Chapter One #3
Shoving his chair back, and running a quick hand through his hair, Bastian prowled back and forth in front of Charles’ desk. “He what?”
“He didn’t apply,” he repeated, wincing. “He wants to go to Europe.”
Just that fact alone convinced Bastian that this was the intern he needed. Someone who knew he was better than everyone else. That was the student Bastian wanted to hire.
“Let me talk to him,” Bastian said. “I can persuade him.”
“I’m really not sure you can. He’s very determined.
And I’m sure he’ll receive job offers from the European restaurants he’s applied to.
” Charles shrugged, like Bastian was just supposed to accept that he wasn’t going to get the best student this graduating class offered.
Clearly, he didn’t know Bastian very well, if he believed that was going to happen.
Bastian didn’t just expect the best—he demanded it. Out of the staff that surrounded him, out of the ingredients he cooked with, but most importantly, out of his own self.
He leaned forward, fists gripping the chair. “Let me talk to him.”
Charles continued to hesitate. “That’s not really our way here.”
Holding his breath, Bastian tried to count to ten like his anger management counselor had told him to do. He made it to four.
Not success, but progress, at least.
“You want me to continue to accept graduating students from this academy at Terroir?” Bastian demanded. “If you do, you will let me speak to this student. Now.”
“Now?” Charles looked confused.
“I’m here to finalize this decision. I don’t care where he’s at. Go get him now.”
“He’s not even here yet,” Charles stammered.
Bastian stared at him in stony silence, punctuated only by a knock on the door.
Rising to his feet, Charles shuffled over and opened it, exchanging a quick word with the person on the other side.
Bastian, his patience in its death thralls, rolled his eyes.
Finally, Charles opened the door wider, and Bastian saw the boy whom he had seen in the kitchen classroom yesterday.
The one who’d gone out of his way to insult him, and in nearly the same breath, swore that he possessed the best set of qualifications.
“Kian, this is Chef Aquino,” Charles said. “He is here to select an intern for his restaurant, Terroir.”
Kian was so young. Had he been this young in culinary school?
Bastian couldn’t remember. But Kian was definitely young, and slight, his white chef’s jacket nearly dwarfing his narrow shoulders and thin arms. Only an air of fierce determination and the look in his light blue eyes grabbed Bastian’s attention.
This was someone who knew what he wanted, and what he wanted was Bastian.
That wasn’t very unusual. What was unusual was that, for the first time in a very long time, Bastian wanted back.
“Kian is our best student,” Charles added. “He was the one we were just discussing.”
Bastian prowled a bit closer to him and tried to ignore the feeling that he was a big bad wolf, after a particularly tasty bit of prey. He glanced up at Charles. “Not available? Not even here yet?” he asked with a raised eyebrow. “He seems to be here now.”
Shrugging his shoulders, Charles gestured towards Kian, like you wanted him, there he is, my work here is done. Maybe that was why he’d ended up here, instead of working in a restaurant or even, God forbid, some hotel somewhere: a willingness to do the bare minimum and call it good.
Bastian eyed Kian resolutely. So he wanted to work in Europe, did he? Thought, just because he was the best in this small culinary school, in this even smaller graduating class, that he deserved better?
What he deserved was someone who was prepared to remind him every second of every shift that there was a higher ideal he was aspiring to. Someone who was willing to help him unlearn every bad habit instructors like Charles had instilled in him.
“So you want to go to Europe?” Bastian asked, and took in the momentary panic in Kian’s eyes. Had Charles been wrong? It probably wouldn’t be the first time, if he had been.
“I do. I did,” Kian said.
“Willing to work seventy hours a week for peanuts?” Bastian paused, gaze focused on Kian’s narrow, handsome face. “Willing to scrape plates for a year, just to get into the kitchen?”
He had no poker face whatsoever. Surprise, shock, denial flashed through his eyes in rapid succession. Charles, who still thought he was needed or useful, inserted a heavy sigh into the conversation.
“You’re supposed to be preparing these students for what comes next, Charles,” Bastian continued, barely wasting a breath. “Instead, you’re filling their heads with dreams and ideas. Even if they take him, they won’t let him near a stove. You know that. But it seems like he doesn’t know that.”
“He has a name,” Kian inserted testily. “And he wants to know the truth. If I work for you, will I get into the kitchen? And not just to scrape plates?”
Bastian knew he was a bastard. Knew that sometimes his employees even risked life and limb to call him that behind his back.
Occasionally a recently ex-employee would even be ballsy enough to call him the Bastard to his face.
But he never felt like one, not when he was demanding what he knew he deserved out of his employees—which was the very best. But he felt like one now, with Kian, all nervous naivety, not even given the basic information on what to expect from instructors who should have known better.
It felt wrong to take advantage of that lack of knowledge, but still, Bastian didn’t pause. He wanted the best; he needed it. And while Charles was a fucking moron, he’d identified Kian as the best. If he had to manipulate him and his overly obvious emotions, he’d do it.
“With Charles as your instructor, I’m surprised you weren’t training to be a dishwasher,” Bastian said cruelly.
“I’m here to be a chef. Not a dishwasher.” Kian’s lips were clamped tightly together, and there was a fierce determination in his eyes. And that, more than anything else, was what convinced Bastian that he was actually the best in his class. Nobody with that look would ever settle for second best.
“Then you want to work at Terroir,” Bastian said, ladling on casual contempt thick and heavy. “But it seems that you didn’t think so when you sent your applications in. I don’t see one here with your name on it.”
Shame bloomed across Kian’s fair cheekbones. “Obviously, that was an unfortunate oversight . . .”
“Obviously,” Bastian interrupted.
“I would very much like to work for you,” Kian finally said, cheeks still flaming, but his chin held high, meeting Bastian’s cold eyes dead on.
Bastian had already made his decision, had played Kian like a fiddle to make sure he agreed with him, but it was the obvious pride that convinced him it was the right one.
When Bastian inevitably yelled at him—likely in the first five minutes of his first shift, if not even earlier—Kian would take it, and with a stiff upper lip, fix whatever he’d fucked up.
He was that type and that type was the sort that Bastian liked to hire.
At least that was what he told himself as he and Kian shook hands, and he departed the academy.
It had nothing to do with the fact that just touching him made his cold, dead heart race again in his chest. He’d just gotten excited about winning, something he loved almost as much as he loved his mother.
That was all. In three weeks, when Kian officially started as his intern at Terroir, he would be just like any other chef under him.
Under him professionally, but never personally, because Bastian didn’t do that.
He’d only been tempted once before, and the way it had ended convinced him it couldn’t ever happen again.