Playing With Fire (Smoky Heights #3)

Chapter 1

ONE

WILDER

Pressing on her soft warmth, I watch as juices run out of her thick center.

Damn, I love a juicy girl.

Testing to be sure, because I don’t wanna rush and do this before she’s primed and ready, I push again with two thick fingers, mouth watering as more of that delicious moisture spills out, over and down the thighs.

Perfect. She’s good to go.

The corner of my mouth pops up in a smirk of self-satisfaction.

And to think, I get to do this dozens of times a day, all in a day’s work.

“Order up!” I call, tapping the bell on the counter to remind the customer to come back to my corner of the bodega and grab their food that’s still sitting there.

I dress a fresh hoagie roll with my special love sauce. Homemade herbed peppercorn aioli, rather than some shit that arrived in a twenty-five-gallon drum, “fresh” off a barge after it took two months to ship here.

Nah, my shit’s homemade. Full of love. That’s why I call it my love sauce. I even grow the herbs myself, on the roof of my shitty building in the South Bronx. Makes all the difference.

“Thank you!” The person picks up their sandwich and taps the counter twice in greeting.

Downright kind for a New Yorker. Probably a transplant, my guess is from the South, where everyone is sickeningly sweet, like that stuff they call tea.

Placing the warm, juicy chicken thighs atop the sauced buns, I spread the rest of the toppings on, then sprinkle on the finishing touches. Wrapping her up—I’m a stickler for such things—she’s ready to go.

I turn around, footlong in hand (sandwich, not my sausage), I find the guy who ordered it still standing there, waiting impatiently, annoyance all over his face.

I hand over the sandwich. “Your Chicken Love Supreme.”

“That just sounds gross,” he says, swiping the package from my hand and taking off.

Clearly he’s got somewhere to be that’s more important than a thank you.

Yeah, that’s what I’m more used to.

A contented sigh passes my lips. This is what it feels like to be home.

My tattooed knuckles rap on the counter in farewell to him, but he’s long gone.

The nerve of him, dunking on my names. The Chicken Love Supreme is a newer addition to the options here, and it might be my current fave.

My sandwich names are great. Hell, naming my creations was my stipulation for taking this job.

Closest thing I’ve ever gotten to designing a real menu.

The bodega owner doesn’t give two shits what I do back here, as long as it doesn’t get her any health code violations or fines. Plus, she’s raking in a lot more dough with me behind the counter than she did when it was just hot dogs and chicken tenders back here.

“Nobody’s poached your ass yet?” The raspy voice I recognize as a regular has me turning around from where I was cleaning my station and keeping my lowboy topped up.

“’Ey, Neil. Still making sandwiches, my guy.” We trade fist bumps. “What about you, still walking dogs?”

The thirty-something regular of mine holds his hands out, showing me zero leashes on him today. “I love the furry fuckers, it’s a sweet gig. But I got the day off. Thought you might get snatched up for something more than sandwiches by now.”

A bittersweet thought.

Look, this place isn’t the job I dreamed of as a head chef, or even a decent leg up in the food industry so I can get there one day, but I get to make people food I’m passionate about, fill their stomachs with my creations day in and day out, and for now, it’s gotta be enough.

“Sandwiches by day, New American by night,” I tell him.

“Double shifting it, huh.” He holds out two fists.

I give him a pound on both and turn back around.

“Usual?” I ask him and he grunts, so I get to work on his lunch and keep talking.

“One day it’ll be my own place,” I tell him.

“Salt + Spice, Executive Chef, Wilder Amante.” My hands spread out with the words, along the roll I’m prepping, visualizing my name etched in glass on the front door, at the top of the leather-bound menu, and on my custom embroidered jacket.

But for now, I gotta take what I can get.

The odd job, filling in for a line cook here or there.

The nicest places don’t usually wanna hire a convict who comes from a past like mine.

And I’ve done enough dishes for the industry experience at the tourist traps already, but they never bring me on for anything more.

“They’re sleeping on ya, Amante. Your time is coming, my man.”

“Working nights now at that new place in the Village,” I tell him.

“Which one?” he asks, and he’s got a point. There’s about a dozen a day.

I tell him, and he whistles. “Think I heard about that place from my girl. You the big dog there?”

My bark of a laugh makes the bottle of love sauce jiggle in my grip. “Junior chef, about seventeenth rung down. Your confidence in me is somethin’ else, amico.”

What I don’t tell him is how I barely got that job, but they were desperate. They’ll probably fire me the second they get someone with a clean record who applies.

Prison took away a lot of options for me, but it also changed my perspective, and it gave me a dream. Wouldn’t have found my love for cooking—or gotten straight—if it hadn’t been for that hellish time in my life.

Wrapping up his sandwich, I hand it over the high counter to Neil, and he slaps a fat tip in the jar.

“My guy!” I point at him, and he salutes me, heading off.

It might not be Salt + Spice, but this place is light-years ahead of where I’ve been.

I didn’t always have this sickeningly cheery outlook, compared to my fellow brethren of the Big Apple. Most of them wouldn’t look at this run-down bodega and call it paradise. When you grow up in a family like mine, with a life like mine, your outlook is dark. Shit, your whole life is dark.

But I found a new path seven years ago, when I walked out of the state penitentiary. Fresh air in my lungs, fresh passion for being in the kitchen thanks to my work assignments at the pen, I was ready for a fresh fucking start all around.

In my family’s line of work, that’s unheard of.

I did my time and got out. I’m on a new trail now. Even got a deal made, so it’s official, and that shit never happens.

But I’m Wilder Amante. I carve my own fucking path.

Getting started on the next customer’s order, I use my favorite knife, an 8.25” Moritaka AS Gyuto, to dice the roast chicken for the sandwich. The same knife peeks back at me in black and gray on the mirrored backsplash along my workstation, from among the sea of tattoos covering my arms.

They cover my whole body, really, but my entire forearm has a to-scale homage of the knife I can’t live without along the outside, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t turn me on in a weird way to see it as I’m chopping the meat for my next customer.

You know what they say, a chef’s best friend is a sharp knife, and I’m a little attached to mine.

With meticulous care I spread my roasted red pepper jam on the bottom half of the roll, making sure to coat it nice and thick, and toss the spreader back in the insert at my station with a juicy clatter.

The meat gets piled on next, followed by a few dollops of smoked crème fraiche and a dazzle of arugula, and she’s good to go.

This isn’t some prepackaged slop you’d get anywhere else, and that’s why the line at my counter is full all day long.

These handmade sauces, spreads, and garnishes speak for themselves.

“Order up!” I call, tapping the bell, and so the day goes on. Just like every other.

The midday lunch rush comes and goes, and I’ve had a chance in the couple of moments in between to restock my station, prepped and good to go for the late afternoon crowd that’ll be hitting on their way home from work.

Gotta keep my workstation clean throughout the day so I can take off on time to get to my next shift.

It’s a life I’m sure plenty of people would find ways to complain about, but the shit I’ve seen?

Hell, the shit I’ve done? I don’t forget where I came from that easily.

Can’t let myself take for granted that shit could always be worse.

A lot worse than making food I love that helps keep the people of this city running.

No risk of getting arrested for doing this job.

Probably not even a real risk of being killed while doing it.

Not like my pops.

The bell on the counter rings, but I didn’t press it to say an order is ready, so some impatient fucking New Yorker must need their sandwich and need it now.

I turn around, ready to give them hell, because no one gives me shit once they see me.

The 6’5” height on this Italian stallion probably has something to do with it.

The giant sonofabitch who can bench press a couple of prison guards, and has the full body ink to prove it, he doesn’t get much opposition.

I think it’s the neck and finger tattoos that really seal the deal for me. Even the knuckle tat that spells out LOVE across my left hand, it somehow doesn’t endear most people to me.

Me? I think it’s sweet. A play on words, my last name means lover, and I put love into everything I make. It was a no-brainer.

But others think it just adds to the fear factor that I tend to give people, maybe some relic of the shadows of my past that seep through, even when I try to tamp them down.

Could be that the hint of crazy that I had to rely on to keep me alive in prison has never really gone away.

Whatever the case, when people see me, they don’t fucking push me.

But in front of my sandwich counter is a face I haven’t seen in an age.

A woman much, much smaller than me, even at her taller stature in those fancy heels.

She’s someone who wouldn’t hesitate to put me in my place, no matter how intimidating I look, and a smile breaks out on my face at the sight of her.

“Aurora!”

My voice booms, no helping it, I’ve got a thing with volume control. When you’re this big, delicate isn’t really an option, unless I’m finishing a plate.