“Just because I had hot sex with a man doesn’t mean I have to change my life for him,” Vi said coldly.
He almost staggered. “Okay, what the fuck, Vi?” The emotions thing they’d talked about. The fragile silky cloths in all their colors? She was shredding them, after he’d been so brave about letting them out?
He’d only been away a little over a week. It wasn’t as if he’d gone for a golf trip.
“There are more fish in the sea,” she said, with her chin up, her eyes hot.
His jaw clenched. A little fuse in his brain just sparked, and the flame started racing down a very short line to the dynamite in the middle of his head. “That goes both ways, honey,” he said, even though he didn’t mean it, and it was the worst possible thing he could say. She’d just flipped his freaking switch so damn bad.
Her eyes blazed. “Let’s just sum it up, shall we? You think what you do is so much more important than me that it’s beyond my comprehension and you could never tell me what it is. You think this,” she waved at the blinds and presumably the kitchen beyond them, “my whole life, all my dreams, is casual road kill as you roll your tank over it to some other goal of yours. And you think my own emotions, my worry is so irrelevant and so unimportant that you can just disappear for a week and not even think about what I might feel. Just show up the first second I’m starting to put the life you destroyed back together and expect me to be thrilled to see you, no harm, no foul.”
“I left you a message!” Chase roared. “It’s in your goddamn journal under your stupid alarm clock with its fucking siren!”
Her eyes glittered. Her fingers flexed into her palms, forming fists and then forcing them apart. He drew a deep breath, trying to un-explode himself. He was pretty sure she was just like him. Once the yelling started, it was much easier to fight than to hear what was being said.
But un-exploding himself was hard to do. He felt as if he was trying to catch jagged shrapnel of his self-control and stuff it back into some semblance of a brain while it was still flying outward from the pressure of the blast. “Look. Vi. My job is really demanding and really important and sometimes—”
“And mine’s not?” Her own fuse lit. He could see it happen. Just see the explosion as she lost all possibility of hearing him or rational discussion. “You bastard. Just get the hell out! I. Am. Working.”
She jerked her office door open and strode out, slamming it behind her.
***
The glass walls weren’t nearly sound-proof enough, and everyone lifted heads to stare at her as she strode back into the foment of activity.
She cast one fierce glance around, all it took to redouble her staff’s activity. Energy radiated off her as if she was a radioactive core. She could not believe that jerk Chase. Disappear for over a week and then show up now, now of all times, when they’d just re-opened after a disastrous scandal, when there were at least three influential critics at the tables, and she was still clinging desperately to the increasingly slim possibility that Secret Service would suddenly flood the place and give her a half-hour warning that the American president was about to arrive.
But of course when had Chase ever for one moment really considered that her job was important?
She was twenty-eight years old, a Michelin two-star chef, and yet to him, just like to every other man, she was still some cute little woman whose career could never possibly be anything but fluff, easily brushed away when the man’s important job took precedence.
A man who considered his job so important he couldn’t even tell her about it. What the hell had he been doing this past week? Had he had anything to do with Al-Mofti’s death that had been all over the media that morning? Was it coincidence that the dropping of the salmonella investigation happened at the same time? Could anyone possibly tell her what the hell was going on that put her restaurant at the center of this? Was the connection some figment of her imagination?
Lina came by, carrying an open bucket of liquid nitrogen, vapor rising off it as she called, ironically, “Chaud, chaud, chaud! Chaud devant!”
Mikhail shaved red tuna with a knife so sharp each slice was transparent.
One of their newer cooks dropped slices of beef into a pan with three centimeters of hot oil, and Vi leaned over him, grabbing the handle. “Not yet. Like this. Watch—”
And a wave ran through the kitchens, a stiffening in shock, like the moment when a lion appears and every member of the herd responds to the reaction of the first gazelle to spot it. In that alert kitchen, reaction time was probably shorter than half a second.
Secret Service? Vi spun and—
Black mask. A man struggling with a machine gun as if something was wrong with it, yelling at everyone to get down, and…
Holy fucking shit.