Best Friend’s Daddy Read online

  Honestly that was why I had such a crush on him—and still did. He’d treated me like an adult.

  Of course, never in the way that I had wanted and secretly dreamed about, but I’d been a teenager then so of course now. Now, I was an adult, and come hell or high water I was going to show him all the ways that I could work under him. Pun very much intended.

  “We’ve been cycling through head chefs like nobody’s business for the past three years and nobody will stick. Now we’re not even getting any great people, we’re just getting the desperate. It’s so awful.”

  Brooke looked incredibly upset and I realized, in a way that I hadn’t before, just how high the stakes were. I put my hand on her arm. “Brooke. Honey. It’s going to be okay. We’re going to make this work. You’ll see.”

  She gave me a watery smile. “If anyone could do it, Stevie, it’d be you.”

  She showed me into the back office, knocking on the door. “Dad! Your interview is here!”

  As if he didn’t know that it was going to be me. I rolled my eyes fondly behind Brooke’s back. She really was such a doll.

  The office door opened and… holy shit.

  Michael looked as handsome as ever. More so, even, as though now with my own maturity I was able to better appreciate him in a way that my teenage self hadn’t been able to. Those eyes were just as piercing, his strong jaw, the hint of stubble, the slightly unbuttoned dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the broad chest, the height…

  Fuck, I wanted him to pin me against the wall and ask if I’d been a good girl.

  But aside from how good he looked, just how naturally handsome he was, he looked… tired. Worn down.

  Michael used to always have this boundless energy. He was full of smiles, ideas, and a way to make me laugh when I was down. Now I felt as though our positions were reversed. I was the one who had to find a way to cheer him up, to get rid of that underlying weariness that I could sense from him.

  Michael gave me a warm smile. “Stevie. It’s been ages.”

  My heart beat rapidly as he ushered me into his office and closed the door behind us. I sat down in the chair across from him, feeling my heart beat continuing to pound in my ears. He was so close, and I wanted him, and I wanted this job, so badly.

  “I looked over your resume,” Michael said, tapping the desk where I could see it sitting. “Congratulations on finishing culinary school, that’s no small feat.”

  “Well you know me, sir,” I replied, looking up at him through my lashes on that last word, making it playful instead of too serious.

  “Stevie how many times have I told you—just call me Michael.” The slightly commanding tone in his voice had me shivering.

  “Michael,” I corrected. “I always do what I set out to do. You were the one who inspired me, actually.”

  “Oh?”

  I smiled at him. “You remember, you taught me how to cook when I slept over. You instilled in me that love for cooking and inspired me so much. I just knew that when I graduated I had to work with the person who made it all possible in my head.”

  Michael gave me another warm smile that had my toes curling a little. “You have no idea how much it means to me to hear you say that.”

  Especially right now, I was sure, but I didn’t say that out loud. I didn’t want to wound Michael’s pride or make him feel anything less than successful. The bullshit going on in his life at that moment wasn’t his fault. Not at all.

  “Unfortunately,” Michael continued, “I just can’t hire you at the moment.”

  “What?” I blurted out before I could stop myself.

  He leaned in across the desk a little. “Stevie, you’ve always been a hard worker and a smart person, top of your classes, dedicated - but you just got out of culinary school. You’re too young and inexperienced to be a head chef. You’ll want to ride with the training wheels first, get yourself a good sous chef job or as a line cook at a prestigious restaurant.”

  “This is a prestigious restaurant,” I replied. “And Theo Summers was my age and right out of culinary school when you took him on.”

  I knew it was a risk to bring Theo up. He screwed Michael over professionally and personally. Stole his goddamn wife. I might have been in love with Michael since I was sixteen but I never wanted him to end up single because his wife hurt him that way. I’d always pictured it in my head as a mutual, amicable divorce, the two of them just naturally falling out of love with each other.

  But cheating on him and abandoning him? No. No way. That wasn’t right.

  Theo hitting a sore spot or no, though, I was right. And I knew I was right.

  “You gave Theo a chance when he was right out of school because you knew that he had the talent and the vision, he just needed a chance to prove himself. Well, I’ve got that. I have a plan to turn this business around, and I know it’s a good one.”

  And I’m not going to sleep with your wife, I thought, but didn’t say out loud. I won’t betray you.

  “I appreciate your confidence. You’ve always had a lot of it.” Michael looked at me fondly, as though remembering specific times. I hadn’t realized that he would remember anything in particular about me, and my stomach melted a little. “But I don’t think you realize how tough this business is.”

  “The business may be tough but I’m tougher. Once I want something, I don’t give up. Not ever.” I squared my shoulders. “Besides, what have you got to lose at this point? Give me a month to get your business to pick up. If it doesn’t pick up then we’ll go our separate ways. I’ll follow your advice and get more of a starter job. But if I’m right…”

  I let the sentence trail off, cocking my head and smirking at him.

  Michael looked at me ruefully. “You’re incorrigible.”

  “So I’ve been told. By you, in fact, before. You always used to say my mouth was too smart for me.”

  “And it’s still true.” Michael’s smile faded as he sighed. “All right, here’s what we’ll do. You’re right, I don’t have anything to lose. And you are my daughter’s best friend and a good kid.”

  I’m not a kid, I wanted to yell, but I doubted that would help my chances.

  “I’ll take you on and give you a shot. But I’m not sure that the restaurant will be open in another month. You give it your best and if you can’t turn this place around, don’t be hard on yourself. You just go and I’ll put in a good word for you at some other place, get you a good recommendation. Fair?”

  “Fair.” I stood up and held out my hand. “But this place will be open in a month. It’ll be bustling.”

  Michael gave me a rueful look, like he wanted to believe me but wasn’t sure if he could. Then he reached out and shook my hand - and I felt myself melt. His grip was firm, his hands large, larger than I had remembered, his fingers long and curling so easily around my own hand, touching my wrist…

  “I look forward to you proving me wrong,” he told me, holding onto my hand as my legs trembled.

  If this was all a handshake did for me, then what could his hands, his mouth, moving all over my body, tasting me, teasing me…what could possibly happen then?

  I was desperate to find out.

  3

  Michael

  It was Friday, and the big test for Stevie as my new head chef.

  Friday night was the busiest night of the week. People wanted to get out and celebrate the weekend, that was when everyone had their date night, and so on. It used to be that Friday nights we had to turn people away, we were so booked with reservations and walk ins, but now I was lucky if we filled even a third of the restaurant on these nights.

  I knew that of course we couldn’t change things in a single night, but I also couldn’t help but feel a stupid kind of hope, one that I hadn’t felt with the other head chefs I’d tried. Stevie had always been the most determined person I’d ever met. If she wanted something, she got it. Not that she was spoiled. Far from it. But when she set her sights on something, she wasn’t going to giv
e it up.

  As I stood by the host stand, staring out into the street, I wondered if I should go back in and check on her. See how she was doing. Staring out of the front windows hoping that customers would come in was not really going to help anything. A watched pot never boiled and all that.

  But at the same time - it felt dangerous to be near her.

  When I last had seen Stevie, she had recently sprouted up two inches and gotten curves, but I hadn’t really noticed. She’d been my daughter’s little friend. But then I had also still seen Brooke as just a child, and had only recently begun to realize that my daughter was now an adult and someone I had to start treating like an adult, capable of making her own decisions no matter how I felt about them.

  At least with Brooke I had seen her almost every day. And then she was my daughter, always daddy’s little girl.

  Stevie was a shock.

  She was a beautiful young woman, voluptuous, her dark hair thick and long and curling. Her clothes were professional but they hugged her body tightly, had clearly been tailored for her, and I kept itching to put my hands on her generous curves. And the confidence with which she’d carried herself, the determined glint in her eyes, that hint of sass that I remembered so well still peeking out…

  When Virginia left me, I had been…

  Well…

  I think everyone in my life had known that I was heartbroken. I hadn’t exactly done the best job of hiding it. As far as I’d known, Virginia and I had been fine. Our relationship had been great.

  Of course, I’d been throwing myself into my work a lot but I’d been excited to give Theo more responsibility and to start taking time off to be with Virginia more. And I’d always made time for Brooke. So I guess I just hadn’t seen the warning signs. Or hadn’t wanted to.

  The point was, when Virginia had left me, I’d still been truly, painfully, deeply in love with her. And it took a while for that to fade.

  Once it had… once I’d realized that Virginia really wasn’t going to come back and that I was an idiot for wanting her to, that she hadn’t appreciated me the way that I deserved… I still hadn’t wanted to look at another woman. I’d been too damn busy trying to save my restaurant. And too damn busy trying to deal with the fucking divorce, and my daughter, and all the rest.

  It was a fucking nightmare.

  Now I was…I was…well. Might as well call a spade a spade. I was wildly attracted to someone for the first time in three years who wasn’t my ex-wife, and it just had to be the best friend of my daughter.

  Stevie was only, what, twenty-one?

  Get a grip, Michael, for fuck’s sake.

  I should go back and check on her—but every time I’d tried, Brooke had kept shooing me away. “Give her space!” she’d say.

  Yeah. Space. The last thing I wanted to give Stevie. I wanted to crowd her against the wall, slide my hands over her, rip open that damn shirt of hers and—

  I shook my head to clear my thoughts. Down, boy. Now was not the time. Now was the time for seeing if Stevie had the kind of chops that you needed to run a kitchen. She was sassy, sure, and determined, and she’d always enjoyed it when I had shown her how to cook something. But could she be the boss she needed to be for this kind of job?

  Brooke appeared at my elbow, smiling. Some of the worry in my chest loosened up at that. “Hey, how’s it going?”

  “Good!” Brooke responded, her smile widening.

  I hope so.

  Brooke had been maudlin for months after her mother left. Things really fell apart between them. I had hoped that despite Virginia’s actions the two of them could still be close, like they used to, but this was apparently a betrayal that Brooke couldn’t get over. She didn’t just see it as her mother cheating on me—she saw it as her mother cheating on her too, keeping such a big secret from her and hurting someone she claimed to love while not being honest.

  There had been some pretty big fights between the two of them. Virginia and I hadn’t really had any fights. What was there to fight about? She left me, said she didn’t love me, said she was going to be with Theo. End of story, really. And she’d cheated on me. How could I have trusted her after that, even if I still loved her?

  Brooke and Virginia, though. Man those had been some big fights. Virginia hadn’t seen why Brooke was so upset, and it would spiral from there.

  But now she was smiling and I couldn’t be more pleased about it. If hiring Stevie made Brooke happy, then no matter what else happened, it was worth it.

  “I have a good feeling about all of this,” Brooke promised me. “I think you should take a hands-off approach tonight, really. Stevie can handle it.”

  “If you’re sure…”

  “You lurking up by the host stand isn’t going to help bring in customers.” Brooke hip-checked me out of the way to take my spot. “Now I can welcome people in with my winning personality.”

  “Are you saying I don’t have a winning personality?”

  “Go organize your desk or something, Dad, we’ve got this under control.”

  Mmm. All right.

  I shrugged and headed back to my office to pay some bills, although God knew how much longer I’d be able to do that…and check my emails.

  Ah, crap. One of the top emails was from a friend of mine, a fellow restauranteur.

  The subject line was: Can you believe this? I clicked on the video link in the email.

  Just as I’d suspected, it was an advertisement for Theo’s new cooking show. He’d gone down to L.A. to promote himself as a celebrity chef and with his good looks and charm, and his skills, no wonder he had secured himself a spot.

  I hated how once upon a time I would’ve been so proud of him. I would’ve been glad for him to go and do something like this. I’d known that he couldn’t stay in the restaurant forever, that he’d want to spread his wings and forge his own path, but did he have to do it by hurting me?

  Asshole.

  I had to admit, though, the commercial was well-produced. It was slick and professional, and eye-catching, and, well, overall impressive.

  God dammit.

  I closed out of the link and shut down the computer. I’d given Stevie enough space, I had to see what was going on out there.

  What I saw put me in an even worse fucking mood. The dining room looked close to chaos. The servers were just milling around, and several diners looked angry.

  Dammit. I knew she was too inexperienced, I should’ve at least given her a guiding hand, I should…

  I stopped short as I stormed into the kitchen.

  Stevie was hustling, and harder than the line cooks that were with her. She was multi-tasking like a pro, giving out orders and serving up food onto plates and sautéing veggies. It was only as I saw her working so hard that I realized how laidback and complacent my other workers had become.

  One of the servers, Cameron, was waiting at the window. “My table’s been waiting half an hour for appetizers!”

  “I told you to 86 the lobster,” Stevie replied. Her tone was firm but not cranky. Chefs could get to be real assholes sometimes so I was glad to see that she was handling this without resorting to yelling. “You didn’t listen. Now you have to wait for the lobster to poach.”

  Cameron rolled his eyes and stormed off.

  Great. Well, if worst came to worst I’d talk to the table. Cameron was a good server but he was also cocky. A real charmer, and he knew it, and he’d yak it up to his tables and promise them the moon because it got him a good tip but it meant that sometimes the kitchen would suffer for it. Clearly Stevie wasn’t going to take that lying down, and good on her for it.

  I walked over. “How’re things going?”

  Stevie smiled at me, and heat sparked in my stomach. Dammit. She was smiling at me like we were sharing some kind of secret, and that was a dangerous way for me to take it.

  “It’s going slower than I’d like,” Stevie replied. “The menu that Theo came up with is overly complicated and the chefs who came in after
him have started cutting corners to try and compensate and of course the staff have followed their example. It means I’ve got to deal with a mixture of inadequate ingredients and dishes that take too long to prepare.”

  “Are you saying Theo’s menu isn’t working? Theo’s menu is what got us our Michelin designation.”

  “Yeah, and it’s his menu that’s going to cause us to lose it.” Stevie arched an eyebrow at me. “Times change and things change and a restaurant has to rotate their menu and change to keep being relevant. What worked once doesn’t always work a second time and what worked for a year doesn’t always work forever.”

  I could see that when it came to Stevie, her sass hadn’t faded with the years.

  If anything, she’d only gotten more outspoken.

  And damn if I didn’t find it attractive.

  4

  Stevie

  I was working my butt off, but I felt like a hamster at a wheel, or like I was running on a treadmill. I couldn’t actually get anywhere no matter how hard I was working. The serving staff got way too cocky after Theo left and now they were used to calling the shots, instead of listening to the kitchen. The kitchen staff had just about given up hope of being listened to, or getting dishes out, or, well, anything.

  The ingredients were second rate, and the dishes were overproduced. We needed simpler dishes that weren’t so goddamn pretentious and fresher ingredients and just some new shit in general to shake things up.

  And now - Michael was frowning at me like he was regretting hiring me in the first place. Fuck. That was the opposite of what I wanted. I wanted to wow him, but how could I do that with Theo’s dishes, Theo’s options that had long gone stale? They’d made a splash way back when but that was, what, ten years ago when the restaurant had first opened?

  So yeah, this wasn’t exactly what I’d hoped for when I’d imagined how tonight would go. Especially the look on Michael’s face. But you know what? He wasn’t seeing me get to be myself. He was seeing yet another chef try and work with a menu that had been highly personal to Theo—and a menu that hadn’t aged well and was now second-rate.