Page 37 of Burning Hearts
Wyatt lifted the heat camera and glanced at the screen. “Temps are falling.”
The alarm shut off a moment later, and the whole building seemed to relax.
Behind me, Ellis’s count rolled like a drumline: “Table nine, out. Plus, two staff from the pantry.”
No drama.
Miss Pearl appeared, clipboard as a badge. “We’re in stand-down,” she told the room, steel in her voice. “Y’all can relax, the only thing on fire now is the playlist.”
That’s when a man I’d never seen before found me. He was dressed in an immaculate suit with a scorched temper.
“What the hell happened here?” he asked.
He was obviously a guest mistaking me for someone who worked at the hotel.
“Do you have any idea,” he said, his voice pitched, “what this has cost us? We’re a group of attorneys hosting a sponsor match dinner at your hotel, and now we won’t reach our funding goal. Contracts, riders, not to mention two million dollars of funding potential in that meeting. And your kitchen just set fire to it.”
“I don’t work here,” I said. “And it wasn’t the kitchen’s idea.”
He looked at the drowned backdrop, the dripping ring light, the river through the room. But he didn’t look at the cooks whose hands were still shaking.
“We’ll be in touch,” he said, which is lawyer talk for I will make this somebody else’s problem.
But Wyatt stepped in with his wedding-friendly smile. “The hotel’s GM will put you in touch with legal. Right now, sir, let’s focus on everyone’s safety.”
Miss Pearl handed the man a napkin.
“Quote for later,” she said, gentle as a shove. “We’re grateful no one’s hurt and proud to support Riverfield.”
He blinked, recalculated, and stalked off. Beck intercepted him by the pillar with a neutral face and a pen.
I set the extinguisher back on its hook, scanned once more for any heat pretending to be gone, and finally let my shoulders drop.
I turned, and Ellis was there, close enough that he noticed the foam on my shoulder. He swiped a clean line with his thumb, caught himself, and made it professional by pressing a bar towel in my hand.
“Hydrate,” he said, the way I say it to rookies at the fire station.
He twisted a cap from a water bottle and handed it to me, his eyes on mine long enough to feel risky.
I drank.
“Nice cadence,” I told him.
“Yours too,” he said, meaning the radio.
For a second, we stood with our shoulders almost touching, the stove cooling behind us.
It was nothing.
But at the same time, it was very muchnotnothing.
“Cade,” Wyatt called, stealing my focus. “Walk the floor?”
“I’m with you.”
I passed the empty bottle back, and Ellis took it like he’d been handed more than plastic.
We hit the service stairs where the dropped tile had fallen. Fluorescent glare, bad footing.
