Sugar by Kimberly Stuart

Author:Kimberly Stuart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2016-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

16

THE following night, a Saturday, made every person working at Thrill feel as though we were moments away from self-destruction. We were stacked from the first minute of the first seating. Avery strode in and out of the kitchen, muttering about the reservationist being on crack and how could any sane person think we could cook for all those people out there? Apparently even he had a limit for the amount of exposure he could take in one evening.

The servers looked frazzled and totally spent by eight o’clock, which was a very bad sign since we weren’t even halfway through the evening. One woman, Gigi, who had come on board with others in Tova’s pretty brigade, began crying hysterically, her mascara running in chunky rivulets down her cheeks. The salmon was overdone, she cried, and she really needed that table’s tip for her rent, due the following day. Six f-bombs and a hushed, back-rubbing conversation with Avery later, she touched up her makeup and soldiered back into the dining room with Salmon, Take Two.

Of course, the cameras caught the entire debacle, one of them coming so close to Gigi’s head at one point that she pushed it out of her way with an impressive shove and naughty word (F-Bomb #4). I was neck-deep in my own troubles after one of the gas burners in the pastry kitchen quit working just as I was building the heat for a finicky caramel. So I heard Gigi’s tirade loudly and clearly, but I didn’t watch closely enough to decide whether she’d been put up to histrionics like Tova had. When things had returned to the noisy but familiar chaos of the kitchen, I did see Vic nod once at Margot. I looked away, determined to know as little as I could about what happened behind the lenses of the black cameras that loomed everywhere around us.

Minutes after the Gigi debacle, Avery flew into our area, his eyes bugging, chef’s cap shoved to one side of his head.

“Charlie,” he said, his voice barely controlled. “We have a situation.”

I looked up from plating a slice of deep-dish peach blackberry pie, one hand over the dessert with a sifter of powdered sugar. “What kind of situation?”

Avery nodded, rhythmically, up and down, up and down. “We have in our dining room,” he said, still nodding, “some very special guests.” He paused, his gaze flickering to the camera above my head. “TiffanTosh is here.”

Tova let out a squeal and dropped the ramekin she was holding, nicking an edge on the counter.

I scowled at her and then turned back to Avery. “I’m assuming this person is famous since her name is so ridiculous.”

Avery’s mouth opened slightly, clearly disturbed I wasn’t dropping ceramics, too. “TiffanTosh is not a person. TiffanTosh is a people. The newest power couple in Hollywood.”

“Tiffany Jacobs and Macintosh Rowe?” Tova was talking and applying lip gloss at the same time. Her eyes kept darting to the door to the dining room, as if any moment a celebrity might walk through and want to discuss lip plumping.

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