Chapter 1 - The Echo in the KitchenDavid’s face had turned the color of a bruised plum.
"What did you say to him?" he hissed again, his fingers digging into Tessa’s shoulder with enough force to bruise. "Tessa, look at me! If you insulted Matteo Moretti, we are all dead. The police won't even pick up our teeth from the alley. What did you say?"
"I corrected his grammar, David," Tessa said, her voice entirely flat. She shrugged his hand off her shoulder, picked up a clean stack of B&B plates, and turned toward the line.
"His grammar?" David looked as though he might hyperventilate. "His grammar? That man owns half the import houses on the eastern seaboard! He has people buried in concrete foundations from here to Atlantic City, and you gave him a linguistic critique?"
From the pass, Chef Marco leaned over the stainless-steel counter, his face pale beneath his white toque. "She’s right, you know. Moretti speaks that low-class Neapolitan slang. Sounds like a dockworker from 1950. A real Florentine education—now that’s proper Italian."
"Shut up, Marco!" David snapped, pacing back and forth on the non-slip mats like a trapped animal. "Just shut up. We need to go out there. We need to apologize. Tessa, you’re going back out with a bottle of complimentary limoncello, you’re going to bow, and you’re going to tell him you’re an immigrant’s daughter who didn't know what she was saying."
"I am not going back out there with limoncello," Tessa said calmly, sliding a ticket onto the metal rail. "Table seven wants a rare ribeye. Make sure Marco doesn't burn it, or Moretti might complain about the carbon footprint next."
Before David could scream another threat, the kitchen doors swung open.
It wasn't David. It wasn't Jenna.
It was Frank Delaney.
The giant bodyguard stood six-foot-four in his custom-tailored charcoal suit, filling the narrow kitchen corridor like an iron wall. Every cook stopped moving. The rhythmic chopping of onions ceased entirely. The sharp hiss of a sauté pan suddenly sounded deafening in the absolute silence.
Frank didn't look at David. He didn't look at the chef.
May you like
His eyes locked directly onto Tessa.
"The boss wants to know," Frank said, his voice a low, gravelly rumble that seemed to vibrate against the stainless-steel counters, "where you learned to speak like that."
