Page 54 of Cornered

“He, um, well ... he either wants to date me or kill me. Honestly, it could go either way. I’m not quite sure.”

Donovan’s jaw worked. She waved a hand at him and mouthed, “Relax before you break your teeth.” Somehow she didn’t think it would be appropriate for that to be on the recording, but seriously, he was going to need to see Meredith and get a night guard if he did that kind of thing in his sleep.

He unclenched his jaw and indicated that she should continue. “To be clear, I’m not interested. I don’t date my sous-chefs. It’s a firm rule. But even if he wasn’t my sous-chef, I wouldn’t date him. He isn’t my type.”

One eyebrow lifted. He went with a different approach. “Can you describe this chef? What was his name again?”

“His name is Amos Cartwright. He’s from West Virginia.Chef Louis hired him two years ago. He’s an excellent sous-chef. He claims that he doesn’t want Chef Louis’s job. But I think he was caught off guard when Bronwyn brought me in rather than promoting him to the role of head chef while Chef Louis is recuperating.”

“Okay. What does he look like?”

“He’s maybe five ten? Two hundred pounds? Brown hair. Brown eyes. May or may not be emotionally stable.”

ANUNSTABLE CHEF?In a kitchen, night after night, with Cassie? No. Donovan did not like the sound of that.

Cassie had the bubbly, girl-next-door good looks that made people underestimate her. They saw her blond hair and blue eyes and easy laughter and didn’t realize that she was a woman driven to be the best. Mentally, she was a force. But physically? She wasn’t much over five feet tall. A two-hundred-pound man with anger issues could be a big problem.

Cassie ran her hands over the smooth tabletop. “But I don’t see him doing something like this.”

“You said earlier that he either wanted to date you or kill you and you weren’t sure which.”

“Oh, I stand by that.”

Donovan’s blood ran cold at her matter-of-fact statement. “Why, exactly, do you say that?”

“Because one day last week, he told me he wanted to marry me. This was after I made breakfast for supper for the staff after a long night. But then a few days later, he half jokingly, half seriously threatened me with a chef’s knife. So I’m not sure how he feels about me. But I do know that he loves that kitchen more than he loves anything else. He’d never damage it. He might damage me, but not the kitchen.”

How could she say that so flippantly? “He might damage you?”

Cassie shrugged. She shrugged!

Donovan squeezed the arms of the chair where he sat and forced himself not to move. “Cass, could you go back to the way he threatened you with a chef’s knife?”

Cassie glanced at the recorder. Then back at Donovan. “This is one of those things that could get blown way out of proportion. I don’t want him to lose his job over what was probably a joke to him.”

“But it wasn’t to you?”

She shook her head, and when she met his eyes for a fleeting moment, there was something he’d never seen in them. It might have been shame. Or fear. Whatever it was, it was bad.

“Cassie?”

She took a gulp of air, and the words tumbled out so fast he was thankful the recorder would capture everything. “It was late. We were all tired. Everyone gets punchy sometimes, and the diners that night had been ... challenging.”

“Define challenging.”

Cassie stood and paced around the table like a caged animal. “Okay.” She pitched her voice low and leaned toward the recorder. Clearly she wanted her words recorded, but didn’t want to risk anyone overhearing. “It shouldn’t come as a surprise that in order to keep them happy, some of our guests require special handling.”

“You mean because The Haven caters to people who almost never hear the word ‘no’ regardless of what they ask for?”

Cassie smirked. “Something like that.” Her shoulders relaxed a fraction. “We had a guest who complained about everything we served him. The salad dressing had too much salt. The shrimp was too spicy. The dessert”—she paused and heldher hands out in a circle the size of a small dinner plate—“was too small.”

“Too small? How do you put up with that?” He would have told the guy to go make his own dessert.

“Your world is black and white. There are laws. People follow them or they break them. If they break them, there are consequences. But my world isn’t like that. Taste is subjective. One person’s spicy is another person’s bland. It doesn’t mean one person is right and the other is wrong. It’s a matter of opinion.”

“People can have a difference of opinion without being jerks.”

“True. And if it had just been about the seasoning of the food, I could have attributed the behavior to someone with a vastly different palate than mine. But when he pitched a hissy fit about the size of his dessert? That’s when I knew there was no pleasing him. We aren’t running a buffet here. This isn’t a cruise ship where people can request three entrées and four desserts. We typically don’t plate the desserts until it’s time to take them to the diners, and we only make what we need. But in this case, someone had miscounted and we had another dessert plated, so I told the server to give him another one, no charge. I didn’t realize that Amos took it upon himself to hand deliver it. When he returned to the kitchen, he was so angry he took a knife, whacked a few onions, a couple of potatoes, and then came toward me with the knife in his hand, point up.”

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