Page 55 of Orc'd & Loaded
Not my hands. My face. I can feel it. Her attention on my brow, my jaw, the set of my mouth while I concentrate on getting the gauze exactly right. She's breathing differently. Slower. Deeper. That controlled rhythm she uses for stirring reductions, except now there's nothing to stir and nobody directing me and the only thing in the room is the quiet rasp of gauze unspooling between us.
I tuck the final edge. Smooth it flat with my thumb.
"There."
Her hand rests in both of mine. Wrapped. Clean. The gauze white and even, the edges neat. My grandmother would approve.
Solene doesn't pull her hand back.
Her lips part. Something moves behind her eyes. Tectonic. The kind of shift you don't see coming until the ground is already rearranging itself beneath your feet. She opens her mouth.
The kitchen door explodes inward.
Explodes. The heavy swing door cracks against the tile wall hard enough to chip the ceramic, and a man in a charcoal suit storms through like he's breaching a fortification. Tall. Lean. Silver cufflinks catching the fluorescent light. Hair slicked so tight to his skull it looks lacquered. He carries a leather briefcase in one hand and a phone in the other, and his face is the particular shade of purple that only money and outrage can produce in combination.
"Solene. What the hell is this."
She yanks her hand from mine. Slides off the counter. The transformation is instantaneous. Spine straight, chin up, shoulders back. The armor snaps into place so fast I almost hear it click.
"Gerard."
"I have been calling you for three hours. Three. I flew in from Manhattan because Jeff told me you were..." His eyes find me. Track upward. Past the stained apron. Past the abdomen. Past the shoulders. All the way up to where my head nearly brushes the kitchen's hanging copper pots.
His lip curls.
"Because you were doing this."
He crosses the kitchen in four sharp strides, grabs the front of my apron with both hands, and shoves. The man is strong for a human in an expensive suit. Not strong enough to move me. But he doesn't need to move me. He steps between us, hisback to me, his briefcase swinging like a weapon as he rounds on Solene.
"I did not invest two hundred and seventy-five thousand euros in your restaurant so you could play house with a monster."
CHAPTER 13
SOLENE
The gauze on my left hand is still warm from the salve.
Gerard's briefcase clips the prep station as he wheels on me, and a metal bowl full of shaved fennel topples to the floor. The fennel scatters across the tile in pale green curls. Twelve minutes of mandoline work. Gone.
I step forward.
Not beside Gerard. Between them. My back flat against Boris's apron, the heat of his massive body radiating through the leather into my shoulder blades. Gerard's face is six inches from mine. His cologne is aggressive. Oud and vetiver and the particular chemical confidence of a man who has never been told no by anyone holding a spatula.
"Step back, Gerard."
"You're not hearing me." He jabs a manicured finger past my shoulder, toward Boris. "Jeff showed me the video from the farmer's market. You, jumping into that thing's booth, physically wrestling an enchanted measuring tape like some kind of circus act. Do you have any idea what my partners said when they saw that? Do you understand what this does to the brand?"
"The brand."
"Your brand. The one I built for you. Clean. Elegant. Refined. Not..." He flicks his hand at the chaos of the kitchen behind me. The blackened cast iron still on the floor. The scorch mark on the ceiling from the fire spice incident. Boris's massive cleaver buried in a cutting board next to my microplane grater. "Whatever this is."
My jaw locks so tight my molars grind.
Behind me, Boris shifts his weight. The floorboards creak. One massive hand hovers near my hip. Not touching. Just present. A wall of green-gray skin and woodsmoke , steady and close.
"Don't." Gerard's eyes snap to that hovering hand. "Don't you dare touch her in front of me. I own forty percent of her kitchen."
Something detonates behind my ribs.
