Tardiness is a dealbreaker for me, and always has been. Time is respect. If you can't show up when you say you will, you're telling me my time doesn't matter. And if this guy doesn't show up in the next five minutes, I'm going to find another supplier and blacklist him from every kitchen I run for the rest of my career.
"Maybe even a rosé for the intermezzo," Margot says, tapping her pen against the folio, oblivious to my internal plotting. "A pale, bone-dry Provence style instead of the white I originally had down. We have both here, so the swap would be easy."
I pull myself back to the conversation, forcing my attention away from the clock. "Actually, yes. I love that. There's so much green on the property with all the vines and the gardens, and pale pink against that would photograph beautifully. Pink and green are complementary on the color wheel, so visually it would be striking."
"A woman after my own heart." Margot's eyes light up. "The visual component of wine service is so underrated. People eat with their eyes first, and the way a glass of rosé catches the light at golden hour on that terrace..." She stops mid-sentence, her gaze shifting to something over my shoulder. "Is that your fish delivery?"
I turn.
A man is walking through the kitchen doorway like he owns the place. Tall, broad-shouldered, with tousled brown hair that looks like he just rolled out of some cologne ad. He's wearing jeans and a navy t-shirt that fits him in a way that suggests he either works out or has exceptional genetics or both, and for a moment he looks less like a fish supplier and more like some action star who wandered through the wrong door on his way to a photo shoot.
I remember that my fish supplier was described by the vineyard manager as "a tall guy just a few years older than you," so this must be him. But attractive or not, the man is almost an hour late without so much as a text message, and that is absolutely unacceptable.
"One moment," I say to Margot, already feeling my blood pressure rising. "I need to go deal with this."
"Go ahead. I have some calls to make anyway." She gathers her folio and heads toward the back office, leaving me alone with the tardy fishmonger.
I stride over to him, pulling myself up to my full height, which at five-six isn't particularly impressive, but I've learned to make it work through sheer force of personality. He breaks into a smile when he sees me coming, warm and completely inappropriate for someone who just wasted an hour of my time.
And he didn't even bring the fish inside with him. No cooler, no samples, no documentation.
"Oh, hey," he says, his smile widening like we're old friends. "You must be Isabelle. Pleasure to meet you, I'm Ale?—"
"You'relateis what you are," I cut him off. "I want to be clear right away that I expect professionalism if we're going to be working together on this project. And showing up an hour late without so much as a text is not a great start."
He opens his mouth to respond, but I'm not finished.
"Samples go directly into cold storage the second they arrive," I continue, gesturing toward the walk-in. "And I needdocumentation on every single item you bring me. Origin, catch date, handling temps, chain of custody. Nothing goes on my menu that I can't trace back to the specific body of water it came from. Understood?"
"That sounds really organized and very thorough, but?—"
"AndI need to understand why an hour went by without a phone call," I say, drawing myself up. He towers over me by a good eight inches at least, but what I lack in the vertical department I more than make up for in attitude. "Delays happen. I understand that. Traffic, weather, equipment failures, I've heard every excuse. But you pick up the phone. That's the bare minimum of professional courtesy. Got it,fish guy?"
To my absolute irritation, his smile only grows wider as I rail into him. His eyes are bright with what I can only describe as amusement, and there's a dimple appearing in his left cheek that I refuse to find attractive on principle.
What a little fucker.He's actually enjoying this.
"Do you find something about this amusing?" I ask, using my best head-chef voice.
"Oh, I find thisextremelyamusing," he replies, eyes practically dancing, and the dimple gets deeper.
"Well, I have to say," I cross my arms over my chest, "I find this wildly unprofessional for someone who came so highly recommended by the vineyard manager. And when we spoke on the phone yesterday, I thought I made it abundantly clear how important timing was going to be for this project. We're running a Michelin-level operation here, not a fried seafood shack on the beach."
He laughs, throwing his head back, and the sound of it fills my entire kitchen. It's a good laugh, I'll give him that—warm and unselfconscious, the kind of laugh that would be charming under circumstances where I wasn’t trying to establish dominance.
"Yeah, thatwouldbe super annoying," he says, still smiling. "IfI was your fish guy, which I'm not." He tilts his head, considering. "Though I have to say, 'fish guy' is one of the kinder nicknames I've been given over the years."
I stare at him, and a horrible, sinking feeling begins to form in my stomach. The kind of feeling you get right before you realize you've made a catastrophic error in judgment.
"Pardon?" My voice comes out smaller than I'd like.
"Yeah, I have no idea what you're talking about with the whole fish delivery thing." He pulls a hand from his pocket and extends it toward me, still smiling. "Alex Midnight. I'm the guy your dad sent to help with the pop-up."
I shake his hand robotically, my brain scrambling to place him, to make this make sense.Alex Midnight.The name means absolutely nothing to me, and I have been planning this residency with obsessive detail. "Well, I'm sorry, but I don't know who you are," I say.
His cocky smile dims slightly, replaced by confusion. "Your father brought me on to help out. He said you knew about the arrangement..."
The missed calls this morning.Him trying to track me down through Margot for something urgent. The voicemail I ignored.