Love at First Fight - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Eight

It was a sandwich—but not just any sandwich. Oh no. This was a Chef Louis sandwich. Fresh cheese and tomatoes, mixed in with steamy ground beef and grilled to perfection. This wasn't just a sandwich. It was the sandwich.

"Outstanding work, Louis," Doctor O'Reilly said between two monstrous bites. "You've really outdone yourself."

"It is a new recipe," the chef replied, his hands covered in flour and his voice covered in Italy. "Perhaps we will call it the Morgan Club Sandwich."

He shot me a wink, reminding me that Chef Louis was every bit as soft with his girls as he was talented with a spatula.

"See that?" Doctor O'Reilly said. "He called you Morgan and you didn't give him any flack."

"He makes the food," I blubbed through the bread. "He can call me whatever he wants."

He nodded, like this seemed to be a sturdy point, but it was Chef Louis who spoke next. "The young lady goes by Maggie, Phineas. You will call her that, or you will be eating saliva in your meals for as long as you eat my food."

"Still just as charming as ever, I see," the doctor said. "Nice to know you haven't changed since we last saw one another."

"Nice to know that you have, friend."

The look that passed between them seemed to be made up of caution and respect in equal measure. The silence was almost too much to take, so I did what I do best—I broke it. "So you two know each other?"

At this, they both smiled, in on a secret that I didn't know, just like the rest of the world. "Yes," Doctor O'Reilly said as he licked each of his fingers. "We were fast friends."

The chef chuckled. "Fast, maybe, but friends? Not quite."

"Nonsense, you and I had an explosive first encounter."

"Which was exactly the problem," Chef Louis told him. "I do not take kindly to people who try to kill my president."

When you're the daughter of the world's finest covert couple, you grow accustomed to hearing sentences that you don't entirely understand. In my family, jokes were told about conspiracies and the long-awaited answers to suddenly cracked codes were screamed across living rooms. Talk about presidential assassinations was commonplace. Average. Normal.

Except, usually, I was sitting next to the people who were trying to stop it from happening. "Come again?" I said.

Doctor O'Reilly gave the chef a look. "Do you see what you did?" he said, gesturing to me. "Now she thinks I tried to kill the president."

Chef Louis sent a dismissive wave my way, flour pluming into the air and shimmering against the light above. "I give him a hard time," he admitted in his strong Italian. Then, in English, "Phineas is the only reason that the White House did not go up in flames that night—knew exactly what he was doing. Disarmed the thing in seconds."

"You disarmed a bomb?" I asked him, and everything seemed all wrong. Until then, I had been sure that he had no training—no fieldwork to put his name to. "But... you're a psychiatrist."

He picked up his cup, took a sip, and then set it back on the sleek silver counter. "I think you'll find that my CV is rather diverse, Maggie. I'm a psychiatrist now, but before this, my wife and I were weapons dealers." He didn't sound proud. He didn't sound happy about it. There was something overwhelmingly dark about his next words. "The only reason I knew how to disarm that bomb was because it had the name O'Reilly branded across the front of it."