Chapter Seven
Even though every fiber of his better judgment screamed at him to shut up, Adrian shoved it aside. There were conservatively a million reasons he should haul himself right back out the door, but as he looked at Teagan, her wide, whiskey-colored stare so utterly desperate, those reasons took a backseat to one simple truth.
She had a kitchen that needed a chef. And he was a chef who needed a kitchen. The sanity-sucking walls of his apartment would be there tomorrow, and he’d have plenty of time to stare at them and heal, or whatever it was he was supposed to be doing. But for tonight, he could escape, and help Teagan while he was at it.
If she’d let him.
“You know this guy?” The wiry, dark-haired bouncer next to Teagan gave him a lingering up-and-down that broadcast his disdain, but Adrian didn’t flinch.
“Uh, yeah.” Teagan blinked as if she’d just arrived in the conversation, nodding quickly. “Long story. Look, I appreciate your offer, but your arm is in a couple pieces too many to run a kitchen, isn’t it?”
His muscles tightened against the canvas sling holding his livelihood captive, but he still didn’t back down. “No more than your kitchen is short a couple of people to make it run, from the sound of things. I might be a little worse for wear, but it looks like I’m the only chef you’ve got.”
The bouncer’s brow popped into a shadowy arc. “You’re a chef?”
Adrian answered in a singular nod before swinging his gaze to Teagan, whose matching nod confirmed what he’d said.
“Still. With that injury, you can’t cook,” she said, her voice layered over with both finality and regret.
“No. But I know how to run a kitchen, and your arms work perfectly fine, don’t they?”
Her lips parted, marking her shock. As much as he hated it, he couldn’t help her by cooking. But he wasn’t useless, either.
He needed to stay busy. He needed a kitchen.
“Okay,” Teagan agreed, her surprise replaced by cool, calculated focus. “Here’s what we’re going to do. Brennan, Annabelle is covering the bar right now, but she’s got tables waiting for her, and we’re about to be slammed. I need you to take care of the bar and anything going down in the front of the house. Fake it if you have to. I’ll take the kitchen with Jesse and Adrian.”
The guy flicked a hard glance at Adrian, eyes full of doubt as they landed on his cast. “You serious with this, Teagan? It seems like a pretty big liability.”
Adrian shifted his body just enough to make his irritation clear—he could do more with one finger than this guy could do unimpaired, for Chrissake—and Teagan’s hand shot out to press against the center of his upper chest.
“Not the way we’re going to do it.” She pinned each of them with a look that mentally tacked on so knock it off before kicking herself into motion. She headed to the back of the dining room, giving them both no choice but to shut up and follow, and damn, her walk was full of purpose.
And her ass was sheer perfection in those low-slung jeans.
The bouncer shook his head as they reached the bar, muttering something that sounded suspiciously like “I hope you know what you’re doing” before leaning in to take a drink order from a curvy blonde. Teagan didn’t waste any time before aiming herself at the wood-paneled swinging door leading to what had to be the kitchen, and Adrian kept up with her, stride for stride.
“Thanks.” The word spilled out with the breath he just realized he’d been clutching in his lungs, and hell if that didn’t make him sound totally desperate.
She tossed her next words over her shoulder, auburn ponytail snapping around her face as she crossed the slick kitchen tiles beneath their feet. “Don’t thank me yet. Brennan’s right. The fact that you’re off the books is a liability enough. Add that injury to the equation, and I’m earning health and labor violations like merit badges if you so much as boil water.”
Unease flared deep in his belly. “I can still help you.”
Teagan jammed to a halt at the mouth of a rectangular galley-style kitchen, where two six-burner cooktops flanked a large, open grill along the far wall. A long, double-sided workstation bisected the narrow room lengthwise, and it looked for all the world like the entire place had exploded. Tickets curled from the printer over the stainless steel workstation in a foot-long coil, and a guy wearing a high and tight crew cut and a stone-cold expression raced between the walk-in at the opposite end of the room and the grill currently belching up an ominous cloud of black smoke.
“I sure as hell hope so,” Teagan said with a frown. “Because I’ll be honest. You don’t have much to work with.”
Adrian’s unease switched over to full-on doubt as Crew Cut jumped to avoid getting roasted by a flare-up on the grill, and the motion sent one of the burgers he’d been trying to flip skittering to the floor.
Teagan winced, but gave the guy a tiny, reassuring nod before turning back Adrian’s way. “Are you still in?”
He opened his mouth to argue with her, to tell her he could at least manage something other than the sidelines, but the vibrating pain running the length of his arm snagged his attention. He couldn’t even open a package of crackers without agonizing fanfare. As much as he despised it, Teagan was right.
Walking her through this was the best option, and from the look on her face, it was the only way she wasn’t going to show him the door.
“Yeah, I’m in. But you’re going to have to do what I tell you, no questions asked, if you want this to work. Be sure you’re good with it.”
She didn’t even blink, and God, her tenacity was hot as hell. “I am.”
His eyes landed on the guy running in circles by the grill, trying to coax burgers from briquettes. “You, too?”
He nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Well, that was a new one. “What’s your name, slick?”
The guy practically stood at attention, straightening to an impressive six-foot-one. “Jesse Oliver.”
Adrian narrowed his eyes on the darkly smoldering grates, shaking his head. “Okay, Jesse. Start with the tickets, in order. Let’s see what we’re dealing with.”
Jesse rattled off the string of orders with efficiency, but man, it was a hell of a list. Adrian took two steps toward the grill on autopilot before jerking his feet to a halt. Oh hell, this really was going to take everything he had.
“Okay. Pass that spatula over to Red here and grab me a copy of your menu. I’m a chef, not a mind reader. You got someone on dishes in the back?” He craned his neck toward the open-air dry racks of various pots and pans marking the alcove at the rear of the room next to the walk-in. A good dishwasher was worth his weight in gold, especially when things got slammed.
“That would be Jesse,” Teagan said, putting a death grip on the spatula as she took the offered utensil from the guy’s hand.
“Of course it would.” How ironic that his sanity would be saved for the night by such an epic train wreck. “Jesse, go back and give me a baseline on the dishes. We can’t plate on nothing. Run whatever you can in thirty seconds and get back up here with that menu.”
Adrian jerked his chin at the grill, his brain pulling priorities into place and searching for order in all the chaos. First things first. “Okay, Red, go ahead and waste those hockey pucks and get new burgers fired on the fly.”
Teagan hitched into motion, awkwardly scraping the char-grilled offenders to the trash and scooping their floor-bound counterpart from the thick black floor mats to join them. “Now what?”
Adrian bit back his frustration and shifted against his pain-in-the-ass sling. He could’ve had new burgers on those grates twice by now, and he prickled with the desire to set his hands . . . hand . . . whatever would do the trick without making him scream . . . into gear and just do it.
But the look on Teagan’s face reminded him that was a one-way ticket home, so he gritted out, “Just what I said. New burgers, ASAP. If the guy who left you in this jam has more than half a brain, they’re premade and labeled. Check your lowboy.”
“My what?”
“The refrigerator at your knees. And wear gloves, unless you want to get up close and personal with E. coli.”
Jesse reappeared in the kitchen with the menu, and Adrian gave it a quick skim as he put the guy on fryer duty. The kitchen was as well-stocked as could be expected for a Friday night, although they’d likely cut it close with those two ten-tops about to put orders in. At least the menu was fairly straightforward. It’d been a while since Adrian had gone the greasy spoon route, but as long as no one ordered anything totally off the wall, they’d manage.
“Aha!” Teagan popped up from the lowboy with a half-sheet pan of premade burger patties in her hands. “These, right?”
Lord. It was a wonder this woman didn’t starve to death. “Yeah. Go.” He watched as she wrestled with the plastic wrap, finally managing to get all three burgers on the hissing grill. She peeled off both gloves with a well-practiced yank before white-knuckling the oversized spatula and setting her unwavering gaze on the grates.
“They’re not gonna break into a dance routine, so go ahead and make yourself useful while they cook.” He blew out a breath. Doing six things at once was Cooking 101, for God’s sake, and they were way too jammed up for her to do one thing at a time.
But she hesitated. “You want me to just . . . leave them here?”
“It’s called multitasking, sweetheart. Make it your friend.” Adrian paused to bark a couple directives at Jesse as the guy brought up a basket full of wings, golden-brown and sizzling from the fryer.
Teagan set her mouth into a mulish line. “I know how to multitask.”
“Then put your money where your mouth is and show me,” he said, firmly in kitchen-mode. “You can start by getting that tray covered up and back into the lowboy. I wasn’t kidding about E. coli.”
For a second, she looked like she was about to light him up like the Fourth of July, and under other circumstances, he might deserve it. But that old adage about not being able to stand the heat rang true. Taking things personally in the kitchen would only nail up your coffin nice and tight.
Teagan bit her bottom lip hard enough to leave a crescent-shaped indentation on the soft, pink skin as she rewrapped the half sheet and replaced it in the lowboy. “Look, where I come from, if I turn my back on something, it usually codes. Or performs an unassisted shoulder reduction.” She leveled an obvious stare at his sling, and yeah, touché. “So I’ll do what you tell me to if it’ll get me through this, but you’re going to have to tell me everything. Unless that’s too much for you.”
The challenge in her eyes, coupled with the determination to take care of things no matter the cost, gave him an instant hard-on. He cocked his head at her, working up a slow grin. “You’re going to get what you want. Just be sure you want what you’re going to get.”
Her grip on the spatula went thermonuclear, and she met his stare head-on. “Ready when you are, Superman.”
The printout box on the shelf above her station whirred to life, spitting out a fat ribbon of paper without pause, and despite the total insanity of it, a hard shot of energy zinged through his veins.
“Well, then, flip those burgers so we can get to it. You’ve got a lot of multitasking to do.”
The next hour and a half ran by in a blurry series of slow and awkward prep to plate, but other than a couple of scrapped orders and dropped items, they didn’t run into anything disastrous enough to sink them. Teagan’s kitchen skills were pretty freaking abysmal, all elbows and stress and wasted movement, and he’d had to fight that overwhelming urge to relieve her of her spatula more than once.
But besides the fact that all that movement would’ve reduced his torso to Silly Putty, it also would’ve earned him a one-way ticket out of Dodge. Spending these few hours in Teagan’s kitchen, while unorthodox as hell, really had saved him from losing his marbles tonight. She’d let him stay even though she probably shouldn’t have, and he’d owed it to her to keep his word and stay on the sidelines.
Man, he hated the sidelines.
“Please tell me that was the last order for the night.” Teagan groaned, her eyes trailing the waitress who’d just snapped up two plates from the hot window. Even Jesse, whose emotions seemed to run from poker-faced to impassive, let some hope flicker across his face at her words, and Adrian had to admit, he, too, was glad they were finally on the downswing.
“You tell me, Red.” His arm smarted like a sonofabitch, and the rest of him wasn’t far behind. Still, whether or not they were done wasn’t his call to make.
Her brows snapped together, and the coppery wisps of hair that had jogged free of her ponytail fluttered over her confused stare. “Huh?”
“Chef decides when the kitchen’s closed.”
“Okay.” Teagan extended the word as if it were a question. “You’re the chef.”
He shook his head. “Not tonight, I’m not. You were on the grill. It’s your call.”
“Oh.” She split a startled look between him and Jesse. “Well, I guess if there are no more orders in, then yeah. The kitchen’s, um, closed.”
Good thing, because the place looked like a culinary Jackson Pollock. On crack.
Adrian exhaled, long and slow. “You ever break down the back of the house before?”
“Not really, no. Lou and my father usually do it.”
Jesse stepped up, speaking for the first time in easily an hour. “I’ve seen them break it down. And I can start running the dishes, which is half of it.”
“That’s definitely a start,” Adrian said, watching the guy head toward the back of the kitchen. Without warning, his stomach let out a wail, reminding him that he’d been long overdue for sustenance when he’d walked in here two hours ago. The thought of eating had quickly been pushed to the back burner at the prospect of helping Teagan in the kitchen, but rather than idling at overdue, now his hunger had reached total foreclosure.
And it was enough to make his legs unsteady.
Teagan’s eyes narrowed on him, and he braced for impact. “You must be exhausted. And starving. Did they give you a ’script for pain?”
He got halfway through his shrug before he remembered the gesture was a bad idea. “Yeah, but I haven’t taken it in a while.”
She took a step toward him, missing nothing as she did a critical once-over from head to toe. She shook her head, muttering something about low blood sugar being an epidemic lately. “You look pale. Come here.”
“I’m good.” Dark spots danced across his vision, threatening to out him. “Maybe a little hungry.”
“Mmm-hmm.” In a flash, Teagan was next to him, his good hand flipped up in the circle of her fingers while she called Jesse back up from the alcove.
“I told you I’m fine.” Jeez, she was sneaky! Usually he was pretty aware of stuff like that—you tended to learn decent evasion tactics in prison—but between his lack of sleep the last two weeks, this morning’s accident, and his negative food count, he was just out of sync.
“What’s up? Everything okay?” Jesse asked, forehead creasing as he caught sight of Teagan doing her little look-see.
“It’s going to be. Can you please tell Brennan I’ll be upstairs for a minute? I have something to take care of.”
The guy nodded and disappeared, leaving Teagan to hit him with a high-level frown. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?” And more importantly, why were his traitorous feet following her without getting the pertinent information? Damn, his body ached, and those black spots were getting bigger and kind of swirly.
“To the office. I want you to sit down.”
“I don’t want to sit down.” The argument lost its steam somewhere between concept and execution, and it fell from his lips more like a plea than anything else. Fuck. When did he get so tired?
Teagan gently prodded him toward the door between the dishwashing alcove and the walk-in, and up a set of dimly lit stairs. “Too bad. If you pass out on me, we’re right back to liability territory. And anyway, you just took care of my kitchen. The least I can do is take care of you.”
“I can . . . take care of myself.” Adrian’s feet felt sloppy beneath him as he followed her into a shadowy room at the top of the steps.
“Uh-huh. You sound like it.” She hit the light switch with the flat of her hand, the soft illumination revealing a small, appropriately cluttered desk and office chair combo, along with the most unsightly couch he’d ever laid eyes on.
“Whoa. That’s, ah. Orange, huh?” The thing was a Muppet, only slightly less subdued.
“Do not mock my office couch. What it lacks in style, it makes up for in comfort.” She nudged him to sit, and he was vaguely aware of Jesse poking his head through the door. He murmured something to Teagan, who answered him in hushed tones before he disappeared back through the entryway.
“Okay. Here we go.” She grabbed a bottle of water from a dorm-sized fridge next to the desk, cracking the cap as she maneuvered back to the orange monstrosity. Rather than sitting down at his side, she knelt in front of him, propping one elbow on the nicked-up coffee table. “Drink this.”
Adrian was shocked to discover he was actually parched, and the ice-cold water slid down his throat as he took a long sip, then another. “You don’t have to sit on the floor.” He might be rough around the edges, but even exhausted, he could call up a little decency. Teaching him good manners had been his nonna’s first order of business when he’d gone to live with her at the ripe old age often, followed closely by teaching him how to cook.
God, he missed her.
“Thank you,” Teagan said, looking genuinely surprised at his niceness. “But I’m okay right here.”
Realization hit him slowly, but with surety. “It’s easier for you to watch me this way, isn’t it? Make sure I don’t keel over, and all that rot?”
A smile eked past her heart-shaped mouth, and she motioned for him to keep drinking. “Maybe.” She took a deep, audible breath before coming out with, “You saved my ass tonight. I really don’t know how to thank you.”
“You just did.” He wasn’t about to tell her the feeling was mutual. She’d probably think he was a total freaking wing nut. “But I really should be downstairs telling Jesse how to break down your kitchen.” Of course, every one of his limbs blackballed the idea, and the bone-weary exhaustion kept him pinned into place on the cushy, extra-wide couch.
“Jesse knows how to run dishes, and I have to stick around and help Brennan until last call anyway, so I’ll make sure everything gets cleaned and put away.” She took the empty water bottle from his hand, getting up to replace it with another.
“Yeah, but you need to prep for tomorrow.”
“And you need to eat something and take your medicine. If the hunger doesn’t get you, the pain will. Trust me when I tell you, you don’t want both of them to gang up on you now that you’ve stopped moving.”
A knock on the door punctuated her words, and before he could argue, Jesse materialized with a plate in one hand and Adrian’s leather jacket in the other.
He held up the plate, looking uncertain. “I made this. It’s, uh, ham and cheese. Nothing special, but I figured protein would be good if you’re feeling out of it. The fries are hot, so be careful. And thanks for all your help tonight.” He hung the jacket by the door and put the plate on the coffee table in front of Adrian before retracing his steps toward the exit.
“No problem, man. Thanks for the food,” he said as Jesse disappeared for the second time in ten minutes. Adrian eyed the sandwich, then Teagan. “You’re not going to get up from the floor until I eat all of this, are you?”
This time, she couldn’t catch her smile before it flashed out. “Only to get you something to manage that arm.” Her eyes flitted to his jacket, outlining her unspoken question.
Adrian gave in, too tired to argue. “Inside left-hand pocket.”
Teagan produced the orange bottle and doled out two pills big enough to choke a grizzly bear. “These first, food on top.”
He obliged, mostly because he’d bet she was serious about growing roots in the area rug until he did. The sandwich was a little dry and definitely plain, but it was the best thing Adrian had tasted in weeks, and it took all he had not to hoover it and the fries in about three seconds. Teagan waited patiently for him to eat, not breaking the comfortable silence between them until he was nearly done.
“Why didn’t you say anything about being hungry?” she asked, and he swallowed his last bite before answering.
“Kitchen’s more important.” It was easier than trying to explain the weird dead-zone focus he felt when doing his job. He’d been surrounded by food for the last two hours, yet the angry pangs of hunger had hit the skids as soon as he’d seen those tickets needing to be filled.
Teagan nodded, tucking a strand of disobedient hair back into her crooked ponytail. “It sounds kind of crazy, but when I’m on a call, I forget I’m hungry. Or tired, or mad at someone, or whatever. I’ve done twenty-four-hour tours at the station where I barely ate a crumb, but I didn’t notice until after they were over.”
Surprise ribboned through him at how well she’d just summed up the thoughts he hadn’t shared, but his head suddenly felt too heavy to even nod in agreement. “Yeah. I’ve done that.”
“They say it has to do with the adrenaline. Me, I think it has more to do with the adrenaline junkies doing the job.”
Man, her eyes were pretty in the low light filtering over from the desk lamp, all glittery and golden-brown, like sunlight shining through a stained-glass window. He wanted to keep looking at them, but his own eyes were so leaden, they just kept blinking.
“Adrian?” Teagan’s voice was right there, but detached, like he was above her. “Oh hell. I should’ve known this would happen.”
“Hmm?” He really had to keep his wits about him. He had to focus. Keeping his eyes open would be a good start.
“You’re exhausted,” she said, and somehow he managed to start floating as she spoke, which would be kind of creepy if it didn’t feel so good. “And after your reaction to the Fentanyl earlier, I . . . God, I never should’ve let you do this.”
“No.” Okay, so at least that one made it out of his mouth. “I’m just . . . I only need a minute.” One minute. Then he’d get up and go back to his quiet apartment with its even quieter walls. The woodsy scent of rosemary layered in with more familiar kitchen smells covered him like a blanket.
Wait, that was a blanket. Hold on . . .
“Get some rest, Adrian.” A hand skated over his face, the sensation lulling him even further into oblivion until everything went completely, blissfully dark.