Page 20 of The Nanny and the Hothead
And it was about to be put to the test.
“Well?” he prompted, crossing his arms.
“Do whatever the hell Chef Elliott tells you to do. And do it right. Or get out,” the sous chef replied, his words popping in sharp staccato breaths.
He nodded to the kid. “Now do it right,” he demanded.
“Chef?” came another timid voice.
Jesus Christ! Did he have to hold everyone’s hand around here?
“What?” he hissed.
It was his manager—his new manager. He’d been burning through them lately.
“There’s an issue with an order.”
Mitch glowered. “What order?”
The manager fiddled with his collar. “It appears that some special ingredients for a sandwich that’s not currently on the menu were purchased from our vendors. It may have had something to do with the new online accounting software. Maybe a glitch.”
“Maybe a glitch?” he barked back. “We don’t have glitches at the Crystal Cricket. We follow protocols. We keep our heads down, and we do our jobs. Take care of it!” he growled when the back door swung open, and a woman’s voice cut through the grinding clatter.
“My goodness, Mitch, I thought you ran a kitchen, not a platoon.”
He scrubbed his hands down his face, then released a weary breath. Still, he couldn’t help but find a bit of comfort in the voice.
“Why are you here, Ines?” he replied, meeting his publicist’s eye.
Barely five feet tall, one would be a fool to write off Ines Gordon as a pushover. While she looked like a sweet granny who set out plates of cookies and mustered up spoonfuls of marmalade, the pint-sized PR wiz was one hell of a powerhouse. She’d been with him since his big break over a decade ago. And she knew everything—one of only a handful of people who had the goods on Mitch Elliott.
She looked over her shoulder toward his office, tucked away in the back of the sprawling kitchen. “We had an appointment to chat after the Friday night dinner rush. And we need to talk, Mitch. You’re about to fuck up royally, young man.”
Oh yeah! In addition to being a cutthroat PR professional, Ines had a mouth on her and got to the point faster than it took for a snowball to melt in hell.
And dammit, she was right. He remembered seeing the meeting on his schedule. A meeting he’d been dreading. A wave of nausea nearly had him losing that awful bite of parmed-to-the-max risotto.
The jig was up.
He barked orders to his trio of sous chefs, then met Ines’s eye and gestured toward his office. Was the dinner rush already waning? He checked his watch. It was! It was easy to lose track of real time. Culinary time took over his brain when he was working. Order in. Order out. He’d surrendered to the rhythm of the kitchen. Once, this had given him a high like no other. Cooking and observing as people oohed and aahed over his creations had sustained him. It drove him to succeed and fed the part of him that grew intoxicated with the adulation. But for the last three years, he’d simply been going through the motions.
And that shit had caught up with him.
Ines stepped aside as he entered a code on a keypad next to his door. The lock clicked as the bolt disengaged. And Christ, he hated that sound. The opening. The vulnerability.
The weakness.
“You and those locks, Mitch,” Ines remarked. “I don’t think any of your employees would dare steal from you, let alone want to step foot in here,” she finished as he held the door open for her.
“The lock is for everyone. It doesn’t give anyone the chance to screw me over,” he answered, about to close the door behind them when Ines stopped him.
“Leave it open, Mitch. I like to hear the sound of the kitchen in the background.”
He stared at the half-open door, and the agitation that prickled through him earlier dialed up a few clicks. She was doing this on purpose. He’d known her long enough to catch on when she was trying to help him, trying to nudge him out of the prison he’d designed for himself. But she should know better than anyone that he was well beyond help at this point. In fact, now he was more screwed than ever.
“It’s a door, Mitch. Leave it open,” she quipped.
“Yep, a damned door,” he muttered, taking a seat behind his desk as Ines settled herself across from him in a club chair.
