His Horizon - Con Riley Page 0,48

that had Jude frowning. Rob calling his menu pub grub had sounded dismissive.

Rob used the same phrase again. “Because pub grub is what you said I’ll be stuck serving, remember? Pub grub, until the Anchor folded? A complete waste of my training, let alone the prize-winnings.” Rob’s voice rose. “Is that why you’ve done this? So we’ll get a terrible write-up before we even get a chance to reopen?”

Jude quietly let himself out of the driver-side door. Through a break in the hedgerow, the harbour was visible, its sea wall a protective curve around what was left of Porthperrin. Then he glanced over his shoulder, breath catching at the sight of Rob white with anger. Even when other chefs had pulled stunts to wreck each other’s chances, Jude had only ever seen Rob laugh as if nothing mattered. Now, Jude saw visible fury and heard it too in the loud slam of Rob’s car door after he ended his call.

“That fucking, fucking….” Rob ran out of adjectives as he stalked over to Jude.

Jude supplied a noun. “Your dad?”

Rob’s phone rang in his hand. He thumbed it off without looking.

“You sure you don’t want to answer that?” It might have been Louise calling. Jude’s gaze strayed to the break in the hedge, and Rob’s, of course, followed.

“Oh, trust me. That won’t have been Lou. She’ll be too busy frantically clearing the last of the crap to call either of us right now.” He didn’t censor his thoughts, making zero attempt to sugarcoat them. “We still had a couple of weeks before the summer season kicked off,” he said, despairing. “There’s still so much shit to clear out. So much decorating still to do just to make it even half-way decent.”

“What’s any of that got to do with your dad?”

“Because he’s the reason we’re going to be forced to face criticism before we’re anywhere near ready.” He raked his fingers through his hair, pushing it away from his face and leaving his expression unguarded. Anger now warred with despair. “He says he did it as a favour. A village pub in the middle of nowhere isn’t most restaurant critics’ first choice of destination. It might keep us afloat if we get a good write-up.”

“And if we don’t,” Jude asked, although, in his heart, he knew the answer.

“Then we’re sunk before we’ve started.”

The next few days passed in a blur of preparations. All three of them ploughed through Louise’s chore list, Rob, in particular, working like a machine without an off-switch. No scuffed wall was safe from his paintbrush, no corner of the kitchen that didn’t gleam after he scoured it. When he didn’t come to bed in the boatshed by one o’clock on the third night, Jude went to find him.

The laptop screen in the office lit Rob’s face as he clicked between online reviews that Guy Parsons had written. “He’s going to slaughter us,” he sighed without looking away from the screen. Gone was the determined automaton Jude had witnessed over and over, striving hard to create perfection. Instead, a beaten man replaced him before the battle had even commenced.

“Then I’ll just tell him he’s not welcome.” Jude moved to close the laptop lid.

Rob stopped him. “Doing that would make it worse.”

“How.” Jude hesitated for a second before placing a hand on Rob’s shoulder. “I could go to the station early,” he suggested. “Tell him that his booking’s cancelled before he gets off the train from London.” He’d do it in a heartbeat if that dragged Rob back from a cliff edge he acted as if was his alone to jump from. “Seriously. This is our place. Ours. All of us.” And wasn’t that easier to admit now he’d witnessed Rob working flat out? “We get the final say. He can’t exactly write a review if he hasn’t eaten or slept here, so what’s the worst that could happen if I sent him packing?”

“The worst?” Rob’s chuckle was hollow. “Oh, the reviews where he hasn’t even eaten a bite are his most popular by a mile. We wouldn’t be the first place he broke before getting a single booking. He doesn’t even need to cross the threshold.”

Rob clicked open a scathing review. Jude read, his mouth drying. “Wow.” He read some more as Rob paged down to the comments, hundreds of readers agreeing online to never darken that business’ doorway. “At least not everyone reads Sunday papers these days.”

Rob scrolled to the bottom of the page and clicked on a blue