Let Them Eat Stake: A Vampire Chef Novel (6 page)

It was not the kind of place an outsider would have expected to find the latest darling of the celebrity chef circuit, but there he was. Oscar Simmons sat as far in the back as the pint-sized dining room would allow, surrounded by a gaggle of would-bes and wannabes. The all-male crowd laughed at something I didn’t hear and picked up hot kidneys in their fingers to dunk in the mustard before tossing them in their mouths like popcorn. This is competitive eating in its purest form. If your eyes water as you chew, you lose.

Letting my gaze slide straight past them as if they were an uninteresting part of the scenery, I pulled up a stool at the bar. “Hi, Mama. Kidneys and a Heineken.” Hey, I was hungry too.

“Special for the bar!” Mama bellowed toward her husband on the other side of the pass while opening my beer bottle and plunking it on the counter.

“Yo, Chef C.” Minnie Perez, a line cook I’d known on and off forever raised her shot glass to me.

“Yo, Cook M. How’s it going?” Minnie was a medium tall, medium brown woman with close-cropped hair whose ancestors came about evenly from Ecuador and Haiti. We weren’t the only women in the place, but it was close. The gender gap in the kitchen is closing, but it’s closing slowly.

She shrugged and downed the shot of crystal clear something. “I’m quitting. I’m going back to school and getting my accounting degree.”

“You’ve
been saying that for what, five years now?”

“Yeah, but this time I mean it.” She pushed the glass back toward Mama Charlie, who shook her head and filled it up again with a distinctly non-top-shelf vodka.

“You know what’s up with the cock party over there?” I nodded toward Oscar and his boys. I meant it as a play on “hen party.” Really. Stop looking at me like that.

“You’d know more than me.”

“Aren’t you going out with one of Perception’s fish guys?” It’s tough for a cook to have a social life. We’re up all night, asleep all day, and working holidays and Sundays. Unless we’re into nightbloods, we’re stuck dating one another.

“Nah. He decided he was going to trade up for some pretty little thing working the door at Moody’s.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. She can have him. Guy was useless. Still.” She grimaced as another burst of laughter exploded from the Simmons environs. “They do seem to be having a good time over there. Wonder who he screwed this time?”

That was indeed the thousand-dollar question, but I just shook my head, and drank my beer. My kidneys arrived, piping hot and smelling richly of cayenne and cardamom. Other colleagues came up to us for an exchange of hellos and gossip. I heard from Ted that he’d been promoted to saucier at Savorings. I heard from Peter that the head housekeeper at the St. Francis had quit and management was making everybody’s life hell as a result. Colon was out of work again and trying to put the moves on Minnie anyway.

All the while, I was aware of the way Oscar kept looking at me out of the corner of his famously photogenic dark eyes. I ate and laughed and drank and groused, and waited.

Finally, Oscar heaved himself to his feet and sauntered over to the bar. Or, he would have sauntered if there was room for it. As it was, to get between the tables he sort of
had to turn and scoot and suck in his gut, which was starting to overhang his belt just a little. Too many good dinners are ever the professional hazard of the working chef.

“Charlotte Caine.” Oscar’s British accent is smooth and rich, with just a hint of the Gordon Ramsey temper waiting in the wings.

“Good morning, Oscar.” I lifted my Heineken to him. “How’re things on the celebrity-chef circuit?”

“It’s quite good, isn’t it? We’re developing our own line of exclusive products.”

“Congratulations.”

“Branded marketing, Charlotte. It’s the way of the present. I could put you in touch with people.”

Those photogenic eyes made a slow and thorough appraisal of my person. They weren’t looking for weaknesses exactly, more like signs of wear. If I was honest, except for the telltale softening around his middle, Oscar still looked good. The gray streaks in his hair lent him gravitas, and his square, heavy-boned face was aging gracefully. Someone would have to look hard to see this man never stopped making calculations about who he was with and what were they good for. I looked hard, every time.

“Actually, somebody’s already been in touch.” I popped another kidney.

“Felicity Garnett?”

“No points for that one. I guess the Aldens decided it was time to get serious about the food.”

To my total and complete surprise, Oscar did not rise to the bait. Instead, he mimed tugging at a forelock. “I wish you and Felicity very happy.”

“I don’t suppose you’ll tell me what happened with you and the Aldens?”

Oscar smiled. “Like you’ve always said, I’m a spoiled little boy in a big chef’s coat. Who knows what I’ll do next?”

An uneasy ripple strolled slowly up my spine. Oscar was into all kinds of things, but self-deprecation was not one of them. “I think you found out they couldn’t pay.”

His smile spread, just a tiny bit. “You would think that, wouldn’t you?”

“If it’s not the money, then what? The bride wouldn’t sleep with you?”

“What’s the matter, Charlotte? You in over your head? Again?”

There was a snicker from somewhere deep in the entourage. Of course they were listening. The entire place was listening. I was surprised one of the boys wasn’t out on the street hawking tickets.

“Not me, but you clearly were. I saw that menu you put together. It looked like you were auditioning for head chef at an all-you-can-eat buffet.”

The bar went dead quiet, leaving my words to hang in the air long enough for me to wonder if I’d maybe gone a little too far. I also got to watch the fascinating way the color red seeped up from under Oscar’s collar to engulf his entire face.

“Oh, this is pure Charlotte Caine, isn’t it?” he said, low and dangerous. “Always so sure she knows just what’s going on. So keen to put the rest of us in our places. You want to know why I quit? I don’t like being bribed or jerked around.”

Deanna had been right. “Jerked” was definitely not the first word he’d thought to use. “You were bribed?”

He nodded. “To plant some gossip about Karina Alden in the media. It didn’t matter what, just something that would get her name out in the press in a bad light.”

“What would you possibly know about Karina Alden?”

He rolled his eyes in disbelief. Ah. So that was it. He’d managed to start sleeping with Karina. It did, however, raise the question of why no one had seen fit to mention their ex-caterer was also the boyfriend, or at least the hookup, of
the bride’s on-the-outs sister. The Aldens were starting to make my personal relationships look straightforward.

“So, who put in the order for character assassination?” I asked.

“You know, if you’d called me first, I might just have told you. But as it is, you wanted this job so bad, you can find out for yourself just what kind of mess you’re in.” Oscar reached down, dipped my last kidney in mustard, and popped it back, chewing. His eyes didn’t water either. “Good-bye, Charlotte Caine.” Still chewing, Oscar strolled back to his waiting followers.

I watched him for a while, but he wasn’t watching me anymore. For the first time in our acquaintance, Oscar Simmons had dismissed me—and not just a little, but absolutely, the way you dismiss someone you’ve beaten.

Except I had no idea what game I’d just lost.

The uneasy ripple up my spine came back, and it brought friends.

Somewhere, a phone was ringing.

I dragged the covers off my face and, on reflex, tried to shove the hair out of my eyes. My bedside clock read nine twenty, which is in fact way-the-hell too early when you remembered I hadn’t gotten to bed until five in the morning. Out in the living room, I could hear Jessie, my number one roommate, singing about bad romance.

I flopped backward and stuffed my head under the pillow.

My phone rang again. I lifted the pillow and glared at it. Jessie switched from bad romance to putting rings on it. The phone rang again. This had to be Felicity. I punched up the screen, ready to read her the riot act.

“I’m sorry,” said a male voice while I was still drawing breath.

“Brendan.” I was going to have to assign him a ring tone. Except every time I thought about it, it felt too much like making some kind of commitment.

“Good morning,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” I slumped back against the wall and tried to push my too-short hair out of my eyes yet again.

“I’m
sorry for not coming by last night after your shift, even though we really need to talk, and for calling so early in your personal morning now. Anything I forgot?”

“That’ll do for now. What’s going on?”

“I’m downstairs.”

I lifted the blind with one finger and peered out. A familiar figure stood beside the half wall that ringed my building’s courtyard, waving his cell phone in the air, as if he knew I’d peek, which he probably did. I’m nothing if not predictable.

“You are not expecting me to invite you up for breakfast,” I said into the cell phone, just to make sure Brendan understood making me wake up before eleven o’clock was a definite relationship misdemeanor.

“I brought dosas.” Down below, Brendan pointed to the white bag and a cardboard beverage tray on the wall beside him. “And coffee.”

“Jessie!” I hollered toward the living room. “Hit the buzzer!”

I hung up on the sound of Brendan’s chuckling.

Fortunately, my other roommate, Trish the Lawyer, had headed out to her office hours ago. This left the bathroom clear so I would be able to meet Brendan both looking and smelling civilized. I came into the dining room, wearing my usual off-duty combination of faded jeans and plain T-shirt (red today) with my hair slicked back under a red headband as a compromise between aesthetics and speed. Brendan moved around our dining nook. He, of course, looked edible, and would have even if he hadn’t been setting out plates for the spicy Indian crêpes he’d brought.

“You are forgiven,” I said loftily as I sat down and peeled back the lid on a very large cup of coffee.

“You may want to hold up on the forgiveness”—Brendan forked a dosa onto my plate—“at least until after we eat.”

I eyed him with what was not entirely feigned trepidation as I handed across a napkin. “So, is this a bribe, or the breakup meal?”

“You’re breaking up?” Jessie ducked her head out of her bedroom. “What’d she do?”

I should have known.
Jessie’s gossip radar was second to none. “You were just leaving, weren’t you, Jess?” I frowned hard at my roommate as she emerged from the hallway.

“Not if Brendan’s breaking up with you.” She plopped herself down in the third chair. As usual, Jessie VanReebeck was immaculately groomed. Her heart-shaped face was spectacularly made up, and her floral-print swing dress perfectly matched her strappy sandals and dangling earrings. Jessie possessed this uncanny ability to look fun, approachable, and professional at the same time, and I tried not to resent her for it.

“Why are you breaking up with her?” She fixed Brendan with a surprisingly steely glower.

“Because I’m carrying Mayor Thornton’s love child.”

I snarfed a hot gulp of coffee. Jessie blinked, and Brendan lifted his soulful, apologetic gaze to her without cracking even a hairline of a grin. Not to be deterred, Jessie scooted her chair around to face me. “Why’s he breaking up with you?”

“There’s nothing to break up.” But as I said this, my heart gave a strange and not entirely comfortable squeeze. I craned my neck so I could see past Jessie to Brendan. “You’re not breaking up with me, are you?”

“I am not breaking up with you. I promise.” That knee-weakening smile worked even better when he turned it on soft and low.

“There,” I said to Jessie. “You can go now.”

“Actually…”

“You can go now.” I reminded her in my best being-slow- is-hazardous-to-your-health voice. Jessie, unfortunately, had
been exposed to this voice enough that she was beginning to develop a tolerance. But then, it always did work better on people I could fire and to whom I did not owe rent money.

With a look intended to make me aware of the extent of her magnanimity, Jessie got to her feet and made her way to the front door, pausing only to collect her tiny handbag and large makeup case. If someone can pointedly close a door behind herself, she did.

Brendan arched his eyebrows.

“She’ll try to make me tell her everything later,” I warned him.

“Duly noted.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes, occupying ourselves with the simple business of enjoying breakfast and each other’s company.

“So,” I said when the edge had been taken off both my hunger and the caffeine jones. “Did you manage to get anything out of your aunt Adrienne?”

“Not much.” Brendan scooted a bit of crêpe on his plate to the right and then the left. This was something he did when he was thinking hard. It drove me mildly nuts, but I was learning to live with it. “She apologized for all of this happening now, when we’re already in the news with the city contract. She said that she really had no choice and that Deanna had been utterly determined to have things her own way. Resisting or forbidding would just make her take her tantrum out into the wider world. It was better, she said, to go along so that as many details as possible could be kept strictly in the family.”