Stepbrother Bad Boy's Baby Boxed Set(55)

I grinned sheepishly and nodded. "Yeah man. Can you give me a ride to the airport after I get tickets? I walked to the beach because my license is suspended still. I can't drive legally for another seventy four days. And I don't think I can stomach walking back to the airport from your home. Where are we in Miami anyway?"

"I live on Fischer Island. Which, by the way, is why you should probably stay indoors as much as possible until I give you a ride to the airport. You happen to have slept with two of my neighbors, and their husbands don't like you all that much."

I shook my head in true regret. "Jesus, all this shit from my past is really starting to catch up to me. I know you weren't quite as bad, but how did you ever get past it?"

Dwayne shook his head. "Considering that I know I could never even think of opening a resort in Macau, Hong Kong, or for that matter anywhere else in China due to what I did with a certain ambassador's daughter, I can't answer that one for you."





Chapter 24





Krystal





I woke up the next morning driven from sleep by the grumbles of my stomach. Rolling out of bed, I made my way into the kitchen, where I looked at the scraps in my fridge. It's a little known secret, but most chefs don't have a lot of food at their homes. We tend to eat bits from the restaurant prep, and are so tired by the time we get home that cooking is the last thing on our minds. When Julian was living with me, I kept the basics, but we'd cleaned out the fridge before going to Castelbon Manor. All I had in the fridge were some condiments, a half gallon of milk, some strawberries, and a tub of cottage cheese.

"Guess I'm going European today," I said, grabbing the cheese and the strawberries. I could turn the strawberries into a quick sauce, chill it, and combine it with the cottage cheese for something that would at least give me some energy, as well as distract me and give me something to do.

Poking around my cupboards gave me some balsamic vinegar, and I had what I needed. I took my stick blender to the strawberries, breaking them down quickly before putting them in a sauce pan with some balsamic vinegar. A few more ingredients, and viola, a strawberry sauce. I poured the sauce into a shallow pan and put it into my mostly empty freezer to chill and thicken up. It was right where I wanted it to be in twenty minutes, and poured it over the cottage cheese. The plating was a total mess, but I really didn't care, plopping it all in a bowl which I sat down and devoured in about two minutes of gluttony.

After my stomach was finally quiet, I thought about what I was going to do. Being fired from Alinea was not what I'd planned, especially the way it had gone down. While I might have been able to recover, the fact was that any chef that called Alinea to check my history would hear that I got fired for mouthing off to Shannon. It would keep me out of a lot of kitchens.

I was still pondering when my phone rang, and I saw that Kimberly was trying to call me. I picked it up. "Hey Kim."

My voice must have been a warning, because Kim didn't start with her normal cheery jibe or joke. "What happened?" she said, her voice heavy with concern.

"Would you believe that in the course of three days I've lost Julian, lost my job, and I don't even have a decent breakfast in my pantry?" I said, laughing hollowly. "So I've had pretty much the worst couple of days in the course of history."

"I'll be there in twenty minutes," Kim said, and my phone went silent in my ear. I knew better than to call her back and argue, Kim's stubborn and dedicated. There was no way I'd stop her, she was most likely out of her apartment already.

I was right. Kim was outside of my apartment twenty five minutes later. I'd given her the security code to the front, so she only had to knock on my front door. "Tell me everything," she said after giving me a hug. "And tell me why I should get my b-tard friends on him now."

It was no idle threat. In addition to all of her legal hacking skills, Kimberly was an active member of the hacker group Anonymous, as well as the prankster subset of 4chan, known as the b-tards. She was well respected by both groups, and had turned them loose twice in the time I'd known her. Both times, the targets were utterly devastated both professionally and financially. One of them, a politician who'd done something to get on her bad side, had so much dirt unearthed on him that the Department of Justice ended up indicting him. So when Kim threatened to unleash the b-tards, she wasn't joking around. "No, he doesn't deserve that. Besides, Julian didn't get me fired from Alinea, I did that all on my own."

"Give me all the details," Kim said, "and take it slow."

I started with the morning of Gina's arrival, telling her as much as I could remember. Kim listened, pausing me only once to get her smartphone out and start typing a few notes. I didn't know what I'd said that caused her to do that, but she had me continue, right up to the point where I'd told Shannon to f*ck off.

"You were right about one thing," Kimberly said as she finished her typing. "You did get yourself fired from Alinea all on your own. Although I want to look into a few things before I say anything else. There might be grounds to challenge your dismissal based off of what Horst said to you at the end."

"I don't want to, even if you're right," I told her. "It'd just cause more poisoning of the waters. Getting a reputation as a disrespectful hothead in the culinary world can be bad. Getting a reputation as a disrespectful hothead who then whined and gamed is even worse."