Manuel was throwing together a batch of his No-Knife Pasta. He’d shredded fresh tomatoes by tearing them apart with his fingers, then added a liberal sprinkling of torn basil and oregano leaves, some smashed garlic that already spiked the air, and a fistful of Kalamata olives, all sprinkled with red pepper flakes and olive oil. He’d mixed together the last of the day’s fresh pasta, mainly fettuccini and penne. And if Angelo had the energy, he’d bless the man because otherwise he would have felt obligated to do it himself.
He wouldn’t trade last night with Jo for anything, though eight hours extra sleep sounded awfully good right now.
But exhaustion wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was his mother, who he’d finally forced to go home an hour ago. Running Angelo’s Tuscan Hearth had evolved into a science. Open at eleven thirty and be three-quarters full for lunch, an afternoon dribble, and two seatings at dinner. Close the doors at eight, finish the second service by nine, done and clean by ten. With the shopping and prep it was only twelve to fourteen hours a day, with everyone getting a couple hours off in the afternoon or perhaps an early leave on a quiet night.
That was about the easiest restaurant job Angelo had ever had, or at least the fewest hours. Add on the two days closed every week and it was downright cushy. It also, he knew, would make his staff insanely loyal by keeping such an easy schedule.
But Maria Amelia Avico Parrano had thrown a hatchet into that the last several days. There was now a line sufficient to fill half the restaurant the very moment they opened the doors, and the tables were packed solid by noon. Afternoon was the staff’s time to shift over to dinner prep, cook the staff dinner, often they could even eat together, or run some personal errands. Now they stayed at busy-lunch levels right to the five o’clock start of dinner for theater goers. And when he’d locked the outer doors tonight, he’d still had two parties of six and three of five that hadn’t even been seated yet. They’d been more than happy to wait, especially as his mother had served them wine and complimentary hors d’oeuvres while they waited.
His mother was just too charming and too beautiful. She flitted between the cookline and the table service. When Graziella and her two assistant waiters were swamped, his mother showed up on the floor with the black pepper grinder for the patron’s salad or the parmesan shaver for their pasta. When Valerie was seasoning the soup, his mother was there to taste and give her an opinion. Angelo himself had agreed with Maria Amelia so many times that he was beginning to sound like a parrot. Even when it was his idea in the first place, her agreement with him somehow instead sounded like his agreement with her. Just trying to figure out how that happened made his head hurt all over again.
Manuel dumped the pasta into a massive colander, flipped the pasta right back into the pot and tossed in all of the ingredients. A couple fistfuls of mozzarella and Asiago then he dropped the pot in the middle of the table.
“Hey Marko!” Angelo didn’t have the energy to go and grab the kid. So he’d be both lazy and devious, killing two noodles with one fork. “Bring over some bowls and forks.”
“We gotta get some more help on the line.” Manuel dropped onto a stool.
“That’s not the problem.” He took the dishwasher-hot bowl from Marko, which would have singed his fingers if he didn’t have a cook’s calluses. “Okay that’s not the only problem.”
He nudged Graziella from her nap. “Food, Grazie.”
“You’re welcome,” she mumbled.
“Not thanking you. Eat, per favore.” He nudged her again and she came fully awake, shook her head to clear it, and tried to serve herself from the big pot. She almost lost it all to the table.
“Then what is the problem?” Manuel took the bowl from her fumbling hands, filled it, and handed it back before she noticed it was gone. Then he filled another and slid it down the table to Angelo. Angelo skidded his empty one back.
He dug in and took his first real bite of food in over eight hours, perhaps twelve hours since he’d had his mother’s cornetto. He couldn’t be sure any more.
“Oh, Manuel,” the flavors bloomed in his mouth. Simple, fresh, clean. Three spices, perfectly ripe tomatoes, and olives for depth. “You’re so good, my friend.”
Manuel was a dark Mexican from Oaxaca in the south, squat, broad-shouldered, and quiet.
“Did I ever tell you how I met this guy?” Graziella had been there, with him since before he opened the restaurant, but the others simply shook their heads.
“This guy,” Angelo took a mouthful of pasta and then aimed his empty fork at Manuel’s chest and spoke around his food a bit. “He shows up at my kitchen door. It was the same day I installed the grill and thought I was finally getting somewhere. He stood silhouetted in the back door of the kitchen.”
“‘Italian?’ is all I say to him.” Manuel joined in his own story.
“That was it, one word. When I said it was, he just nodded and walked away. I didn’t think anything more of it.”
Manuel just grinned at him.
“You were a little spooky,” Graziella told him then turned to the others. “Half an hour later he walks back into the kitchen with a couple of shopping bags from the Market. Without a word he pulls out a knife, a beautiful piece of chicken, some sherry, and three other ingredients. He just walked in and started cooking as if he owned the place.”
“That basil-mustard-lemon chicken poached in sherry was truly spectacular,” Angelo told him. “Simpler even than this, nowhere to hide any mistakes. I’d had this whole plan of interviewing and training my sous chef. Had to have at least culinary school and ten years’ experience. Manuel took the job that afternoon. A crazy Mexican who cooks Italian.”
“Want to try my Chinese?”
“Don’t even think it!” Angelo knew he’d be a goner the day Manuel left.
He laughed quietly. “Thanks boss. It’s been great. But we need help. Why you say that no hay problema?”
Angelo dug into his pasta one more time hoping to find another answer.
It was a problem and Angelo knew it. But it wasn’t the only problem. Hiring more people didn’t scare him, he had the cash flow to do that. It was the other idea that was worrying him spitless.
They all ate in silence for a minute or two while he tried to collect his thoughts. They were drooping, every last one of them.
“The problem,” he went to the walk-in cooler and found himself a beer to balance the heat of the red peppers and tang of the garlic. “The problem.”
Man! He was already in over his head, might as well go the rest of the way. He got back to the table and faced his team, they deserved to know.
“The problem is that we don’t have enough seats in this restaurant. Between the amazing cooking and service we’ve been doing, and what my mother has taught us about marketing ourselves better these last few days, there just aren’t enough seats here.”
“Well,” Valerie looked up at the ceiling. That’s where she and Vic lived, right over the restaurant. “I guess we could move.”
Manuel was shaking his head. “No! The kitchen, she matches the restaurant. If we go up, we need bigger kitchen. That fix nothing.”
“Right. What we need,” Angelo knew he was going to hate himself in the morning. “What we need is to open a second restaurant.”
The collective groan was exactly the answer he’d expected.
“But my girlfriend is moving to Hawaii,” Eugene repeated his news as if it were a protest.
“That’ll give youse more time to make fine Italian desserts.” Marlys, the grillardin, used her fake Brooklyn mobster accent and slapped her drinking buddy on the back almost making him snort his pasta.
No one quite knew how the two of them got along. Marlys hailed from a good Italian family in Brooklyn. She and Angelo had met when he was working a restaurant in Brooklyn Heights, he’d been the master of the grill then, and she’d been in charge of the fryer. When he’d started the restaurant, she’d been one of his first calls. Her lover had just dump
ed her and she leapt at the chance to move out of the city.
Eugene, was, well, to put it kindly, a slightly annoying kid from Colorado. But he made exquisite pastries.
Angelo knew they double-dated on several occasions, Eugene and Audrey, Marlys and whatever woman she was seeing at the time. On the cookline they were always talking movies or the latest hot television series that Angelo had never heard of, they were seriously into media. Eugene was also into online gaming, though not in a deep fanatic kind of way, and Marlys kept teasing him about not living in the real world. As if performing detailed analyses of this week’s shape-shifting-vampire-British-spy episode placed her on such superior footing.
“No,” Eugene planted his fork in his pasta as if for emphasis. “I’m going with her.”
That shocked the table to silence. For two years the core team had remained inviolate, except for Marko joining them just six months ago when Ricky had decided to go to college, in astrophysics of all unlikely things. To lose their patissier was unimaginable. There was no position harder to replace. Angelo was the only one who could possibly fill in, but he’d need to work full time at just pastry and he had a restaurant to run.
“Are you, uh,” Angelo struggled to find his voice and keep calm. “Are you sure?” It was also hard to imagine the sallow-faced boy in the land of sea and sun. Boy. He was four years younger than Angelo, but he always seemed to be eighteen going on sixteen.
“I was going to tell you today, but service never stopped.”
Angelo glanced at Marlys. She looked surprised and worried. Neither of them had missed the way he’d phrased it. Not, “My girlfriend and I are moving to Hawaii,” but rather “My girlfriend is moving.” Did he know Eugene well enough to point out that maybe she didn’t want him to follow her and was being too nice to say so? He remembered Heather at the CIA. She never said, “No, we’re done.” She simply kept not finding time to be with him. It had taken him a while to learn that while some women said no and weren’t listened to by the jerks, there were some women who simply didn’t know how to say no.
He opened his mouth and shut it again when Marlys shook her head. He’d leave her to delve into it. In the meantime, he’d start hunting for a new pastry chef, two of them if he was going to open another restaurant. Ye gads but his head hurt. Maybe he’d be better off if Jo went to Alaska, because whether or not Eugene remained, he wasn’t going to have time to breathe, never mind sleep or fall in love.
That shocked him bolt upright.
He never fell in love. He fell in lust. Lust was fun, healthy, and made the passage of time exceedingly pleasant.
That’s all he had with Jo. She was beautiful, enticing, and did really wonderful things to his hormone balance.
Counselor Jo Thompson was the one, again, causing him trouble. That woman was interesting, intense, brilliant, and had him near-enough hypnotized. He was definitely under her spell.
He took a bite of the now-tasteless pasta as the others began probing Eugene about what he would be doing in Hawaii, but he couldn’t hear their words.
What had Counselor Thompson done to him?
Chapter 20
“You’re a witch!”
Jo burst out laughing and completely lost her rhythm on the rowing machine. Her legs stretched at full extension, but her hands lost the handle which retracted with a sharp snap. Without the tension of the rower handle, it was hard to sit back up.
Angelo leaned over and placed a warm, solid palm on the center of her back and provided the leverage for her to sit easily upright.
She looked up at him standing beside her, a towel over his shoulder. They’d missed each other for three days in a row. First she hadn’t gone to the gym, then he hadn’t. She’d drifted by the restaurant on her way through the lunchtime Market, but the long lines told her not to risk disturbing him. At night, all she was doing was working crazy hours, then plummeting into bed.
Now they were together in the Eastlake gym.
She looked up at him and everything that she’d told herself she wasn’t feeling burst through her body in a flash of animal heat. She hoped the flush of her workout would hide the flush rising to her cheeks.
“Yes, a proud member of the order of…” she tried to come up with something witty. “The raw need for your body,” came to mind but she discarded it. “The order of legalus witchcraftia.” It was the best she had off the cuff.
He looked so good standing there. His hands casually holding the ends of the towel looped behind his neck. Sweat shone on his chest above the line of the black tank top. His arms were flexing in a way that told her he’d just finished with the weight machines.
“How did you discover my secret membership?” She felt goofy around him. He was looking at her as if he’d devour her right there in the middle of the gym floor. She was lousy at flirting with men, much better at staring them down into silence until they slunk away. But somehow she was flirting with Angelo. She tasted the salt of sweat when she licked her upper lip only afterward realizing that too could be a flirtatious gesture.
“Well,” he dropped down to sit sideways on a recumbent-cycle machine next to her rower. “My first suspicion was Cassidy.”
“Cassidy?” What did she have to do with the nice flirt they had going?
“Cassidy. When she bewitched a confirmed bachelor like Russell, I knew something was suspicious about you three.”
“The three witches of Eastlake?” She reached for her own towel and wiped at her face before draping it around her own shoulders in such a way that it hid most of the exposed skin above her sports bra.
“Something like that. At the wedding Josh Harper described you three as beauty, truth, and joy.”
Cassidy was the great beauty of their threesome and Perrin had to be joy. That left her as truth. While accurate, she could wish for a somewhat more alluring label.
“But I think he missed the mark.”
“Oh?” What was she besides truth? Hard working lawyer, no social life, no personal activities except her solo pursuit of a triathlon simply to provide focus for the one thing she ever did for herself, working out. She found a peace in wearing her body toward exhaustion, and exhilaration in discovering what she could do, but no more.
“Yes,” Angelo clearly hadn’t been distracted by her reverie. “I think that my problem with you is that you embody all three elements.”
Beauty. Truth. Joy. No one had ever called her joyous before. And while she was often labeled beautiful, none of those who did so had been interested by the deep ‘truth’ that was far more a part of who she was.
“All three?” She could become deeply attached to being seen that way. “Does that make me the head witch?”
“More the goddess template of which all others are but pale copies.”
“That does it,” she burst out laughing. “That is so over the top, Angelo. How do you come up with these lines?” She pushed to her feet and he did the same bringing them closer together. But even as he shrugged it off with a laugh, his eyes did not change. If it wasn’t a line… That possibility was not one she’d ever consider.
She stroked fingertips down his cheek.
“That’s sweet, but I am a real woman, Angelo. Flesh and blood. Not worthy of any pedestal.”
“I’d argue the point, but I’d rather see you again.”
Jo checked her watch. “I have phone conferences to Washington and Alaska this morning and this is Friday and you’re open late.”
His eyes clouded for a moment with worry, but the look was fleeting.
“We could ride together again tomorrow? I don’t want to get in the way of your training.”
Blast the man for being so considerate. Yes, she needed to ride, but what she wanted was to feel even half of what Angelo had made her feel their first night together.
“Sure, a ride sounds great.” Then the Evil Jo took over, the one with too much lust on her mind. “If you meet me on the other side of the locker rooms, I’ll give you my spare key an
d the code for the elevator. Maybe you can bring your bike over after work tonight, then we can ride in the morning.” She’d never been so forward in her life and found that she was holding her breath to see his reaction. Consciously ordering herself to breathe didn’t work, so she held on and waited, hoping he’d answer before she passed out.
He didn’t make her wait too long.
“And how in the world am I not supposed to put you on a pedestal? You’re glorious.”
Chapter 21
Angelo risked the front hall light to help him navigate inside the unfamiliar apartment. Bike, helmet, and shoes he left against the wall and crept through the entryway.
The kitchen was immaculate, so immaculate that he wondered if she used it much. A quick peek in the refrigerator revealed the answer of, “not much.” Leftover containers roughly equaled number of food products.
The combined dining and living room was almost Spartan except for one wall which was a solid, tight-packed bookshelf. Half law books and half thrillers. He looked closer, most of them legal thrillers. Clearly she was interested in nothing other than law. So what was she doing with him? A woman like her should be with—
Angelo cut himself off. Don’t go there. She should be with him, that’s who.
The room was female, but in an odd way it wasn’t feminine. Or maybe he had that backwards. It was feminine in the perfect taste that had been applied to the selection of furnishings and art. It wasn’t female in its lack of what he would typically expect: brightly colored pillows, knick-knacks, or a knit throw over the couch.
Of course his own décor was primarily a wall of cookbooks. So he wasn’t one to talk.
The perfect control of her entire world revealed yet another facet of Jo Thompson. Her car was incredible, her apartment exquisite, her personal conditioning exceptional. As a matter of fact, the only thing that didn’t fit her was that disaster she called a desk in that terrifyingly powerful office. It had looked as if a bomb had gone off there and he’d bet it was far worse by now. He hadn’t seen it in three days but he’d wager it had begun breeding on its own.
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