Death by the Dozen (7 page)

“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 point.”