Mr. Forrester: An Alpha Billionaire Romance (22 page)

"
A
llez Cuisine
!"

Marc Dacascos was a lot smaller than I thought he would be, and his acting was hammy enough I could understand why he never really got much traction with his movie career past B movies and kung fu flicks. Still, with the clock starting, I put it all out of my mind, and sprinted up to the stage with Shannon. My first job was to help her get at least a few pounds of ground lamb, while she got the ground beef. It was a hamburger battle, and I was worried. For all of Shannon's skill and the Alinea team's abilities, ground meat was perhaps the weakest of our chances against the Iron Chef. Hell, the man owned a hamburger restaurant that was named the best in New York according to the Zagat guide!

"Get back, get that tartare going," Shannon said as I scooped my second double handful of ground lamb into my bowl. I could hear the tension in her voice, and I knew she was thinking the same thing I was. With one of the rules being that we had to have a gourmet hamburger up in front of the judges within the first twenty minutes, we were in trouble.

I got back to my station and scooped out the meat for my tartare, setting it aside to combine with the other ingredients later. Then I rushed over to the produce area of the stage, getting mint, lime, lemons, capers, shallots, and Shannon's secret, gherkin pickles. Shannon would add quail eggs later on top when they were on the plates.

One of the key differences between fine dining and home cooking is in your cuts. Your average home cook, when they read chop, starts going to town like a killer in a slasher film, often with as big a knife as their cutting board allows. While it's a lot of fun and gets the work done seemingly quickly, the result is inconsistent cuts, pieces of all different sizes, and tastes that vary.

A professional chef, on the other hand, cuts precisely, and knows exactly what chopped means. It's an actual measurement, with the industry standard being half inch pieces.

A fine chop, which I was doing, is quarter inch pieces. A mince is finer than that. You get the point. Also, we use just the right sized knife for the job. Since I was cutting mint, shallots, and other things like that, I worked with a small knife, not much larger than a paring knife, getting my cuts exactly what they needed to be.

I worked quickly before sautéing the shallots in butter. While a tartare is normally a raw dish, raw shallots or onions can be a bit abrasive for a lot of people. By cooking the shallots through, it added a nice hint of sweetness while still keeping the texture. Once those cooled, I mixed it all together, massaging the whole mass together into something that would be an awesome meatball if I cooked it. By adding the pickles though, it would be somewhere between a tartare and a cerviche, which is what Shannon wanted. I threw the whole bowl into the fridge to keep it cool while we moved on. "Chef! Clear!"

"Get over here then!" Shannon yelled, and I was on to my next assignment.

The entire battle was stress from minute one. I was glad that we'd done practice run-throughs, because nothing from a normal service could have prepared us for what that one hour was like. The rush, the ad-hoc decisions, everything was different from the well-oiled machine that is a normal dinner service at Alinea.

Adding to the stress was the camera crews, the judges, and everyone else around us. I almost elbowed a camera man in the face at one point as he shoved his camera over my shoulder while I was working on preparing daikon radishes for another dish, and turned without him expecting it. You'd figure after ten years of doing the show the cameramen would be on their toes, but it seems even the best can get caught off guard at times.

Plating was a crazy situation too. Normally, I knew exactly where to put everything. Instead, for the battle we were bringing prepared ingredients to Shannon who was making the first plate for us, then having us duplicate it based off of her initial example. I could hear Smith muttering to himself as he copied Shannon's sauces on the third plate, smiling while he did so. "Madness. This is madness!"

It was an old joke in the Alinea kitchen, after a particularly overly dramatic line cook quit in the middle of a service. I hadn't been there at the time, I'd still been in High School, but the joke carried on through the years.

"One minute remaining!"
the overhead announcer said, and we somehow doubled our speed, just getting the last plate done as the final five seconds were counted off. I tossed my now empty bowl into the sink and threw my hands up, all of us elated that the hour was over.

"Great job team," Shannon said, clapping us all on the back. "Now we see just how the judging goes."

"
T
ell
me what you know about the marriage between your father and your mother," Kimberly said, clicking her trackball and pulling up some files. "Start from the beginning."

I had no idea what this was all about, but I sighed and went with it. Obviously Kimberly had a point to all of this. "Johnathan Castelbon met Alicia Youngblood while he was a grad student at Stanford University. He was twenty-one when they met. She was eighteen. They dated for about a year, then got married in a Las Vegas ceremony. I was born four years later. They divorced seven years after that."

"Come now Julian, details are important here. Why did they get divorced?" Kimberly asked, turning off the screen and turning around to face me. "What happened in the divorce that made you hate your father so much?"

"Which part are you looking at?" I half sneered, striding back and forth across the small carpet. "The fact that he cheated on her at least three times with various female employees, or the fact that he beat her and broke three ribs while I was away at summer camp, which led to her finally calling it quits? Or maybe that during the divorce, he used every slimy lawyer trick in the books to take me away from my mother and keep me for himself?"

Kimberly watched me let loose my anger, then sighed and turned towards the computer. "When your father started dating Sandra Aksoy, Krystal approached me to do some research on him," Kimberly said. "After all, Sandra Aksoy's net wealth at the time was over a hundred million dollars. While John Castelbon by reputation was super rich, he had been divorced twice, and Krystal was worried. So she asked me to do what I do. I would have done it for free, but she insisted on paying."

"So you hacked John Castelbon," I replied, my voice flat. "I thought you said you only did legal hacking, not that I'm upset about it. What did you find?"

Kimberly turned back to her computer and turned on the monitor she'd just turned off. "I didn't have to hack at all, it's a matter of public record in the State of California. While they don't exactly advertise it, most of the old records were digitized a few years ago, and that includes divorce proceedings. The majority of my work was merely doing a records search and reading the details of a very ugly divorce."

Before I could interrupt, Kimberly continued. "Case in point, the divorce of Johnathan Castelbon from his wife of eleven years, Alicia Youngblood Castelbon. During the trial, Alicia tried to claim that on the night of July seventeenth of the prior year, John Castelbon assaulted her and broke three of her ribs."

"I already said that," I replied. "I was at summer camp, and when I came home Mom's ribs were taped up, and she said Johnathan had done it. The bastard was so guilty he never even tried to deny it."

"The court found differently. In fact, considering that Johnathan Castelbon wasn't even in the United States on the night of June seventeenth, the claim that he had broken her ribs was a flat out lie."

I felt like my own ribs had just been punched, most likely by Mike Tyson. "What?"

"John Castelbon had gotten on a flight to Nagoya, Japan on the morning of June fifteenth, the day after you left for camp, to meet with representatives from the Nissan and Toyota corporations. He checked into the Nagoya Marriot, and was having breakfast with business clients at the time your mother claimed she was attacked. While she did have three legitimately cracked ribs, it couldn't have been your father who did it."

"That doesn't even make sense... then who?" I asked, my throat tight and raw. I could feel something inside me straining, and I was afraid of what it was.

"The courts never did figure it out, but photographic evidence taken from a surveillance camera the night of the attack showed your mother in the company of a Javier Salamanca, a known crack dealer in the area at the time. They were seen getting out of her convertible and getting gas approximately a half hour before she checked into the hospital."

"No..... no....." I whispered, shaking my head. "NO!"

Kimberly sat there quietly, then pointed to the screen. "It's all there, Julian. The photos, the hospital records, all of it. The judge found her lies so unbelievable that she actually cited her for contempt of court, and she spent a week in jail about it. Have a read for yourself."

Kimberly got out of her chair, turning it over to me. My legs were numb as I dropped into it, and started to read. It started with the final decisions of the court, including the citation for contempt of court against my mother. Afterwards, I started in on the transcripts themselves, and certain words kept popping out to me. Words like adultery, theft, and embezzlement. Words that seared into my heart, because none of them were against John Castelbon. Instead, it was Alicia Castelbon, my mother, who was seeing men on the side. It was her who stole family heirlooms and sold them off, and had tried to embezzle money from the family business.

I read until I heard a ding, and realized that tears where streaming down my cheeks. I looked around, and found that Kimberly had left the apartment. "Kimberly?"

A key rattled in the door, and Kimberly came back in, carrying a small plastic bag. "Sorry I stepped out. I said something, but you were too far into your reading to hear me I bet. I just ran down to the Circle K down the block."

"Oh," I said, getting to my feet on wooden legs and walking stiffly across the room. "Your computer dinged a few seconds ago."

"Thanks," she said. She stopped and looked into my face, and saw what I had learned. "I'm sorry, Julian."

Her words almost burst the dam inside me, and for the first time since I was nine years old, I truly felt like crying, but I wasn't going to let Kimberly see that. Instead, I sat there in shocked disbelief.

Was this what life with Krystal was going to be like? Just a week ago, I was basically broken down when I realized what a worthless son of a bitch I'd been most of my life. Now, I'd just learned I'd been treating my father like shit my entire life for no reason at all. Jesus, I wasn't even sure I was Julian Castelbon any longer, not that being Julian Castelbon was all that special.

Finally, I gathered myself and looked at Kimberly. "Thank you, Kim," I said, "give me a few minutes? Go check your computer."

She looked into my eyes and then rose without a word, going over to her computer and fired up the other three monitors. I couldn't see much other than her profile as she clicked and typed for about ten minutes, then a single ding as whatever she was doing was completed. Finished, she turned back to me. "You want to talk about it?"

Every other time someone had ever asked me that question in my life, I'd told them to fuck off. I'm an Alpha, and I don't need to talk about my feelings like some pussy on
Dr. Phil
. Instead, what came out of my mouth was, "Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why did John..... why did my father let me hate him for so long? He must have known what I was so angry about. It makes no sense."

Kimberly nodded. “I’m sure he did. But, and this is just what I think based on what I learned, that your father didn't say anything because he wanted you to have a good image of at least one of your parents. After he saw that Alicia's lies had already taken hold in your head, and at the age you were, he didn't want you to hate her too. So, he let you think he was the bad guy."

"And the mistresses? Were those lies too?" I asked numbly. "The court records mention them, but nothing about proof."

"There were never any mistresses," Kimberly said. "Each and every one of them, there was proof that supposed adulterous meetings either never happened, or were innocent. Two of them were business partners, again with surveillance footage, one was a doctor he went to because he was having some trouble with his stomach, and the final one had never even met him."

I just shook my head, feeling like someone had taken a hand mixer and stuck it in my brain before turning the whole thing on high. I sat there like that, with my forearms resting on my knees and my head drooping for a while, then I looked up again. "So what now?"

Kimberly looked at me and smiled. "Now, you know the truth. You're Julian Castelbon, you're richer than most of Chicago, and you're young."

"Which doesn't mean shit," I said honestly. "I'd trade it all away in three seconds if I could have Krystal."

Kim shook her head and looked at me like I was insane. "Hey dumbass," she said, before I interrupted her.

"You keep calling me that."

"You keep deserving to be called that. Julian, Krystal is my best friend, I've known her for years. And she is head over heels for you too. When you came to Chicago, she said you could stay with her for a few days. How long has she let you stay in that apartment?"

"A few weeks."

"A few weeks," Kimberly replied. "A few weeks to a man that she'd only known for a grand total of seventy two hours beforehand. Hell, you've practically moved in, and she hasn't complained one peep about it, other than when you gave her some grief at work. You two have spent more time together in those two weeks than she and I have, which is very rare, by the way. When we do spend time together, she almost never shuts up about you. Since you moved in, the only two topics of conversation she seems to be interested in is the damn cooking show, and you."

In my heart, I could feel a warm ball of hope blooming. Was there really a chance for me? Could I be more than just the asshole I'd always been? "You really think there's a chance for us?"