Heart on the Run (22 page)

“
Where the hell did that thing come from?” he muttered.

“
I bought it the other day. It wraps all the way around the door, and you can hang lights and Christmas cards off it. Thought it looked cool.” Mason smiled, obviously proud of this purchase. This one was tame compared to all the others he tried to get away with.

Sprocket looked at the huge display that somehow wrapped around this side of the doorway. He hadn’t been in the dining room all night since you could easily get to and from the kitchen from the other hall. The decoration was over-the-top—Mason did pick it out—but thankfully, it didn’t have any barnyard animals or gaudy huge Christmas balls on it. Looking up, he saw a sprig of mistletoe and laughed.

“
Oh yeah,” Mason joined in, chuckling himself. “Gotcha under the mistletoe, didn’t I?”

“
Cute, Mase.” Sprocket pecked him on the cheek and headed into the main room where the party roared on.

It was gonna be a long night.

Chapter Sixteen

The kitchen reeked of garlic.

Which would have been fine, if they’d been having some sinus-clearing special or something for lunch. But they weren’t.

“
What the fuck?” Chaz put down the knife he’d been using to cut fresh French bread into thin slices for crostini. He wiped his hands on his blue apron and sniffed again. “Who’s roasting garlic?”

Macy, setting up the dining room in preparation for their eleven o’clock opening, paused, a cart full of wrapped silver and water glasses half thru the doorway. “Aren’t you making garlic soup?”

“
Garlic soup?” The idea came out of nowhere, completely alien and unwelcome. “No. I’m making creamy coconut carrot curry with toasted walnut and garbanzo bean crostini and classic turkey noodle with sweet potato cakes and cranberry relish.”

“
That’s definitely garlic.” Macy shrugged. “Maybe Dermot needs it for dinner tonight?”

“
Maybe.” Chaz frowned suspiciously at the ovens. “I’m nervous,” he confessed to the newly promoted chief of waitstaff. Macy had laughed when Dermot offered her the position, but she took the job and the responsibility for her tiny staff of two full-timers and two part-timers seriously. “This is the first time I’ve done this.”

“
What do you mean?” The buzzer on the back door chimed, and Macy leaned awkwardly over her cart to hit the lock button. The back door swung open and Melrose, a petite gothic man of indeterminate age strolled in, followed by Diego, who’d been scheduled to be there an hour earlier. “You’ve been doing the lunch menus more days than not since that party when you blew Dermot away with the mini menu. I think he’s actually pissed you wouldn’t give him the recipe you used for those beef wellington puffs.”

Chaz bit his lip and waited for the other two to pass out of hearing range. He leaned toward Macy confidingly. “It’s my first time to be in charge of the whole kitchen though. Usually, Dermot comes in, leaves instructions, and…approves the menu. Today, he just ran right through, told me to save him a vegetarian plate, and mentioned something about the ghost of Christmas past before he left.”

Giggling, Macy clapped him on the shoulder reassuringly. “Not to worry. He’s not cracking up, and you can handle this. He’s shopping for a present for Xander this morning.”

“
Yeah. I figured he wasn’t being haunted.” Not like Chaz was. Nearly a month and Halloween was still haunting him. More like, the naked image of Mason Garber meandering into the bedroom where Chaz pleasured himself haunted him. “But…it’s Black Friday.”

“
I know. I’ve fielded half a dozen calls this morning about the lunch specials already. Can you believe people want to make reservations?”

“
Really? We don’t do reservations for lunch, though. First come, first served.”

“
That’s what I’ve been telling them. It looks like the whole old-fashioned Christmas thing with the sleigh rides in the park and the pictures with Santa at the gazebo is going to lead to a pretty heavy shopping day here on the strip.”

“
I know.” He swallowed his nervousness. “It’s good, right?” The entire downtown had come to life in the past year, but
Alimentaire
had benefited most from the increased parking and the city council’s attention. There was no such thing as a slow day at the restaurant anymore, and they’d nearly doubled their staff in the last year.

“
Go on. Get lunch out to the masses. Let’s go, Melrose!” She called over her shoulder to the waiter and the two followed the clattering cart out to the table. Chaz turned back to his work, waiting for Diego to finish stripping off his outerwear and come over to him for instructions.

To his surprise, instead of consulting the whiteboard, which Chaz had meticulously filled out with the day’s prep tasks and menu, or approaching Chaz, Diego went straight to the ovens and pulled out three trays filled with foil wrapped, fragrant garlic heads.

Chaz put down his knife and crossed his arms over his chest. “What are you doing?”

Diego set the trays on the meat prep station but didn’t turn around. “Making cream of garlic soup.”

“
Cream of garlic soup is not on the menu today.”

“
I already roasted the garlic.” Diego glanced over his shoulder, and something in his eyes pricked Chaz’s attention.

He pointed deliberately at the board. “The prep list is complete. It does not say roast a week’s supply of garlic.”

Diego stared.

Chaz squared his shoulders, stiffened his spine, and drew a proverbial, metaphoric line in the sand. “Put that garlic in the cooler and start peeling the sweet potatoes.” It was a Mexican stand-off, but Chaz refused to give ground. “My menu is complete. You’d better hope that the boss has some use for that garlic for dinner tonight.”

Diego scowled. “This soup is delicious. I saw it on Top Chef and the judges raved over it. You’ll be sorry if you pass it up.”

“
Oh now, that’s just the kiss of death. Dermot will
never
serve some other chef’s recipes in his restaurant.” Shaking his head pityingly, Chaz turned back to his crostini. Out the corner of his eye, he watched Diego tip the foil bundles into a hotel pan which he then placed in the walk-in cooler. The prep cook returned a long moment later with another hotel pan laden with roasted sweet potatoes.

Chaz bent his head to arranging his toasts, satisfied that he’d established firm control of the kitchen and the menu for the day. He’d just slipped the final baking sheet into place in the walk-in when he realized that Diego had to have come into the kitchen very early to start slow-roasting the garlic. How had he gotten in? Had Dermot let him in, known what he was doing?

“
He had to have.” While Chaz was out on his coffee break, in the park, without Sprocket, on the back path, away from the gazebo. “Shit.” He slammed the walk-in door and stalked over to grab his cell phone from his coat pocket.

“
I’ll be right back. I need to make a call. After you get those peeled, fill the prep table, and get ready for the first rush.” Instead of going outside, he went out to the main dining room, around the corner and up the stairs to the landing outside Dermot’s apartment.

Dermot answered his phone on the second ring. “What?”

Quailing at the brusque tone, Chaz debated blowing it off, but decided that he had no choice. “Did you need a hundred heads of roasted garlic for something?”

“
A hundred?” Voices and muffled noises in the background drowned out Dermot’s voice for a second. “Damn it! Now look what you made me do?”

“
Uh…I’m sorry?”

“
I just bought something.”

“
Okay?”

“
I have no idea what it is.”

“
Boss?”

“
I’m at an estate auction. They had a sweet model railroad circa 1925 that I wanted to get for Xander. But it looks like I just bought a…” His voice faded.

“
What? What’d you buy, boss?”

“
An art deco ashtray. Damn. What did you say about garlic?”

“
Diego…” He felt like a kid tattling on a classmate, but persevered. “Roasted a hundred head of garlic while I was on break. Did you need that for something?”

“
No. I don’t. Why the hell would I need that much garlic for anything?”

“
Garlic soup?”

“
Disgusting. I’ll talk to him. He’s overstepping the bounds of his job description a little too much for my liking. You didn’t tell Sprocket where I was this morning, did you?”

“
No. I didn’t see him on my break.” It wasn’t a deliberate twist of the knife in a wound that hadn’t healed, probably would never heal. Just Dermot being Dermot, self- absorbed and unobservant.

“
Good. This is a surprise. I don’t want Xander guessing what I got for him.”

“
Pretty sure he’d never even think of an ashtray, boss.” Still chuckling, Chaz disconnected the call and returned to the kitchen.

Chapter Seventeen

“
My pocketbook always looks forward to this day, my back and feet never do.” Shawna laughed as she bagged another person’s purchase and waved good-bye to them.

“
Yeah, well, at least your pocketbook gets something from this madness. I get paid the same amount no matter what day it is.” Sprocket stuck his tongue out at her as he restocked the paper bags at the register stations. Black Friday was always a bear to handle, but the smiling faces and courteous customers made it worth it.

Of course, the courteous customer thing didn’t normally happen until after the first morning rush. All the holiday shoppers seemed anxious and agitated when the store first opened, but by mid-morning, they settled down, realizing that the sales were storewide for the most part and the inventory upped to handle all the demand.

“
You get my undying devotion and Xander buying everyone a late lunch today from—”

“
Alimentaire
,” Thom piped in, a huge smile on his face. “I’m picking it up at three after the lunchtime rush.”

“
He probably gets a special discount from Dermot,” Lydia chimed in from the third register. This was one of the few days they utilized all three registers. “Mrs. Mincer, I’ll help you over here.” She waved the elderly lady over to her with a smile on her face.

Shawna mumbled something about the restaurant, and the only part Sprocket heard clearly was, “Should keep his employees away from mine during the holiday season…”

She could’ve been talking about him, but Sprocket honestly didn’t think so. She would’ve looked him in the eye and said point blank what she was thinking. So she must’ve been talking about Thom and the eagerness he had to pick up lunch. He wasn’t one of her managers and tended to be more sensitive than Xander or him, so she spoke more gingerly around him. Sprocket wasn’t sure if he should be envious of the tact she showed Thom or not.

But who at the restaurant piqued Thom’s interest?
Alimentaire
had more employees than Craft Time, with all the waitstaff including hostesses and busboys. The restaurant clientele had really expanded this past year. Sprocket heard that people in all the neighboring cities thought it was a perfect date night to drive the extra way to have a romantic dinner at
Alimentaire
. Dermot even hired a part-time helper in the kitchen, Diego. Sprocket didn’t trust that guy. Xander said he’d applied for the position with minimal references but a desire to learn as much as he could and no qualms about only working fifteen hours a week. That was all nice and good, but the older man rubbed Sprocket wrong. The way he stared at Chaz—he either wanted his job or his body. Neither was up for grabs.