CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONE

“Where are those crème brûlées, Allison?” Russell barked, from the opposite end of the busy kitchen. “Table five’s still waiting!”

Ali Sweet narrowed her eyes at her boss. She hated the way he yelled at her like a kid. But there wasn’t much she could do about it. Landing a coveted job at one of the finest French restaurants in Los Angeles made her a very, very lucky woman. Not that Ali felt particularly lucky…

She’d joined three years ago as a pâtissier. It was supposed to be her dream job. She’d trained years for it. But thanks to her mean boss, her dream job had quickly turned into a nightmare.

“Don’t just stand there!” Russell yelled, snapping his fingers. “Chop chop!”

With a reluctant sigh, Ali made her way across the hot, noisy, crowded kitchen of Éclairs to the ovens. She pushed her thick, dark blonde braid over her shoulder and peered in through the oven window to assess the fiftieth batch of crème brûlées she’d made that day. By now, she’d made more crème brûlées than there were traffic jams in LA.

“They just need a couple more minutes,” she called over her shoulder to Russell.

Though Russell’s beady brown eyes stayed fixed on his chopping, Ali noticed his nostrils flare with fury.

A couple more minutes

was clearly

not

the answer he’d wanted, and now he was going to blow.

Ali knew she was about to be on the receiving end of one of his epic meltdowns. She gulped with dread. But there was

muttered as he shook his head of dark hair. “A couple more minutes…” Then he stabbed his nowhere to run. She felt helpless.

“A couple more minutes…” Russell knife into the chopping board, swirled to face her, and yelled: “You have one task, Allison! One task! And you can’t even do it right!”

His insult hit her like a slap across the face. Ali shrank back. She hadn’t been a wallflower before the job, but thanks to Russell she felt beaten down.

None of the other chefs in the busy kitchen reacted to Russell’s demeaning outburst, but Ali knew they were all watching her out of the corners of their eyes. She could feel their side glances burn into her like lasers. There was no such thing as an ally when it came to the kitchen of Éclairs.

“Sh—shall I serve them now?” Ali asked, her voice trembling. “They’ll be a little underdone.”

She already knew the answer was

no

, but Russell had put her in an impossible position between speed and perfection, and she had to say something.

“Of course I don’t want you to serve them now!” Russell screeched. “This crème brûlée is for a Hollywood executive! It has to be perfect!”

Ali couldn’t care less who the crème brûlée was for. It could be for the Pope and it would make no difference to her. She’d just about reached the end of her tether.

Suddenly, the sound of a loud metallic bang made Ali jump out of her skin. Russell had hit one of the hanging pots with a metal soup ladle.

“Don’t just stand there!” he yelled. “Start on the next batch.”

Ali scurried back to her workstation and began on the next batch of crème brûlées. She went through each step robotically—slicing the vanilla pod, scraping its seeds into the cream, whisking the egg yolk and sugar, setting the porcelain ramekins in their baths of water—all the while wondering wistfully where it had gone wrong.

She’d been thrilled, initially, to get a job at the exclusive Éclairs restaurant in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. Since her first class bachelor’s degree in the Culinary Arts hadn’t been sufficient for the high-end restaurants, she’d headed back to school and completed a further postgraduate advanced degree in Culinary Innovation.

Still

unable to get the job she was after, she’d then studied for her doctoral degree while completing an apprenticeship under the tutelage of master chef Milo Baptiste.

Milo had been an inspiring tutor. His passion for cuisine was infectious. His knowledge of food was vast. Under his direction, Ali had felt like she was destined for greatness, the Ernst Pauer to his Wolfgang Mozart. Thanks to Milo, she’d found her culinary flair.

At first it seemed her efforts had paid off. She quickly secured an interview at Éclairs, which was basically the Vienna State Opera House of restaurants. But then Russell had assigned her to crème brûlée duties. Crème brûlée and nothing more.

Reality hit. Instead of performing to adoring crowds, Ali was playing the same uninspiring pop hit over and over again. This was not how her career was supposed to turn out and Ali was just about ready to lose her mind from the monotony of it all.

The bleep of the oven alarm brought Ali out of her ruminations. The batch was finished.

She went to the oven and removed the crème brûlées, set them on the counter, and lit her blowtorch. If someone had told her back in culinary school that one day she’d be bored with burning food with fire, she would’ve laughed them out of the kitchen. And yet, here she was, wielding a blowtorch, turning the top layer of sugar on the crème brûlées to a bubbling golden brown, feeling nothing.

She finished each brûlée off with a perfectly placed sprig of spearmint, then delivered the batch to Russell, forcing her blank face into a wan smile.

“I present to you, the perfect crème brûlée,” she announced.

Russell peered down his bony nose at each individual ramekin, inspecting them thoroughly. He offered no praise at all. He simply plucked out the one he wanted delivered to Mr. Hollywood at table five, and dinged the brass bell for a server. Ali wasn’t surprised. She’d long ago given up expecting praise from her boss.

A swarm of attractive young servers appeared at the serving hatch. They were all aspiring actors, desperate to be the one to deliver the crème brûlée to a Hollywood exec. But Ali had no interest in the fate of her dessert. She was midway through the next batch, after all, so she slunk back to her position, shoulders slumped, burdened by the weight of her unspent talent.

She rolled her eyes up to the ceiling tiles—tiles she’d stared at so many times she knew every grease spot and projectile tomato juice stain.

Please let something change,

she thought.

Just then, a voice called from the serving hatch: “Table five wants a word with the chef.”

Surprised, Ali swirled on the spot to look at the hatch. Troy, the handsome young server with the flawless dark skin and inviting smile, was eagerly drumming his fingers on top of it, his dark eyes on her.

“Did he say why?” Ali called back, acutely aware that every pair of eyes in the kitchen was now fixed on her.

Troy shook his head. “He just asked me to bring you out.”

Ali swallowed anxiously and hurried across the kitchen, self-consciously pushing stray strands of blond hair out of her face as she caught snippets of whispers from the other chefs. Before she left through the swinging doors, she smoothed down her apron. Then she headed through them and paused beside Troy.

“Did he look mad?” she whispered, craning her head closer.

“Hard to tell,” Troy replied in an equally discreet murmur.

It’s fifty-fifty then

, Ali thought apprehensively. Either Mr. Hollywood was so impressed by her crème brûlées he was about to buy the rights to her life story and turn it into the next feel-good indie blockbuster, or he was so dissatisfied he felt the need to tell her to her face. Of course, the former wasn’t likely, but Ali knew the latter wasn’t either. Her crème brûlées were perfect. Milo Baptiste had told her so himself. In fact, his exact response had been, “Someone needs to invent a new letter to come before A in the alphabet, because these are better than A star!” followed by an outpouring of European-style cheek kissing.

She tried to muster that confidence as she began the long walk across the marble floor to table five, cautiously weaving through the elegant sandalwood dining tables so as not to interrupt any of the diners enjoying their expensive evening out at the classy establishment.

She reached table five. Each of the red velvet chairs surrounding the round table was filled with an overweight white man in a black dinner suit. The men were distinguishable only by their varying degrees of baldness.

Ali nervously clasped her hands together. “Did someone ask to speak to me?”

The man who’d overcompensated for his receding hairline by growing a goatee looked her up and down with piercing, pale gray eyes. Ali’s crème brûlée sat untouched in front of him.

So this is Mr. Hollywood,

Ali thought.

“I did,” he said.

Ali felt scrutinized under his gray-eyed stare. She tugged the collar of her chef’s coat, feeling suddenly restricted by it.

“What can I do for you?” she asked, forcing herself to sound genial.

The man slowly pulled the spearmint sprig from his untouched crème brûlée and held it up to the light.

“Anything look amiss?” he asked.

Ali peered at the sprig. She saw no eyelash attached to it. No dead fruit fly stuck to its leaves. It was a normal sprig of perfectly nice spearmint. Better than normal, really, since it came from a local organic produce store.

“It looks fine to me,” Ali said.

“IT HAS THREE LEAVES!” the man suddenly yelled.

Ali jumped. Her eyes pinged all the way open with surprise. Every single patron in Éclairs froze and turned to look. An uncomfortable silence descended on the restaurant.

“I’m sorry?” she asked, bewildered.

“COUNT THEM!” the man bellowed. He pointed at each leaf in turn. “ONE. TWO. THREE!”

His face was turning quite red. By the sensation of heat creeping into her cheeks, Ali assumed hers was too.

“I don’t understand,” she said, finally.

Mr. Hollywood threw his napkin onto the table and rose to his feet.

“Spearmint should have four leaves,” he said, stepping close until his face was just an inch from hers. “FOUR!”

His yell was so forceful, spittle flew into Ali’s face.

Ali blinked—appalled, disgusted, and totally dumbfounded. She’d dealt with angry customers before, but nothing like this.

She glanced back toward the hatch appealingly. Troy was still standing where she’d left him, watching on helplessly. There was nothing he could do to help. In the strict hierarchy of Éclairs, the servers were even lower than the chefs. The only person who could rescue Ali from the situation was Russell.

Just then, she spotted her boss through the hatch. He was watching the whole thing with a satisfied smirk on his face.

Ali realized, with burning humiliation, that Russell had no intention of helping her. In fact, he appeared to be relishing her misery.

Suddenly, a surge of calm clarity overcame Ali. She looked over at table four, where one of the crème brûlées from the same batch had been delivered, and plucked the spearmint from it. The woman who’d been eating it let out a horrified gasp.

“Excuse me, I just need to borrow this,” Ali said, calmly.

She turned back to Mr. Hollywood and held the sprig out to him between her pincered fingers. “One, two, three, four,” she said, counting each leaf.

Then she slammed it into his uneaten crème brûlée.

The crispy sugar layer cracked, sending the gooey cream beneath exploding into the air. Cream splattered over every single bald head at the table.

The men leapt out of their seats so quickly their chairs tipped back and hit the marble tiles, sending loud thuds around the restaurant. Every single patron turned and began murmuring as the black-suited men started screaming angrily at Ali.

“Enjoy your meal,” she said, serenely, as she untied her apron strings.

She threw her apron down on top of the mess she’d created, turned away from their angry red faces, and marched for the exit, her head held high as she ignored the stunned diners and open-mouthed servers she passed.

Just as she reached the door, she heard Russell’s voice yelling from the kitchen across the entire restaurant.

“That’s it, Allison Sweet! You’re fired!”

Ali paused, her hand on the exit bar. A small, triumphant smile inched across her lips.

“Good,” she said.

Then, feeling giddy with relief, she pushed the door open and exited into the hot LA sunshine.

She felt like she’d been released from prison. She was free! And she couldn’t wait to get home to tell her boyfriend all about her triumphant victory over her bully of a boss.