Ten
TEN
Mia
I SEARCHED THE modestly sized seating area for Byron, my heart in my throat. None of this made any sense —wasn’t Byron supposed to be at the youth center in East St. Louis? Luca said he’d come in late and was acting strange. Had he left and come back across the river in the middle of the workday?
Even if he had, that still didn’t explain why he’d be here , of all places. Unless... Luca had told him where I worked? He was the only one in Byron’s orbit who knew the name of the restaurant, and for some reason the idea that he might have sent Byron here to talk to me felt like a betrayal.
I knew that was irrational. Why shouldn’t Luca tell the others that I was the head chef at the Elderflower Inn? It wasn’t as though I’d sworn him to secrecy. At most, I’d exhibited a bit of reticence about strangers finding out, because sometimes people got weird about it.
There was no sign of Byron at any of the tables. I was just about to round on Nat and demand to know what he thought he was playing at when my attention caught on long dreadlocks gathered up in a half-bun. The dreadlocks’ owner had his back to me, but realization immediately clicked into place with a nearly audible snap .
It wasn’t Byron crossing the invisible demilitarized zone between my fucked-up private life and my equally fucked-up professional life. It was Zalen.
And... not only Zalen. Next to him sat a very tall, very broad alpha with a shaved skull. Emiel . They were both wearing smart, well-tailored business suits, and were sharing the table with a pair of older white guys—betas, I was pretty sure—who were also dressed professionally.
My panic began to abate, though this unexpected plot twist did nothing to clear my confusion about why the hell they were here. I turned on Nat.
“For gods’ sake,” I hissed. “I told you—I met the man in a bar once , and we talked about neutral subjects for maybe ten minutes. That’s the sum-total of my lifetime interaction with him!”
“Interesting,” Nat said in a monotone. “Because you sure did seem excited when I told you he was out there.”
I drew breath to snap at him, before realizing with a lurch that my only defense would be blurting out that I hadn’t been excited, I’d been panicking—because I thought he’d been talking about the guy I screwed three times last night in a hotel room.
My inability to defend myself made anger flare in my chest, and the creeping sense of shame that came along with it made the anger even worse. Goddamn it, why was I always the one on the back foot, when Nat was the one who’d started us down this road?
“You know what?” I said, low and vicious. “You can go fuck yourself, Nat.”
Turning my back on him, I untied my apron with sharp, angry movements and set it aside, revealing my pristine chef’s whites beneath. Then I wiped my hands on a clean towel, checked that no stray hair was escaping my toque, and headed out of the kitchen to try and determine why on earth Zalen and Emiel were in my restaurant, asking to see me.
God . I was supposed to meet Luca in the morning for coffee. I’d have to talk to him about this, wouldn’t I? What was I going to say, though? ‘ I’m upset because you told your housemates something about me, even though I didn’t make a point of asking you not to tell them? ’
When had I become such an emotional dumpster fire? Luca wasn’t psychic. He hadn’t done anything inappropriate. If I gave him a hard time about it, I’d be the one in the wrong. At this point, walking toward the table with my heart thudding double-time, I wasn’t even one hundred percent sure why I was so upset that Zalen and Emiel were here.
Because their presence had set Nat off? What the hell kind of reason was that ?
A really unhealthy one , my subconscious whispered helpfully. Like, ‘serious emotional abuse victim’ levels of unhealthy. What the fuck, Mia ?
I was not an emotional abuse victim, goddamn it. I straightened my spine, squared my shoulders, and pasted a public-facing employee smile on my face as I reached the table.
“Hello,” I said pleasantly to the four men as they looked up at me. “I’m Mia Dimitriadis, the head chef. I trust your meal was enjoyable?”
Zalen blinked at me. The two white beta guys greeted me and immediately started enthusing about the parmesan-crusted sea bass and vegetarian lasagna they’d just eaten. Both Zalen and Emiel looked surprised, and I realized with a tiny, internal flinch that I might have been blaming Luca for a situation that had absolutely nothing to do with him.
“Ah,” Zalen said after a moment. “Hello. When you said you were a chef, I didn’t realize you were the chef here . Small world.”
“Hi, Mia,” Emiel said. “I liked the food. It was really good.”
“You three know each other?” asked one of the other men. “Well, that’s an interesting coincidence.”
I smiled with a bit more real warmth, reminding myself that the Elderflower Inn was one of the premier restaurants in the region, and sometimes random people simply came here for special occasions or when they wanted to impress someone.
“We’re acquaintances,” I said. “We share a mutual friend. Small world, as you say. I’m glad to hear the meal was up to par.”
“More than,” Zalen said, offering me his own smile.
It was... a truly devastating smile. How had I not noticed that before, at the bar? Combined with his clean lime and vanilla scent, I was vaguely horrified to realize that it had awakened a yearning deep in my belly.
One that should have been sated—if not completely comatose—after the night I’d just spent with Byron.
Zalen, thankfully oblivious to my growing embarrassment, gestured to his and Emiel’s companions. “Mr. Kettlewell and Mr. Johanssen are here from Chicago. They run the largest private non-profit in Illinois supporting local youth shelters. We wanted to offer them a memorable meal during their visit.”
A- ha . So, this visit fell on the ‘wanting to impress someone’ end of the spectrum, it seemed. Well, my irrational behind-the-scenes freakout aside, I hoped they’d succeeded in wooing their potential supporters with food. In fact, maybe there was something else I could do to ensure that they did—beyond providing a decent vegetarian entrée and a plate of perfectly cooked fish.
“That’s wonderful,” I said, dialing up my smile for the two betas. “From what I hear, the Hope Project is doing some amazing work in a place that really needs it.”
I’d taken Zalen by surprise again. Meanwhile, a sweet grin at odds with his ‘scary tough guy’ appearance spread over Emiel’s face for a fleeting moment before self-consciousness seemed to overcome him. Out of nowhere, the absurd desire to know what he smelled like when he wasn’t using suppressors washed over me.
“Thank you for that,” Zalen said quietly, breaking the moment. “And thank you for the meal, as well. It truly was wonderful.”
“That it was,” said Mr. Johanssen. “And everyone knows, the way to a donor’s heart is through his stomach.”
Mr. Kettlewell laughed jovially at this, and I hoped that was a good sign for whatever Zalen and Emiel needed from the pair.
From the corner of my eye, I caught Nat striding in our direction with a pinched look on his face and my patience just... snapped . I extricated myself as quickly and smoothly as I could, citing the demands of the kitchen, and headed toward him on an intercept course before he could get within speaking range of the table.
“Do. Not ,” I said through gritted teeth, grabbing him by the upper arm and turning him around to retreat to the kitchen. “Nat, I swear to god—whatever it is that you think you need to interject into this situation, you fucking don’t .”
I was mildly surprised that he let himself be manhandled. Nat was a strong guy even when he wasn’t practically living at the gym during his off hours. I dragged him back to the empty corridor behind the kitchen and turned on him.
“As I may have already mentioned several times , Zalen runs a youth center,” I snapped. “He’s courting a pair of high-value donors, and in case you’ve forgotten, we run the only Michelin-star restaurant in the region. He brought the donors here to impress them, and he had no idea I was the head chef—because we’ve only ever talked for ten freaking minutes !”
I glared up at my husband, watching mulish stubbornness war with dawning self-awareness that he might’ve been acting like a douche canoe for no rational reason whatsoever. My curiosity at which direction he’d try to take this almost outweighed my general state of being over it .
“Well,” Nat said, his tone giving nothing away. “He clearly knows you work here now .”
“Yes, he does,” I replied, because what the hell else was I supposed to say to that? “And if you have a point to make with that jab, don’t bother clarifying. Because I really don’t give a shit.”
Without another word, I turned and stalked back to the kitchen, trying not to think about how homey and welcoming the big house in Ladue had been, or how my body had gone soft and liquid in response to the alphas’ warm smiles.