Page 11 of Recipe for Romance (Applewood #2)

Everyone else might, but they are what got him to where he was today.

Of course, that now included begging for money and trading off his skills in exchange for it, but that wasn’t something he was going to look too hard at, not yet anyway.

Eyes flicking toward the clock, Aiden considered what the first task the two of them embarked on should be and made his mind up almost immediately.

“It’s just after seven,” he told Nicole. “I’m going to freshen up while you take a look around the kitchen. I’ll give you one hour to make the two of us breakfast, plating exactly how you would if you were cooking in a professional kitchen.”

Nicole’s jaw dropped and she glanced around the room uncomfortably. “Breakfast? Here? Now?

Aiden tossed his empty cup in the garbage.

“Yes, now,” he called over his shoulder.

On his way back upstairs, the sound of clanging pots and dropping utensils rang in his ear, causing his shoulders to tense and rise up, already knowing that when he came back down he would find a bit of a mess.

Nicole had a sort of frenzied quality about her.

Aiden knew it would likely spill over into her cooking.

After the fastest shower he’d ever taken and a quick change into some dark jeans and collared shirt, Aiden walked into the kitchen to find the disaster he had expected, but it was so much bigger than even his worst imaginings.

Every surface in the kitchen was taken up by something, whether it was a pan, an ingredient, or a cutting board with half an onion chopped only to be abandoned.

The previously clean and polished surface of the granite was now covered in a light dusting of flour and puddles of what he assumed was milk.

Looking at the woman responsible for the epic mess, Aiden saw a frazzled expression on her face as she whisked eggs in a bowl.

She was whipping far too little air into the mixture, but instead of commenting on that or any number of things he’d already seen that needed correcting, Aiden simply slid onto a stool and watched as she worked.

Trying his best to concentrate on what was happening and not who was doing it, Aiden’s eyes followed Nicole around the space.

She’d twisted her hair into a messy braid that rested over her shoulder where a large stain was spreading.

It reminded him of baby spit-up and he was suddenly picturing her cradling a baby instead of a large mixing bowl.

The image that seemed to come from nowhere nearly knocked him off his perch, but he couldn’t will himself to banish it right away.

Chalking it up to his male biological clock ticking, Aiden eventually shook the unbidden thought from his head, focusing once again on Nicole’s work.

In addition to whisking the eggs too slowly, her chop of the onion was rough and inconsistent, and she had used a serrated knife to cut the block of cheddar cheese he always kept on hand, which shredded the already uneven slices.

Once he’d decided he’d seen enough, Aiden made mental notes of all the things they would need to work on as he moved from the island to the dining table.

“Times up.” A few moments after his time call, Nicole walked over to the table carrying two plates.

Setting one down in front of him along with a fork, she took the seat across and smiled at him nervously.

They stared in silence for a long moment until Aiden realized he was going to have to hold her hand a lot more than he’d realized. “Present your dish,” he commanded.

“What? Oh, oh, ” she replied. Standing, Nicole straightened her shoulders and placed her hands behind her back.

If she thought she could hide the fact that they were shaking from him, she was wrong.

Aiden was very good at seeing small details, and as he peered down at the plate in front of him, he could see much more than she probably wanted him to.

“Today, I have made for you a potato and onion omelet.” When she spoke no further, Aiden raised a stiff brow at her, signaling her to keep going.

“Um, well. I knew I wanted to make you an omelet. You might not remember but you made me an omelet on my birthday once, so I wanted to make one for you.”

The hazy memory of a lonely looking young girl sitting in front of plates filled with food she was clearly uninterested in flashed in his mind.

Aiden remembered feeling sorry for the younger Nicole, having known that her mother, Eddie’s wife, had passed not long before her appearance at the chef’s table.

He had wanted her to experience at least a little bit of joy that night, and if he’d known it was her birthday he would have done something a little more special than just eggs.

Clearly Nicole remembered it fondly if she was trying to create the same thing for him.

It was touching, but Aiden did his best to ignore the warmth that it put in his chest. He already felt a little too much for the woman standing in front of him. He didn’t need reasons to feel more.

Nicole went on, oblivious to his turmoil. “I started to chop an onion but then I couldn’t find any potatoes, so I stopped and remembered that I always carry a snack in my purse so I used that instead,” she revealed.

At this new information, Aiden eyed the plate more dubiously.

The omelet was practically dumped onto his plate rather than having been folded neatly and released delicately from the pan, orange cheese with black edges oozed from beneath it, and there was a generous dusting of something translucent and flaky over the top.

“Snack?” he asked, worried about the answer.

Nicole nodded enthusiastically as she bounced over to the kitchen counter.

It looked more like a FEMA disaster zone than his normally pristine workspace, and after plucking a small aluminum bag from the mess, she joined him at the table again.

“I always carry a little bag of chips or sometimes a granola bar around because I’m always snacky.

” She flipped her long braid over her shoulder, revealing another stain on her shirt.

“Anyway, since you didn’t have potatoes, and the chips I have on hand happened to be sour cream and onion, I used those. ”

Aiden looked at her incredulously. “You put potato chips in my omelet?” It was like something out of one of his nightmares.

He was trapped working in a truck stop kitchen, forced to use subpar ingredients to make food that no sane person would eat.

It always ended the same way, with Aiden presenting a dish consisting of limp noodles and sliced hot dog, but at least both of those ingredients had been cooked properly.

Nicole nodded again, though the enthusiasm she displayed moments ago was diminished.

“Uh huh. Haven’t you ever put potato chips on your sandwiches?

Like potato on turkey or nacho cheese on tuna fish?

” Without waiting for a response to her odd inquiry, she plowed forward.

“You should definitely try it. It’s really good and why should sandwiches get all the potato chip love?

I just happened to have this flavor in my purse today, so I figured that I would use those, though I also think that barbeque could have added a nice sweet and tangy flavor as well. ”

Attempting to process everything Nicole had just told him at the last minute was proving difficult for Aiden, not because she was hard to understand, but because she looked so happy while she said it.

She really was stunningly beautiful, but that wasn’t what he was supposed to be thinking about.

Deciding that the proof would be in the pudding, or in this case the omelet, Aiden cut off a small chunk of the egg dish and placed it in his mouth.

The first thing that struck him was that the texture of the eggs was all wrong.

They were rubbery and overcooked yet still somehow runny enough to feel a bit slimy while the cheese that hadn’t oozed out and burned against the hot pan was cut too thickly and still cold, not allowing for the natural tang of the cheddar to be truly freed.

As he chewed, he discovered that not only had she put potato chips on top, but also inside, but due to the heat of the eggs, they had steamed out and become soggy, chewy masses that were more grease than potato.

A loud crunch reverberated in his ears as he realized that the last chip he’d bitten into was actually an egg shell.

Putting his fork down, Aiden plucked the shell from where it had lodged itself in his molar. Praying that his dental insurance was still in effect, he looked across the table, watching as Nicole stared at him expectantly, her lower lip back between her teeth. “Did you like it?”

Aiden took a second to consider his answer.

She was his mentor’s daughter and it was possible that anything he said to Nicole would make it back to Eddie.

He’d already screwed up his career once by not taking the nepotism of everything into account, and this could turn out much the same way.

However, Eddie was as much of a straight shooter as Aiden and would know more about her shortcomings in the kitchen than anyone else.

Is that why he’d pawned her off on Aiden instead of teaching her himself?

The thought of Eddie pushing his own daughter aside made Aiden’s stomach sour, or maybe that was the effect of the abomination he’d just consumed.

No, Eddie must simply be busy with his undoubtedly packed schedule.

The longer Aiden stared across the table, the more he realized that his hesitation had more to do with not wanting to hurt Nicole’s feelings than not wanting to harm his career.

He’d never once considered someone else’s feelings more important than the critique, and he shouldn’t do it now.

Aiden was opening a restaurant, not running a coddling camp for wannabe chefs.

Newly determined. Aiden shook his head curtly.

“I did not,” he stated plainly. The light in her eyes began to diminish, and while he wasn’t going to spare her feelings, he could offer up the things he had liked.

“Even though it’s a bit obvious, the cheddar was a good choice to pair with the eggs, and while putting potato chips in an omelet isn’t something I would make a habit of doing, thinking on your feet and trying to be innovative is always a good thing. You just have to do it more mindfully.”

Nicole nodded as she pulled a small notebook and pen from her back pocket. “What else?”

Aiden’s mouth ticked up slightly. Not only did she take the criticism well, but she was hungry to learn more.

Most people took his judgement on the chin but shut down somewhat, not quite as eager to keep going as Nicole had been.

Despite her starting out at a considerable disadvantage with no formal training or real job experience, she was already proving to be an excellent student.

She would test his patience, certainly, as well as his need for order and cleanliness, but as Aiden went on to detail some of the other missteps she had made and ways that she could improve her approach the next time, he couldn’t help thinking that maybe, along the way, she might teach him something as well.