Now Amy stands here, and even though she isn’t mine—she’s my boss, my business partner for lack of a better term, whom I kind of want to strangle sometimes—it feels like she’s all for me, too. She meets my gaze without hesitation, with pride. Her chin tipped up, ready to fight. A tremor rolls through me, and I know with sudden clarity that as much as I want to fight with her, I want to burn my tongue on this woman, too.

“These changes,” I say, my voice catching in my dry throat. “I can’t keep up.”

Maybe that’s what I need. To burn out on Amy. To step fully into these feelings, into myself. Maybe that’s what will help me to take back some control of my life and my kitchen.

She frowns. “I told you that I’d do this. I said you need to worry about the menu we serve to Camilla Vargas. I’ll take care of the rest.”

“Amy, we don’t even know if we’re going to make it onto the show. Why do all this if nothing comes of it?”

“The location scouts are coming in tomorrow,” she says, like that means something.

I close my eyes. My lids are sandpaper. “Scouts are not enough of a guarantee for you to be fucking with my kitchen.”

She narrows her eyes. “I’m fucking with your kitchen?”

I stand straighter. “Yes. My kitchen. You made a last-minute change to our seating chart. We didn’t have enough time to prepare.”

“I told you about it this morning.” She looks like she might want to strangle me, and I don’t know what it says about me that I’d be okay with the feel of her fingers against my throat, pressing into my pulse, my jaw.

“I’m saying that this morning isn’t enough time. I had to comp a meal tonight.”

“What I’m really hearing is you’re fucked. Not the kitchen.” She folds her arms over her chest.

Instead of answering her, I take another sip of whiskey. The amber liquid is an almost perfect match for the color of her eyes. Traitorous alcohol.

“This isn’t working,” I say quietly, the fight deflating me. My list of frustrations burning off my tongue with the eighty-proof.

She releases a frustrated breath; it sounds so bitchy I could scream. “It could work if you just—”

Apparently, the only thing my fight needed was another dose of Amy’s attitude. “No ‘if I just’! There is no ‘if I just’!”

Despite having known Amy for less than a year, fighting with her feels like something I’ve done before. It’s not particularly enjoyable but it’s been like this with her from the beginning, this layer of comfort that we share with each other. I could say just about anything to her and she could say anything to me.

I lied when I said I didn’t trust her. You can only fight like this with someone you trust. Which is the only explanation for why I say, “If you would just listen to me when I tell you how I want to run my kitchen, and if you just stopped distracting me—” My growl fades between us.