The Chef's Choice (8 page)

H
auling furniture wouldn't have been his choice of a way to spend a couple of hours, Damon thought as he fired entrées for the staff meal, but all things considered, it hadn't been bad. Not that he was happy to see Ian McBain sick, but schlepping chairs had been a good excuse to be outside.

And to spend time with Cady.

He'd kept his distance after that afternoon in the greenhouse, in part to give her space, in part to give himself time to get his head together. He was supposed to be walking the straight and narrow now, not turning around to make the same mistakes with the same kinds of people. But Cady wasn't quite like anybody he could think of, and he wasn't at all sure that she was a mistake.

He finished up another plate and slid it across the steel counter under the overhead shelf to the pass where waiters picked up plates. The servers were beginning to crowd around like cats at the sound of a can opener. Even as they were filling the butter dishes for the bread baskets and topping off salt, pepper and cream containers, they could smell the food. They knew the staff meal was near.

Staff meal or family meal was traditionally a haphazard exercise in turning leftovers and scraps not fit for diners into something vaguely edible to keep floor and kitchen staff going through service. Damon had never subscribed to that approach, though. In France, Descour had always served family meal at the table, with plates and napkins and real food. Treat the staff right and they'll treat the customers right, was his theory. A good one. And Damon had carried it out ever since.

Of course, that didn't mean that family meal couldn't double as the waiters' meeting and tasting. Especially now, when he was shifting the old menu over to the new one by a half-dozen dishes a night. The servers needed to taste the new entrées and appetizers, see how to place them on the table, know the ingredients and presentation so they could answer questions, if necessary.

With a quick flick of the wrist, he drizzled brilliant green chive oil around the last plate and pushed it over to the pass. “Okay, listen up, people. We're still in the process of changing over the menu. Tonight, we're launching the new seafood—”

And then Cady walked in and his train of thought didn't just derail. It went right off the damned trestle.

He'd seen her already that day, watched her in her worn jeans and T-shirt as she'd planted flowers, moved furniture. Watched her and tried not to remember how she'd felt in his arms. But the woman who walked in wearing the uniform of white tuxedo jacket and narrow black skirt bore no resemblance to that Cady at all.

Slender, he'd no idea she was so slender. Perhaps it was the formal clothing, but she looked graceful, taller somehow. The skirt was far from short, almost demure, and yet it seemed almost indecent as it revealed a pair of startlingly lovely legs. She'd drawn her hair back with combs. There was a delicacy to her face, he saw now, one he'd never fully appreciated. Her mouth looked soft and tempting beyond all sense.

She'd kissed him with those lips, kissed him and gasped against him and spun his world right around. And though he could tell himself that he shouldn't have done it, he wasn't a damned bit sorry. And, he realized, he had every intention of doing it again.

Regardless of the consequences.

He cleared his throat. “Right. Let's talk about the new entrées for tonight.”

You didn't grow up around an inn like the Compass Rose without learning every aspect of the business—whether you wanted to or not. Working in the restaurant might have been Cady's least favorite activity, but she'd bussed and even waited tables from the time she'd been sixteen.

So she put on the white shirt and bow tie and the tuxedo jacket in preparation for her shift. If she added lipstick and actually took a few minutes to fuss with her hair, it had nothing to do with seeing Damon. She was merely being professional, she told herself, nerves roiling her stomach as she walked into the kitchen. But the little buzz of purely female satisfaction she felt when he gave her the double take had nothing to do with professionalism.

It was strictly personal.

Given her choice, Cady would have skipped family meal. Showing up two hours before the start of dinner service ate up precious time and she didn't trust herself around Damon any more than was absolutely necessary. Her parents had insisted, though. And now, as she stood at the end of the line and stared at the plates, she understood why.

Things had changed—the menu, for one. Gone were many of the dishes that the Sextant had served for decades. Those that remained had been reinterpreted—the baked New England dinner of seafood covered in bread crumbs had morphed into pan-seared scallops with brioche minicroutons and lemon beurre blanc, for example. And to the delight of the servers, Damon was serving the plates for family meal.

Fancy plates, Cady saw, arranged like sculptures, painted with color. Pretty enough, but it was the incredible smell wafting up from them that had her mouth watering. Of course, it had the same effect on the crowd of floor staff currently digging in with forks and knives.

“Alfred, for chrissakes, that was my hand, not the veal,” complained a tall blonde named Sylvia.

“And here I was going to tell Chef that the meat wasn't tender,” stocky Alfred returned, shoveling a bite of roasted potatoes into his mouth. “Now I understand.”

Amused, Cady looked up, only to catch the eye of the chef in question.

“I knew you couldn't stay away,” Damon singsonged under his breath as he walked past her to the line.

“I'm only here because I'm working,” she shot back.

“Well, if you're going to be working, you'd better get in there and try the entrées. How else are you going to be able to answer questions?”

“No thanks,” she said, glancing over at the clutch of waiters. “I'd like to keep my fingers just the way they are.”

Damon turned to the oven behind him and pulled out a ramekin. He pushed it over to Cady. “Here.”

She poked at it suspiciously with a fork. “What is it?”

“Something I made special when I heard you were coming. Fresh-made penne with a truffled asiago and fontina béchamel.” His lips twitched at her blank stare. “Macaroni and cheese.”

Tentatively, Cady took a forkful, and put it into her mouth. And pure bliss flooded through her. Tangy cheese, silky cream, an addictive hint of earthiness. “Oh my God,” she mumbled, reaching out for more. “This is incredible.” In the midst of taking another bite, she glanced over at Damon.

And felt a flare of heat that had nothing to do with the food.

He was watching her again with that naked hunger in his eyes. She held the fork but he was the one who looked starved—and she was the main course. He stepped closer to her, his gaze never wavering.

“You think I can make your mouth happy now,” he murmured into her ear, “just wait.”

She swallowed. “Dream on.”

“Remind me to tell you what's been happening in my dreams lately,” he said softly. “I think you'll find it very interesting.”

There were glints of gold in those dark eyes, she realized as she stared back helplessly, like sparks at midnight. And his mouth had been so soft. Nearby, the rest of the staff were oblivious, but the feeding frenzy was beginning to die down. She moistened her lips. “This isn't the place or the time.”

“Give me another place and another time, then.”

“Later,” was the best she could do. “Right now, we need to worry about dinner service.”

“And later we'll worry about something else.”

The dining room, with its broad sweep of windows looking out over Grace Harbor, had always been one of her favorite places at the inn. Antique maps of the Maine Coast dotted the pale blue walls, rugs covered the wide-planked maple floors. Atop each snowy-white tablecloth sat a glass storm lantern with a flickering candle. Outside, the sailboats in the marina bobbed on water stained gold by the last rays of the setting sun.

It had been a while since she'd waited tables. She'd forgotten just how exhausting it could be. By the end of the first hour, she'd discovered that her new black shoes pinched; by the second, she'd managed to punch a hole in her finger with the corkscrew. By the third, her arms were leaden from carrying heavy plates.

It could've been worse—at least the servers didn't have to haul the meals from kitchen to table. That honor fell to the runners, who carted the heavy trays of dishes out to a station in the dining room where Cady and the other waiters delivered them to waiting diners. Not that the arrangement had kept her from burning herself on a plate that had been broiled under the salamander a little too long. All things considered, though, she'd probably gotten off easy.

“Waitress, over here.”

Or maybe not.

She turned to see a disgruntled-looking man waving at her from a table in the corner. The flesh of his neck spilled over his collar; his comb-over didn't hide the pink shine of his scalp. The hint of embarrassment in the face of his companion across the table warned Cady that it wasn't his incipient baldness that had made him unhappy, though.

She gave him her best smile. “How are your meals?” she asked.

“Terrible.” The man's face was dark with displeasure.

“What seems to be the problem?”

“I ordered fois gras glazed tenderloin, medium well. It's not glazed, it's all dried out, including the meat.”

Cady glanced at the plate. “It looks right to me, sir. That's the way the dish is made.”

“Well, that's not the way it sounds from the description. You can't serve meat dry like this. It needs some kind of a sauce.”

Perfect. Cady could just imagine walking into the kitchen and delivering that particular bit of news to Damon. She'd wind up with the plate launched at her head, if she weren't careful. Or the customer tossed into the parking lot.

“I think it's dry because you asked for medium well, sir. I did warn you that this cut of meat is very difficult to cook anywhere past medium. The chef recommends that if you want something more well-done, you order the rib eye.”

“If I'd wanted the rib eye, I would have ordered the rib eye,” he said peevishly. “I
ordered
the tenderloin.”

“But, sir—”

“No buts. I want it sent back.”

“Walter.” His companion looked embarrassed.

“I want my dinner,” he returned, obstinacy in the very set of his shoulders.

Cady sighed. “I'll take it back, sir. It'll just be a few minutes.”

Now this, she thought, had all the makings of a disaster.

During one renovation or other, a McBain had installed a double set of sliding doors between the dining room and the kitchen, separated by a vestibule. The arrangement insulated the dining room from the racket of the kitchen. It also gave Cady brief refuge before facing Damon with the unwelcome news that a customer had had the temerity to suggest that not only had they overcooked the tenderloin but that the very concept of the dish was faulty.

She took a deep breath and walked through the second set of doors.

The unbroken hot surface of the stove was festooned with steaming kettles of soup and boiling pasta water and what looked like dozens of sauté pans of sizzling meat and fish. On a shelf above the stovetop, dozens more clean sauté pans sat waiting, flanked on either end by salamanders for warming finished plates or adding a final broil.

In the lane between the stove line and the counter stood the trio of white-aproned line chefs. At the far end, quick-handed Roman manned the grill and deep fryer; in the middle was Rosalie, on veg and pasta; and nearest Cady, on sauté, stood Damon.

During Nathan's tenure, the scene had been one of more than a little chaos, with insults and ribald jokes flying thick and fast above the sound of speed metal from the radio. Now, the room was almost eerily quiet. Gone was the music, gone was the sense of untidy confusion. In its place was a focused calm. The only voices were those of the expediter, Andy, reading off the orders as they printed out on the machine in the corner, and Damon repeating them.

The printer chattered. “One tenderloin, one salmon, two lobster,” Andy called out.

“One tenderloin, one salmon, two lobster,” Damon echoed.

Watching the group at work was a bit like watching a ballet because for all the quiet, the line was the scene of rapid, purposeful activity so synchronized it could have been choreographed. The cooks pivoted between stove and counter, passing plates to one another, saucing and garnishing, each of them working on three and four dishes simultaneously.

And as in a ballet, there was always one who was impossible to stop watching. Damon worked the end of the line in constant motion, bending, reaching, flipping, stirring, shaking a sauté pan with one hand while seasoning an entrée with the other. And, she swore, plating up with a third. There was a precision to his movements and more than a little grace, as though he were indeed going through the moves of a dance. He seemed totally absorbed in the process, bending over every plate as he worked with a swift, silent, almost ferocious concentration.