Page 1 of Recipe for Romance

Chapter One

~Aiden~

A warm breeze traveled through the trees of Kemp Family Farm. While the sound of rustling leaves might be soothing to his younger brother Travis, Aiden found it irritating beyond measure as he leaned back against the trunk of an apple tree. The only other sound in the large expanse of the orchard was the occasional chirping from the barn swallows. The small birds loved to take up residence in the eaves of the various buildings that dotted the land his family had owned and cultivated for the last hundred or so years. It felt as if it had been almost that long since Aiden had heard it.

The birdsong was bright and melodic, something Aiden’s mom had suggested that he listen to in an effort to ease his troubled mind, but it was doing the opposite. The sound grated on his last nerve, something that wasn’t difficult to do given his near-constant irritability, but it was worse today. Peaceful sounds of nature, the smell of damp earth, and new life in the form of nearly ripe apples made up his brother’s happy place, not his. He needed the noise and organized chaos of the kitchen to set him back to rights. Unfortunately for Aiden, that likely wouldn’t be happening anytime soon.

As he continued to stare up into the trees, the sun shining brilliantly through the canopy of leaves a stark contrast to his current mood, Aiden willed himself to find peace with that fact just as he’d willed himself to do so many other, more challenging tasks in the past. He’d graduated from high school and moved halfway across the country for God’s sake, traveled the world working at the finest restaurants, and learned from the best of the best all while becoming one of them himself. Getting over one mistake should be easy enough.

Except that one mistake had been a colossally stupid one, something Aiden could have easily avoided if he had just played the game like he’d seen so many other chefs do, but he’d been stubborn. Now that one mistake was like a hundred-pound ball and chain strapped to his ankle, dragging him down into the career abyss. Like all the other incidents Aiden tried to move past, he just ended up playing the whole episode over again in his mind.

Zoretti’s, the flagship restaurant of one of the most lauded restaurant groups in Chicago, was just the latest in the history of executive chef positions Aiden had gotten based solely on his reputation. He’d worked his ass off in culinary school and at many illustrious restaurants for years after to the point where, if he was available, Aiden had his pick of numerous prominent positions. Aiden hadn’t lived in Chicago before and thought the windy city might finally be the place where he would feel at home.

Neither New York, Los Angeles, nor Boston had felt like somewhere he could put down roots. As exciting as it had been to live overseas in London and Berlin some years back, those cities hadn’t felt right either, nor had the many places he’d traveled to during his very limited time off. The food was always amazing, but there was also something always missing from the equation that kept him moving along.

Chicago had been shaping up to give the other places a run for their money, a city where he would find the sense of permanence he’d been longing for lately. Although, he hadn’t loved the feeling of claustrophobia in his downtown apartment. Or the icy winters. Aiden had also never understood the hype over deep-dish pizza. It always tasted more like a casserole masquerading as a pizza than anything else. As much as that bothered him to an almost irrational level, it was something he could have eventually gotten over if the job had panned out.

But it hadn’t. Not six months after starting as the Executive Chef at Zoretti’s, Aiden had slipped up and gotten himself canned. Never before had he been let go from a position at a restaurant, and it took a while for the shock to wear off and the reality of his new situation to sink in. The firing hadn’t been his fault, not completely, though now that more than two months has passed since it happened, Aiden could see how it hadn’t been his best moment. Not that there were many of those anyway.

Aiden knew he was a grump. He always had been and probably always would be to some extent, but in an odd way, it had served him well in life since it stemmed from a desire for excellence. Determination was something that was instilled in him from a young age. Nolan and Cora Kemp expected their boys to always put in a valiant effort. While they would stress that it was the effort that mattered, not the result, Aiden disagreed. What was all that effort worth if the results didn’t follow? So while his mother would show him how to cook a meal and be happy as long as he tried, Aiden was only happy if he not only completed the task to her specification but also improved it somehow.

When she taught him how to make the family’s favorite pot roast, he added extra butter and pepperoncini, making the sauce richer and more flavorful. Baking a chocolate cake with her had been straightforward, but then he decided to slice it, layer it, and add a fresh raspberry compote on the side to elevate the simple sheet cake. His mother had given him the basics, and Aiden had taken those and perfected them. Perfection was something he aimed for and demanded of anyone working for him. If someone didn’t live up to his high standards, then they didn’t make it in his kitchen. Aiden had fired a fair number of people in his time, but none had brought as much ruin to his career as the last one.

All of his intense focus and the near constant striving for perfection had only made him grouchier as the years went on, so Aiden was under no illusions that he was anything other than a giant asshole. By the time he landed at Zoretti’s, his reputation as a seeker of excellence had preceded him. The staff knew exactly what he expected of them and they delivered night after night, churning out elegant dishes that had been cooked and plated with precision. If they did it with a look of fear in their eyes, well, that was fine with him. The same should have happened the fateful night of his firing, but things had gone sideways in the worst possible way.

Aiden had already been in a sourer mood than usual that evening. He’d barely slept the night before. What little rest he had achieved was swiftly cut short when dirty water had dripped from the ceiling above him and onto his face. It turned out that the bathroom of his upstairs neighbor had flooded while they were on vacation, so the entire apartment was underwater. After dealing with the building superintendent and trying to clean up the mess, Aiden had also missed his train and arrived at the restaurant much later than he liked to.

Once he’d finally made it to Zoretti’s, he saw that prep was already well underway. Aiden was eager to jump in, needing the focus that came over him when he cooked to unruffle his feathers, but then came the notice from the manager that there would be someone staging in the kitchen for the next week. Unpaid interns had always been a thorn in his paw, with their incessant questions and undeveloped skill set requiring a patience he did not possess, but Aiden tried to grin and bear it, especially since the intern in question happened to be the son of one of the restaurant owners.

Aiden had put nineteen-year-old Luca on vegetable prep, something the young man sneered at. Ignoring the kid’s attitude, Aiden tried to get on with his night. At the start of service, Aiden noticed that service seemed much slower than usual. Serving a dish more than twenty minutes after being ordered wasn’t something he would do anywhere, let alone a Michelin caliber establishment. Passing over expediting duty to his sous chef, Aiden marched toward the vegetable prep station, finding it abandoned. After a short search, Luca was found chatting with a few delivery people while he took a smoke break. Red had clouded his vision, but Aiden swallowed his anger and gritted his teeth.

Swallowing the biting remark he would normally make, Aiden tried for something more diplomatic. “You may not have been made aware, but smoke breaks aren’t to be taken during service.” Aiden knew for a fact that Luca had been told the rule, he’d overheard the conversation with the manager himself. “Get inside, wash your hands, and get back on veg.”

“Aren’t you going to ask nicely?” someone scoffed from behind Aiden.

Ignoring the insubordination, Aiden barely glanced back at the young man from over his shoulder. “No,” he replied curtly. Thinking that was the end of it, he went back inside. Little had he known, that was only the beginning of what would turn into the worst night of his life thus far.

The rest of the night devolved into one long conversation with Luca about his lack of attention to detail. The vegetable prep was slow and Luca’s cuts inconsistent, so Aiden moved him to sauces. There, Luca spent more time flirting with his station partner than he did on the work. The younger woman looked increasingly uncomfortable with the attention, so finally, Aiden told Luca to mash and cook the potatoes. After an eye roll worthy of any teenager, Luca sat at his station where he proceeded to send Aiden pot after pot of lukewarm, lumpy potatoes that he wouldn’t have served if his life depended on it. Having had enough of the younger man’s attitude and lack of work ethic, Aiden snapped.

“Just what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Aiden’s booming voice seemed to startle the young man, but instead of showing regret, Luca jut his chin out in defiance. The look of unearned arrogance was the straw that broke Aiden’s back. “Slow veg, no sauces, and now you want to send me shitty, cold potatoes that I wouldn’t serve to a dog?” Aiden shook his head in disgust. “Grab your knives and get the fuck out.”

Whatever look Aiden expected to see on Luca’s face, glee with a hint of smugness was not one of them. The eerie silence that had come over the kitchen in the seconds since his rant ended with the clearing of a throat. Aiden would never forget the sound for it ended up being the death knell of his career since the throat belonged to Luca’s father, his boss, and one of the most successful restaurateurs in the country, Gio Zoretti.

“I came back to congratulate my son on his first day on the job,” Gio said smoothly. His dark eyes were narrowed, not at his screwup of a son, but at Aiden. “May I have a word,Chef?” Behind the cool veneer, Aiden could see just how pissed off the older man was. In the moments that followed, with Aiden once again handing the reins to his sous chef and following the owner back to the office, he knew he would lose his job. He just hadn’t realized how bad things would get after that.

While Aiden could admit that a thirty-four year old man telling off someone much younger, his boss’ son no less, wasn’t a good look, Gio had known his reputation when he’d hired him, so surely the incident couldn’t have been that much of a surprise. Apparently, hearing about his perfectionist ways and witnessing them were two different things. After refusing to apologize, not only was Aiden fired and blacklisted from any restaurant owned by The Zoretti Group, but Gio had made some calls and gotten Aiden blacklisted from many other places as well.

Once word had spread through the culinary grapevine that he was “arrogant, unstable, and difficult to work with,” other rumors started to spread. Former coworkers and employees came forward with their own horror stories about the notoriously bad-tempered chef. According to their exaggerated and oftentimes fabricated accounts, his demanding perfection of himself and others had made him the villain of the culinary world. Not in an entertaining and reality show worthy way like some other famous chefs, but in an immediately fired and cancelled by nearly everyone in the business sort of way.

The month after his firing had probably been the worst of Aiden’s life. He made call after call to former employers, coworkers, and people who were ever remotely connected to a high end restaurant to try and find a job, but he’d gone from famous and in demand because of his incredible skill set to unwanted and nearly unmentionable because of how toxic his name was. Even his former teachers in culinary school, people Aiden looked up to and who helped him find internships, wouldn’t take his calls.

Aiden had become poison to anyone’s business and reputation. Just when he thought he’d seen the worst of it, he was hit with another wave of bad press. Food reviewers and bloggers who had once sang his praises were now coming out against him, unsurprised by his firing. Each one went on to detail how his food was pretentious, lacked soul, and above everything else, lacked passion. It was that last word that cut Aiden the deepest. With nothing left for him in Chicago or nearly anywhere else for that matter, he packed up his things and moved back home to Applewood.

The small Washington town was where everything had started for Aiden, so he assumed it was where he would find the solution to his problem. Aiden had always been passionate about food and he still believed that he was, but those articles had wormed their way into his brain, convincing him that maybe he wasn’t everything he thought he was. Maybe in his pursuit of perfection, he’d lost a bit of his passion along the way. If he could find it anywhere, that culinary spark that would jumpstart his stalled career, it would be back in Applewood. That being said, Aiden knew he wouldn’t be finding it in this damned orchard, so after heaving himself off the flannel blanket his mother had provided for him, he strode back toward the main house.

Apple trees with heavy branches lined his path, but they didn’t hold the answers to the questions plaguing his mind. Aiden had an inkling of what he wanted to do, but with no one willing to work with him, was it even possible? The Old Cider Mill had burnt down last month in a fire that could have claimed his brother’s life. While Aiden was grateful Beckett had come out with only a broken arm, he was also appreciative of the event itself.

The mill was a property that had been abandoned for longer than Aiden had walked the earth. It had remained a derelict monument to a bygone era where apple cider was produced in mass in the town instead of in small batches by people like his other brother, Felix. No one would touch the property either out of reverence for the past or because it was a money pit due to it being in need of some serious renovation. But since the fire had hollowed the whole place out, it paved the way for someone with a vision of what the mill could be to come along and easily turn into something else. Something like a restaurant.

---