Falling Sweetly (Starling Falls #2)

by Aidan Willows

  I looked down at her. “Well, we knew it was going to be a long shot anyway,” I said calmly, trying to avoid getting her riled up further.

  The last time she had gotten angry pots and plates had been thrown, and I wasn’t in the mood to play ‘dodge the flying frying pan’ again.

  She looked at me surprised. “Why are you so calm all of a sudden? The last time we placed third at a competition you basically worked twenty days straight to create a new menu.”

  Too drained to care, I shrugged and ran a hand through my short blond hair. “You win some you lose some. Placing fifth nationwide is not bad, Tisha. It’s the best we’ve ever done in this competition.”

  We had been in New York for a week for the annual National Culinary Association’s Fine-Dining Competition. My staff had been attending the contest every year without fail, hoping for first or second place, but so far had not come close.

  In addition to a cash prize, which would have been useful considering how badly the restaurant had been doing financially lately, the publicity from winning an award at the competition would have also generated some much needed publicity for the restaurant.

  Tisha undid her hair tie and allowed her shoulder length, dark brown hair loose. She looked at me with annoyed amber eyes. “At least those assholes from Cannata’s didn’t turn up this year.”

  I nodded in agreement. Why the hell didn’t they?

  The question left an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. Monty Cannata, the owner of ‘Cannata’s,’ a restaurant in the neighbouring town of Smithsville, was a miserable, competitive bastard and all around awful human being. For decades he had thought of Marco, the owner of the restaurant I worked at, as a rival.

  “Why didn’t they turn up?” Tisha asked, echoing the question running through my mind.

  “I don’t know and I don’t care. All I know is I’m more than ready to go home,” I said with a shrug as I packed the remaining pieces of black truffle carefully.

  “Let’s hope that jackass hasn’t managed to burn the place to the ground while we’ve been gone,” Tisha grumbled referring to the other sous-chef at Marco’s, Dillon Morant, whom I had put in charge for the week while we were away.

  “He may be a dick, but he’s talented, Tish. That’s why we put up with him. Even though I would like to boil his head in all that goose fat he seems to love using on every fucking thing,” I said with a sigh.

  I nodded to some familiar faces as we left the competition area with our bags and equipment to get a taxi to the airport.

  Tisha was still in a snit next to me, so I made the wise decision to stay silent and not ask her about any potential changes to the recipes we had made for the competition.

  Keep your mouth shut and do not anger the beast by talking on the drive to the airport. She is tiny but freakishly strong. You’re in a small confined space. She throws something at you, you may not survive it.

  Yawning loudly, my attempt to stretch my long legs was hampered by cramped space in the back of the cab, and I shifted uncomfortably. I rolled my neck and closed my eyes as I rested my head against the headrest to try and get some sleep before the flight.

  Between the hectic past couple of days of the competition and the strain I’d been feeling at the restaurant, I was mentally and physically exhausted.

  In the past couple of months, I’d started working sixteen hour days, six days a week, and the extra hours were beginning to take a toll. I constantly felt worn out and drained.

  The message alert on my phone sounded and I groaned, took out my phone from my pocket and reluctantly opened my eyes to read the message.

  I smiled when I saw that it was a text from my twin, Josh.

  JOSH: You put any herb things on the pizza? It smells kinda funky.

  I snorted at his message before replying.

  ME: Pizza’s over a week old, man. You’re smelling mould.

  JOSH: So… don’t eat it?

  My brother is an idiot.

  ME: You want a repeat of what happened when you ate all that leftover Thanksgiving turkey in 2010? Definitely do NOT eat.

  JOSH: Dude. I’m starving. When you coming back? Nate can’t cook for shit and Caleb is always off somewhere, too busy sucking face with Liya to see to my nutritional needs. I’m wasting away to practically nothing here.

  I rolled my eyes at how pathetic his message was.

  ME: Go to Aunt Deb’s.

  JOSH: I tried. She and Uncle Jeremy were making out in the kitchen. I fled in horror to protect my innocence.

  I shook my head at the thought of my brother being anything even close to innocent but decided to take pity on him.

  ME: Frozen lasagne. Top shelf of the freezer. Heat up at 400°F for 50mins to an hour. Make sure it’s hot all the way through. Don’t eat half frozen food again.

  JOSH: Sweet. Safe flight, bro.

  I switched off my phone and put it back in my pocket as I stared out the window, thinking about all the shit I needed to get done when I got back to town.

  Please don’t let taking Josh to the hospital for food poisoning, again, be one of those things.

  I came from a big family of six children. Nate was the oldest, followed by Caleb, me, Josh and then twins Alex and our sister, Addie.

  My memories of our mother were hazy, though I knew she had been an alcoholic and a drug addict. Nate and Caleb had raised us between them until our Uncle Jeremy and Aunt Debbie had taken us to go live with them.

  Uncle Jeremy was my mother’s brother, but they hadn’t been in contact for years. He had known about Caleb and Nate but hadn’t known that she had given birth to two sets of twins.

  When things had become really bad, Nate, who had been eleven at the time, called our uncle whom the rest of us hadn’t known existed.

  We were lucky that Jeremy and Debbie Jameson turned out to be loving and kind people. They had threatened to fight our mother for custody of us, but she had signed over her parental rights to them and disappeared.

  The people of the small town of Starling Falls were friendly enough, but the whisperings behind our backs were hard to ignore.

  In addition to being an addict, our mother hadn’t had much success with relationships, as was evident from how none of us, apart from each set of twins, looked like each other.

  Nate had the same brown hair and green eyes as Uncle Jeremy, Caleb had tanned brown skin, dark brown hair and blue eyes. Though Josh and I were fraternal twins, we both had blond hair, similar to Aunt Deb’s, and blue eyes. Addie and Alex had black hair, brown eyes and light brown skin.

  We grew up knowing we had a unique family, but we were raised by Uncle Jeremy and Aunt Deb to not give a shit what people said about us, though Aunt Deb didn’t use those exact words. Uncle Jeremy always said that hell would freeze over before Aunt Deb cursed.

  None of us knew who our fathers were, and we weren’t bothered to find out either. We all thought of Uncle Jeremy and Aunt Deb as the only real parents we’d ever had or needed.

  After the initial gossiping had died down, we settled into the town and it had become our home. Nate, Josh and I shared a house about twenty minutes away from Aunt Deb and Uncle Jeremy’s house, though according to Aunt Deb, that was twenty minutes too far. Caleb had lived with us, but he’d recently moved in with his fiancée.

  We had our family and had made many good friends, and over the years we had all settled into various jobs.

  After a brief stint as a bounty hunter, Nate had eventually opened his own private investigation firm with a friend. Addie, who was something of a computer whiz, had started working with him after graduating from college.

  Caleb worked as a fire-fighter. And Alex was a tattoo artist who had opened his own small studio in town a couple of months ago.

  In the same way that I’d grown up loving to cook, Josh had always loved cars. He had spent most of his weekends tinkering with engines at the garage that Uncle Jeremy owned. To no one’s surprise, he’d ended up working there after he’d (barely
) graduated high school.

  We were a large, close-knit family that was expanding. Caleb’s recent engagement had meant that our brood had grown by another two members; his fiancée Maliya Abbott and her sister Annika.

  Annika or Niki, as she preferred to be called, was five feet five inches of pure sweetness. Her creamy light brown skin, warm mahogany eyes, and curvy body had become a mild obsession of mine for the past six months.

  However, the little baker seemed blind to the effect she had on me. I thought I was making progress with her when we had shared an interesting night together on New Year’s Eve, but after our encounter, she’d started to treat me as if I had rabies.

  She had been successfully evading me for six months. On the rare occasions I actually took a day off from work and was at family meals, she would speak to me briefly before making an effort to stay far away from me for the rest of the meal.

  When I stopped at the bakery in the mornings for my daily cup of coffee and one of her incredible cinnamon rolls, she was either mysteriously absent, which I found odd seeing as she ran the place, or she would ask one of her co-workers to serve me instead.

  I’d seen her going into the grocery store a couple of times, but instead of finding her, all I would usually find was an abandoned cart of groceries. She wouldn’t even make eye contact with me when we saw each other around town.

  Every time I tried to call her, a robotic voice (that sounded a lot like Niki’s) always answered with the same message. It told me that the person I was trying to call was not available because she was “busy doing something super important” and that I should leave my message at the tone.

  Even the texts I sent her received brief replies, which was unusual, as Niki was a rambler even when she texted.

  All my efforts to reconnect with Niki were unsuccessful, and I was beginning to feel like a fixated stalker.

  You probably shouldn’t resort to actual stalking.

  Stalking is wrong.

  You also work 90 hours a week. When the hell would you find the time to stalk her?

  I figured I had fucked up big time, but I wasn’t sure how or what I had done wrong, and I couldn’t even begin to fix things between us as she wouldn’t talk to me.

  When we finally got to the airport, Tisha had to poke me hard in the side to get my attention away from my distracted thoughts, which were centered around how to get the cute, little baker with an adorable accent interested in dating me and accomplishing this feat during the sadly limited free time I had available when not working.

  I’d never been the ladies’ man like my twin was, or had the same level of confidence as Caleb and Alex, but I hadn’t done badly with women in the past.

  However, in the last couple of years, any thoughts of relationships had taken a back seat to work, which had become a priority.

  Then eight months ago Annika Abbott had appeared in my life and turned years of disinterest in relationships around with a few small smiles and shy blushes. I was hopeful that the attraction wasn’t just one sided.

  Now that the competition was over, and as soon as work at the restaurant slowed down, I planned on taking some time off to recuperate.

  I was determined to use that time to reconnect with Niki, and figure out where the hell I had gone wrong.

  But where to start? How do you make her talk to you again?

  Flowers? Candy? Food? Everyone loves food. Food is great. They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, so why not for women too, right? I’ll just keep sending her food until she feels compelled to talk to me.

  Feeling rather happy with myself and my awesome plan, I got out of the taxi, unaware of the shit-storm that was headed my way.

  * * * * *

  Tisha and I headed straight back to the restaurant, after the six hour flight, to leave all the equipment we had taken with us. After the long and tiring week I’d had, all I wanted to do was open a beer, order a pizza and do nothing but stare at a TV screen for a couple of hours.

  As we entered the empty restaurant at nearly midnight, a manic looking Martina Stern came running up to us, an opened bottle of red wine held loosely in one hand and a torn page from a magazine in the other.

  “Why the fuck haven’t either of you been answering your phones?!” she said hysterically, her face flushed. Martina was the general manager of the restaurant, and was usually the most together person I knew. I didn’t think I had ever even heard her cuss at all before.

  Tisha and I exchanged confused looks.

  “My battery died,” Tisha said with a shrug.

  “I forgot to switch mine on again after the flight. What’s going on?” I asked with a frown, as that sinking feeling in my stomach came back again.

  “Fucking Dillon screwed us over,” she screeched, looking and sounding part banshee, as her auburn hair had escaped from its usual neat bun, and her green eyes were wide and wild.

  “What are you talking about, Martina?” I asked, putting my heavy bag on the floor.

  “That little shit screwed us! Scottie McKenzie, the critic from The Wine and Dine Guide, came in a couple of days ago. Dillon cooked the dishes he ordered himself. But the little bastard must have fucked with the dishes he ordered. The review was printed today,” she waved the torn paper in her hands manically, “McKenzie trashed us completely. We are so fucked, we’re knocked up with triplets.”

  The Wine and Dine Guide was one of the most prominent fine dining food guides in the country. Countless chefs had found fame, and many others had their reputations ruined, based on the opinions of the tough food critics who reviewed restaurants for the guide.

  Martina brought the red wine bottle she had in her hand up to her mouth and chugged a quarter of it down.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I said as I felt the blood drain from my face, “He works here. Doing that would be bad for his reputation too.”

  “Not anymore! He’s Head Chef at mother-fucking Cannata’s now. That asshole must have made him an offer he couldn’t refuse! He quit today at the end of his shift, with his stupid shit-eating grin, just as I was reading the review.”

  She stopped ranting to chug another quarter of the bottle.

  “I checked the contract he signed with Marco. He wasn’t even required to give notice before quitting. He was free to leave whenever he wanted. Marco always did suck at making contracts. Not that we would have wanted his traitorous ass here after he betrayed us, but at least we could have messed with Cannata’s plans. Guess which food critic is visiting their restaurant tomorrow? Scottie freakin’ McKenzie.”

  Martina sat in a chair as her attempt to down the rest of the wine was interrupted by Tisha who grabbed the bottle from her and finished it before she could even protest.

  “How bad is the review?” I asked warily, dreading the answer.

  “Imagine as bad as it could be, and then times it by a hundred,” Martina said, slumping in her chair and kicking off her heels.

  Fuck.

  “Let me see it,” I said, dread filling the pit of my stomach as Martina reluctantly handed over the review. Tisha moved closer to read the review over my arm.

  Wine and Dine’s Review of Marco’s (Starling Falls)

  By Scottie McKenzie

  One has to wonder, what on earth renowned chef, Marco Toussant, must have been thinking of when he placed his once great restaurant into the novice hands of a chef such as Jacob Jameson.

  His decision to name his young protégée as head chef when he retired, raised eyebrows throughout the local food scene, and apparently those eyebrows were raised with good reason.

  The young chef’s obvious inexperience and lack of formal training was apparent in the food I was served, when I visited the restaurant, in the charming little town of Starling Falls. However, I wish I was able to say the same of the food I ate whilst there. Sadly, this was not the case.

  The usually vibrant food at Marco’s seemed to have been brutally tarnished under the new Head Chef’s rather insane ideas o
f what passes for fine-dining in the present day.

  The horrors, oh the horrors, that I encountered. My starter, of honey-glazed cod on a pearl barley risotto, was simultaneously blackened to a char on the outside, whilst raw in the middle. One should almost applaud any chef able to achieve such a feat.

  After the initial ordeal was over, I figured surely the entrée would have to be better. However I was proved wrong. The atrocities that were committed to that beautiful piece of Kobe beef - well, it was almost criminal.

  As for the truffled mashed potatoes that accompanied my beef, how on earth small stones ended up in my food, I can’t imagine. Surely washing the produce before you cook with it is lesson one that chefs are taught? The less said about the cavalo nero served with the meal, the better (who knew such a vegetable could be made to look and taste like wallpaper paste).

  To talk about the disaster that was dessert, or not? Well, yes, of course we shall, because by this point, I was so incensed, and I couldn’t imagine that my experience at Marco’s could get any worse. Once again, how wrong I was.

  A salty banana soufflé, of partially uncooked egg whites, and custard so lumpy and thick, I could have used it as cement, greeted me at my table.

  Not quite believing my eyes at this ridiculous food, I asked to speak to the chef only to be told, he wasn’t seeing anyone at the time, and any compliments for the chef would be passed on by the wait staff.

  Compliments? Hah! The only thing worthy of compliment at Marco’s was that the silverware had been polished to perfection. Even the wine that was sent complimentary to my table was corked.