Chapter One

Chapter 1


I’m going to kill Harold.

While I’m at it, maybe I’ll kill my father, too. They’re the ones who got me into this mess. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be standing in a swank twenty-table dining room, wondering if the wineglasses are going to shatter.

“Whoever puts wilted flowers on a table is crazy! Should go to an asylum!”

My new boss, Gina, paces back and forth in stilettos and tight jeans, waving a limp white bloom. “How many languages I have to tell you in?” she shouts in a heavy Italian accent. “What did I do to deserve this?”

I stand frozen in a line of waiters, asking myself the same thing. What exactly did I do? Oh, that’s right. Four months after being laid off, I let Harold, my father’s golf buddy and one of the biggest liquor distributors in the state, talk me into taking a job at a “hot spot” called Roulette. “The owners are customers of mine, real sweethearts. And your dad tells me you can practically run a restaurant single-handedly.”

Single-handedly? Did my father really think that I, a former marketing manager, could wait tables at one of the best restaurants in Manhattan? Did he honestly believe that a college summer serving chowder prepared me for this?

“Answer me!” Gina shrieks.

I jump. Somebody answer her. Please.

“The florist has really been slipping lately,” says Cato, the waiter who’s been assigned to train me. He has a spiky blond crew cut and wears a T-shirt that says Queen for a Day.

“I don’t care! Is your job to choose what go