A Wood-Fired Christmas (Mistletoe Kisses)

Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE

“IT’S ALREADY A success!” Ezra ranted at the speakerphone while driving home. “The food is good. The bills get paid. The customers are loyal. And she pirouettes in dictating changes…? What does she even know?”

His sister said, “Before you go to war, take a deep breath. Okay, so she’s being a brat. Give Miss Rich Buyer Girl a week, and I bet she’ll do just what Barrett does and cash her checks without opening the door.”

“I didn’t get that impression. She thinks she’s going to stomp in and save the place—which, you’ll notice, doesn’t need saving.”

“What other reason is there to buy a restaurant, except to save it?” The way Shelly snorted, he could hear her roll her eyes even over the phone. “But seriously, is it possible the place isn’t doing as well as you think?”

“I do everything there.”

“Everything except filing the taxes and writing payroll and monitoring the bank balance. You know the stuff that’s coming in and going out, but you’re not writing the checks.” Shelly hesitated. “You know, the way Mom always seemed to have money coming in, and yet…?”

Ezra huffed. “Fine.”

“You need to figure out if both of us need a different job.”

Shelly didn’t really “work” for Loveless Pizza. She popped in to deliver pizzas when she wasn’t taking classes. She could deliver pizzas for anyone.

Ezra could make pizzas for anyone, too. But he knew Loveless. He’d set up everything to work the way he wanted it to. Barrett pretended to be in charge, but in point of fact, Barrett always let Ezra do whatever he wanted because Ezra had made the place successful.

The whole “one hundred doughs a day” cap had seemed like lunacy, so Ezra did the thing you always did with something dumb and phrased it like an incredible opportunity. Ezra had set up their social media with an automated countdown, and when they got to twenty-five pizzas remaining, the different accounts posted one of several rotating messages. (Shelly had a way with snark, so some of the messages were funny. “I hope you’re committed to intermittent fasting. Only five pies left.”)

“Fear of missing out,” people called it, and Ezra worked that angle hard. “Order your Loveless Pizza early so there’s no love lost!”

Lacey was going to change it back to “Love-lace” and destroy the whole gimmick because she didn’t understand.

Shelly said, “Look, there’s one thing you do really well, and that’s—”

Ezra pulled into his driveway. “Making pizza.”

“—it’s operating under pressure, you dork. You never lose your cool, not even when you get like thirty-five orders at the same time.” Shelly laughed. “Pretend this woman is a fifty-pizza order that’s got to be on the table in twenty minutes. Keep calm. Get analytical. Make a plan of attack.”

Ezra shut off the engine and frowned as he stared at the carved-up Victorian where he rented a room. “Maybe more like a nor’easter.”

“Better analogy. You’ve got a month to plan for the storm. What do you need to weather it? What are the things that might get blown around? What’s most important and needs to be secured? What’s most at risk of getting buried?”

Ezra pulled his phone from the holder but didn’t leave the car. “So, Hurricane Lacey is en route. We need bottled water and canned goods, and we need full batteries in all the electronics.”

“You need gas in the car. And you need a go-bag.”

The go-bag equivalent was getting another job. “I don’t want to leave.”

That was the crux. Barrett wanted to leave, but Ezra didn’t.

Lacey wanted to stay. Still, give it a month. The weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas were a wringer. Maybe after that, she wouldn’t want to buy the place after all.

Even so. Ezra said, “If Barrett was going to sell the place to someone, it should have been me.”

Shelly said, “I’ll help you look for change in the couch.”

Ezra didn’t even own a couch. With a sigh, he got out of the car.

Lacey arrived at Lovelace Pizza to find Ezra in shirtsleeves and already at work making dough. Again, he moved with a control and smoothness that left her shivering.

Get a grip. He was about to be her employee. The last thing she needed was for him to feel like she was checking him out, so she’d better quit checking him out.

He looked up with a frown creasing his forehead. So serious. For a moment, she shivered again, this time at the intensity in his expression. Could this man see her soul? Was he actually human, or was he instead a forest elemental her uncle had summoned by accident while sipping whiskey and playing cards with his friends?

That did sound like the kind of thing Uncle Barrett would stumble into. Instead of winning a pizzeria in a poker game, he’d won ownership over one of the fae, and when it turned out Uncle Barrett had no idea what to do with an otherworldly servant, the Fairy King had replied, “Well, I make decent pizza.”

Ezra certainly had the eyes for it. What was it people said about the fae, that they could use “glamour” on unsuspecting humans? Ezra probably had that.

Lacey removed her backpack. “What do you need me to do?”

Ezra stared her down. “I wasn’t aware I needed you to do anything.”

“I need to learn everything you do, but it doesn’t make sense for me just to watch if I can help.”

Ezra’s eyes got wide as she pulled a canvas apron from her backpack. “You’re serious?”

She glanced at her apron. Was he surprised it was black? His was white, or at least it had started out white. Now it was whatever color you’d call semolina and flour and tomato sauce and a thousand other splotches after hot water ceased evicting them all. She said, “It’s neat thinking of all the pizzas your apron has seen.”

That was the first moment Lacey saw anything on Ezra’s face other than control. It was a wild mix of overwhelm and disbelief. He hadn’t counted on meeting her this morning. Or maybe ever, given how Uncle Barrett described the business. Maybe like a true fairy king, he’d been planning on whistling a tune like a cartoon magician and having the pizza doughs knead themselves, only she’d interrupted.

Ezra said, “Everything’s under control, so you might as well watch.”

She sat on a stool with a notebook, and Ezra returned to his work.

The man operated like a machine, not a preternatural visitor to the human realm. While prepping, he shut her out completely and got his stations set up. Set up for one person, she realized. Uncle Barrett claimed to come in “pretty often,” but Ezra seemed to have had no such illusion that a second person would come. Instead, he’d set up a twelve-by-twelve work area to accommodate everything within arm’s reach. One tiny kitchen, one walk-in, one minuscule office, and one monster of a wood-fired oven. Behind him, a mixer churned dough while Ezra heated pots of sauce and set up stations for toppings. Lacey noted everything he did, including the time when a truck pulled up to the back door and unloaded supplies. Lacey recorded the delivery guy’s name. (Ezra greeted him with, “Hey, Max,” and Max just grunted.) The large mixer had a name, too: “the Hobart.” Ezra ignored Lacey while turning the Hobart’s massive mound of dough into pizza-sized balls that would stand to rise.

Lacey set aside her notebook to stack the delivery items. The walk-in had a precision to its setup, and she made sure to add new product to the back and push the older product forward so it would get used first. She did the same on the storage shelves. Ezra let her do this in silence, only glancing at her every so often.

It would be nice if he talked. He had a dusky voice, but she’d only ever heard a few sentences.

At some point, he checked everything over, then frowned as if puzzled. He said, “You’ve messed up my system. It went faster because you handled restocking.”

As Lacey set that in her notebook, she said, “Is that a problem?”

“I’m not used to downtime.” He huffed. “Are you going to dock my pay for half an hour of daydreaming?”

“Don’t even joke. My former manager used to say if I had time to lean, I had time to clean.” As Ezra approached, looking at her notebook, she showed him what she’d been writing. “You’re super efficient. I don’t see anything I can improve.”

He huffed. “Did I ask you to improve anything?”

Those eyes of his were piercing. Lacey said, “Sometimes a newcomer can see flaws in the system.”

Ezra drew breath, but then he said nothing. Instead he found one of the ubiquitous kitchen-things that needed to be done and turned his back on her.

Lacey called, “If you need unskilled labor, I can assemble pizza boxes.”

“You’re going to be the boss. I usually assemble them as needed because there’s not much room.”

In terms of understatements, that was magnificent. Lacey said, “I wonder if we could make more room in here by repositioning the equipment.”

“If you’re thinking of hanging the Hobart off the ceiling, no.” Ezra sounded unamused.

“No, but with more space, we could be selling wings or cheesy bread.” She glanced around. “And more toppings.”

Ezra said, “Why?”

She stepped into the center of the kitchen and swiveled. “The wood-fired oven is great, but we’re under-utilizing the stovetop. We could be offering more and better options.”

He set his jaw. “Our customers don’t think the options are sub-par.”

“Except for the ones who want a greater variety and therefore don’t become our customers.” She turned back to Ezra. His dark eyes were lit up with that earlier intensity. “We could open a whole new world to them. I’d love to offer farm-to-table pizzas.”

His voice was thin. “Are you out of your mind? Did you forget we’re in Maine?”

She huffed. “There’s sustainable eating in Maine.”

Ezra said, “Sustainable eating is an unsustainable business practice. Have you looked into what that would require?”

Again, his voice was beautiful, but the anger undercutting it was making him less attractive.

She nodded. “One of my previous jobs made an arrangement with the local farms so we could offer seasonal produce.”

“And how much do we get?” Ezra stepped toward her. “How many of these can we sell? What do we do with the extras? How long can they stay fresh?” He gestured at the rest of the kitchen. “I can tell you how much of any topping we need for every day of the week, but if Farmer Bill shows up with a trunk full of onions, what am I supposed to do with that?”

Lacey tilted her head. “So we offer a daily special.”

“The pizza grab-bag? Blind date with a pizza?” He pivoted away, then turned back. His eyes were even more livid. “You’ll pop in with a bag of zucchini, and it’ll be my job to figure out how to sell twenty zucchini-topped pizzas?”

She raised her hands. “Only toppings you’d expect on a pizza—but locally-sourced.”

Ezra pointed to the walk in. “That’s local enough for me.”

Lacey sighed. “There’s something special about food that remembers the field it came from.”

He rolled his eyes so hard it was a shock he didn’t sprain them. “Most people would prefer their food not remember anything at all. Do we also do farm-to-table ground beef for the meatballs? ‘Today’s Loveless farm-to-table special used to be named Bessie. We even made the mozzarella with her milk.”

Lacey recoiled. “Wow. That’s awful.”

He lowered his voice. “Is there something I should know about the finances? Because if bankruptcy is around the corner, I need to find another job now.”

Lacey paused. “How’d we get from torturing innocent cattle to bankruptcy?”

Ezra folded his arms. “You’re storming in here talking about making it more efficient and changing things up when it’s working fine. Did Barrett sell it to you because he wanted to jump off a sinking ship?”

For the first time, Lacey realized what she was seeing in Ezra’s eyes. It wasn’t just intensity. It was resentment. She blurted out, “Why are you angry at me?”

“You’re changing things you don’t understand. Pizza isn’t about the gourmet experience—or maybe some places it is, but not our pizza.” He took a ragged breath, as though steadying himself. “People want to know what they’re getting, and they want it in a reasonable time frame. It’s cheap, and it’s fast, and it’s the same every time. We are not changing anyone’s life. But we might be changing someone’s evening by making it easier.”

Lacey spread her hands. “But we can make it memorable, too. We can make it better for the environment.”

Ezra said, “By destroying our customer base? We’ve already got a niche.”

She waved a hand. “We don’t need to stay in a hole like a mole rat. We can branch out. Maybe expand our offerings, maybe offer more than a hundred pizzas a day.”

Ezra said, “You’re going to destroy the place.”

Lacey’s breath caught, and she stared into Ezra’s eyes.

He was intense, sure, but this time, she didn’t look away.

A thousand responses blazed in her mind, but the one she snapped out was, “Or maybe I’ll realize its potential the way you never did.”