Chapter 4 - The Sabotage at Folly Beach
The salt air at Folly Beach smelled of impending disaster.
By six o’clock the following evening, the wind off the Atlantic had picked up to twenty knots, whipping the palmetto fronds outside the newly constructed Sutton Dunes Pavilion into a frenzy.
Inside the three-story glass atrium, chaos was forty-eight hours away from becoming a reality, and we had only forty-five minutes before the first chartered buses arrived from the downtown hotels.
Arthur Prescott had done his work thoroughly.
At two in the afternoon, the executive chef Dennis had hired—a high-priced Frenchman with an ego larger than the harbor—had walked out, taking four of his lead line cooks with him, claiming the kitchen conditions were “unsafe and professionally insulting.”
At four, the linen delivery truck had mysteriously blown two tires on the Ashley River Bridge, leaving three hundred banquet tables bare.
And at five o’clock, the city inspector had posted a yellow conditional citation on the main kitchen door, citing an uncertified grease separator.
I was on my knees on the tile floor behind the banquet line, my white blouse rolled up past my elbows, a sixteen-inch pipe wrench in my right hand and a heavy flashlight in my left.
“River, you can’t be serious!” Wade called out from the doorway, holding a clipboard that looked like it had been through a shredder. “The guests are boarding the shuttles right now! The local news is running Delaney’s sob story about the ‘troubled Sutton girl’ every twenty minutes! We have three hundred people coming to a grand opening with no head chef, no tablecloths, and a kitchen that technically can’t operate!”
“Hand me that brass coupling, Wade,” I grunted, my shoulder muscles burning as I hauled back on the wrench.
A metal thread caught. I twisted the wrench until the iron groaned, sealing the gasket that the city inspector had claimed was leaking.
“Grease separator is certified,” I said, wiping a smear of black gasket sealant from my jaw with the back of my wrist. “I installed this exact model at the Savannah property three years ago. The inspector’s citation is based on an outdated 2018 municipal code. I photographed the compliance plate, emailed it to the head of the district office ten minutes ago, and cc’d the city attorney. If that inspector steps foot on this property again tonight, Marcus Vance will have him arrested for commercial extortion.”
I scrambled out from beneath the stainless-steel counter and stood up.
Nolan Reed was standing ten feet away, leaning against the pass-through window of the hot line.
He wasn’t wearing his suit jacket. His silk tie was tucked into his shirt, his crisp white sleeves were rolled up over forearms that showed hard, ropy muscle and an old anchor tattoo near the wrist that he certainly hadn't gotten at Harvard Business School. In his hand, he held a commercial meat slicer blade he had just finished cleaning with degreaser.
“Tablecloths are solved,” Nolan said calmly.
I blinked at him, panting slightly. “How? The Ashley River Bridge is still backed up for three miles.”
“I had three hundred sets of raw linen dropped by helicopter onto the dunes twenty minutes ago,” Nolan said, as if ordering a corporate helicopter for table linens was as standard as hailing a cab. “Josephine has twenty housekeeping veterans from the Flagship ironing them in the ballroom right now. They’ll be on the tables in fifteen minutes.”
I stared at him. The feared, cold-blooded billionaire of Wall Street had a smudge of flour on his right collarbone and grease under his fingernails.
“What about the food?” Wade groaned, pointing toward the cold storage walk-in. “We have four hundred pounds of dry-aged prime rib and sea bass, and nobody to cook it! We can’t serve billionaire investors canapés from a grocery store!”
I dropped my pipe wrench into a metal bucket with a loud, ringing clang.
“Wade,” I said, walking toward the prep line. “Who taught you how to cook low-country boil?”
Wade blinked. “Nana Jo. When we were eight.”
“And who ran the line at the Folly Beach crab shack when the head cook broke his leg during Fourth of July weekend in 2019?”
Wade’s eyes widened. “You did.”
“We’re not making French reductions tonight,” I said, grabbing a clean white apron from the shelf and tying it around my waist with a vicious, snapping knot. “We’re serving Charleston. We have sixty pounds of fresh Carolina gold rice, forty pounds of wild-caught white shrimp from the docks we bought this morning, three bushels of sweet corn, and twenty pounds of smoked sausage. We make low-country perloo, cast-iron blackened sea bass, and grilled peaches with bourbon cream for three hundred people.”
The kitchen doors burst open.
Mrs. Maria Santos, who had been head of housekeeping at our meeting street hotel since I was six years old, marched in leading a dozen line cooks and prep workers from our other four Charleston properties.
“Miss River!” Maria barked, adjusting her apron. “The buses are crossing the causeway! We hear Dennis tried to sell you to that weak-chinned Hartwell boy!”
“He tried, Maria,” I said.
“Well, we don't work for Hartwells,” Maria said, slapping a chef’s knife onto a cutting board. “Tell us where to cut.”
For the next forty minutes, the kitchen of the Sutton Dunes Pavilion became a symphony of steel, fire, and fury.
There was no hierarchy of suits and titles. Nolan Reed stood on the prep line beside an eighteen-year-old dishwasher from North Charleston, shucking sweet corn with methodical, terrifying speed. Wade manned the industrial steam kettles, his face red from the broth. I took the grill, seasoning seventy sea bass fillets at a time, flipping them with the practiced rhythm of someone who had learned the trade from the bottom up.
Every time the pass-through window opened, the smell of garlic, charred butter, sea salt, and old bay drifted out into the atrium, drowning out the tension with the irresistible, undeniable scent of authentic coastal hospitality.
At seven o’clock, the doors of the main pavilion opened.
The guests poured in.
They had come expecting a disaster. The *Charleston Chronicle’s* afternoon smear piece had done its work—half the room had their phones out, ready to film the collapse of the Sutton empire, ready to watch Dennis Sutton’s daughter drown under the weight of her own scandal.
Instead, they found a room transformed.
The raw linen cloths, still warm from the irons, looked like minimalist coastal perfection, draped over heavy cedar tables adorned with wild sea oats and hurricane lanterns.
And the food that came out of the kitchen wasn’t the stiff, cold, over-sauced catering fare of country club receptions; it was steaming, vibrant, magnificent Southern food that made the food critics from the *Atlanta Journal-Constitution* stop mid-sentence and reach for their forks before they even sat down.
I stood by the kitchen pass, wiping the sweat from my brow, watching the dining room through the glass window.
Spencer Hartwell was out there.
He had come with Delaney Prescott, clearly expecting to witness our humiliation. Delaney was wearing an ostentatious lavender gown, her neck craned toward the kitchen doors, waiting for the inspectors to shut us down, waiting for the food to fail.
She watched a waiter place a plate of blackened sea bass over sweet corn perloo in front of Charles King, the most vicious restaurant critic in the Southeast.
She watched King take a bite.
She watched his eyes close in sheer, unadulterated delight.
Delaney’s face twisted into an expression so bitter it could have curdled cream.
“You did it,” a voice said behind me.
I turned.
Nolan was standing there, handing me a clean, cold bottle of water. He had washed his hands, but his sleeves were still rolled up, his dark hair slightly ruffled by the heat of the kitchen.
“We did it,” I corrected, taking the bottle. My fingers were trembling again, not from fear this time, but from the raw, intoxicating rush of adrenaline. “Reed Capital makes an efficient prep cook, Mr. Reed.”
“I’m expensive,” he murmured, stepping closer.
The pass-through hallway was narrow, shadowed, and smelled of woodsmoke and vanilla. For a moment, the roar of the three hundred guests in the pavilion faded into the background.
Nolan reached out. His thumb brushed against my cheekbone, his skin warm and slightly calloused, wiping away a faint smudge of charcoal that had escaped my towel.
The touch was gentle, completely at odds with his reputation as the most ruthless investor in the hemisphere. My breath hitched in my throat. I didn't pull away.
“They tried to tear you apart, River,” he said, his voice dropping into a low, resonant register that vibrated straight through my chest. “At the Hartwell estate. In the newspapers. With the inspectors. And you just picked up a wrench and cooked them dinner.”
“It’s what we do,” I whispered, looking up into his stormy eyes. “We build things. We don’t let parasites burn them down.”
“No,” Nolan agreed, his hand lingering on the curve of my jaw for one heartbeat, two, three, before slowly dropping to his side. “We don’t.”
Before I could say anything more, Marcus Vance slipped into the hallway, his face dark and urgent.
May you like
“Mr. Reed. Miss Sutton,” Marcus said quietly. “You need to see this. Lorraine Hartwell just arrived. And she didn't come alone.”
***
