Extreme Danger (McClouds & Friends #5)(23)

He loaded himself up like a donkey, and took off. Sliding and scrambling through clinging vines and thorny bushes, all to make the perfect three-cheese soufflé for the evilest scum-sucking motherf*cker in the known universe. It was surreal.

A sound jerked out of his chest, so rusty, he almost didn’t recognize it. Laughter.

Mr Big? How the f*ck had she come up with that?

Better not to speculate.

Chapter

7

K eeping busy was the trick. Squinting fiercely, she located bowls, utensils and small appliances. Whiz, bang, and there it all was, neatly assembled on the central island. God, how she loved a kitchen with counter space. Too bad she was using it to feed her potential murderers. Or rapists.

Yeah. Bechamel first. Then the crepe batter. Watching butter melt and flour sizzle soothed her rattled nerves. She counted the slow stirs until the sauce thickened, up to ten and back down to zero, over and over, so she wouldn’t fall to screaming pieces.

No disasters so far. She set the white sauce aside to cool and whipped up batter for the crepes, grateful for the well-seasoned electric griddle she’d found in a bottom shelf. She’d be able to do six crepes at a time on that thing. Some day, when she’d finally landed Mr. Right and had the perfect kitchen, she’d get herself one of those. A professional-grade food processor, too.

Good girl. Keeping it together. Cool as a cucumber.

The door burst open. Startled, Becca sprang into the air and made a sound that only dogs could hear.

It was Mr. Big, laden with boxes and plastic bags. The wine bottles clanked together. She was so relieved, she almost burst into tears. “Oh, thank God.”

“This shit is heavy,” he grumbled.

She tore into the boxes. Mr. Big watched, his mouth dangling open. Ingredients for the soufflé, arrayed in a row on one section of the counter, elements for the crepes on another. Her mind whirled with logistics, timing, sequence. Should she get the soufflé in the oven before starting the sauce for the crepes? If the soufflé was done too soon, they wouldn’t be ready to serve it on the spot. It might fall. She couldn’t serve a flat soufflé to those guys. They had guns. They would shoot her.

She decided to grate and chop the savory ingredients, then whip up the orange sauce, then assemble the soufflé and pop it in the oven, which left exactly twenty-five minutes to bake the crepes on the griddle and get the ham browned, the fruit blended and the bread toasted. Assuming she had six arms, and that somebody else would deal with linens, dishes and cutlery. And she thought she had job stress at the club.

Mr. Big proved to be worse than useless as a line cook. He was slow, sullen, clouded and uncomprehending.

“What do you mean, orange zest?” he grumbled. “What the f*ck is f*cking orange zest?”

“If you have to ask, never mind,” she snapped. “Grate the cheese into this bowl, fast. Then wash the grater. I need it for the zest. And cut these herbs. Very fine. That should be simple enough for even you.”

“Stop bitching,” he muttered. “Nobody asked you to get mixed up in this.”

“I just came back for my glasses and my keys,” she whispered fiercely. “I had to! I’m blind as a bat without my glasses! You might have warned me about this last night! Instead of—instead of—”

“Warned you?” he shot back. “Jesus Christ, I tried to scare you away from here last night. At least until I—we, I mean—got distracted. But any female with half a brain would have run like hell. What was the matter with you?”

Her fault, huh? Asf*ckingif. She wrenched the bowl of grated cheese away from him and dumped it into her warm bechamel.

Half a brain, her ass. Hah. Scare her? Sure, if scaring her included kissing her senseless and giving her a transcendental orgasm. And now the jerk was mangling her herbs, too.

“Stop that,” she snapped. She yanked his cutting board away and tossed him a peeled onion. “Chop this,” she ordered. “Very fine.”

He whacked his knife down on the board. The two halves of the guillotined onion flew off the board and rolled to opposite corners of the room. “Christ,” he said, in a savage undertone. “What a f*cking mess.”

“Tantrums do not help,” she pointed out sweetly.

He collected the onion, chopped it with a glower that would have intimidated her if she had the time to be intimidated, which she did not. She stared at his chopping technique. “Finer,” she said snippily.

“What do you mean, finer? Any finer than this, and it’ll be paste!”

“Finer,” she reiterated. “Then put them in the saucepan, and stir them constantly. Do not let them burn. They need to caramelize.”

He muttered, dumped, stirred. She turned her back to deal with the eggs, sifting through the words he had just said as she separated the whites from yolks.

She dropped the yolks into her bechamel, stirred them gently into the mix until the mixture was tinged with bright sunny yellow. “So, what you’re saying is…last night you were trying to scare me away? You didn’t want me and I just didn’t catch on?”

He grabbed a paring knife off the counter and stabbed it into her cutting board, in the midst of her heaps of chopped herbs. They scattered. She stepped back with a soft gasp.

“Wrong,” he snarled. “We did what we did because we both wanted to. But I sure as hell didn’t think you’d come back. I hoped you wouldn’t. Now shut up, do as you’re told, and do not f*ck with me. Clear?”