Total pages in book: 65
Estimated words: 59647 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 298(@200wpm)___ 239(@250wpm)___ 199(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 59647 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 298(@200wpm)___ 239(@250wpm)___ 199(@300wpm)
Is about to turn up the heat in this sleepy little mountain town!
My dream’s on hold and I’m stuck waiting tables
When Kieran, the town’s new firefighter strolls in like a heat wave,
Tall, blonde, and ripped enough to sell all the calendars himself.
I’ve got a plan.
Winning the chili cook off will prove to Dad I’m good enough to cook at Sergio’s.
My competition? The sexy fireman.
He invites me over, and soon the heat in his kitchen has nothing to do with cooking.
Our good-natured rivalry becomes a sizzling fling,
The nights together are too hot to handle.
And soon, I find out I’m cooking way more than just chili,
The bun in my oven might just change everything!
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
1
SOFIA
“Four top, all lasagna,” I called as I walked through the door into the kitchen of the bustling restaurant. The smell of oregano and marinara would be enough to overwhelm the senses of most people, but I’d grown up around it. For me, it was just another Friday night.
With another lasagna order.
“Four lasagna, all day,” my father called from behind the stove, where he was shaking a cast-iron pan so the shrimp inside it slid to the edge, flew in the air, and landed back in the center again.
“How many have you made today, Papa?” I asked.
“Twenty-three, I believe,” he said in his thick accent that confounded people when they heard it. Equal parts eastern Italian, Brooklyn, and Tennessean, it didn’t make sense to the ear. He would alternate between “you’s,” “y’all” and “tu.” He seemed to have no concept that certain words were regional, mixing and matching them according to whatever language arithmetic was going on in his head at that moment.
“That’s why they call it a special, Bella,” Leo said, coming in from the freezer with a crate of milk. “People order it because it’s popular.”
“That’s not why they call it a special, you moron,” I said. “It’s a special because it’s what we want to push today.” I shook my head in disbelief. “How did you make it out of high school?”
Leo smiled.
“I smile and good things come to me, Bella,” he said, and I rolled my eyes.
Leo was one of those guys who thought he was a ladies’ man, despite all evidence to the contrary. I had never seen him with a girl that didn’t look put-upon by being in his presence, and his constant attempts to hit on the waitresses were met with enough disdain that we had all casually mentioned to Dad that the place would be better without him. Unfortunately, he was also Papa’s best friend’s son, and since those two served in the war together, Leo was going nowhere anytime soon.
“My name is Sofia. Stop calling me Bella,” I said, “or I will rip your arms off and feed them to the pigs.”
“My apologies,” Leo said, dripping with sarcasm as he bent at the waist in an overly dramatic bow. “Sofia.”
“There, he apologized,” Papa said. “Now run table two and table four’s food out, then come back here and taste this sauce.”
“Fine,” I said, muttering various curses under my breath in what little Italian I knew.
I felt terrible that I didn’t speak the language, but Papa was adamant that we spoke English at home. After immigrating at fifteen, he’d settled in Brooklyn and learned English working at a pizzeria. It was there that he met my mother, a little Irish girl from Tennessee. When she got pregnant, they moved back to her hometown near Nashville and had me.
A few years later, we all moved to Ashford, and Papa opened his own pizzeria, slowly evolving into a full restaurant and then adding a bar a few years back. As my sisters and I grew up, we did so mostly in those walls and the apartment on top. When Mama died a decade ago, Papa threw himself so completely into the restaurant that I wasn’t sure he ever did anything other than sleep upstairs.
Still, he was shockingly spry for a man of sixty-three and bounded around the kitchen at a hundred miles an hour. Unlike a lot of Italian cooks, Papa didn’t have the big belly or giant mustache, preferring to stay clean-shaven and in shape from his constant running around. He liked everything fast. Which explained the Ferrari he always had parked prominently in front of the store, even though he hardly ever drove anywhere.
I ran the two dishes out to the tables that were waiting on them and put on my waitress smile as I dropped them off. I disliked being on the floor, preferring to be in the kitchen whenever Leo wasn’t there. Occasionally, if Papa was feeling ill or had to go out of town for something, I would be the one left in charge of the kitchen. Those were the best days.