“Seriously, Dutch, why would Bertie listen to me? I wasn’t his favorite, you were.”
“Yes, but you are one of the best and the brightest of our class,” he said. “And everyone, even Bertie, respects your opinion.”
As if he’d flipped a switch, the charm was back on full force. Angie came trotting through the swinging doors, took one look at him, and turned back around and left.
“I like her,” Dutch said.
“She has a boyfriend,” Mel said.
“Ain’t that always the way?”
“Listen, I can’t make any promises, but if I see Bertie and the opportunity presents itself, I’ll do my best to plug you,” she said.
“You’re a peach, Mel.”
“Just remember that when you’re judging the contest.”
With a salute, Dutch headed out the door, and Mel felt herself collapse against the counter. Suddenly, the contest that had seemed like such a good idea was looming up like a storm cloud on the horizon, and she didn’t have an umbrella.
“Long day?” Joe asked as he refilled Mel’s wineglass.
“You could say that,” Mel said. “Between cranky customers, crazy festival competitors, and judges, I’m done.”
“How long does this thing last?” Joe asked as he stretched out beside her on the futon.
“Well, it starts with forty-four competitors, and they whittle us down each day until the last four remain.”
“Wow,” Joe said. “I think I’d rather try another serial murder case.”
“It’s going to be great publicity if we win.”
“You’ll win,” he said. She loved the note of certainty in his voice. “You make the best cupcakes in the state. I feel bad for the poor shlubs going up against you.”
Mel smiled. This was her favorite part of the day, curled up with Joe after a nice meal, flipping through the channels while they talked about their day. It just didn’t get any better.
She had only had one significant relationship in her past, and that had been years ago when she was working as a marketing whiz in Los Angeles, before she pitched it all to go to culinary school. Her boyfriend had dumped her when she’d dropped out of the rat race.
Sometimes it frightened her how much she cared for Joe. It made her feel vulnerable in a way she had never experienced before. She truly didn’t know how she would cope if their relationship didn’t work out. She pushed the thought away as soon as it crept into her head. If her father’s death ten years before had taught her anything, it was to live in the moment.
That being said, she wondered if Angie had heard from Roach. Would their relationship die now that they were on separate continents? How would Angie handle it if it did go up in smoke?
“Whatcha thinking about?” Joe asked.
“Angie and Roach,” she said.
“She still hasn’t heard from him?” he asked.
“Not as of closing tonight,” Mel said.
Joe was silent.
“Whatcha thinking about?” Mel asked his question back at him.
“That a good brother wouldn’t be happy that his sister was about to get her heart broken,” he said.
“Do you think Roach is going to dump her?” Mel asked.
“He’s in Europe on tour with groupies launching themselves at him like sexy missiles,” he said. “I find it hard to believe that he could resist for long.”
“I hate that she might get hurt,” Mel said.
“Me, too,” he said. “But I’d also be relieved if she found someone more . . . stable.”
“I don’t want her to move to Los Angeles with him when he gets back,” Mel said. “Selfish?”
“No, she’s your best friend,” Joe said. “It’s perfectly understandable.”
She yawned and burrowed closer into his warmth. He took the wine out of her hand and placed it on the table behind them. He wrapped his arms about her and held her close. Mel desperately wanted to stay awake, but she could feel the lethargy from weeks of getting up way too early seep into her bones. Joe kissed the top of her head, and Mel slid into sweet oblivion.
A high-pitched, ear-piercing wail jolted Mel out of her sleep. She jumped to her feet, fighting to clear her head while Joe did the same on the other side of the futon.
Finally the wailing stopped, and Mel blinked to find Angie holding an air horn up over her head.
“Angela Lucia DeLaura!” Joe yelled. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“You’re late, Mel,” Angie said. “I told you if you were late, I would take it upon myself to get you moving.”
“How about knocking?” Joe asked. He was clutching his chest, looking like he was fending off a heart attack.
“Now where’s the fun in that?” Angie asked. “Come on, Mel, it’s our last day to prep before the big contest. We need to get our game on.”
“Ugh,” Mel grunted. “I’ll be down in five.”
“Okeydokey,” Angie said. “But if you’re not . . .”
She looked like she was going to give the horn another blast for good measure, but Mel snatched it out of her hands and said, “Don’t even think about it!”
“Five minutes,” Angie said. She must have sensed from the crazed look in Mel’s eyes that it would be in her best interest to skedaddle.
The door shut behind her, and Mel turned back to Joe with a dark look. “Okay, I take it back. Los Angeles might not be far enough for her to move if she ever pulls a stunt like that again.”
“Agreed,” Joe said. “But I still think she can do better than Roach.”
He was the middle of Angie’s seven older bothers, and although he hadn’t been superpleased with his baby sister’s latest boyfriend, he’d been the most accepting of the brothers. In fact, Mel was pretty sure that the only reason Angie and Roach were even still dating was because he was away in Europe right now where the brothers didn’t have access to him.
Mel grabbed her clothes out of the dresser in the corner and ducked into the bathroom. Once she was dressed, she gave her teeth a solid once-over and tried not to look at the clock, which read four forty. Good grief. No wonder she couldn’t keep her eyes open past nine o’clock.
Tate was waiting with his usual brown bag. He looked wiped out, and Mel wondered if the past few weeks had been as hard on him as they’d been on her.
“One hour,” he said. He handed Mel a steaming cup of coffee and disappeared into her office.
Mel peeped into the bag. After three weeks, she knew Tate must be running out of ideas, but this was going to be more of a challenge than she was up to this early in the morning.
“So, what do we have?” Angie asked.
“Sauerkraut,” Mel said.
“What?” Angie asked.
Mel reached into the bag and pulled out a jar.
Angie curled a lip. “I dig it on a bratwurst but in a dessert ? Not possible.”
“You’d be surprised,” Mel said.
“Clock’s ticking,” Angie said. “Let’s do this.”
Off the top of her head, Mel only knew one recipe that sauerkraut could be used in to make a delicious dessert. It was chocolate cake, but she also knew the judges would be expecting that. Given that she now knew three of the judges and one of her competitors besides Olivia, she figured she’d better pull out all of the stops on her creativity.
“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” she said. Then she laid out her game plan for Angie, who grinned when she heard the whole idea.
“You are a culinary genius,” Angie said in wonder.
They set to work, and an hour later when the buzzer went off and Tate popped out of the office, they had a tray of fabulous pastries, ready to be taste-tested.
The back door opened, and Mel glanced up expecting to find Joe, looking for his morning sweets fix. He had really taken to having fresh baked goods ready to sample first thing in the morning, even if they were made out of unexpected and downright bizarre ingredients. So far, she’d had really only suffered
one failure, and that was when she’d tried to make a frosting out of barbeque sauce. It hadn’t gone well.
But to her surprise, it wasn’t Joe at the door, but Vic Mazzotta with a dark-haired young woman.
“Vic, what brings you here?” she asked. “No, don’t tell me, let me guess: You came by to wish me luck.”
“Luck?” Vic scoffed. “You’d better not need luck. You’ve got the skills that I taught you. Don’t embarrass me and lose now, you hear?”
Mel rolled her eyes and held out her hand to the woman with him. “Hi, I’m Mel.”
The woman took her hand, and Mel noticed she had a pretty face and generous curves but her eyes didn’t meet Mel’s. Instead, the woman glanced around the kitchen, and Mel got the sense she was cataloging the room with a mental cash register in her head sounding ka-ching! It was all Mel could do not to throw herself protectively in front of her Hobart mixer and Blodgett convection oven.
“This is Jordan Russell, my protégée,” Vic said. “Say hello, Jordan.”
“Hello, Jordan,” the young woman joked as she let go of Mel’s hand. “You have some amazing equipment for a bakery that is so new.”
“I have a partner who is heavily invested,” Mel said. “And cupcakes are all the rage. I’m pleased to say, we’ve been doing very well.”
“I’d love to have a kitchen like this,” Jordan said. She turned and gazed at Vic with adoring eyes. But just like she had assessed the kitchen around her, Mel got the feeling that Jordan’s eyes glittered not for love of the considerably older man but because she viewed Vic as her own personal money bag.
“So, you’re a chef, then?” Mel asked.
Jordan simpered, “Oh, no, I’m not formally educated in the cooking arts.”
“She’s learning from me,” Vic said. “I found her working in a high-end grocery store in Manhattan, teaching customers how to make fifteen-minute gourmet meals.”
Mel felt her smile get hard. What was Vic doing with a protégée who hadn’t been to cooking school?
As if he read her thoughts, he said, “I hired her as a sort of personal assistant–intern type of thing.”
Mel noticed that his gaze lingered on Jordan’s figure when he said this, and she wondered when exactly protégée had become a euphemism for extramarital-activity partner. Poor Grace. Mel felt a flash of anger on her behalf. How could Vic be so stupid?
She glanced over at Tate and Angie. They were both looking at Vic as if he were a wriggly bug who’d crawled out from under a rock, and Mel knew she wasn’t the only one to guess the truth about Jordan’s true relationship to the Master Chef.
“Now what is this you’re trying to pass off as an entry in the pastry division?” he asked. One of his bushy gray eyebrows was raised in his trademark derisive expression.
“Try it,” Mel said. “You’ll like it.”
“Well, your plating is vastly improved from the last time.” He stared at the tray of desserts as if trying to pick the best one. Finally, he settled on one and sat at the table. Jordan hovered behind him, and Mel had to fight the urge to elbow her out of the way, all the way out the door, in fact.
Vic had always had a mega-ego, but having this young little tart giving him massive doses of worship was only going to make it worse, way worse.
Vic forked up a bit of the dessert, and his lips twitched in surprise. Tate was watching him eagerly, and Mel knew he was hoping he wouldn’t guess the mystery ingredient. Fat chance.
“Not a traditional use of sauerkraut as a dessert,” Vic said. “You finely chopped the kraut and tucked it into a custard and then piped that into a puff pastry shell and topped it with warm cinnamon apples. The unimaginative generally bury it in a chocolate cake.”
Mel saw Tate sag with disappointment, but Angie bolstered him by throwing an arm around his shoulders and giving him a squeeze.
Just then the back door opened, and Joe strode in with Grace, Vic’s wife, right behind him. Mel glanced from Jordan to Grace and back. This could not be good.
“How did it go?” Joe asked Mel as he planted a kiss on her temple.
“You tell me,” Mel said, and she gestured toward the table.
Joe pulled out the chair next to Vic’s and helped himself.
“Vic, I have been looking all over for you,” Grace said. “You have another TV interview scheduled for seven thirty. Really, Jordan, if you’re going to be his personal assistant, you need to be more on top of his engagements.”
Tate muttered something to Angie, who burst out laughing. She still had her arm around him, and he looked at her with such longing in his eyes, it was painful for Mel to watch.
Angie must have felt it, too, because she removed her arm and said, “I’d better go prep the front so we’re ready to open.”
Joe looked at her like she was nuts. “But you don’t open for another three hours.”
“So? I’ll have you know there’s a lot to do,” Angie said. She hustled through the swinging door into the bakery.
Tate gave Mel a confused glance, and she knew he was trying to decide if Angie bolting away from him was a good thing or a bad thing. Then he smiled, making his decision clear.
“Don’t blame Jordan for my being off schedule,” Vic said to Grace. “I wanted her to meet Mel. It’s good for her to meet the best of the best if she’s going to get into this business.”
Mel was oddly touched that he regarded her so highly. They’d had a rocky start when she was attending culinary school, mostly because like every other student at the culinary institute, she was dead scared of Vic. He was known for yelling at students if their cooking was below his exacting standards, and he made most of his students cry at one point or another.
Mel had never cried, however, and one day when she’d been whipping up a meringue, he’d gone to stick his finger in to test it, and she had whacked his hand with a spatula and snapped, “Don’t mess with my meringue.”
No student had ever dared to stand up to Vic before, and there had been a mutual respect between them ever since. After Mel graduated, Vic went on to stardom on the Food Channel, which from what she had seen had only worsened an already severe case of narcissism.
And now Vic was apparently cheating on his wife. Although Mel loved him dearly, she was disappointed that he was treating Grace so badly. Grace and Vic had been together for at least forty years. Mel couldn’t fathom how he could step out on her now and with someone a third of his age no less. It was disturbing.
“Vic, the time,” Grace said, and she tapped the face of her watch.
“All right, I’m coming,” he said. “See you tomorrow, Mel. Do me proud.”
He strode through the back door with Jordan on his heels, looking more like an adoring puppy than a woman in her mid-twenties.
“You know, if you’d tell me your secret ingredient, I’m sure I’d win,” she called after him.
Vic laughed but didn’t turn back and pony up the goods.
“See you at the competition, Mel,” Grace said. She squeezed Mel’s hand and added, “I know you’ll do fabulously.”
Mel watched her petite form leave the kitchen and only half noticed when Joe came to stand beside her. He was chewing, and through a mouthful he said, “These are your best yet.”
Mel smiled at him. He was dressed for the office, and as always, her heart did a little cartwheel at how handsome he was.
“I’ll call you later,” he said. He snitched another pastry off the table, and Mel laughed.
As the door swung shut behind him, she turned to Tate and asked, “‘But why would a man need more than one woman?’”
Without hesitation, he quoted the next line from Moonstruck right back at her, “‘I don’t know. Maybe because he fears death.’”
“Well, he should. If I were Grace, I’d kill him,” Mel said.
Tate raised his eyebrows. “You can’t even kill a housefly.”
“Flies don’t cheat on their wives of forty years,” Mel said.
“Good poi
nt.”
Seven
“Stop eating the profits!” Angie slapped her brother Tony’s hand as he reached into the glass display case.
“I need fuel if I’m going to man this bakery all by myself,” he protested. He clutched his injured hand to his chest and gave her his best wounded look.
“Have a banana,” Mel said. She handed him one from the bowl of fruit she kept in the kitchen as an alternative to a steady diet of sugar.
Tony took the banana with a put-upon sigh.
“Now what do you do if you get a special order while we’re at the competition?” Angie asked.
“Take the person’s name and number, and tell them you’ll call them back,” he said.
“Do you use any of the kitchen implements—yes, this includes the mixer—while we’re gone?” Mel asked.
“I know, no touching the equipment,” he said. “Gees, you two act like I’m an idiot.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Angie said. She didn’t sound sorry at all. She turned to Mel and said, “Silly me, I must have dreamt that the last time he covered the shop for us, he tried to modify the Hobart with a robotic arm that would frost cupcakes by itself.”
“You have to admit, it would have been cool,” Tony protested. He was the gadget geek of the DeLaura family and spent most of his days cooking up new and different electronic gizmos that he was sure would make him a fortune.
“Yeah, except we were cleaning up frosting for two days,” Mel reminded him. “Don’t touch my stuff.”
“And Oz, our intern, is coming in later to help out,” Angie said. “Be nice to him.”
“All right. Go kick some baking butt already.” Tony was tall and thin, and he hunkered down to hug them both. They squeezed him back, giving him one last warning look before they headed out the door.
The competition was being held outside at the Scottsdale Civic Center Mall, which was easy walking distance from the shop. But as they drew closer to the event, Mel was suddenly riddled with doubt. What if this plan for publicity backfired and she was bounced from the competition in round one? Olivia would probably announce it to the world with a billboard on the interstate. How would Mel live with the humiliation?
Death by the Dozen Page 5
