The Blackmail Blend

by Livia Day

  ‘You’re going to expose her,’ I said slowly.

  ‘That was Jake Madison, one o’ the rare ‘out’ male romance authors in Australia. His sister Vi did Queen Beatie’s workshop retreat this week, and we set a trap. An old journalist pal o’ mine’s on the inside too. Publishing scandal o’ the year.’

  I sighed. ‘Is there going to be a riot? Should I put out the breakable tea cups?’

  Stewart grinned and kissed me on the cheek so quickly I almost missed it. ‘Dinnae worry, Tabitha. I wouldnae ruin yer party. We’re still gathering evidence.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said gratefully. ‘No offence, but if you’re going to try to take Queen Beatie down, I want as much distance as possible between my café and the flying shrapnel. Though I totally volunteer to provide tea and cakes afterwards.’

  Stewart looked as if he was going to say something else, but at that moment, Xanthippe emerged from the kitchen, still every inch the wicked Regency Rake. ‘Tish,’ she said to me, and rolled her eyes at Stewart as he gave her an ironic wolf whistle. ‘Oh very twenty-first century male, I swoon in your general direction. Tish, there’s a problem with Queen Beatie.’

  I hurried over to her. ‘Is she offended by something else? Did she find out about the Duchess of Bedford? Is the tea too cold? Too hot? Are the sandwiches the wrong shape? Did she make more people cry?’ Stewart and I exchanged a brief glance, and the question ‘Did she find out there’s a conspiracy to blackmail her’ rose to my tongue, but did not emerge.

  ‘No, none of those things,’ said Xanthippe.

  I flung my arms in the air dramatically. ‘Then what’s she in a strop about?’

  A light went off in Xanthippe’s eyes as if she had spotted the perfect way to present me with bad news as if it was good news. ‘Oh, she’s definitely not in a strop. This is a strop-free situation.’

  ‘Brilliant!’ So why was I suspicious and not relieved?

  ‘And the ambulance will be here any minute.’

  Oh, right.

  The courtyard swam around me, and then snapped into focus. ‘Ambulance, like…actually what? Start again. WHAT?’

  ‘It’s all going to be fine,’ said Xanthippe. ‘Though when I say fine, Queen Beatie is in fact not very fine at the moment. Still breathing, though, so there’s that.’

  I opened and shut my mouth and nothing came out. ‘Did someone stab her with a cake fork? I hid the cake forks to avoid that very specific situation!’

  ‘Looks like she was poisoned,’ Xanthippe admitted.

  Stewart was standing right behind me, and I felt him take my hand.

  ‘What kind of poison?’ I said in a small voice. ‘Not—allergies? She’s allergic to things. There was a list.’ Had I missed something? Was this my fault? ‘Is she going to be okay?’

  I could hear them now, the ambulance sirens, getting closer.

  Stewart guided me back to one of the tables, where I could sit down. Poison. Thoughts of my café’s reputation flooded through my brain. Poison was bad. Hard to come back from poison. ‘You don’t mean food poisoning?’ I said in an even smaller voice than the one before. Salmonella in the quiches. Egg white in the chocolate mousse. This could be the end of Café La Femme.

  ‘To be honest,’ said Xanthippe. ‘I’m pretty sure it was attempted murder.’

  ‘Oh, thank goodness,’ I said, and then realised a beat later that it was the wrong thing to say.

  A woman is like a tea bag—you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water.

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Several hours later, I made my weary way home to find a police officer in my bed.

  To be precise, he was sitting on my bed reading something on his laptop, fully dressed in a work-related suit, but after a day like the one I’d had, I would take what I could get.

  ‘And what time do you call this?’ I said lightly.

  Leo Bishop glanced up, and something about his face told me that I looked exhausted and pitiful, despite (or maybe because of) the sprigged muslin Regency gown I was still wearing. I had lost the bonnet somewhere between the café and the police station and home.

  ‘Sorry, Tish,’ he said, sounding genuinely guilty about it. ‘Word from above is that I am not to attend any crime scenes involving you. Or Xanthippe, actually. Which comes up slightly more often.’

  I frowned at him. ‘Did this word come down today, or were the Powers That Be anticipating that your girlfriend and sister were likely to get mixed up in future crime scenes?’

  He winced in my general direction. ‘They weren’t wrong. How did it go?’

  ‘Beatrice Wilde suffered an extreme allergic reaction. Luckily one of the students had an epipen in her handbag.’

  Bishop frowned at that, his forehead creasing up. ‘But wouldn’t she have told you—’

  ‘She did tell me. That was a nut-and-strawberry-free tea. At least, it was supposed to be.’ I flopped on the bed next to him. ‘I checked and double checked beforehand, and again after everyone had cleared out. I know this stuff. All the chocolate was carefully sourced to make sure there was no possible nut contamination. I don’t know how…’

  ‘At least it’s not a murder inquiry.’

  ‘That’s going to be such a comfort when I get sued by a millionaire romance writer and Twitterbombed by her many irate fans. I’ll hug the knowledge of it to my chest at night. At least no one tried to murder her!’ I grabbed a pillow and smothered myself with it. ‘So how was your day?’

  ‘Quiet.’ I could almost hear him frowning. ‘Tabitha, are you sure this wasn’t deliberate?’

  ‘You mean, am I sure that I didn’t subconsciously lace her food with peanuts in order to kill her dead? Because my money is still on cake forks as the method by which this woman will ultimately meet her death.’

  ‘No,’ Bishop said slowly. ‘But you don’t make mistakes like this.’

  I took the pillow off my face. ‘Say that again.’

  ‘You don’t make mistakes with food.’

  I leaned in and kissed him hard. He pulled back for a moment, placed his laptop carefully on the floor, then came back to kiss me. It was a slow, exploring kiss, and my brain fell mercifully silent as the heat took over.

  Many languid kisses later, I surfaced for air long enough to say: ‘I even hired this dress.’

  ‘I like the dress,’ said Bishop, kissing the way down the side of my neck.

  ‘It’s not my usual style…’ I continued to babble, despite the heat in his gaze that had melted my bones. I couldn’t have moved if the bedroom floor was on fire. ‘You said you wanted to go slow,’ I accused him, as his clever fingers worked at the little pearl buttons at the back of the Regency gown. ‘You made a whole thing about it. We could have been doing this weeks ago!’

  A slow, slightly guilty smile crossed over his face. ‘I forgot.’

  ‘You never forget anything. You are Sergeant Remember All the Details.’ Details like every embarrassing thing he had ever witnessed me doing, through my teen years and beyond, long before we got together.

  I had been a bit worried about this whole ‘go slow, no sex’ thing between us. Mostly, I was concerned that he had never quite stopped thinking of me as the chaotic brat of a teenager I was when we first met, a decade ago.

  From the dark, enticing expression on his face at this very moment, it was possibly that I nothing to worry about.

  ‘You need a distraction,’ was all he said.

  If I hadn’t been lying half underneath him in a slightly restrictive historical costume, I might have put my hands on my hips. ‘Is that what I am, a distraction?’

  ‘No,’ he corrected, leaning down to kiss me again. ‘That’s what I am.’

  And he proceeded to distract me, very thoroughly.

  Come along inside... We'll see if tea and buns can make the world a better place.

  The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame

  Stewart rang at ridiculous o’clock in the morning. I looked guiltily at the sleepi
ng frame of Leo Bishop as I grabbed my phone and went out to the staircase to answer it. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘D’ye wannae interview the suspects?’

  ‘They don’t even know if it’s attempted murder or my bad cooking yet,’ I hissed.

  ‘Obviously it’s attempted murder.’ Oh I did like how the men in my life trusted me not to kill people with my food. ‘I stayed the night at a log cabin full o’ romance writing students who hated Queen Beatie’s guts. I say again, d’ye wannae interview the suspects?’

  A quick arrest might well save the reputation of my café. I thought about the handsome naked man in my bed, and sighed. ‘More than life itself,’ I admitted.

  ‘Get yer skates on, then. Bring snacks. Writers get hungry.’

  I couldn’t quite bring myself to raid the café for supplies, not with the cloud still hanging over my catering. Instead, I grabbed a Tupperware container of homemade cheese straws out of my own deep freeze, and another full of experimental Danish pastries from cherry season. They actually tasted like sunshine and good decisions.

  Before I left, I put the coffee on with a note for Bishop when he awoke.

  Had to go and see a man about a nut allergy. Drink this before you face the world. Xxx

  Three kisses made up for abandoning him the morning after we finally slept together, didn’t it? I had to hope so.

  It’s set in a secret tea lair with a different location each episode. There’s a butler and mild peril.

  Emma Newman, Tea & Jeopardy

  Queen Beatie’s bush retreat ‘Build Your Career’ romance writing workshop turned out to be in a fancy log cabin conference centre just past Fern Tree—technically there were plenty of gum trees around, but it wasn’t exactly what locals would call a bush retreat. Fern Tree is suburbia that happens to live on the side of a mountain, so it only took me ten minutes to get there.

  Stewart came to meet me in the driveway, his hands shoved into the pockets of his faded jeans.

  ‘Why me?’ I asked, unloading Tupperware containers from the boot of my little blue Renault and piling them into his arms. ‘I’m not a journalist or a detective, so unless this was a sneaky way of getting me to cater for you all, I’m not sure why I scored this invitation.’

  Stewart looked slightly embarrassed, but only slightly. ‘People talk more around ye, Tabitha. Maybe because they’re trynae get a word in edgewise…’

  ‘Hey!’

  ‘But this is a narrow window o’ opportunity tae find out wha’s going on wi’ this lot. Thought ye might speed things up.’

  ‘Just as long as it’s understood that no one utters the phrase ‘the reason I gathered you all together,’ and this doesn’t count as sleuthing.’

  You solve one mystery mostly by accident, and suddenly people expect you to transform into Miss Marple in a mini skirt, fighting crime every other weekend. I don’t even know how to knit.

  ‘Aye. I promise,’ Stewart said.

  But we both knew what this was.

  ‘Tabitha brought breakfast,’ Stewart announced as I set down my containers on the massive Huon pine table in the main room of the cabin, which had a kitchen at one end, then a sprawling expanse of cork tiles and table in the middle, and a few couches and comfy chairs at the far end.

  Several pairs of eyes turned towards us. I didn’t see any ‘hey isn’t that the lady who poisoned our beloved leader’ expressions, which was better than I had been hoping for.

  ‘Did you bring tea?’ asked a mumsy looking older woman in the kitchen half of the room. ‘Hello, I’m Debbie. It’s just that we’re down to the last two plain bags, and the only other tea we have is, well.’

  ‘Queen Beatie’s special blend,’ drawled Spiky, the female half of the brother and sister pair I met in the courtyard yesterday. Vi, I remembered, though Spiky suited her better. ‘It tastes of resentment and broken dreams. How is the old bat, then?’ she added. ‘Still breathing?’

  ‘Just about,’ I said, taking the lids off the Tupperware. ‘Is Queen Beatie’s blend quite that bad?’

  ‘The opposite,’ said Vi’s brother, who was sharing the couch with her. ‘It’s annoying how amazing it tastes—something about pears and pepperberry? I don’t even know. But she’s been pouring it down their throats all week. If you could have PTSD from tea, that would do it.’ He leaned forward, turning on what I recognised as a top-notch Professional Flirt Performance. ‘Hi, I’m Jake Madison.’

  ‘Tha’s Vi next tae him,’ Stewart added. ‘Ye met Sally,’ he went on, pointing to the mousy-looking girl who had been acting as Queen Beatie’s assistant yesterday, passing all the most demanding orders to and from the kitchen with an apologetic smile every time. ‘And this is—a cup o’ coffee,’ he added with a dreamy expression as the last member of the group stepped out of the kitchen and passed him a freshly-brewed long black in an enormous mug.

  ‘Well, you’d gone half an hour without one,’ she said with a laugh. ‘I knew it was only a matter of time.’

  ‘Tabitha, this is Lise,’ said Stewart, very casually, as if he had been practicing the introduction all morning. ‘The pal I told ye about.’

  Lise had an expensive manicure and ironed jeans, neither of which said ‘writing student’ to me. She was effortlessly pretty, even without makeup (not no-makeup makeup, actual no makeup), and she wore thick-framed hipster glasses with an ironic indie band tee that I seen Stewart wearing a month ago.

  Well, that answered a few questions I hadn’t even really knew I had. Like why Stewart had stayed the night here, and why he was getting so involved.

  A small voice that snuck in beneath my overwhelming thoughts of DON’T BE JEALOUS THAT WOULD BE WEIRD added, maybe this is why he wants you here, too. Because he’s not impartial where she’s involved.

  I made up my mind right there and then that I was going to like Lise, no matter what.

  ‘So, you’re here as an undercover journalist, right?’ I said to her with a smile.

  Lise blinked. ‘Yes,’ she said with an odd glance at Stewart. ‘I didn’t know he’d told you that.’

  ‘And you two,’ I added to Vi and Jake. ‘Got involved in the workshop to prove Queen Beatie was a plagiarist. Was anyone here to actually learn about romance writing?’

  ‘I was,’ said Debbie. ‘But honestly we’ve spent more time fetching and carrying for Beatie and watching her check her emails than we have improving our craft. And after what Vi and Jake told us about her business practices, I’m thinking I wasted my money.’ She took a deep breath. ‘She made me cry nearly every day, even after I told myself I wasn’t going to care.’

  ‘I wanted to be here,’ said Sally with a pout. ‘I think you’re all horrible, the things you say about that poor woman who isn’t even here to defend herself.’

  Debbie gave her a dirty look. ‘She made you cry more than me. She pays you less than minimum wage.’

  ‘She’s tough on us, but that’s the publishing industry for you,’ Sally shot back with surprising heat.

  ‘So,’ I said cheerfully, loading the food I had brought on to a platter from the kitchen. Feeding people has always been my best way of getting information out of them. There’s something about being surrounded by heavenly baking scents and having your mouth half full with delicious crumbs that loosens the tongue. Hopefully only after the delicious crumbs have been swallowed. ‘Should we get the part where I ask if anyone tried to murder Queen Beatie out of the way now?’

  ‘I like you,’ said Jake, whose only modes of communication were ‘flirt’ and ‘smoulder’.

  ‘That’s sweet,’ I said, bringing the platter of pastries over to the coffee table near the couches. ‘But I already have one of you waiting for me at home, and mine comes with his own handcuffs.’

  ‘Shame,’ he said huskily, and his sister smacked his arm.

  ‘Turn that off, Jake, or no one’s going to get anything done.’

  Sally and Debbie were both blushing a bit, from mere proximity to Jake Madison in mid-flirt
. Lise, I was pleased to see, seemed immune. Good news for Stewart.

  Look at me being all pleased for him and not jealous in a non-platonic way. I would give myself a gold star but I think I’d have to remove it instantly for even thinking that way in the first place because I’m supposed to be super casual about all this right now. Baby steps.

  ‘Shall we start with the blackmail?’ I said in a friendly voice. ‘Or the poisoning?’

  ‘No one was trying to blackmail anyone,’ said Lise, taking an armchair opposite me. ‘I was here to expose Beatie’s terrible business practices, and Vi joined the workshop for the same reason.’

  ‘Oh I was totally planning to blackmail her,’ Vi said cheerfully. ‘She wasn’t going to stop unless we pulled out the big guns. I came in as a student with one of Jake’s old manuscripts—it has been published already but only in Czech so we thought she wouldn’t spot it. Jake stayed at the pub down the road to be out of the way. But then we found out that Stewart and Lise were doing the same thing, and we joined forces. Exposing her publicly in the glossy magazines sounded a lot more satisfying and less likely to backfire with us getting arrested.’

  I eyed Stewart, who was sitting on the arm of Lise’s chair. ‘Known each other a while, have you?’

  ‘Jake an’ I share a publisher,’ he said. ‘Lise used tae interview me, for Read Monthly.’

  ‘I didn’t know all this was going on until the letters started,’ Sally huffed. ‘I was here as an honest student, unlike some people. To learn. And signing on as Beatie’s personal assistant for the week was the only way I could afford to take part, but it was worth it.’