“I’m so sorry about Hortencia, Aunt Paulie,” Sera jumped in, eager to change the subject, and also to comfort the woman who’d once been her sole solace after her parents’ deaths. “It must have been quite a shock, her passing so suddenly. I had the impression she was healthy as a horse, with all that hiking and mountain climbing you two were always doing. I’m just sorry I never got to meet her. From everything you’ve told me, she must have been a really special lady.” Sera patted Pauline on the shoulder. “How are you holding up?”
Was it her imagination, or did her aunt flush, just slightly?
Pauline made an impatient, fly-shooing gesture. “Don’t get me started with the wailing and weeping just yet, kiddo. I need these eyes to see. It’s a long drive to Santa Fe, and we have a lot of catching up to do. So,” she finished, briskly clearing her throat and pointing at the luggage rattling around the conveyor, “I’m gonna guess yours is the one that looks like a giant pink cupcake with rainbow sprinkles on the front?”
Sera had to admit it was.
“Great, let’s get that cupcake to go.”
As she stepped out into the sunlight, Sera took her deep first breath of New Mexico’s thin, dry air. Goose bumps rose along her arms, but somehow she didn’t think the cool September breeze was to blame. She sensed a weightlessness, a sense of potential—as if destiny had taken a vacation and left her with a wide-open fate. She couldn’t say how she knew, but she had a feeling her life—her very being—was about to change.
And considering the woman she’d been until recently, that might be a very good thing.
Because that chick had been a real fuckup.
Chapter Two
The Maidstone Club, East Hampton, New York
One year and two months ago
June
Saturday
3 p.m., give or take
The Anderson wedding was tanking.
It wasn’t because the bride was a ’zilla, or the groom had cold feet. It wasn’t the work of an obnoxious mother-in-law or a spiteful stepsister. No meddling ex-lovers were waiting in the wings, ready to spill salacious secrets during the best man’s toast. Even the weather was idyllic, and the twelve-piece band stood ready with the perfect playlist to get the whitest of the white practicing their funky chicken. The ceremony was at this very moment going off with precisely the proper amount of hitching, the happy couple sniffling sentimentally through vows they’d written themselves as their friends and loved ones looked on, beaming beneficently.
But though they weren't yet aware of it, the whole honking show was sinking faster than the Titanic upon hitting a Love Boat–sized ’berg.
And it was all the fault of one person.
The pastry chef was drunk as a skunk.
She was also, apparently, in a meat locker.
With Lorenzo the busboy.
And very little clothing on.
Helluva time for one of my blackouts, Sera thought woozily. Worse time to come out of one. How did I get myself into this mess?
She remembered snagging a bottle of vodka from the service bar. She remembered drinking to her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend’s ill health—more than once. More than five or six times, probably. And she remembered catching sight of the teenaged Enzo, who had been making eyes at her ever since signing on to their catering company a couple months back. She had a vague image of herself crooking a finger at the kid, like some floozy in a Mae West movie. After that, things got a little hazy. But clearly, there’d been some disrobing going on. And some hanky-panky, if the tongue currently licking her left earlobe was anything to go by. But this was no place she’d ever have chosen for a seduction, if the booze hadn’t been doing the choosing for her.
Holy frozen buns, Batman, it’s cold as the center of a Baked Alaska in here.
The brushed steel walls were rimed in frost. Trays of hors d’oeuvres, tubs of sauces, and carts of canapés practically shivered on the shelves. Her breath was coming out in puffs of eighty-proof steam, and her increasingly exposed skin was all gooseflesh. Her meat locker compadre, however, was quite obviously not chilling out. In fact, he was rather on fire, if his hot hands and hotter lips were any indication.
Oh, God. What if my boyfriend finds us? she thought. Horror sobered her up, and fast. The door didn’t lock… and half the food for the wedding was stored in here. Any second someone from the staff was sure to walk in, if not her boyfriend himself.
Said boyfriend, however, had other priorities.
“Where are my shrimp cocktails? What the fuck did you clowns do with four hundred shrimp cocktails? And why the hell didn’t anybody warn me the avocados were hard as a stone?”
The person so politely inquiring was celebrity chef and society caterer extraordinaire Blake Austin. He was not drunk. But boy, was he pissed.
“Who is responsible for this atrocity!” Austin wheeled around in the country club's gleaming industrial kitchen, his glare hotter than a brûlée torch. As executive chef of a Manhattan restaurant so sophisticated one’s taste buds needed a graduate degree to properly appreciate its cuisine, as well as a frequent guest on the Food Channel’s Hot Chef!, he inspired instant obedience in any kitchen he commanded. A dozen frozen faces were caught in his headlights, like deer in chef’s whites.
The tall, reedy chef de partie piped up timidly, “Ah, Chef, I think you put Serafina on shrimp-and-guac duty since she was done with the cake and desserts.”
“Then where is Serafina?” roared Austin, glaring about. “Produce Serafina Wilde before me in the next ten seconds or explain why you cannot!” He waved a filleting knife with reckless abandon to emphasize his point. “Why can none of you troglodytes accommodate this simple request?” he mused, taking his wrath down a degree from rolling boil to simmer. He shook his leonine head in disgust. “Why do I bother? I might as well ask Paula Deen to cook without Crisco as expect you twits to give me a straight answer.”
“Um, Chef?” squeaked the quaking commis chef, raising his hand.
“Um, yes?” mocked Blake. “Have you found the balls to speak up, peon? Because you’re clearly not wearing them.”
The unfortunate commis gulped, wavering on his feet as though debating whether to bolt or pass out on the spot. “I… ah… I think I saw her headed for the walk-in with that new busboy Lorenzo, um… a few minutes ago?”
“Well, then, why have none of you worthless fart knockers seen fit to fetch her lazy arse? And no, that wasn’t a rhetorical question!”
A snide, rawboned girl (who had endeared herself to no one with her attempts to seduce Austin into advancing her from her lowly position in vegetable prep) stepped forward. “Chef, she didn’t exactly look like she’d appreciate an interruption, if you know what I mean.” The girl crossed her arms over her chest and smirked, ignoring the glares from the crew for her disloyalty to a fellow cook. Especially when that fellow cook was Blake Austin’s long-suffering girlfriend. No one liked a kitchen snitch.
Even if the snitch was right.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoaaaa!”
With one Godzilla versus Tokyo collision, Sera’s half-frozen derriere obliterated the fish-shaped savory sculpture it had taken the poissonier hours to perfect. Cold, rich puree of smoked salmon squished between her cheeks, and behind her, Sera heard a crash as an enormous platter of hors d’oeuvres went down. The close metal walls of the walk-in rang as if they were under artillery fire as cutlery and trays flew. But it was what loomed above her that had really gotten out of control.