Page 6 of Sawyer
She could feel sweat bead and run down her back as she lay back against the wall of their former Girls’ Floor, which she, Thea, and Brooke had called home before Kyle had bought the monstrous property they now lived in.
An anonymous Michelin critic might very well have been called and dispatched to Nanine’s today with the express purpose of securing a reservation. Of course, somewhere inside her gut—a gut she trusted after growing up in a dangerous Miami neighborhood where one wrong step could mean a gunshot or worse—told her the reservation had been made well before this moment.
Nanine’s’ reopening was a huge deal, and the people who followed the Parisian culinary scene damn well knew it. After running a celebrated restaurant for decades, Nanine had rebooted the restaurant and turned the reins over to a newchef de cuisinewho had trained with another French Michelin-starred chef.People would want to see if Nanine’s could scale those famed culinary heights again.
Thank God she and the staff had proven they were up to it. There were no soft openings in Paris.
They’d worked up to the standard of perfection, and now they had to do it again. And keep on doing it…
But God, it was a relief to know that her idea to do individual bread pairings had been a success. She’d felt in her gut that it would make them stand out—and she’d been right.
Thank God!
She firmed the slight weakness in her knees, telling herself they had everything in place. The menu. The staff. The setting. Their vigilance and dedication to perfection would take them where they wanted.
Her agony needed to stop, that was for damn sure.
She’d been agonizing about everything in the lead-up to the grand reopening. First, because it was Nanine’s. Second, because of her roommates. Third, because this was her place now too, beingchef de cuisine.
Madison was proud of her role here, even if it still broke her heart that Nanine had needed to step back after her heart attack. She thought about it every time she was manning the stove or plating a dish in the kitchen. It made her even more emotional that this was the first kitchen she’d worked in, under Nanine’s brilliant and loving tutelage.
She was really turning into a sap.
Somehow, she needed to manage that too. Like an extra teaspoon of salt could ruin a dish, she needed to make sure she was measured in her emotions. Dammit, she hated all these feelings sometimes—even though it was her passion and her determination that helped her be who she wanted to be. They were essential ingredients in her life like salt and sugar, and she damn well knew it. So she couldn’t throw them all out.
But still…she’d been too emotional since she’d retuned to Paris. Nanine had almost died—strong, stalwart Nanine!—shaking her to her core.
Having the hots for Kyle wasn’t helping her exit the emotional roller coaster. Dammit, she swore she could still smell the lingering notes of his sexy aftershave in the stairwell down to the main floor of the restaurant. She should never have kissed him to make his ex-fiancée back the hell off when she’d arrived uninvited a few months ago. If she’d never felt his perfectly made, beautiful mouth on hers, then maybe none of this would have happened. No denying that hot, smoldering kiss had changed everything between them.
She’d almost kissed him again over a week ago, though, and there was no jealous ex she could blame that one on…
She’d like to think she’d just gotten swept up in the insane happiness that had overtaken her when three Michelin-starred chefs, one of them her old boss, had told her she’d knocked it out of the park with her new menu. But she could call bullshit on herself. She’d almost kissed him because she wanted to, pure and simple.
Kyle wasn’t just hot eye candy. He’d had her back every step of the way. He’d agonized alongside her.
Every day their bond had strengthened until they could finish each other’s sentences and read each other’s thoughts. She’d never felt this close to another person in her whole life. Sometimes it scared the shit out of her. Sometimes she wanted to bury herself in him and go deeper, knowing he’d meet her every step of the way.
Her sleep had been troubled with dreams of him, his blue eyes blazing, his hand skimming the length of her arched neck. But that wasn’t the worst. Thelocura—the Spanish word for madness, which native speakers fittingly also use to describe love—wastheworst thing for her cuisine. And now that the restaurant was open, she was starting to worry.
When she’d been in thelocurabefore, her food had tastedof need and longing—a horrible pairing. People wanted the awe-inspiring magic like her old mentor atLe Fleurin Miami or even the childhood nostalgia of the three-starred Michelin chef Massimo Bottura. Not a woman’s insanity over a man.
So far it hadn’t bled into her cuisine, but it might, because this madness was the most intense she’d ever experienced.
She had to keep things between them under control.
She had to keepherselfunder control—especially in the kitchen.
She was so close to having what she’d always wanted.
She couldn’t allow any man—not even Kyle—to mess that up. She wouldn’t respect herself if she did.
Focus on what’s going right and keep doing it. Block out the rest.
That had worked so far. When she entered the sanctuary of the kitchen, she willed all thoughts of him away.
She’d told him not to hang out at the restaurant. If she needed him, she would find him. He’d accepted it with one of his intoxicating smiles like he did all her other requests.
She slid the newspaper out from under her arm and carefully peeled it open to the article. Sometime later, she would need to sneak Pierre up to her room and read it to him. Because that cuisine-crazy parrot had also had her back, despite how totally weird it had seemed when Dean had first brought him home. Of course, Pierre had worked at another Michelin-starred restaurant in Paris—the one Jacqueline’s father had opened to great fame, which had closed upon his death. A total weird circle of life thing.
