“I… but…” He couldn’t seriously mean to trash all this food? But the others were already filing past her with garbage bags, reaching into the shelves with stoic expressions. Out went the amuse bouche. Out went the gravlax. The blinis and the cheese puffs and the crab-stuffed mushrooms also met their doom. Sweet heavenly biscuits, the appetizers alone represented three days’ work on the part of their entire team! All because her unclothed bum had been somewhere in the vicinity? “No, Blake, wait! We can still save—”
“No excuses!” Blake snapped coldly. “You have single-handedly ruined half the comestibles in this kitchen. Fix this, Serafina, or face the consequences,” he threatened, waving the filleting knife under her nose. “Now get out of my sight. I have no time for amateurs.”
He thrust himself away from the refrigerator door with a shrug of his shoulders and turned to snap at his minions. “And would somebody, for the love of all that is holy, be so good as to sanitize this fucking station before the health inspector arrives and demands to know why there are arse prints on surfaces on which food is prepared!”
When nobody moved, Blake’s voice rose to its usual roar. “Move!”
The kitchen crew scattered.
The ladies’ room door couldn’t shut behind Sera fast enough. Not wanting to run into any of the catering staff—who were surely snickering into their sleeves at her misfortune right now—she’d escaped the kitchen and found a restroom down one of the country club’s lavishly decorated halls. Safe at last, she darted into the stall farthest from the front, snapping it locked behind her and leaning her back against the divider. Her hands trembled as she reached in her pocket, withdrew the flask she’d secreted there. Just one more belt. To take the edge off. To calm her down. To forget the awful, hateful look on Blake’s face and make this disaster somehow just a nightmare she could still wake up from. Screwing the cap back on, she stuffed a piece of gum in her mouth, chewed despite the dry Sahara her mouth had become. Wouldn’t do for the Andersons to catch their pastry chef smelling like a distillery, would it?
Though how Blake expects me to explain to them why he threw out $20,000 worth of perfectly good canapés just to make a point, I don’t know, she thought with a spurt of terror. He hadn’t had to go that far. But Blake was given to grand gestures—the more spiteful, the better.
Yet who was more hateful in this situation? After all, hadn’t she just gotten an innocent kid fired due to her shenanigans? Wasn’t she the one kicking up drama and putting a woman’s wedding celebration in jeopardy in the process?
Fix this, Serafina. Stop fucking around and figure out a way to salvage the situation.
Exiting the stall reluctantly, Serafina washed her shaking hands and splashed cold water on her face. She stared at her reflection in the mirror with loathing, and not just at the outward signs of her distress—the bloodshot gray eyes, wan greasy skin, and lank black hair unflatteringly caught back in a hairnet. Bad though she looked on the outside—like a candidate for A&E’s Intervention, if she were being honest with herself—it was what was inside that truly appalled her. What would her parents have said had they been alive to see how their daughter had grown up? What would Aunt Pauline think of the darling niece she’d raised to know right from wrong? There was little trace of that bright, hopeful girl in the mirror now.
“C’mon, Sera,” she said to her reflection, slapping her own cheeks to snap her back into focus. “This is no time for a come-to-Jesus moment. You’ve got four hundred hungry WASPs to placate—and fast.”
Inhaling the deepest breath of her life, she forced herself to face the music, striding back into the country club kitchen with her spine stiff and the vodka singing a siren song through her veins. C’mon, it was telling her, it isn’t that bad, you’re Serafina Wilde! You can fix this. You can fix anything.
Maybe the Maidstone Club could do something—after all, they regularly hosted several hundred guests at a time during the summer season. Their deep freezers had to be packed with the fixings for your basic surf-and-turf. If she could track down the general manager, if the staff would cooperate, maybe she could still salvage something of this mess—at least, if not to save her own reputation, to keep the bride from having the kind of disastrous wedding her social set would whisper over for seasons to come. She owed Lexi Anderson that much. The girl might be a starveling size two with a five-carat ring and highlights that cost more than Sera’s annual income, but she wasn’t half bad for all that. To ruin her big day… Christ on a cupcake, that’s enough bad karma to keep me in crappy boyfriends for the next six lifetimes.
At least, Sera consoled herself, the cake would exceed all expectations. It was her masterpiece. Her finest creation in a long line of justly celebrated and much-coveted confections. It was gorgeous. It was scrumptious. It was…
At a kid’s party in Brooklyn Heights.
Serafina stared in horror at the contents of the oversized box marked, inexplicably, “Simpson Birthday,” trying not to scream at the sight of the pirate-ship-shaped chocolate fudge galleon that sailed gaily on a sea of foam-flecked fondant.
No way. It wasn’t possible! No amount of vodka would make Sera fuck up this bad. She knew she’d packed up and correctly labeled the right cake for this wedding. One didn’t easily mistake a lovebird-themed, lemon buttercream–filled extravaganza with twelve tiers and eighty hours’ worth of gum paste flowers and sugarplum birdies painstakingly appliquéd to each layer for a third-grader’s dark chocolate buccaneer boat! She’d seen the Simpson cake off on its maiden voyage just this morning. So how had it drifted so far off course…
There was only one explanation. And it was wearing a cream linen suit.
And smirking at her.
Sera could feel the eyes of the kitchen crew on her. Watching her wither under Blake’s bullying, as she’d done so often in the past. Watching her lose what little was left of her self-respect.
Something inside her snapped. The years of humiliation, of kowtowing to this man… groveling for his approval, apologizing for her shortcomings while excusing his. God, why had she never seen what a douchebag he really was? Why had she so easily swallowed her pride, along with her self-esteem, washing them down with alcohol when they stuck in her craw? This wasn’t the woman Aunt Pauline had raised.
Enough was e-fucking-nough.
“What. Have. You. DONE!?” she roared.
She ignored the gasps from the kitchen staff. One didn’t raise one’s voice to Blake Austin. Ever.
Then again, one didn’t cuckold him while he was in the midst of catering a wedding reception either, so this was a day for firsts.
Blake’s chest puffed up. “I hope you don’t mean to employ that tone with me in my kitchen after what you have done, you disgraceful little pastry pissant.” His smirk turned sharklike, threatening. Sera wanted to retch. God, how did I ever think he was charming?
“You absolute creep,” she swore. That last shot of vodka emboldened her enough to get right up in his face, though his cologne—which she’d never liked—played havoc with her roiling stomach. Sera poked a finger into Blake’s solar plexus, wishing it were a knee to the groin. “First you cheat on me, then you sabotage my cake?” She stomped her foot, too furious suddenly to care how much of a scene she was creating. “You want to hurt me? Fine. But now you’re hurting poor Lexi Anderson, whose only crime was paying you a fortune to make her day special. I mean, Christ, your name’s on this event, too. Why? Why would you do this?”