It's Wednesday! Lex and I have been working away at Some Assembly Required, but I wanted to share something else with you today. King of the Kitchen was accepted and will be released in early November, just in time to hit the preorder page for GRL. I'll be reading an excerpt from it there (and man is THAT going to be interesting...I already feel like I've swallowed a swarm of butterflies just thinking about it!), and I thought I'd share a different excerpt here today.
King of the Kitchen (Dreamspinner Press November 2015)
JULY 2006
The kitchen was as hot as a sauna, and the bandanna Duncan had tied around his had lost its ability to keep his forehead dry hours ago. His feet ached, his hands were chapped, and despite being surrounded by food, he hadn't eaten since breakfast. It was long past the dinner hour, but the flurry of frenetic activity hadn't slowed much at all.
People were underfoot everywhere in the small space, bustling around with hot pans and large pots, and everywhere he turned Duncan ran the risk of toppling a precariously placed container. It was perfect.
“Order in! Rancher's omelet, no onions, no peppers, no potatoes, no meat.”
Duncan rolled his eyes, yanking the ticket out of John's hand. “So basically they want a cheese omelet? You don't think you could make it easier on us in here and just write down what they actually ordered?”
John grinned. “She ordered the rancher's omelet, dude.”
“Without three quarters of what makes it the rahncher's omelet? Did you tell her she could just order a cheese omelet and save $3.75?”
“I did, but she's not the one paying and she wanted to stick to him.”
That startled a laugh out of Duncan. John motioned toward a table over his shoulder and Duncan leaned through the pass through, trying to see the couple without being too obvious. He knocked over a battered pot in the process, making most of the diner's customers look up. So much for subtle.
“Them,” John said, pointing toward a small table toward the front of the diner, right in front of the plate glass windows.
The woman was tall and slender with dark wavy hair cascading down her back. Her clothing and the purse perched on the floor near her feet screamed money, as did the suit on the man she was with. They weren't the diner's typical patrons by a long shot, but Duncan did have to concede that she looked like the type of person who'd be a special order. When business was slow, he and some of the other kitchen staff passed the time by betting on whether or not the customers who walked in the door would be complicated. He was almost always right.
“What about him?” Duncan asked, jutting his chin toward the man she was with.
He could only see him from behind, but from his immaculately cut hair and his ramrod straight posture—difficult in the rickety diner chairs, Duncan knew from personal experience—he looked like a special order as well. He looked down at the ticket, frowning as he tried to decipher John's chicken scratch. No matter how many times the kitchen complained, John's handwriting never improved. Duncan had worked there on and off for more than ten years and the only constant had been John and his atrocious handwriting. It was kind of comforting, in an extremely exasperating way.
“Seriously? Two eggs over easy, bacon, and whole wheat toast?” Duncan looked from the ticket to the man. That was a surprise. He peered at him, studying his shoulders and finding himself wishing he could see the mystery man's face. It wasn't often that Duncan's culinary profiling went astray. It was intriguing.
“They're cousins. It was his week to pick where they had dinner. I'm getting the feeling that she's less than pleased,” John said.
No comments:
Post a Comment