Knife, Volume 1 (Rolling Thunder MC #15)
Chapter 1
Tuesday stepped through the Rolling Thunder Meat Company’s front door and smiled at the man behind the counter. She usually dealt with Shaggy, but she usually came on Thursdays.
His nametag said he was the manager, though, so she figured it couldn’t hurt to just tell him what she wanted. If he looked confused, she could explain it.
But the second she had the thought, she realized he was going to know exactly what she needed.
There was something about the way he stood behind the counter — not leaning on it, not scrolling his phone, but completely present.
Tall, broad through the shoulders, with the kind of forearms that came from actual work rather than a gym.
His eyes tracked her from the door with calm, unhurried assessment, and she felt it the way she sometimes sensed a shift in barometric pressure.
And her inner wolf perked up and took him in almost disconcertingly. Generally, the bitch only took the time to decide if someone was a threat or not, but she was way more interested in this man than Tuesday was comfortable with.
Dating a biker would be a bad idea all around, and Tuesday had the idea Rolling Thunder only put members into management positions.
She told her wolf to settle down, and she stepped to the counter with a friendly smile.
“Good morning. I need a center-cut whole roast tenderloin, as even as you can get it. No big taper, no thin tail. It’s for a Wellington, so the sear and the slice both matter.
Any chance I can look over what you’ve got on the rail first? ”
He lifted a brow. Not the ‘oh honey’ brow she got from suppliers who heard a pretty woman use technical language and assumed she’d read it somewhere. This was the brow of a man recalibrating. Reassessing. She felt the difference in how he was looking at her and liked it more than she should have.
“Normally, we don’t let customers in the back,” he said, “but since you seem to know what you’re talking about, I suppose I can make an exception. I’m Knife, and since I haven’t seen you come in before, can I see your card?”
She pulled her wallet from her small purse, fished the card out, and showed it to him.
Something moved across his face when he read it. Not quite a smile, but close. “Tuesday? Interesting name.”
“I usually come on Thursdays and deal with Shaggy,” she said, “and Tuesday is downright normal compared to Knife.”
He chuckled, low and unhurried, and the vibrations arrowed straight to her clit. She shut that down fast before he scented arousal on her, and she paid attention to what he was saying.
“Which is about as odd as the name my parents gave me, believe it or not.” He opened a door behind him and motioned for her to come around the counter. “C’mon, let’s make it fast so I don’t have to pull someone from the back to fill in up front.”
When she neared him, she revised her earlier estimate of his size upward. He was compact, but at least six foot three, and he moved with an economy of motion despite his size. He held the door for her without making a production of it. “I assume the Wellington means you have big Valentine’s plans?”
“Oh, no. I’m making this for my brother, who has super-special plans that involve staying in, but it’s kind of doing double duty, since I’m looking specifically for how to help a restaurant put it on the menu as a daily special, meaning they’ll need to make a dozen or more at a time.
So, I’m looking for ways to train them in how to mass-produce them one day a week to the restaurant’s standards. ”
The smell hit her immediately, cold air saturated with iron, but clean and wholesome. Her wolf found it grounding while Tuesday found it reassuring.
He glanced back at her over his shoulder as they moved through the processing area, and she caught something in his expression that might have been approval. “Smart. You test the method on one before you scale it.”
“Exactly.” She looked around the space with genuine interest, noting the organization, the cleanliness, the way the workflow was laid out.
It was a serious operation. She’d been in enough professional kitchens to recognize when someone had thought hard about how a space should function. “Did you design this layout?”
“Inherited most of it. Modified it.” He said it without false modesty, just information. “Here we are.”
She moved along the rail, judging the tenderloins on the hanging carcasses with focused attention. She was halfway down the row before she found the one she wanted and pointed to it.
“This one.”
That lifted brow again. “Good eye.”
“You hung them evenly. Made it easier.”
“Most people don’t notice that.”
“Most people think meat comes from a grocery store and don’t understand why we need cows.”
She turned to find him watching her with that same calm, unhurried attention he’d had from the moment she walked in, and her wolf perked up with the same awareness she wanted to shut down, but she ignored it.
“Can you break it down for me? I want to see how you’d trim it for the Wellington prep, and whether your approach matches what I’m going to recommend to the restaurant. ”
As they’d done when she’d first told him what she wanted, his eyes lit up. Not the polite interest of a man humoring a customer. Actual engagement.
“Yeah,” he said with a smile she didn’t think a whole lot of people saw. “I can do that.”
- - - ? - - -
Knife didn’t get customers who asked to see the rail, nor did he get customers who could pick the best hanging tenderloin just by walking down the row.
People came in, told him what they wanted, and trusted him to carve it up and hand it over. Which was fine. That was his job.
But this was something else.
He’d clocked her the moment she came through the door, and his first read had been pack wolf, which her card had verified. His second read, overlapping almost immediately with the first, had been something he hadn’t expected and didn’t entirely have a name for.
For the most part, dire wolves don’t have much interest in modern wolves.
Knife mostly fucked the shifter sweetbutts at the clubhouse, avoiding the humans, but the flavor of shifter didn’t matter.
He hadn’t been in a serious relationship since high school, and he’d left home in part to avoid the pressure of dating the dire wolf that his pack, his alpha, had decided he’d marry.
But this wolf spoke to his soul the instant their gazes met.
He’d filed that away and focused on the fact she was saying something completely interesting.
Center-cut whole roast tenderloin, even taper, Beef Wellington, sear and slice both matter.
She knew exactly what she was asking for and why.
That was rarer than it should have been, even from people who cook professionally.
Now he was breaking down the tenderloin she’d selected, and she was watching his hands with full attention.
He found himself slowing down slightly. Not performing, the way he sometimes did with the pig at parties. Just taking the time to make the cuts so she could follow.
“You’d want to take the chain off first,” he said, his knife finding the seam instinctively.
“Most restaurants leave too much of it. It’s good meat but it cooks different, and on a Wellington it’ll throw off your crust.” He set the chain aside.
“Your restaurant is going to want to source consistently. You want the same grade, same age, same handling every week, or the cook times will drift.”
“That’s what I’m trying to build into the protocol. It’s too bad they’re in New York, or I’d recommend you to source for them.”
He started trimming the silverskin with long clean strokes, nothing wasted, and thought it interesting that she was helping out a New York establishment.
“You spend a lot of time in New York?”
“Only for consulting jobs, and I do the work as fast as I can.”
He nodded. “My wolf isn’t happy with big cities, either. He deals with it because we’re both a fan of the Jersey Devil coaster. Also, the Soaring Eagle and the Thunderbolt.”
She frowned at him, and he smiled. “I can tell you every detail of all the greatest rollercoasters, and a lot of the not-so-great ones. Kind of my thing.”
“Really? My wolf doesn’t like being strapped into them. I enjoy them, but I have to promise my wolf extra time in the woods. She doesn’t like the loss of control.”
He glanced at her. “That important to you? Being in control?”
Her scent gave him tons of conflict, but he didn’t smile at what that might tell him.
“I usually prefer driving to riding,” she said, “and I tend to like my own cooking more than other people’s.”
A half-truth. Or rather, the words were true, but the point she conveyed was not completely true.
And he sensed her wolf, like a shift in the air pressure. Whatever her wolf was picking up from him, it wasn’t making her nervous.
He finished the trim and set the tenderloin on the scale, then wrapped it in butcher paper with the efficiency of someone who’d done it ten thousand times. His nimble fingers folded the ends, taped it, and finally marked the weight and cut in black marker.
He walked her back out front, and she told him a dozen other things she’d need on the way. He got it all for her, gave his hands a quick mist of hypochlorous acid before touching the cash register, and she had her card out before he could tell her the amount.
“Thank you for letting me in the back,” she said, handing it to him without blinking at the final tally.
“You knew what you were looking for.” He said it simply, because it was the simple truth. “Not a lot of people do.”
She nodded, accepted her card back, the bag with all her purchases, and turned away from him to leave… and he heard himself ask, “You got plans tonight?”
She turned back to him, her expression carefully neutral. “I’d planned to read, but there’s no reason that has to happen tonight.”
“I can take some prime ribeyes home.” He kept his voice even. “You could come over, and we could pretend it isn’t the day before Valentine’s Day. Just two people who understand meat, eating a proper meal.”
She smiled. “You’re the manager of a vertical meat operation, and you’re asking me over to look at your ribeyes.”
He couldn’t help his smile. “Among other things.”
Her wolf reacted to that. He read it in the half-second pause before she answered. “Text me your address. I’ll bring the wine.”