He Said, She Said by Jasmine Cresswell

Author:Jasmine Cresswell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2013-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

He said: I don’t have time for romance. Maybe next year.

DEV REACHED for the bottle of olive oil to add to the garlic and shallots he was sautéing for this week’s TV show. He tilted the bottle and gave a quick shake, the movement calibrated by experience so that he knew he would add exactly a teaspoonful. Except that the pouring spout broke and oil gushed into the pan, drowning the food, and splattering all over Dev’s shirt.

“Cut!” Scott Mortimer yelled. He rushed onto the set, grabbing a cloth and rubbing at the grease on Dev’s shirt, only making the stains larger and more visible. He waved his clipboard in a familiar sign of impending panic. “Dev, what’s going on here? So far we’ve spent three hours trying to tape a half-hour show and all we have is a series of disasters.”

“What’s going on is that people are messing with my equipment,” Dev snapped, pulling off his shirt and tossing it into the darkness surrounding the set. “There’s no way the pouring spout on that oil could have come off by itself, any more than the eggs could have been rotten, or the faucet could have suddenly started spraying water because the valve just happened to stick.”

Scott turned pale. “What are you suggesting? That somebody’s sabotaging the show? That’s impossible—they’d never get access to the set.” Despite his vehement denial, Scott grabbed a towel to mop his sweating brow and scurried around the kitchen, shaking bottles and pulling open cupboard doors in a frenzy of impromptu testing.

Was he being paranoid? Dev wondered as he wiped up spilled olive oil, cleaning off the stove elements so that they wouldn’t smoke next time he used them. Annette Dunning’s unexpected arrival in Denver had him on edge…with reason, in view of the fact that she’d told both him and Cathy that she wouldn’t be arriving until today. But just because he and Cathy had discovered that she’d had dinner with Paul Lyman, forty-eight hours before she was due to get into town, was that grounds for leaping to the conclusion that she was sabotaging his TV show for KDID? Maybe. Dev wasn’t sure how far Annette’s thirst for revenge might stretch, but he feared the worst. On the other hand, accidents did happen, and he shouldn’t let his suspicions run away with his common sense.

He had just finished talking himself into a more reasonable state of mind when Scott let out a howl, and marched over to Dev’s side, his face twisted into an expression of such exaggerated dismay that in other circumstances it would have been comic.

“The oven’s not working!” Scott delivered his line with enough tragic overtones to do justice to Hamlet’s death scene. “I switched it on, and nothing happened! Oh, boy, are we screwed! We’re going to run out of studio time and lose the production crew before we’ve finished taping. We’ll be left with no show for this week. Oh my God!”

The oven not working made four minor, but time-consuming disasters in the space of fifteen minutes.

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