“Wait, what?” I asked, swinging wide into my spot and almost taking out a trash can.
“You heard me right! I auditioned for the show last fall when they were in Poughkeepsie, with your aunt Cheryl, and they picked us! We’re going around the world!” she yelled.
“Okay, stop shouting. Mom, seriously, stop—okay. Okay, hello?” I tried to get a word in edgewise, but it was impossible. She was spouting names of cities and countries right and left, her voice getting ever more excited. Cairo. Mozambique. Krakatoa.
“Krakatoa? You’re going to a volcano?”
“Who knows, that’s the whole point! They could send us anywhere! I’m going on a quest!”
“With Aunt Cheryl? She got lost in the new A&P. What good is she going to be on a quest?”
“Oh, don’t be such a pill, Roxie,” my mother said, and I could feel my shoulders tensing up—like they always did when she took this tone.
My mother was a “free spirit,” and she couldn’t for the life of her understand why her daughter was such a stick-in-the-mud. A stick-in-the-mud who, since she was fourteen, had made sure the lights stayed on, the gas didn’t get turned off, and there was always food in the pantry. Still, I was happy for her.
“Sorry—it sounds awesome. Really, I’m excited for you,” I said, envisioning my mother and her sister trying to navigate a bazaar in North Africa. “When does all this happen?”
“Well, that’s the thing, sweetie. We leave in two weeks.”
“Two weeks? Who are you going to get to run Callahan’s?”
“Who do you think?” she asked.
She wasn’t— No, she couldn’t possibly think that I’d leave my— No, she would never . . . Hell yes, she would.
“Are you insane? Like, ‘check you into a place without forks’ insane?”
“Just hear me out, Roxie—”
“Hear you out? You want me to leave my business, which is finally starting to get somewhere, to cook in a run-down diner in Bailey Falls, New York? While you go off on some geriatric ‘around the world in eighty days’ bullshit?”
“I can’t believe you would call me geriatric—”
“I can’t believe that’s the word you heard!” I exploded. As I sat in my car, eyes bugging out of my head at my mother’s audacity, my phone vibrated with a text. “Explain to me how you think this can work. How can I do this?”
“Easy. You take a leave of absence out there, you drive to here, and you run the diner while I do this.”
I took a breath, held on to it for a moment, then let it out slowly. “A leave of absence.” Breathe in. Breathe out. “I work for myself. So a leave of absence means a leave of no more business. A leave of unemployment. A leave of, ‘hey, clients, get someone else to cook for you. I’ll be up to my elbows in tuna noodle casserole back home in Podunk.’ ”
“We don’t make that casserole anymore.”
“We have to discuss your selective hearing sometime,” I said as my phone vibrated with another text. “Mother, I have to go. We can—”
“We can’t talk about this later. I need to know if you can do this or not.”
“You cannot call me up out of the blue and ask me—”
“Wouldn’t be out of the blue if you called more often,” she sneaked in.
Breathe in. Breathe out. I suddenly understood the phrase “my blood was boiling”: I could feel bubbles of stress forming inside my veins, knocking around and heating me up from the inside. I was a little past simmer, getting close to parboil. Before I could go fork tender, I tried once more.
“Here’s the thing, Mom. I need you to be reasonable. I can’t do this every time you get into trouble or—”
“I’m not in trouble, Roxie. I’m—”
“Maybe not this time, but it’s the same thing, just dressed up in a package from CBS. It’s not going to work anymore.”
“I paid for your college, Roxie—two years at the American Culinary Institute. The least you could do is this.”
Okay. That’s it.
“You know what, Mom? No. I’m not doing it,” I said angrily, just as another freakin’ text came in. “And you only paid for ACI because you’d just won the lottery. And you’ve gone through the rest of that money already, which is ludicrous.”
She remained stubbornly silent. This was usually the point in the conversation where I’d cave. But not this time.
“Okay, Mom. While you’re figuring out the real meaning of life and jumping into a shark tank off the coast of South Africa with Aunt Cheryl—who can’t swim, by the way—I’ll be here. In Los Angeles. Working my ass off, trying to build a business and keep my own lights on so I don’t have to live in my car,” I snapped—as yet another text came in.
“You really think they’ll make us go in a shark tank?”
“Oh, go smoke a bowl, Mother!” I hung up, steaming, wondering how in the world she could be ludicrous enough to think I’d drop everything to go home and run her diner. Unbelievable. I had a life, I had clients, I had . . . good lord, another text?
I looked down at my phone, which showed six messages waiting for me. Nope, seven—another one just came in. What was going on? Opening the first, I saw it was from Shawna, a client.
Roxie: I won’t need you to cook for me next week.
Huh. That was weird. I opened the next bubble.
Sorry for the last-minute notice, but I’m going to have to cancel the meals you have planned for next week, and the week after that. I’ll contact you in the future, perhaps.
Wait, what? Miranda was another client. She’d been with me for a few months, referred by . . . Mitzi. Ah shit.
I opened the next text bubble. By the time I’d read them all, every single client Mitzi had referred to me had canceled. Backed out. Quit me.
Over B U T T E R???
Or maybe over the obscene finger gesture?
I fucking hate this town.
Referrals were everything in a town like this, and because of Mitzi St. Fucking Renee, I was now a culinary pariah. Vapid, plastically beautiful women with more money than actual God had had decided to make my career into a game of herd mentality. The few clients I had left only used me occasionally, for events or as their schedules allowed.
Though I loved California, I really was beginning to hate LA. The money was great here, but what it took to live here, to deal with these people—it was almost too much sometimes. And the money was only good . . . until it wasn’t. I’d just spent most of my savings on a new engine for the Jeep, and I was temporarily light in the cash-flow department.
All those clients, all those dependable dollars, gone in the span of one phone call. My stomach knotted at the thought of having to rebuild my business. A bubble of worry floated up as I mentally ran through my client list, wondering who might be able to use me on a more full-time basis.
Then my phone beeped with another text. Oh, God. Was someone else getting in on the butter gang bang?
I’ll be back in town the middle of next week. Let me know if you’re up for some company.
Thank God, it wasn’t culinary related. Although there was that one time with a jar of peanut butter . . . never mind that. I sighed as I let myself into my apartment. Mitchell was my . . . hmm. Not my boyfriend, that’s for sure. He was my . . . plaything. My latest in a string of men whom I enjoyed for the sexing, not for the vexing. Emotionally invested? No. Interested in long walks on the beach and a partner for life? I’ll pass. Sweaty, writhing, panting bodies a phone call away with a minimum of fuss and muss? Now you’re talking.
No how was your day, dear? No hey, Roxie, we’ll get through this hard time. The kind of hard time he’d bring would be me bent over the easy chair, one of his hands full of my hair and the other hand full of my . . . Too bad he wasn’t here tonight— I could use something to take the edge off. My brain was churning, my career was potentially imploding, and there was a guilt trip barreling west from Bailey Falls, New York.
I needed peace. I needed quiet. My e
yes scanned my apartment—which I couldn’t afford unless I got every single one of my clients back—and settled on the Patrón. Besides peace and quiet, I needed a lime. . . .
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© ALYSSA MICHELLE 2013
Christina Lauren is the combined pen name of longtime writing partners/besties/soulmates and brain-twins Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, the New York Times, USA Today, and #1 international bestselling authors of the Beautiful Bastard and Wild Seasons series, Sublime, and The House. You can find them online at christinalaurenbooks.com, Facebook.com/ChristinaLaurenBooks, or at @ChristinaLauren on Twitter.
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Books by CHRISTINA LAUREN
WILD SEASONS
Sweet Filthy Boy
Dirty Rowdy Thing
Dark Wild Night
Wicked Sexy Liar
THE BEAUTIFUL SERIES
Beautiful Bastard
Beautiful Stranger
Beautiful Bitch
Beautiful Bombshell
Beautiful Player
Beautiful Beginning
Beautiful Beloved
Beautiful Secret
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings
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First Gallery Books trade paperback edition September 2015
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Cover photograph by © Stefano Cavoretto/Shutterstock
Razor Fish logo design by Heather Carrier
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file.
ISBN 978-1-4767-7794-8
ISBN 978-1-4767-7795-5 (ebook)
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Acknowledgments
Nuts Excerpt
About Christina Lauren