Cravings (24 page)

Chapter 3

M
urder. Poison. Mushrooms.

Maeve's brain rolled those words around in her head as her stomach twisted. What poisonous mushrooms were indigenous in Brazil? Hadn't she read something about mushrooms in South America? Was it in Brazil?

She reached for her phone. “What are you doing?” Jackson asked.

“I'm looking up poisonous mushrooms in Brazil.”

“Why?”

“Just curious. You know how Chef was, he would not have eaten an imported mushroom. It would have had to be a local mushroom,” she said.

“Oh yeah. He was kind of a nut about that eating local stuff, wasn't he?”

Maeve smiled at him. Of course he was. He had the utmost respect for farmers and the whole local eating movement. He said it made more sense than people knew and traveling Americans should just be quiet and eat what the locals were eating.

“Here's something,” she said. “Green Spored Lepiota . . . sometimes occurs in large fairy rings . . . identified by its green spores . . . distinctly poisonous for some people and not for others. Old specimens contain more poison than the younger. And this poison is never fatal.”

“Well, that can't be it then,” Jackson said, leaning into her shoulder.

She ignored his hot breath on her neck, the tingling sensation moving through her, despite herself, and looked at him out of the corner of her eye. She needed to see Mark soon.

“Well, I think they have the idea now,” Alice said, walking into the room.

Maeve and Jackson jumped, startled by her brisk entrance. Maeve dropped her phone; Jackson picked it up.

“What?” Maeve said.

“I just told the publisher I'm taking the project elsewhere if they are not interested.” The authority in her voice stood in contrast to the rumpled woman in front of them.

“Where?”

Alice shrugged. “It doesn't matter where. They have the first option. If we can't come to terms, we are perfectly within the contractual terms to seek another publisher.”

“Another publisher? But we love our publisher . . .” Maeve said.

Alice held up her hand. “Please, no whining, Maeve. I have a splitting headache,” she said, sitting back down in her chair. “This is business.”

Maeve was intrigued by Alice's reaction to Chef's death. She was a mess. Maeve didn't know they had been close at all.

“Well, I'm sorry,” Maeve said. “But we already have a relationship there.”

“Yes. But don't for a moment imagine they would be interested in you or your projects if you weren't selling so well. Bottom line. You've made them money. Do they think you can make them more without Chef? What might save your ass is that while we've not quite signed off on the contracts, your sponsors have. Airlines. Hotels. Embassies. Food companies. And so on. Done deal for them. So it will take some time for them to round up the general consensus.”

“And in the meantime?” Jackson said.

Alice bit her lip. “My suggestion is we proceed with our plans. We have meetings set up over the next few days with travel consultants, embassies, and so on. Let's keep on it, until we hear otherwise. And show up for the meetings,” she said, looking directly at Jackson, who raised his eyebrows and looked at a smirking Maeve.

Maeve had never been so glad to leave Alice's office in her life. Between the news of Paul's death and Alice's reaction to it, the awry book deal, and her sexy-but-pain-in-the-ass partner, she felt as if she'd been through some kind of intense therapy. So now they were proceeding with their plans, but they were constantly fluctuating. And that drove Maeve a bit bonkers.

Also, now that they were proceeding, she and Jackson were getting different “aphrodisiacs” shipped to them to start things off. Saffron was supposed to arrive in Jackson's mail tomorrow and they would try it out together at her place, which presented problems. It wasn't as if she thought the saffron would make her get all horny and lose her mind over Jackson. It was that she thought she did not need an aphrodisiac to get horny over Jackson. She hated to admit it, even to herself, but he was just the kind of guy she liked to have in her life—successful, gorgeous, and wanting only sex. That's why she liked Mark. It was never complicated with him. He didn't get possessive at all—and that's exactly how she liked it. Who said all women were after a wedding ring? She certainly wasn't. In fact, the whole idea of marriage scared and annoyed her—because every woman she'd known who'd gotten married had slipped into a backward drive when it came to her career. Not for her.

When Maeve slid her key into her apartment doorknob, it opened too quickly. There was no click. No struggle to get the damned thing open. Had she forgotten to lock it? She opened the door slowly, an eerie feeling coming over her. Damn, the apartment was cold. One sweeping eye search of her tiny studio apartment told her there was nothing amiss—except the window was wide open. Odd. She didn't remember opening it that morning, though she sometimes did, especially when she was cooking.

Her phone rang. She turned to reach for it, finding it wasn't in the cradle. Had she left it in the bathroom again? It rang again. No. It was in the kitchenette, next to the stove.

“Hello,” she said into the phone.

Nothing but silence. And tonight, the silence sent shivers through her.