent communication and teamwork.
But, as it turned out, Danny had nothing under control. Because from the minute the pretty hippie-lady chef passed by the Lunden’s table and turned her head far enough see Beck, all hell broke loose.
And there wasn’t a damn thing Danny could do to stop it.
Chapter 8
Okay, so far so good, Eva told herself, tugging at the arm of the executive chef of the Queenie Pie Café and resolutely keeping her gaze away from the cameraman in the corner.
All chefs were finally present and accounted for, and presumably ready for action. Now if the judges would just show up before Ryan Larousse had the chance to continue his campaign to turn every single one of Eva’s hairs gray.
She had no idea what had caused the bad blood between Larousse and the teams from the East and West. Coastal envy? She didn’t know, and she didn’t care, so long as she could get her competition off the ground without any further drama taking the focus off the—
Eva looked down at her empty hand, then back a few paces to where Skye Gladwell, the final addition to the pool of contestants, stood staring, openmouthed and wide-eyed, at the Lunden’s Tavern team.
“Henry?”
Eva didn’t miss the way every head at the East Coast table swiveled to take in their teammate. “Hold up, who the hell is ‘Henry’?” Winslow demanded, but no one looked at him.
Skye Gladwell lifted one trembling hand toward Beck, but didn’t touch him. “Is that really you?” Her voice was disbelieving, as if she couldn’t trust the evidence of her own eyes.
Eva took a suspicious inhale and frowned at the West Coast chef nearest her, a stocky man wearing a canvas artist’s smock and eau-de-marijuana. If Skye had been hitting the hash pipe as hard as her sous chef here, she was probably right to doubt what her wide, shocked eyes were telling her.
Except that the tall, dark chef Skye stood blinking up at happened to be the same one who’d gotten into a fistfight the day before—and the stony look on the guy’s face couldn’t quite hide the flash of recognition in his black eyes. Recognition and something more dangerous, Eva thought.
“Skye.” The tall chef acknowledged her with a nod.
“I didn’t know you were going to be here,” Skye said, sounding dazed.
“Surprise.”
Eva’s gaze snapped back to Skye, making her realize that she, along with everyone else in the kitchen, was following the tense exchange like a match point at Wimbledon.
Uh-oh. Is the camera already rolling?
“Oh my God,” Skye muttered, red spreading up the back of her neck, all the way to the tips of her ears. “This is unreal. I can’t believe you came.”
A sly voice from the back of the room called out, “I bet that’s not what you were saying last night! Boo-yah!”
Eva had seen Beck in full fighting mode the day before, but it was still startling to watch the berserker rage take him over.
“You piece of shit,” he snarled, turning and lunging toward the back table as if he’d hurdle all the tables and chefs between him and his prey.
The Midwest guys followed Ryan Larousse into a round of loud, jeering laughter, while the chefs at the front table exploded into action, trying to keep Beck under control, and the tables in the middle erupted with excited chatter. In the blink of an eye the entire kitchen was in an uproar.
“Stand down, Beck, come on,” Danny commanded, getting one arm around his teammate’s straining chest to hold him back.
Eva took a moment to appreciate the way the muscles and tendons stood out along Danny’s hard forearm before shaking herself and sticking two fingers in her mouth. But her usual earsplitting whistle barely made a dent in the fracas.
Just as Eva was wondering whatever happened to that air horn her father had insisted she keep in her purse when she went off to college, the three judges walked into the kitchen, and the torrent of conversation stopped as if some giant hand had brought down a cleaver.
Skye Gladwell and her crew scurried to their places, not making eye contact with anyone, and Eva telegraphed a warning to Danny Lunden, who managed
to unobtrusively wrestle Beck to a standstill in the front row.
Intensely aware of the cameraman, who was suddenly standing behind his camera and avidly filming rather than slouching around looking bored, Eva let her biggest TV-ready smile spread across her face, checked to make sure her mike was hot, and stepped forward to greet the judges.
Time to get this situation under control, before the Rising Star Chef competition turned into a three-ring circus.
Danny met Eva’s gaze and for one blazing moment of connection, he knew they were thinking the exact same thing.
Let’s get this show on the road.
Apparently, the judges were of the same mind-set.
“Welcome to the seventeenth annual Rising Star Chef Competition,” said the celebrity chef judge, Devon Sparks, to a round of applause. He flashed his gleaming grin, dimple winking into view, and vamped to the camera a little bit. Even though he’d recently quit his mega-hit TV show, playing to an audience was clearly second nature.
“You’ve all worked hard to get here,” Sparks continued, warming to his theme. “You beat out hundreds of chefs in your regions of these great United States for the honor of competing today. This is the chance of a lifetime—the chance to prove yourself the best of the best. And make no mistake, Chefs, that is the true prize.”
“Although, let’s be honest,” the other male judge, Kane Slater, drawled with a winning smile. “The actual prizes are pretty much made of awesome.”
Kane Slater wasn’t a chef or food professional, of course, but he was one of the most famous amateur foodies around. Given the teeniest opening, Winslow would rattle on for hours about the rock star’s legendary feasts and food-themed costume parties.
Some people had questioned the choice of Kane as a judge, but Danny didn’t have a problem with the guy. He’d certainly seemed to know his stuff at the regional competition finals.
Although when Eva threw the blond-haired, blue-eyed rock god a wink and a wave out of the camera’s sight line, Danny thought he might have to revisit that opinion.
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