Chapter Text
As a general rule, Jack makes a point to not date the staff–no waitresses, no line cooks, no managers. It keeps things clean and simple and if things go wrong, no one gets burned–pun fully intended.
It’s a good rule and it helps him run his kitchen with authority and no drama. He barks at Daniel to pick up the pace on apps and praises Teal’c for his excellent front of house management and O’Neill’s runs just fine–he’s even got the Michelin stars to prove it.
And then George Hammond hires pastry chef Samantha Carter whose bread comes out airy and soft, whose meringues are whipped to perfect peaks, whose kitchen-sink cookies and to-die-for desserts bring in a cult following of customers.
It’s easy to ignore her at first (”I like women,” he smirks at her at their first staff meeting. “It’s pastry chefs I have a problem with.” She just quirks an eyebrow and stuffs a cookie in his face. And yeah, okay, she’s talented). But after a hard service–burned entrees and pissed off customers and a food critic who ended up with a lapful of wine–Jack’s tired and just wants to go home.
But when he gets to the kitchen and sees a light on in the back corner, he frowns and follows his nose to find his pastry chef, barefoot in the kitchen–his kitchen–and following a recipe out of a cookbook, humming softly to herself.
He leans against the counter and clears his throat. “Your onions are burning and those bare feet of yours are breaking about a hundred health code violations,” he announces. She jumps about a foot in the air and turns, hand on her heart and blushes, trying to block his view of the cookbook on the counter.
“Chef! I didn’t know you were here! I,” she scrambles for her kitchen clogs and he smirks at her flushed cheeks and disheveled appearance. He saunters over to her and stares at the cookbook and back to her.
“Ramsay? You bring a Gordon Ramsay book into this kitchen?”
Her blush deepens but she doesn’t shy away from him. “I’m a pastry chef, Chef. I don’t–I don’t do cooking.”
He rolls his shoulders, getting the cracks and pain of the day out of his muscles and pushes his sleeves up, taking the hot pan from the stove and dumping it int he industrial sink. “Okay,” he says, eyeing the recipe she was trying to recreate. “Follow my lead, Carter.”
She perks up and sidles up beside him, looking eagerly at his long, lean fingers and the way it easily handles the chef’s knife, dicing through tomatoes, capers, and onions. “Yes, Chef.”
They spend the evening laughing and humming. At some point, a bottle of wine is opened, and they sip at expensive red wine that he knows he’s going to have to log with Fraiser in the morning. But the fragrant smell of butter and garlic and lemon and scallops waft through the kitchen and he finds that they work pretty damn easily together. She seems to anticipate what he needs next, more so than any sous chef he’s ever had.
As they eat the pasta and scallops, he reaches over and brushes the droplets of butter sauce from her bottom lip and he really, really wants to lean over and kiss her to find out if her mouth tastes sweet like the wine they’re drinking.
After dinner, they clean up, throwing the utensils and pans and plates in the industrial dishwasher and wiping down the stainless counters. It’s the wee hours of the morning and they both need to be in early for kitchen prep and the staff meeting tomorrow.
They lock up the restaurant in easy silence and they linger by her Indian, their hands resting on her helmet on the back of the bike. He inches his finger forward to brush over her knuckles and she lifts her head, searching his eyes for any sign that he’s feeling what she is–that whatever this spark between them is, it’s going to spark and fan into flames.
“Dessert!” he exclaims. She looks startled and he ducks his head, runs his hand over the back of his neck. “You should show me how you do that,” he gestures nonsensically. “That whole baking thing, Carter.”
He has a flash of her covered in flour and sweet dough and her mouth tasting like sugar crystals and vanilla and he wants that–really, really wants that.
She bites her lip and looks down, thinking, before nodding. “Yeah, I think I can teach an old chef new tricks.” And before he can react, before he can be outraged at old, she surges to her tiptoes and plants a quick, searing kiss to his cheek.
“See you tomorrow, Chef.”
He watches her ride away on a rumbling Indian and seriously reconsiders his ‘No Dating Staff’ policy.