Cutthroat Chicken (10 page)

Authors: Elizabeth A Reeves

BOOK: Cutthroat Chicken

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“No more men,” I chanted, starting the hot water blasting. “No more dates. No more kissing. I’m done! No. More. Toads.”

I kept chanting my new mantra as I poured half a bottle of sugar-cookie scented shampoo into my hair and started sudsily scrubbing out my miserable night. Once I started in on my equally delicious conditioner, I finally began to relax.

Images of fabulous desserts danced through my brain. Banana peanut butter crème brulee, I day-dreamed, or maybe a nice summery orange-scented bread pudding. Suddenly, I couldn’t wait for my four A.M. alarm and a full day of work.

I was one of those lucky few who truly loved my job. I knew that wasn’t always the case and couldn’t help but feel a little smug about it. Sugar High Bakery had been a job of desperation in my college days, begun with the advent of a ‘Help Wanted’ sign over a tray of late-night studying cookies. I’d figured ‘hey, I like food’ and applied. Very quickly after starting work there it had taken over my entire life. I had even dropped out of my pre-law program to take classes at a pastry school to the horror of my entire over-achieving scholastic family.

I had found my true calling in being elbows-deep in flour and butter. My bosses, an adorable older-but-not-elderly couple, had given me free rein with creativity after only a year and one highly successful brownie that was still our number one seller. As long as I kept up with their traditional offerings, to please the long-term customers, I could create what I desired.

I seemed to have pastry-scented dreams these days. Wherever I went, dessert inspirations filled my head. Someday I was going to own my very own bakery and fill the displays with all of my own creations. Visions of handmade truffles spiked with chipotle and my special cinnamon honey caramel chews danced in my head. I could almost taste the scent of baking bread on the air.

With a sigh, I pulled my hair up into a wet ponytail and dragged on my work uniform, a t-shirt and what I called my ‘artistic’ jeans, with the random rips, doodles, and patchwork flowers that I had painstakingly, and clumsily, stitched on myself.

I knew better than to try to sleep when this mood struck me. I would end up lying in bed daydreaming about pastry, sugar, and butter until I got up and did something about it.

Ten minutes later I was unlocking the door of the bakery. Moments after that, I was sifting flour while my block of butter softened on the counter and beckoned to my imagination. Puff-pastry nuggets nestled in a sticky sauce, ready for the oven. Mandarin-orange cheesecake and cupcakes formed under my hands. Rows of fresh bread slowly began to fill the cases. My own favorite jalapeno cheddar bagels came out of their water bath and into another oven. Flour and spices and magic filled the air.

Weeks into my early employment as a pastry chef, I had discovered that my rather capricious magic had been drawn to the pastry-creating process. Somehow my basic pastry skills and small gift in magic had combined to make me something more, a bit of a pastry genius.

Sometimes I thought that this exercising of my meager magic talent was the only reason my mother didn’t drag me, kicking and screaming, back to law school or into some ‘better’ profession, more suited to a child of her womb. Only here, with flour on my hands, did my magic really shine, sometimes quite literally.

My mother was proud of her long legacy of magic. In our quiet community she was considered to be the strongest practitioner in the entire Southwest. Her magic was of the Earth type. She could grow any plant in her extensive gardens. She could even start a small earthquake when truly annoyed (She didn’t ‘get angry.’ That would have suggested she didn’t have mastery of herself, which no one who knew her would ever even insinuate).

She had always blamed the capriciousness of my magic ability on the elusive father-figure I had never met. A long series of men had come into my mother’s life, and left, starting with my own father, whom she stayed resolutely silent about.

I had five half-sisters. Only the twins had the same father. Currently Mom was married to the head of the Western Magic Counsel, which meant she had been calling me with tons of ‘job opportunities’ she felt would be better for me than the bakery. The only thing that helped me keep my patience with her was that she always finished our conversations by asking me to send her a box of my goodies.

It tickled my vanity that even she couldn’t resist my baking.

My magic never worked the same way in two pastries. In some it could intensify flavors, others, well... my lemon meringue pie had a tendency to make people remember the very best day of their lives while they were eating it.

So, as I worked there was always a presence of magic in the air. It shimmered through everything in the bakery, enhancing, changing, and making sure every texture was right. My pie crusts were always perfect and my soufflés never fell. My oven always had exactly the right temperature, and I almost never burned anything.

Not that everything always went smoothly. Even magic couldn’t fix the mess I made when I mistook powdered milk for the flour. In my defense, I had a cold at the time, so the resulting goop was really the fault of a non-functioning nose, not my incompetence.

Before I knew it, Jessi arrived at the bakery to open it for the day. She surveyed the display cases and the bread rack behind the counter and shook her head. “Did you pull another all-nighter?”

I nodded. I was still on a magic high from all the creating, but I knew that I was heading for a crash, if I didn’t get a quick nap. “Make the coffee, will you?” I yawned, heading to the far back of the bakery, where a nice comfy chair was set up just for me.

I was out cold and snoring the second my bum hit the chair. I happily dreamed about making cannoli with lavender honey cream.

When I awoke, the bakery was well into its early morning rush. I helped Jessi dole out the goodies until she shooed me back to the kitchen.

I made cannoli.

They were a big hit. In no time at all, it seemed, we were sold out and I was measuring out homemade fresh ricotta again.

Jessi stuck her head into the kitchen not long after I sent a new tray up to let me know that our customers were hooked.

“We might have to make cannoli a permanent addition to the menu,” Jessi said. “Someone wants to give compliments to the chef. Can you come out?”

I was elbows deep in dough for my cinnamon butter rolls, but I dusted a little flour off of my arms and went out to meet my fan. It was kind of exciting to have my presence requested, as if I were a super star of pastry.

I came out of the kitchen, patting flour dust out of my favorite apron. It featured a grinning skeleton with a bow on her head and right now, she had a flour beard to rival Santa’s. I tucked a stray coppery curl back under the bandana I wore over my hair.

Someone was standing near the register. It had to be my fan. He turned towards me. I reached out a hand to shake his. Our eyes met.

And I slipped.

I thought I had a good thirty seconds of hang time while all of the customers stared with horror before I landed hard on my rear end and slid into the wall with a resounding THUD!

My head hit the glass door of the large display fridge where we kept the cheesecakes. I could feel a goose egg rising even as I struggled to my feet.

My cheek bone was already throbbing and, by the tenderness of my face, I knew I was going to end up with black eye.

“Omigosh,” Jessi shrieked so fast that it became one word. “Are you OK?”

I knew my face was scarlet. It took all my willpower not to scuttle back to the kitchen to hide. I was absolutely mortified and what made it worse was that I had a sudden urge to cry. I gulped back the approaching tears and tried to catch hold of my fleeing composure.

“Um,” I managed to say.

“Omigosh,” Jessi said again. “Cindy, this is Timothy Borden, the one who wanted to meet you.”

I put out my hand to shake his before looking up at him, hoping that I didn’t come across too much as a victim of a hit and run with a wall. I glanced up and froze.

He was yummy. I mean yummy as in, I could eat in his face for the rest of my life and not get tired of it… Not in a creepy zombie way, of course.

I was immediately reduced from bumbling idiot to speechless bumbling idiot. He was about six feet tall, nearly a foot taller than me, with dirty-blond hair and the clearest hazel eyes I had ever seen. His eyelashes were beyond ridiculously long, past movie-star and right on to camel-length. The lashes were surprisingly dark around those amazing eyes of his.

He was gorgeous.

And I was staring at him with my mouth open.

“This is our pastry chef,” Jessi nudged me in the ribs so hard I almost fell over... again.

“Um...” I said, brilliantly. “Cindy Eller. Pleasedtomeetcha.”

His eyebrows rose and I cursed myself for not remembering to add in my middle name. ‘Cindy Rachel Eller’ sounds saner than ‘ Cindy Eller’.

He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry? I thought I heard you say...”

If possible, I blushed harder. If my face got any hotter I was going to spontaneously combust. “Cindy Eller.” I carefully enunciated every single syllable of my detested name. “I have an evil mother.”

He cracked a grin that made him even more gorgeous, if that was even possible. I was pretty sure I was starting to drool. So much for avoiding that whole zombie thing. “Not an evil stepmother?”

I shook my head, sure I was creating a flour halo around my head. “Nope. I wish I could say she was my stepmother, but she’s really all mine.”

He laughed and I managed to smile back at him, hopefully not looking too frightening.

Wow, he had serious dimples. He must have frequent dimple mileage.

Darn it. I was staring again.

Toads, I reminded myself. Big, bad, slimy, toxic toads.

It didn’t help.

“This cannoli is spectacular,” Timothy Borden was saying, apparently— and hopefully!— oblivious to my inability to rub two brain cells together in his presence.

“Um,” I dazzled him with my stunning charm and wit. “Thanks.”

“What made you think to use crushed pistachios in the cream filling?”

I shook my head, trying to clear it. “I love pistachios with honey,” I managed, only slightly too fast. “I was thinking they would play off each other with that little hint of lavender.”

He smiled. “I think you aced it. In fact, I’ll take the rest of these. I can’t wait to show them off at work.”

Jessi nodded and started packaging the order.

“Would you like anything else?” I asked, hoping I sounded professional and not... like I was desperately asking him to order a serving of me.

He frowned slightly in thought, creating an adorable crooked furrow between his eyebrows.

“Bad girl,” I told myself. “Toads. Think toads.”

“I’ll take the ‘Road to Bliss’,” he decided, pointing at my brownie creation featuring three kinds of chocolate and Macadamia nuts covered in a shell of ganache.

“One piece?” I asked. “A dozen?”

He shook his head in thought. “No. I’ll just take the whole tray.”

I gaped at him yet again as Jessi compiled his order and rang it up. I stood stupidly as he paid with a credit card.

“You’ll be seeing me again,” he said over his shoulder, as he carried his packages out the door.

“Um,” I cleverly retorted.

Continue on for more about Elizabeth A Reeves and her books.

About the Author

Elizabeth A Reeves is a mother, a sister, a daughter, a wife, and a writer. She tries to balance all the aspects of her life. She is the author of
Adrift
(The Last Selkie), Running, and the Cindy Eller Cupcakes series. She is also the author of the Goldie Locke and the Were Bear series

She is a very prolific author and has nearly twenty titles under her belt at this point—with up to six titles per year currently being released.

You can reach her at the following links:

Website: http://ElizabethReeves.com

Twitter @SelkieHorse

Blog
: CindyEller.blogspot.com

Want to Read more by Elizabeth A Reeves?

Cindy Eller Series

How (Not) To Kiss a Toad

How (Not) to Kiss a Prince

How (Not) to Kiss a Beast

How (Not) to Kiss a Ghost

How (Not) to Kiss a Gargoyle