Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
THE CHEF WHO DOESN’T NEED ANYONE’S OPINION (HE NEEDS HER OPINION)
T he shark was not the problem.
The shark was fine. The shark was, in fact, excellent, if you liked cured and fermented shark, which no one really did. But it was a traditional Icelandic recipe and people came from all over to try it and Stenrik took it as a personal challenge to make the best shark he could.
It took months of curing and fermenting to make the shark edible and no longer poisonous for human (and troll) consumption.
This shark had completed the fermentation and air drying and was ready to be served with some Brennivín that evening in a special plating concept he’d refined for this special dish.
The problem was the woman currently being shown to the staff quarters by Sigrid, who was dying to know more.
Stenrik wanted Elise gone and time to confront his mother but he sensed his mother would find a way to use her magic to block him from getting closer.
She was a master at interfering then avoiding the discussion after.
He picked up a knife and cut off the hard exterior skin and cubed the tender inner flesh .
He had followed Beyond the Plate before she had notified him that she was coming.
He followed several shows, cooking and restaurant reviews, saying he was keeping up with the trends, but he enjoyed hers the most. He had watched them in the hours between the end of the night service and the beginning of the prep cycle.
At three or four in the morning, sitting at the counter in his kitchen with a glass of Aquavit and the loneliness of the Icelandic summer, when he was trapped indoors by the sunlight that never ended.
She captivated him. She was good at her job, genuinely engaged in it.
The way she moved through a kitchen, the questions she asked, the things she noticed that other journalists missed (the temperature of the water a chef used to wash vegetables, the sound the knife made against the board, whether the staff moved with ease or tension).
She paid attention to the little things, not just the big things.
He watched the Lyon episode four times. Not because of what she said about the cellar—though she’d been right about the cellar, it was unconscionably small and he would not have lasted thirty seconds—but because of the moment at the end when she tasted the second course and her face changed in a way that she clearly hadn’t meant to do.
Surprised pleasure, breaking through the professional composure like a crack in volcanic rock.
He had filed this away and hoped to see it in his own kitchen, especially now that she was here.
He began to chop the herb bundle on his cutting board with more force than strictly necessary.
Her scent lingered in his nostrils. It happened sometimes with certain people—something in his troll blood responding to a particular human the way iron responded to a lodestone.
But this was the strongest he had ever responded and it was strange.
Warm and green, like sunlight on grass, and something beneath that was more complex: the faint residual ghost of whatever perfume she’d worn this morning, now mostly gone, replaced by her own warmth.
Berries, he thought. Something citrus and something earthier.
He was a chef. He identified things by smell. It was a professional hazard. Or so he told himself.
However, he’d never had such a powerful reaction to anyone before, not in five centuries of life, and he resisted naming what it could mean.
His body stirred, blood heating and his cock perking up in a way it had not in more years than he could remember.
Since that traveling chef visited a decade ago, was it?
She entertained him during the summer, during a time when he often went stir-crazy not being able to go outside for weeks at a time because of the constant sunlight.
“You’re not trying to kill your new blogger with hákarl, are you?” Torfi’s voice scraped against every nerve Stenrik had. “Chasing her off before she’s even unpacked?”
Stenrik turned from the prep station. There was his least favorite brother—leaning against the counter as if he owned it, arms crossed, contaminating everything within reach simply by existing.
He hadn’t sanitized his hands. He hadn’t sanitized anything.
The entire station would need to be broken down now.
Of course.
“What are you doing here?” Stenrik kept his voice flat. “Don’t you have a video to post? Twelve minutes of yourself falling down something?”
Torfi clutched his chest with both hands, staggering back into the adjacent station—that one too, now contaminated, fantastic—with the theatrical devastation of a man who had never once felt a genuine wound.
“I’m wounded, dear brother. And here I am, trying to save you from yourself.
Again. Since you keep running off your staff. ”
“If you stopped sleeping with them and ghosting them before the dinner service, I wouldn’t need to replace them every third week.”
“That,” Torfi said cheerfully, “has not happened in at least a month.” He inhaled through his nose, slow and deliberate, eyes closing like he was sampling something expensive. “Speaking of which—the blogger. Where is she? She smells incredible.”
Stenrik snapped his towel. It caught Torfi square on the forearm.
The resulting yelp was deeply satisfying.
“And don’t call her ‘the blogger,’” Stenrik said. “She has a name. Use it, or don’t speak about her at all.”
Torfi rubbed his arm, grinning despite himself. “Fine, Chef Bro-R-Dee.”
“I am better than canned food.” Stenrik thrust the sanitizing spray and a clean cloth into his brother’s chest. “You dirtied two stations. Clean them. The staff has enough to do before service.”
Torfi stared at the supplies. His expression cycled through offense, negotiation, and resignation in under four seconds. He took them. “Fine.” He spritzed the counter with far less enthusiasm than the situation warranted. “So. Where is she?”
“Getting settled.”
Stenrik pointed his knife at the center of his brother’s chest. “Leave her alone. She’s here to work. You will not make this difficult.”
Torfi looked up with a smirk. The one that had preceded approximately nine hundred problems over the course of their long, loud lives. “I never make things difficult. I make them interesting. Mother suggested?— ”
“No.” The word came out sharper than a filet knife. “Absolutely not. Whatever she suggested. She has done enough. I will throw you over the deck railing myself.”
“Into the ocean?” Torfi pressed a hand over his heart. “You’d turn your own brother to stone?”
“Gunnar would never put me through this.”
“Gunnar,” Torfi said darkly, “is insufferably well-behaved now that he’s mated. It’s embarrassing.” He spritzed the second station with exaggerated care. “Fine. Best behavior. I swear on the fermentation.”
Stenrik watched him.
He’s going to be a problem.
Not the hákarl. The hákarl was fine—aging beautifully, actually, despite the summer heat. The fermentation was the least of his concerns.
He was going to have a problem, and it was standing in his kitchen wearing a smirk and smelling of mischief.
S ervice started at eight, which meant his kitchen had been in controlled chaos since three. Add to it a woman with a camera, and he was on edge.
Stenrik did not consider himself a difficult man. He had standards. There was a difference.
“Again,” he said, very quietly, to Bragi, who was plating the hákarl amuse-bouche.
Bragi looked up with the patient expression of a man who had heard these words before. “Chef?”
Stenrik pointed at the plate with a single extended finger. “The angelica sprig is two millimeters left of center.”
“It’s an amuse-bouche, Chef.”
“It is a five-bite introduction to everything this kitchen stands for. The sprig is crooked. ”
Bragi moved the sprig.
It was, Stenrik noted with deep professional satisfaction, now exactly centered. He moved on.
The kitchen had its rhythm—voices clipped, movements economical, the range a steady roar beneath the volcanic stone.
He knew every inch of it. He had built all of this, from the lava rock counters to the skylights above the herb garden to the iron sconces in the dining chambers. He was fine. Perfectly fine.
He was aware of her.
She was in the corner near the pass. She’d asked to observe first service from the kitchen periphery, and he’d agreed because he’d read her work and knew she wouldn’t get in the way. He’d regretted it approximately four minutes later when he became aware of her.
Most food journalists stood in corners and took notes.
Elise Moreau stood in the corner and watched.
Quiet. Sharp. The way a chess player watched a board rather than a single piece.
Her camera captured the chaos, and she murmured commentary into the video periodically.
She didn’t get in the way, as she promised, but she distracted anyway.
He did not look at her. He was absolutely not going to look at her.
He felt the warmth beneath his sternum again—that faint, thrumming heat he’d first noticed when she’d walked into the anteroom and which had subsequently refused to leave.
He had filed it under physiological response to being annoyed.The problem with that feeling was that it intensified when she moved closer and lessened when she didn’t, which was not how irritants worked.
He focused on the char.
“Marta. Skin on table six.”
“It’s crisp?—”
“It should snap. Thirty seconds. ”
Marta pulled the char without argument. She had learned, in three years, when to fight. He paid her accordingly.
The thirty seconds passed. He leaned in close to assess the glaze. Sea buckthorn catching the candlelight, the skin a perfect dark gold. That. That was it.