Chapter 1
Carlos was drunk.
Luca stared in disbelief at the man who was the head chef at his family’s flagship restaurant, Nonna’s Fine Italian, as he upended a bottle of Marsala wine and let the remainder trickle down his throat.
“What are you doing?” he demanded.
Carlos, who’d worked for his family for nearly twenty years and was practically family, shrugged.
“He and Lydia broke up,” Marcella, Luca’s younger sister, supplied. “He’s heartbroken.”
“You mean he probably worked too hard and she got tired of waiting at home, alone,” Dario, Luca’s younger brother, muttered under his breath. Not helpful, but probably accurate.
Carlos began singing Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” very loudly and very poorly, and Marcella shot Luca a look.
“Do something,” she hissed. “I called you here so you would do something.”
The problem with being the oldest of seven siblings and in charge of his family’s business was that any hiccup, any issue, any problem, automatically came to him.
Were the others capable? Supposedly. But it wasn’t like Luca ever saw them handle anything on their own.
He was always their first line of defense. And the second. And often the third.
For better or for worse.
Tonight, it was definitely for worse.
“Get him out of here,” Luca said succinctly.
“Where should I put him?” Marcella asked.
She was smart. Capable. Raising two children while managing the front of their three sit-down restaurants with confidence and certainty. Yet when faced with the crisis of Carlos, drunk off his ass and unable to manage the kitchen for dinner service tonight, she looked lost. Helpless.
You know why they’re helpless. You made them that way.
He had. He hadn’t wanted to. Or intended to.
But when he’d first taken over the family business—okay, for the last five years, after he’d officially been handed the reins to Nonna’s—he’d become a little bit of a control freak.
Nonna had instilled in him not just the belief that the Moretti family always came first, but the absolute certainty he either knew or would figure out the right thing to do in every situation.
Only in the last year, after the falling-out with his brother Gabriel, had Luca begun to question what he was doing to run the business—and how he was doing it.
“I don’t know. Put him in an Uber and send him home,” Luca barked. “Marcella. Dario. Figure it out.”
But Marcella, normally so fucking capable, still looked lost. Dario, one of the fundamental and key pieces of the Moretti business, didn’t move.
“Marcella. Dario. Figure it out,” Luca snapped, barely hanging on to his temper. It took a level of patience he wasn’t quite sure he possessed.
“Fine, fine, Dario, do something,” Marcella said, directing another look at their younger brother.
Dario finally nodded. “I’ll take care of him,” he said. “But what about service? What will we do without Carlos?”
“You need someone to run service tonight?” Luca questioned, and they both nodded. He’d known it from the moment he’d gotten her first text and also what he’d be doing about it, though deep down, he’d sort of hoped things might shake out differently. But that ship had sailed a long fucking time ago.
“You know we do,” Dario said, looking frantic. He was not at his best behind the stove. The whole family knew it. His genius was in numbers. Put him in front of a computer with a budget and a spreadsheet, and he was in heaven, but he couldn’t sauté to save his life.
Marcella was not much better. Plus, she usually did her rounds early, among the three restaurants, and then went home, to tuck her kids into bed.
Luca already knew he’d be spending the evening tonight behind the swinging doors, not in front of them. So much for the date he hadn’t really wanted to go on. Maybe it was better this way.
No maybes about it; it’s definitely better this way.
“I’ll do it,” Luca said. He’d learned to cook from Nonna herself. She’d taken especial care with him, not only instilling in him the responsibility for the Moretti family, but making sure he knew the recipes, too. He could prepare all of them with his eyes closed.
He set his phone down on the stainless steel counter that ran the length of the big kitchen, and with deliberate movements, shrugged off his suit jacket, carefully hung it up on a nearby hook so it wouldn’t wrinkle, then began to unbutton his cuffs and roll up his sleeves on the crisp white button-up he was wearing underneath.
“Apron,” he demanded crisply, and Marcella handed him one. He tied it on and went to inspect the main kitchen. It was spotless—at least he could say that for Carlos. The staff was in the back, prepping, but with questions in their eyes.
When he came back, Dario and Marcella were dragging Carlos off, and he was still singing, off-key, and horribly, about losing his lady love to. . .well, something. He’d mangled about half the lyrics of the aria and Luca didn’t remember the real ones.
Maybe, Luca thought, he lost her to his own fucking stupidity.
Who got drunk on Marsala? It wasn’t even real wine.
It was . . .well, it wasn’t good for drinking, Luca knew that much, because when he’d been eleven and still a little bit wild, he’d snuck some once, and Nonna had caught him red-handed.
The wine had made him lightheaded, but it hadn’t been worth it because it had tasted like crap.
“Because,” she’d said firmly, scolding him, “it’s not meant for that, Luca.
It’s meant for garlic and mushrooms and thyme and chicken.
You will try it that way and you will see. ”
She’d cooked him her own recipe of chicken marsala that afternoon and he’d seen exactly what she’d meant. Tasted exactly what she’d meant and never forgotten it.
He’d also never forgotten the steely look in her dark eyes.
The inevitable disappointment.
That day he’d vowed never to disappoint her, or any of his family again.
So at twelve, when his friends at church had plotted to sneak into church and steal the communion wine, he’d said he was busy.
When they’d snuck out at sixteen for beers and to raise hell on the quiet streets of their town of St. Helena, he’d stayed home.
Even in college he’d kept his head down, studying hard, trying to be worthy and ready when his parents decided to retire.
Then Nonna had died, and grief hadn’t changed him. Instead, the knot of sadness had coalesced into a desire to be everything she was. Steadfast. Responsible. Never shirking a single duty to her family.
From the moment he’d graduated, early, with his MBA, and come back to St. Helena, to the family fold, he’d been the real power behind the Morettis.
His father, Matteo, and his mother, Nicoletta, were sweet, but they weren’t tough. Not tough enough, anyway.
The Morettis required someone strong and capable, someone to protect them and to watch their interests, and Luca had become that.
Exactly, he’d believed, what his family needed.
Then Gabriel had left, with Ren, their cousin, and at first Luca had told himself a pretty lie, that they were leaving to expand the Moretti empire, branching into the food truck business.
But in time, it became clear, they’d left to get away from him.
He and Gabriel had never been close. But the truth still stung.
Then Ilaria, his youngest sister, had announced she had no interest in joining the family business. She’d gone to school in San Francisco and decided to stay. And then six months ago, to his shock, Chiara, the second youngest, had joined her.
Luca had been furious, at first.
Now he was just resigned. Resigned and worried, deep down, that he’d fucked all of this up.
But there was no time to think of that now—no time to think of that normally, which, Luca believed, was better all around.
He turned to the stove.
Carlos had barely started the marinara sauce for the night’s service. The huge pot was sitting on the stove, cold now, but it had clearly gotten hot and then too hot, because when he glanced in, he saw the garlic had burned black in the olive oil.
“Goddamn it,” Luca muttered under his breath.
He lifted the big pot and took it to the back, to the dishwashing room, himself.
Putting it in the big sink, he ran the water as hot as he could stand, and scoured the pot as well as he could.
The last thing he wanted was for the taste of burned garlic to get into the new batch of sauce, and to do that, he had to make sure that every single inch of the pot was clean.
Once he was as sure as he could be, he gave it one more rinse, because nobody could ever accuse Luca Moretti of not being a perfectionism stacked on perfectionism, then dried it off and took it back to the prep kitchen.
The rest of the staff gave him a wide berth, but, Luca was pleased to see, continued to work hard at their jobs, getting ready for the night’s service.
He set the pot back on the stove, poured in the olive oil and pulled out the garlic, chopping it and then grinding it with salt into a fine paste on the cutting board, just as Nonna had shown him how to do so many years ago.
“Nobody wants a huge bite of garlic, even if it’s perfectly cooked,” she’d lectured him.
Once the garlic paste was cooking in the olive oil, he added red pepper flakes and oregano, and then turned to the gigantic cans of whole San Marzano tomatoes that Nonna’s imported from Italy by the pallet.
Finally, the sauce was simmering away, and he added the huge bunch of basil in, tied with a string, to impart flavor as the sauce cooked.
He kept a close enough eye on all their restaurants that he had a good idea of how Carlos ran things here at Nonna’s flagship, and as he started the nightly meeting of the staff, he noted with pleasure nobody batted an eye at anything he suggested.
Just before five, Marcella came into the kitchen. “Dario and I got Carlos home,” she said. “You good in here?”
Luca glanced up. “Yes,” he said. “Everything’s under control.”
But she looked skeptical still. “How many years has it been since you worked on the line? Ten at least.”