The Romance Recipe
Also available from Ruby Barrett
and Carina Press
Hot Copy
Praise for Ruby Barrett
“An intoxicating blend of wholesome sweetness and tear-off-your-clothes steam...Ruby Barrett’s writing leaves me breathless.”
—Rosie Danan, author of The Roommate, on Hot Copy
“A delightful office romance for the #MeToo era... This is a winner.”
—Publishers Weekly on Hot Copy
“Ruby Barrett’s Hot Copy is filled with everything you could want in a romance novel: main characters who are easy to root for, a charming cast with sequel potential, and plenty of sizzling love scenes. The genre needs more heroes like Wesley Chambers, a soft man who embodies non-toxic masculinity.”
—Meryl Wilsner, author of Something to Talk About
“Ruby Barrett’s Hot Copy is a sizzling debut—sweet, steamy and oh so satisfying, this book stole my heart on every blissful page. Wesley is the soft-hearted, glasses-fogging hero we all need, and Corrine is a powerhouse heroine who doesn’t shy away from the job she wants, or the man she deserves.”
—Katie Golding, author of Fearless
“Barrett’s work was a delight from start to finish. Her masterful storytelling and electric prose shined throughout.”
—Charish Reid, author of Hearts on Hold and The Write Escape, on Hot Copy
Content Warning
The Romance Recipe deals with homophobia (experienced off page and excluding the use of slurs) and parental emotional abuse. The death of a character’s parent (from cancer) is also referenced.
The Romance Recipe
Ruby Barrett
To Meryl and Rosie, for letting me tell you first.
To Michael, for your most unconditional love.
To my queer community, especially my Later Life Queers,
especially, especially Danielle.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Excerpt from Pack of Lies by Charlie Adhara
Excerpt from Hot Copy by Ruby Barrett
Chapter One
Amy
A restaurant has a certain indefinable quality on a good night. With every seat filled, it’s loud. The bartenders sling drinks with panache. The front of house staff moves around each other like dancers, while the bussers are more like ghosts, slipping in and out so fast you never notice there was a table waiting to be flipped. Expo quality controls every single morsel so that the plates are always Instagram-worthy, and nobody has to wait more than twenty minutes.
A good night smells like the signature cocktail and the house special, perfectly paired.
A good night smells like money.
Tonight is not a good night.
“I’m done, Amy.”
Chad throws his white chef’s coat onto the hostess stand, sending a cup of pens flying and toppling the tablet displaying the seating chart off its stand. Maggie yelps, righting the tools of her hostess trade.
I cover the phone receiver with my palm. “Chad. What the—So sorry. Can you hold another moment?” I say into the phone. “You’re done what?” I hiss at him.
He slaps his Sox cap onto his head. “Here. I’m done here.” He rips open the front door, letting in the smell of cold and rain.
The customer on the other end of the line has hit a rhythm that seems like she did not, in fact, hold for another moment. “I don’t see the problem,” she says. “Give the table away,” the woman says.
As if I would be having this conversation with her if there were anyone I could give the table away to. The door slams shut behind my sous-chef, and the few people who are currently in the dining room stare. Which I’m sure was his intention.
I am putty, slowly pulled apart by a line cook and absentee reservations.
“We have a twenty-four-hour cancellation policy that I reminded you of on our confirmation call,” I say, my Customer Service Voice cracking under the strain of wanting to run after Chad. I sound like the Stevia version of myself, artificially sweet—and not as good as the real thing, if I do say so myself. “If you can’t keep your reservation we’ll have to charge you the twenty-five-dollar cancellation fee.”
As if twenty-five dollars will cover the hundreds this table was probably going to spend.
The tabletop set for ten guests sits pride of place at the front of the room. Framed by the floor to ceiling window, the empty table is reflected back at me, so really it looks like twenty empty place settings. The visual equivalent of poking a finger in an open wound.
“Listen.” The woman who was supposed to be here with her nine friends forty-five minutes ago drops her oops I forgot act. “We’re not showing up. And your cancellation policy is nice and all but you never asked for my credit card and I’m not giving it to you so no, you can’t charge me for the table anyway. But if you keep harassing me...”
I left her one message asking where she was.
“... I might be forced to leave a less than stellar review.”
The worst thing restaurant owners ever did was decide that the customer is always right. Customers can be right. Sometimes. So can a broken clock twice a day. Doesn’t mean I’m going to give it free food. And it certainly doesn’t mean I’m going to let myself and my business, that I’ve spent years preparing for and countless hours building, be bullied by a no-show.
“You know what?” I turn toward the wall, hunch over the phone to spare Maggie this “do as I say, not as I do” behavior. “Leave your bad review,” I hiss. “I don’t give a shit. We don’t need your business.”
A damned lie.
She laughs like a person who wears coats made out of puppies. “Are you sure about that?” The line goes dead.
That went terribly, but the great thing about running your own restaurant is that you never have a second to stop and think about how you could have handled that better.
Or that maybe you should have listened to your head chef when she suggested taking down customer credit cards at the time of booking a reservation, for situations just like this.
Or to pee.
Or breathe through the sick feeling in your gut.
Because there’s always another crisis to deal with.
I grab Chad’s chef’s coat and run out the door after him.
He slouches against the window of the brunch place next door, cigarette glow lighting his face. I knew he wouldn’t go far. He’d want a chance to tell me his side. I dodge the crowd of umbrellas on the sidewalk, holding his coat over my head to get to him.
“What the hell.” I’m breathless from that ten-foot sprint. “You’re quitting in the middle of a service?”
His gaze slips away from mine and he shifts on his feet. Suspicion prickles the back of my neck.
“She’s gonna be the end of this place, Ames.” He waves his hand around, the ash drifting toward me. I step back. “She’s all...” He throws his cigarette on the ground. “She’s all show,” he says in disgust.
“Why don’t you come back inside and we can talk things through with Sophie?” I suggest with more artificial sweetness than I gave the no-show on the phone.
He sighs and shakes his head with a quick jerk.
Chad came with me from our old restaurant and has been with me since I first opened Amy & May’s. He’s been loyal and hardworking, and that’s the only reason I gave him a second chance on our zero-tolerance harassment policy. But his second chance is burning up with the cherry at the tip of his cigarette.
I punch his coat into a ball and toss it at his chest. “You did it again, didn’t you? I vouched for you, Chad,” I hiss.
A passerby snorts their laughter as they walk past. This is just great. An empty dining room, a bad Yelp review, and now the owner of Amy & May’s is having a conniption in the middle of the street.
“It was just a joke, Amy,” Chad whines.
I step in closer to him as incentive to keep my voice down. “It’s not fucking funny. I don’t want to hear it,” I cut him off, slashing my hand through the air as he opens his mouth, most likely to tell me how Carly, the new dishwasher, actually likes it when he makes comments about her body.
I’ve been working in restaurants since I was sixteen and I’ve been harassed in every single one of them. Now that I’m in charge, no one working for me is going to experience that.
Sophie “Hollywood” Brunet and I don’t agree on much but on this one thing we do.
“You can come by tomorrow to clear out your locker and get your last paycheck. And fuck you for saying that Sophie is going to ruin my restaurant when it’s your behavior that caused this.” I spin on the heel of my über-unfashionable, ultra-comfortable black canvas slides.
“I’m not the only one who thinks so,” he says to my back. I stop at the edge of the awning, the rain already soaking into the toes of my shoes. “She cries in the walk-in.”
I absolutely love it when men tell me things I already know.
“She’s always worried about her Instaspam.”
He knows exactly what social media platform he’s talking about, he just thinks he’s better than anyone with a profile.
“She can’t make a decision to save her life.”
“She made the decision to fire your ass,” I say, but only so I can hide the sinking feeling in my gut. My staff has lost confidence in their kitchen leader.
And so have I.
He shakes his head. “Whatever, Amy.”
“Goodbye, Chad.”
The restaurant seems even quieter since I ran out mere minutes ago. My head chef, Sophie, stands at the expo station. A lock of her auburn hair has fallen loose from the black bandanna around her head, and her face glows from the heat of the kitchen. The light makeup she wears to work has run, leaving her wide eyes with a smoky look. I nod to her and tell Maggie I’ll be back in a bit. I stomp—because it feels good despite being totally unprofessional—down the hall next to our open concept kitchen and the bathrooms and push through the door with a sign that reads Staff Only. I bypass the staff locker room and throw myself into a chair in my cramped office, kicking the door closed with my foot. I flip through my problems like my mom used to look for dinner inspiration in her Rolodex turned recipe book.
There are three unanswered texts from my brother on my phone but zero returned phone calls from my father.
After a year of success my dream restaurant is inexplicably tanking. We’re bleeding staff and customers.
Despite years of experience, I can’t find one surefire strategy to get more butts in seats.
There’s an unopened email in my inbox from the landlord and I know what it’s going to say. That I have three months to make up the rent owed, or we’re out.
And yet, like the losing end of a CW Network love triangle, the only thing I can think about is that lock of hair and how it stuck to Sophie’s lip, the way her hazel eyes only seem to get bigger and bigger when I walk toward her.
Sophie is my biggest problem of all.
Ever since I first watched her on the final episode of Pop-Up Kitchen, I’ve wanted to kiss Sophie Brunet. The idea of kissing her hooked me but watching her hold her own against the biggest asshole TV chef of our lifetime and a kitchen full of men made me want to take a chance on her. After watching the finale, I fell down a wormhole of past episodes, watching her skill and passion turned into easily consumable reality TV fodder. I scrolled through years’ worth of her Instagram grid until, stupidly, I felt like I knew her from the carefully curated snippets she gave followers, starting as a line cook at a five-star hotel in Montreal all the way to her job as a sous-chef at Table Hanover, her last job before she quit to join the cast of Pop-Up Kitchen.
When I sent an email to the address listed for her agent, I chalked it up to a mild crush, a strong Negroni, and the frenetic energy that comes with being wide-awake at two in the morning. When Sophie herself responded, excited, thankful, for the opportunity to run her own kitchen at my zero stars restaurant, I thought I could set aside the attraction and focus on putting Amy & May’s on the Boston scene. It was a relief to finally have someone to do this with, to share the absolute panic that comes with fulfilling your dream before you turn thirty, and watching it light up around you. To have someone to help put out the fire.
But if anything, my attraction has grown, despite that everything Chad said is technically true.
She does spend a lot of time in the walk-in. She’s always bent over her phone, worrying at her plump pink lower lip, frowning at the screen. The change was like whiplash. One minute our restaurant was thriving. Reservations months in advance, the atmosphere electric every single night. There were plenty of rubberneckers. People wanting to eat food prepared by someone who was on TV once, like the tangential proximity somehow made the food taste better.
And maybe it did. Until it didn’t. Because suddenly it was like Sophie’s fame ran out. And everyone just...stopped coming.
The last few months, she’s been nothing like the badass woman she was on the show, quietly acquiescing to all my ideas, blindly nodding to everything I say. Even her suggestion to take credit cards at the time of reservation was more of a question. But still, I should have listened.
Now I’m back where I started, doing it all alone. Except this time with a side of an even bigger unrequited crush, on a straight girl, no less. Maybe my biggest mistake of all was thinking I should rely on anyone but myself.
The rest of dinner service goes off without a hitch. If only three tables but no more no-shows counts as not a hitch. “Where’s Sophie?” I ask, after the last table has settled.
Carly jumps, dropping a pan into the sink. “Sorry, ma’am.”
The restaurant is quiet. Only the closing staff still here.
“Please, no. Don’t...” I shake my head. “Don’t call me that.”
She bends over the pan in the sink, the shwish shwish sound of the scouring pad grating at my shot nerves. “She’s in the walk-in,” Carly says.
Of course she is. I sigh. When we were eight, my twin brother, Wes, and I snuck out of bed and watched Jurassic Park. I was so traumatized by the scene with the raptors in the kitchen that to this day, the chill I get when I close a walk-in freezer door behind me is as much from fear as it is from cold.
Sophie doesn’t turn around, writing the date on a sauce container, as the door slams shut behind me.
“Next time, can you at least warn me you’re going to fire someone?” I wrap my arms around my middle in a fruitless attempt at staying warm.