HungryforMore




Good bread is better than the most expensive cut of meat.

—JAMES LACHANCE, Meal of a Lifetime,THE MENU: BEFORE THE MEAL

Chapter 20


First seating was over, and the second was hitting the kitchen like a tsunami. The kitchen staff whirled in the steam and heat. Roni lifted two plates off the warmer, and James slid two more into their places before she had turned away.
“Nice to have you back,” James said. He noticed that her hands were steady, but she was still pale.
“Nice to be back,” she said as she backed into the swinging doors.
It really was great to have Roni back. No one else in his kitchen was polite.
“Fire two Josies. Go soup on four,” Burt called.

Keep the mind on the food . If Burt was calling dishes, then he was falling behind. James was working the line on the rotisseur station, handling the sauté. In his kitchen, it was the most complicated spot on the line. He had to make up to twelve different dishes with eight roaring burners and a finishing oven blasting high heat. If he let his mind wander and missed a plate, he could bring the whole kitchen to a screeching halt. You couldn’t serve a table of six if one Duck L’orange was missing. The whole process stopped, the food waited, cooled, congealed, curdled. An entire table ruined because he couldn’t get his mind off the gorgeous Gypsy who was probably right this moment stealing everything he owned while he slung pork medallions.
Not that he cared much about his stuff. Most of it wasn’t even his. Leftovers from the chef who had lived there before and who had split for France at a day’s notice—a chance to work the line in Louis Blanche’s kitchen. If it had been James’s stuff, he’d have thrown every damn book out the window the first day. Every last stinking pillow. He’d sleep, curled up in front of his stove, the memories of another successful night at Les Fleurs lulling him to sleep.
He just hoped Amy had the decency not to touch his knives.
Burt called, “Chef, where’s my lamb?”
James put his head down and stared at the eight sauté pans. Twelve more pans stood to the side at the ready, waiting their turns for heat. He never made a mistake.

Except for maybe the woman in my apartment, waiting for me tonight .
He pulled the lamb, perfectly done, from the finishing oven, plated it, garnished it, and slung it into the window. Perfection.
Amy awoke with a start.
James stood in the doorway, the door to the hallway still open behind him, staring at her as if she were a ghost.
The cookbook she had been paging through when she fell asleep tumbled to the floor with a thud. She rearranged herself on the leather couch. Had he forgotten she’d be there? “Hi.”
“Found the place okay?”
“No problem.”
“You like it?”
“It’s nice.” Except that I hate it.
“You hate it.”
She tried to cover. “What kind of American has no TV?”
“A guy who would skewer that rat-bastard excuse for a chef Emeril for a loaf of bread. Can’t stand watching that man and all his cohorts.” James closed the door behind him. “Well, I sort of like Rachael Ray. Except when she tries to cook.” He hung his coat in the entry closet, then came into the room and picked up the cookbook. He put the book on the coffee table, picked up the empty wine bottle, and raised his eyebrows at her.
“I was gonna come by and help out tonight, but I started with the wine. When you start with the wine, the rest never quite gets done.” Amy stretched. She glanced at the clock. It was two in the morning.
James looked freshly scrubbed. He had changed out of his chef whites and was wearing his jeans and a green long-sleeve T-shirt. Looking at James made Amy hungry. For food, also. He was a curious combination in a man, the food-sex provider in one very lovely package, pleaser of the tongue extraordinaire. . . .
Egad, listen to her. She was drunk. The problem with hanging out with pretend friends like Oprah was that you kind of felt like you were sharing a bottle, when really you were just scarfing it yourself. She stretched out her sleepy muscles again. “I’m starving.”
“It’s two in the morning.” He sat in the armchair across from her, sinking into it as if it were a bed. He closed his eyes. The effect was languid and sexy.
She longed to curl up in his lap. She was, after all, his muse. Didn’t muses curl? Now that he was here, with her, her fears melted away. All she wanted was him.
“We were packed. We could’ve used your hands.”
“You were glad I wasn’t there so I couldn’t spill anything into anyone’s lap.”
He opened his eyes and smiled. “You do have special psychic Gypsy power, don’t you?”
“What have you heard?” she asked, trying to keep the alarm out of her voice that he had triggered with the word Gypsy.
He cocked his head at her. “Nothing. Why?”
Good. Roni hadn’t spilled her guts about the voice. Amy hoped he wouldn’t start asking her about Gladys Roman again.
She got up off the couch, stretched, and kissed him on the forehead as she passed him on her way to the kitchen. Trace aromas of the restaurant rose off his skin, garlic and seared meats. Thank God another chef handled the fish station. She didn’t think she could be the muse of a fishy chef.
James followed her into the kitchen. “You’re wearing my pajamas,” he said.
She looked down at his cozy brown flannels and shrugged. “So? Buy me lingerie if you’ve got a problem. I’m starving.” She went to the cabinets and got out a box of spaghetti. She began reading the instructions on the side of the package.
“My pajamas never looked so good.”
She felt him watching her, heat rising inside her.
“Are you reading spaghetti instructions?” he asked.
She turned and leaned against the counter and squinted at the directions. “Does eight to ten minutes mean eight minutes or nine or ten? They make it so confusing.”
He shook his head in dismay and took the package from her. He put it back in the cabinet. “Sit.” He put a pot of water on to boil, grabbed some garlic off a hanging vine of the stuff, and crushed it slightly with the blade of his knife, just enough to make the peel fall away like clothing.

Me next, please.

She watched him transform the misshapen garlic into paper-thin slivers. How did he do that? He got out a small sauté pan and put it over the heat.
Warmth spread through her, as if by heating the pan, he was also warming her. “I can’t remember the last time someone cooked for me,” she said, surprising herself with how empty and sad the revelation made her feel.
“Me neither,” he said. He pulled a container out of the freezer, then a stick of butter out of the enormous chrome fridge. He picked a few fuzzy green leaves off a plant on the counter. He washed the leaves and began to tear them.
The water was boiling, and he dumped in a hunk of frozen white rocks, not even glancing at the clock or setting a timer. He unwrapped the butter and dropped the entire stick into the sauté pan, an act that shocked her with its recklessness. It wasn’t like she was a dieter, but she knew the dangers of an entire stick of butter. No wonder this guy is excellent in bed. I mean, in the kitchen. He’s a madman.
He salted the pan and watched the butter melt, prodding it with his wooden spoon. It was as if he were God, creating a new universe to his pleasure in the tiny pan. He threw in the garlic, then a handful of the leaves and watched them curl away from the flame, trying to escape the heat. Maybe not God but the devil, she thought. The food smelled like pure sin.

“Pure Sin. If I ever had a restaurant, that’s what I’d call it.”
He flashed her a devilish smile. “You thinking of opening a restaurant?”
She felt herself blush. “No. I have my own life, thank you very much.”
“Maybe you should start thinking about it.”
She scowled at him, but he just raised his eyebrows and shrugged.
“So, Roni was talking up a storm tonight,” he said.
“What did she say about me?” Amy asked.
He salted the butter/leaf mixture and stirred the pebbles. An earthy, rich aroma rose from the pan, and Amy almost swooned. James turned off the heat under the pan, drained the pebbles, tossed the butter mixture and pebbles into an enormous bowl, and handed it to her. “She said to thank you for looking after Troy.”
Amy’s mouth fell open. Warmth flooded her; would it all be okay? They’d all be part of a happy family?
“Just kidding.”
She deflated, then shoved his shoulder to hide her disappointment. His impish smile worked its way all the way to her toes, making her feel instantly better.
He turned his attention to the pepper grinder. “She said she’s going to rip out your heart and have it for dinner for lying to her son.”
Amy scrunched her lips, fighting down her panic. “From what I’ve picked up about Roni, she couldn’t rip off a hangnail.”
“Okay, kidding. She didn’t say much. Just shrugged and smiled a lot. You know, she’s Roni. I was just joking.”
“So she didn’t say anything about where she’d been?”
“No.”
“Forget it. I don’t want to talk about her now. I just want to eat.” Strangely, it was true. She didn’t care about Roni or Maddie or Gladys. Her entire being was focused on the desire to eat those misshapen white things covered in mangled, curled houseplant and glistening fat. She sat at the counter, accepted his offer of a silver fork and a cloth napkin, and dug in.
He crossed his arms and leaned back against the sink, watching her eat as if the food were some sort of magic concoction that he expected would transform her.
She ate a pebble.
But it was no pebble. It had expanded and softened in the water into something remarkable. She closed her eyes and chewed slowly. The leaves were crunchy and salty. The white puffs were rich and dense and melted on her tongue. She opened her eyes.

Transformed . Into a willing slave of this incredible man.
Neither one of them said a word until she had run her finger around the empty bowl, getting the last remnants of butter sauce. She didn’t know how to describe what she had eaten. “What were those—clouds?”
“Gnocchi. Potato pasta. Best you can get outside of Verona.”
“Who makes them?”
“Me.”
“Why isn’t this on your menu?”
“They’re Italian. Les Fleurs is French. The world would end if I served them. They’d take away my French chef license.”
“Would they take your silly hat?”
“I don’t wear the silly hat.”
“I know. I wish you did, though. I kinda dig the hat.”
“Then tomorrow, I wear the hat.”
They met each other’s eyes, and Amy gulped at the charge she got just looking at him. I know he’s my One True Love. Her heart thumped a warning.
James broke the spell. “Anyway, this kind of food is too simple. People want truffles and reductions from a two-star joint. This is simple home food.”
“This simple home food makes me want to rip off your clothes, even without the hat.” She put down the bowl and considered him. His brown eyes fixed on hers. Something inside her shifted. His gaze, his food, his touch. He is the devil, and his food is his temptation. As if his eyes and hands and the rest of him weren’t enough.

Pure sin.

“That’s why they don’t serve it in restaurants,” he said. “Can’t have the customers ripping off the chef’s clothes and doing it on the white tablecloths.”
“But why not? That’s the way a restaurant should be. Since there wouldn’t be enough chefs to go around, the patrons would have to get it on with each other. Then if you were hungry, you could stroll around town and look in windows of restaurants and say, ‘Oh, look, dear, they’re howling at the moon in there. Let’s try this place tonight.’”
“Pure sin.” He nodded. “But what if it was a business meal with the boss and six guys from the Tokyo office?”
“Oh.” She hadn’t thought about other people other than lovers who might dine out. That sort of business world was as foreign to her as she was to them. “Well, that could be fun, too.” She shot him a wicked smile and crossed the kitchen. He was leaning against the counter, and she pressed herself against him. “You should listen to your muse. Just think of all the customers who might want to give their compliments to the chef.”
“They can’t; I’m taken.” He wrapped his long arms around her, and she let her head rest on his chest, trying not to melt from the beauty of his words. I’m taken.

Yes, you are, James. She memorized the feeling of his hard, tall frame. The warmth of his calm embrace combined with the afterglow of the meal and of the wine she had earlier lulled her into a sleepy light-headedness.
They stood like that, inhaling each other.
She looked up at him. “We have work to do.”
He rested his chin on her head and sighed. “We need to redo the whole menu. Start to finish. When Scottie Jones comes back, I want to blow his mind.”
“Are we talking about food or sex?”
“Same thing.”
She nuzzled into the warmth of his chest. After that gnocchi, she knew what he meant. “So we start with appetizers?”
“Appetizers,” he said, nibbling her ear, “are my specialty.”