Page 22 of Things We Burn

Not since…

I didn’t think about that.

The deep voice washed those memories away. The tenor of the single word. The way it boomed right through me. It was liquid sex.

Slowly, my eyes moved up.

Kane was standing there, dressed in a black tee and jeans.

The restaurant had a dress code—something I didn’t approve of as it was classist and elitist, but once again, I had to play thegame—and it was famous for enforcing it upon even the most powerful of guests.

A football player had thrown a tantrum last year when he wasn’t let in because he was wearing sneakers.

Expensive, designer sneakers that cost more than the host’s monthly take-home, according to him.

He was not only refused a table but banned indefinitely.

People tended to adhere to the dress code.

Not Kane.

And somehow, he’d been let in without incident.

Maybe it was the electric presence, the cheeky smile, the charisma he had about him that was somehow both effortless and powerful. Warm too.

Hot.

Even though I’d spent my adult life in sweltering kitchens and hadn’t broken a sweat, suddenly my upper lip felt moist.

A few seconds. That’s all I paused in shock for. It might as well have been hours in my world.

“Chef?” Ferris prompted, looking uneasy. I’d never spaced out in my kitchen. My chefs knew to rely on me, and I could tell by the concerned tilt of Ferris’s mouth that he was slightly worried.

Regaining my senses, I stepped back so he could plate the scallops I asked for.

Wordlessly, I finished dressing the plate then tinkered with the placement of the scallops, tweezing on a garnish before a final wipe down.

“Away on fifteen!” I yelled, mentally calculating the amount of scallops we’d plated tonight with how many I’d gotten from the docks this morning.

“We’ve got three orders of scallops left,” I told Angela, our head server.

“Heard, Chef,” she replied, expertly balancing plates before floating toward the restaurant at a brisk pace.

I forced myself to keep working despite Kane watching me.

“I don’t want to interrupt …Chef,” Kane drawled.

My toes curled at the title I’d been addressed by for years, by countless people. No one had ever made the deferential term sound sultry, dirty and impossibly sexy.

Kane managed all of those things, said in the same tone he’d murmured naughty things to me last night, with the gaze that communicated he knew what it felt like to be inside me.

The clang of the kitchen brought me back to earth, and I jerked, looking back down at my plates.

“You’re busy,” he continued.

“I’ve got twenty-seven minutes left in service,” I informed him. My voice was crisp, cold, not betraying my simmering insides. I felt panicked at being put off-kilter in a kitchen,mykitchen, by a man. My guard was up. It needed to be up.

“Then I’ll be back in twenty-seven minutes,” was his reply, not obviously perturbed by my icy response.

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