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the quail’s breast. Nathan Yamaoka, the only Asian Rastafarian Skye had ever seen, was on a perpetual, if lackadaisical, campaign to turn the Queenie Pie Café into a vegetarian restaurant.
    “I had you all set up for a nice little veggie dish,” he went on.
    “Who added the quail?” Skye interrupted, looking around at her team.
    Oscar Puentes raised his hand, totally unconcerned by the scowling of his shorter, much skinnier, dreadlocked teammate. “That would be me.”
    Skye waited until Nathan had turned away, muttering something about dead baby birds, before she gave Oscar a discreet thumbs up and a grin.
    Nathan was a genius with vegetables, and they had a huge number of vegetarian customers who were kept extremely satisfied and enthralled by his many innovative uses for kale, but her team was in the RSC to win it.
    And glancing around at her competitors’ dishes, Skye knew a salad wasn’t going to cut it.
    The judges walked back to the front of the kitchen, snapping Skye out of her unhappy thoughts and prompting her to make a grab for Rex, who was deeply involved in the second half of the flour-puff girl routine, which consisted of him trying to get his hands into Fiona’s hair and rub her head until he’d generated enough static electricity to power a small city while she squawked a protest but secretly loved it.
    “Guys! Quit it! The judges are about to announce the winner.”
    Get a room was what she wanted to say, but Skye restrained herself.
    Eva Jansen swiveled her slinky hips to the front of the judges’ group, her shiny brunette bob swinging smoothly against her chin. Why was it Skye’s fate to be surrounded by gorgeous size-two women with perfect, glossy straight hair? This wasn’t exactly how she’d pictured the restaurant business.
    “Thank you, chefs, for some lovely small plates. Midwest team, the judges loved your gnocchi—I actually heard the phrase ‘light as a feather,’ which is not something I often associate with tiny balls of potato dough. But they’re getting a little tired of the foam, and felt it should’ve had more shiitake flavor to really add something to the dish.”
    “Oooh, somebody’s mad,” Fiona muttered out of the side of her mouth, her pale blue eyes avid as she watched Ryan Larousse’s reaction to the critique.
    Skye bit the inside of her lip. Yeah, the Midwest team had made some mistakes, but it was down to the final three now. The small stuff was where it would all play out, and perfect dishes were rare.
    “Chef Beck,” Eva Jansen said, moving on. “Your local crab with tarragon champagne sauce seems to have been a favorite with the judges. According to my notes, it was the quick pickled cucumbers and shallots that tipped it over the edge from a nice, if uninspired, French-inflected dish to something new and uniquely yours. Good job.”
    Sneaking a glance at Beck, Skye wasn’t surprised to find him looking entirely unmoved by the whole thing. Of freaking course. She wondered, as she had so often during their brief, tumultuous year of marriage, what it would take to truly move Henry Beck.
    She’d certainly never cracked the code.
    And if there was a part of her that thrilled with quiet pride for Beck at hearing such positive feedback from the judges, Skye squashed it just in time for Eva Jansen to turn to her with that feline smile curling up the corners of her too-red mouth.
    Skye bit her lip again, never more aware of the fact that her all-natural tinted lip balm, while cruelty free and completely organic, didn’t have as much staying power as whatever industrial-strength lipstick slicked Eva’s scarlet mouth.
    “And last but not least, we have the West Coast team. The team with home-field advantage here in San Francisco.”
    When Skye reflexively stretched her mouth into a smile, she had to hide a wince as the expression pulled against the sore worry spot inside her bottom lip. For the millionth time, she vowed to stop biting her lip at the first