by Beth Bolden
Copyright © 2018 – 2020 Beth Bolden.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, at the address below.
Beth Bolden Books
[email protected]
www.bethbolden.com
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Book Layout © 2020 Gwen Martin
Book Cover © 2020 AngstyG Book Covers & Design LLC
The people in the images are models and should not be connected to the characters in the book. Any resemblance is incidental.
Ordering Information:
Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact Beth Bolden at the address above.
Bite Me
Talented pastry chef Miles Costa is bored. Working at the celebrated Napa Valley restaurant Terroir is supposed to be the cherry on top to a promising career, but instead it's a creative desert. So when he gets an offer to turn his online video series into a career, he leaves his three best friends in Napa and swaps Terroir for Los Angeles.
With the resources now at his fingertips, turning his pastry series into a hit should be easy. Then Miles meets his producer, Evan Patterson, and realizes he’s screwed. And not even in the good way.
It's not a meet-cute . . .
Evan lives to work and loves every minute detail Miles loathes. Not only that, he seems hell bent on micromanaging every aspect of Miles' show despite the fact he knows nothing about the culinary arts. Evan doesn’t even like sweets—until Miles seduces him with a rainbow of delectable confections he can't resist.
. . . it's a collision.
With every confrontation, the intensity between them flares even hotter until they're not sure if it's hatred they feel . . .or something else. Is it possible for two people with nothing in common to discover common ground and romance?
Chapter One
The crash woke Miles up, the sharp metallic clang of stainless steel against the deeper, resonating thud of the wood floor.
Almost certain dents in his favorite copper pot—check.
Scratches in the hardwood floor their landlord would definitely freak about—check.
Bruises his roommates would inevitably punish him for? Still in question, though if Xander’s exaggerated howl of pain was any indication, Miles Costa thought those were inevitable.
“Goddamn it, Miles,” Xander exclaimed loudly, as Miles dragged his head up from where it had landed in a slump of exhaustion only a few hours before on his marble pastry slab. If he was a betting man, he’d definitely bet that the fine grain of the marble was imprinted on his cheek.
He probably shouldn’t have fallen asleep in the kitchen after filming the video, and he definitely shouldn’t have piled those pans in such a precarious pile to dry after washing them. Inspiration had struck midway through the dinner service last night, and he’d been in too much of a rush to work out the intricacies of the recipe in his head to care much about the consequences of yet another late-night/early-morning filming marathon.
“At least I washed the pans out?” Through his tired squint, Miles could just make out Xander’s disgruntled expression. He was annoyed, not pissed off, which boded well for Miles. He was also pretty sure that Xander had a few crumbs clinging to his chin, which meant that he’d already sampled some of last night’s experiments.
Having eaten one over the sink just past 4 a.m., Miles knew just how fantastic those tarts were. Xander’s forgiveness was no longer an uncertainty, but an inevitability.
“Good, huh?” Miles asked with a grin. After culinary school, working in many good kitchens, before finally moving to the great kitchen at Terroir, and then ending up with three chefs as roommates, he knew all about the culinary ego. Sure, he had one, but constantly crowing about how talented he was got exhausting. He normally preferred the food to do the talking for him—but in this case, distracting Xander from the fact that he’d used the kitchen until 4 a.m. again, was way more important.
“You film these too?” Xander asked ruefully. He reached for another tart, not even trying to be subtle.
Miles remembered when they’d first met, and Xander, all that ego barely restrained, had looked down his nose at pastry. He’d claimed to not even like sweets, but now he was chowing down on Miles’ tarts like there weren’t about a hundred more packed away in neatly stacked Tupperware.
It was particularly sweet to convert someone who didn’t appreciate his craft, just like he enjoyed bringing the skill of his craft to the masses. Even the masses who didn’t necessarily appreciate it, but watched his videos anyway.
“Of course I did.”
Xander might have been converted to liking Miles’ tarts, but Miles knew he probably wasn’t ever going to understand why he filmed himself making them, and posted them to social media. For Xander, it felt too much like a magician giving away his secrets for free.
Xander might want the cultured and erudite to enjoy his food, but he didn’t want to teach them how to make it.
He shook his head. “You’re wasting your time,” he said.
Miles was tired. It couldn’t be any later than 8 a.m.—because that was when Xander took his run every day—and that meant he’d gotten only a handful of hours of sleep on a marble slab that wasn’t quite the same as his feather pillow. He had a fierce crick in his neck, and he had to be at work in two hours for prep.
Which was why he nicked the tart from Xander’s fingers, and popped the remains in his own mouth. “But it’s my time,” Miles said, and made a shooing motion. “Now go jog like a good boy.”
Xander made a face, shrugged, and then turned away, shutting the door behind him a little louder than normal. Miles might be worried things would be weird between them, but they worked fourteen-hour days at one of the most exacting restaurants in the world, and after going through Chef’s bullshit each shift, nothing ever seemed weird for long.
Miles bent down and started gathering his pots. Yes, there was definitely a dent in his favorite copper sugar pan. Damnit. He’d just got the sink filled with soapy water so he could wash them again when his other roommate wandered in.
Wyatt was rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, but they lit up when they saw the Tupperware containers. “You filmed last night?” he asked, popping the lid off. “Oh, these are pretty. Raspberry and strawberry?”
Wyatt’s nose was legendary. He could sometimes tell the separate ingredients in a dish just from the aroma, and always by taste. Sometimes Miles enjoyed trying to stump him, but today, he just nodded, then turned back to his sink full of pots.
“Delicious,” Wyatt pronounced through a mouthful of pastry cream and flaky tart shell. “I never would have dreamt of doing just raspberry and strawberry. Mixed berry is so middle-class housewife. But you elevated it.”
Since he had his back to his roommate, Wyatt couldn’t see Miles roll his eyes. Every chef he knew believed they were as high class as the restaurant they worked with. He would be the first to tell anybody that Terroir was special, because it was. Chef Bastian Aquino had built something one of a kind deep in the heart of the Napa Valley, an
d then maintained it—which, Miles knew, was most of the struggle. But most of the chefs he knew also came from decidedly low or middle-class origins. And they wanted to forget them as quickly as possible.
But Miles had lots of good memories of his childhood, and the dreaded “mixed berry” had shown up lots of times in bundt cakes and muffins and as far as he was concerned, it was a classic. He’d just used a little of the technique he’d spent so many years perfecting to make it even better.
“Wish we could get marionberries here,” Miles said, because he wasn’t going to tell Wyatt, who was one of his best friends, that he was full of shit. He’d already antagonized Xander this morning, and he tried to only piss off one of his roommates per day.
“Chef could,” Wyatt said. Miles rolled his eyes again. Chef could get anything, because he was Bastian Aquino, and a god of American cuisine. Pans washed, he started drying them one at a time, because he wasn’t letting them air dry in a precarious pile again. His precious copper sugar pot might not survive another tumble.
“At the farmer’s market,” Miles clarified, which Wyatt must have known he meant. Chef was only vaguely aware of Miles’ “little internet experiment,” as his boss had termed it, and as far as Miles was concerned, it was going to stay that way. He wasn’t going to go around name-dropping Bastian Aquino to get some marionberries.
Wyatt might, but then Wyatt was a fucking idiot.
“They’re good just as they are,” Wyatt said complacently, which as far as Miles was concerned was Wyatt’s biggest drawback as a chef. He rested on his laurels. He made the vision in his head, and if it matched, declared it done and perfect.
Miles knew his own personal drawback was that no recipe was ever truly done. The tarts would be better with a single marionberry resting on the glossy surface of the pink pastry cream. They’d not only look better, they’d taste better too.
Putting the last pan away, Miles turned back to Wyatt. “I’m going in at eleven. What about you?”
“Just got a text. Bunch of artichokes came in. Lots of prep today. So I’m going in early.” Wyatt flashed him a carefree smile that belied the fact that he’d be spending approximately the next sixteen hours at the restaurant, deep in the bowels of the kitchen. “But your tarts were a great start. Breakfast of champions.”
“You’re welcome,” Miles said, wiping his hands on a towel.
“Go get some sleep. You look like the walking dead. And not that hot one with the bow and arrows either.”
Miles didn’t look in the mirror when he walked back to his room, but he considered it for a brief moment. He probably did look like hell, nothing like that admittedly very hot man from The Walking Dead. He should go take another catnap, but he wanted to get the tart video posted before his shift started.
He spent the next two hours editing his footage, and without even watching it all the way through, posted it to his page, Pastry by Miles. He took a lightning-quick shower, jumped on his bike, and was walking through the back door to the kitchens at Terroir right on time for his prep shift to start.
Part of the beauty of posting a video before a shift began was that there was no time to check hits or views or comments or anything at all. He was deep in prep, waist-high in white chocolate lemon mousse pyramids when René, the head pastry chef, stopped in front of his station.
René was sort of a dick, but almost all the chefs that reached his level were, so Miles mostly didn’t hold it against him.
“Did you put the rosemary in the cream while it steeped?” René asked, like Miles hadn’t been making these all summer. Terroir was considered one of the best restaurants in the world, and René wasn’t a terrible innovator—it wasn’t like they were making hot fudge lava cake or anything—but sometimes his desserts were a little obvious. Miles had also discovered the hard way that René wasn’t a huge fan of anyone having an idea other than him. If this wasn’t Terroir and the best job anyone at his level could hope to have, Miles would have left long ago, but here he still was, fielding René’s stupid questions and creating white chocolate lemon mousse pyramids.
And it should have been thyme, not rosemary, as far as he was concerned. But nobody had ever asked Miles and that wasn’t about to change.
“Yes, Chef,” Miles answered respectfully, but didn’t glance up from his work.
“Good,” René said, and then lingered in front of his station, which made Miles nervous. René lingering didn’t usually mean good things; it usually meant a great deal of unexpected work, and Miles was already tired.
“Your new video,” René said, and Miles couldn’t help but tense. René knew about the videos but he’d never imagined René might watch one.
He’d had to tell René, and René’s boss, Chef Aquino, what he was doing with Pastry by Miles, because he figured it was better to beg permission now than to be fired later. Chef Aquino hadn’t cared, because it wasn’t about him, and René had only insisted that the desserts he created be Miles’ ideas and Miles’ ideas alone.
That was perfectly fine by him, because the site had originally been created because he’d been creatively stymied at work, so he had zero intention of ever posting a white chocolate lemon mousse pyramid to Pastry by Miles.
“Yes, Chef?” Miles said, glancing up when René didn’t spit it out right away. His dark beady eyes seemed to grow even beadier. Or maybe Miles had just been up three quarters of the night baking. It was hard to say exactly.
“It was good.” René’s voice was gruff, like he could barely bring himself to say anything positive. “An innovative concept.”
So much of his job was biting his tongue, and Miles kept right on biting it. “Thank you.”
“I might mention to Chef Aquino that we could use it as a special next weekend.”
Miles had to tamp down his excitement so it wouldn’t show. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see Chef taking some poor sous apart for not cooking the scallops to perfection, but celebrating in the Terroir kitchen? Out of the question.
“That would be good,” Miles said, and because he was too tired not to, took a risk. “I didn’t even realize you watched the videos, sir.”
René had turned to move on, but looked back at Miles’ question. “I don’t,” he said. “Chef Aquino recommended I watch it. Apparently he really enjoyed it. He said he was seeing it all over his Twitter feed.”
Miles couldn’t hold back his smile at that. He might not enjoy the reign of Chef René but he very much respected Chef Aquino. And all over Chef’s Twitter feed? He knew his videos were popular, but he’d never heard of them spreading that quickly before. He wished he could put his pastry bag down and look at his phone, but he still had a good hour left and these pyramids needed to chill before the dinner service started.
He’d check his phone on his break.
When he finally finished the white chocolate lemon mousse pyramids, and they were nestled in the blast chiller, the crick in his neck was much worse than it had been that morning. Trying to stretch it out, he detoured into the tiny locker room next to the dishwashers. Grabbing his phone out of his locker, he was floored by how many notifications he had—and he’d anticipated having a ton.
Chef Aquino hearing about his video and seeing it on his timeline had been a pretty good hint that his video had gone viral. The avalanche of notifications he was trying to sort through proved it.
After fifteen minutes, Miles felt overwhelmed and for the first time ever, he was relieved his break was over. It felt like he’d barely touched the growing mountain of comments and shares and likes.
He couldn’t put his finger on why the sudden flash of white hot popularity bothered him, but as he was dusting the mousse pyramids with edible gold, it hit him.
Pastry by Miles had never been about becoming popular. It had been an expression of his creative side that had been stifled at Terroir—a necessary outlet that he paid attention to in fits and starts. He didn’t post videos weekly, or even regularly, but he must have hit a nerve because each vi
deo he posted seemed to exponentially increase his social media reach.
It was, Miles decided, a serendipitous symptom of something he enjoyed doing. He’d still record the videos if nobody but his little sister watched them.
“Costa,” a voice bellowed across the kitchen. Miles glanced up and tensed. It was Xander, his short brown hair covered by a bandana festooned with chili peppers, and he had his phone in his hand.
“What do you want?” he asked shortly, and far more quietly than Xander. It was just like Xander to believe that even in another chef’s kitchen—even in Chef Aquino’s kitchen—he could do whatever the fuck he wanted.
Sometimes Xander pushed his buttons, and all Miles wanted to do was push them back. But Miles always remembered he was a roommate and a friend, and even worse a co-worker, before he punched Xander in the face.
“You didn’t tell me you were famous,” he said, coming to stand over by the tray of pyramids. Miles set his brush on the lid of the gold dust with a steady hand.
“I’m not famous,” Miles said, even though the notifications blowing up his phone might argue otherwise.
“I don’t know,” Xander said skeptically, “when my aunt in New Jersey texts me to say she thinks our kitchen is a pit, I sorta feel like you are.”
Miles stared at his friend. “You don’t have an aunt in New Jersey.”
“But I could,” Xander said blithely.
“You’re an asshole,” Miles said, scowling as he picked his brush back up. “Now go away, I have to finish these. Don’t you have about a thousand artichokes to break down?”
“Roughly two thousand,” Xander announced cheerfully.
Miles shook his head in disbelief. Not at the artichokes—that didn’t surprise him at all because Chef Aquino was a famous perfectionist and a closet sadist—but at how happy Xander seemed to be about them.