Page 178 of Naughty Nelle

“Jane, we need water, yeast, butter, and flour,” she says with authority.

How am I supposed to know where they are? I’ve never been in this kitchen. In fact, I haven’t been in a kitchen for years. When I was Queen, I had cooks.

“Hurry, Jane. We don’t have all day!”

Maybe it’s time to remind her that I’m still a Queen and don’t take orders from anyone.

With her hands planted on her wide hips, she taps her foot as though she’s counting down to an attack. The thought of her two hundred-pound body tackling mine motivates me. I’m not ready to die. I have a future ahead of me. A title to recapture.

I manage to find all the ingredients. Winifred mixes them together in a large earthenware bowl.

“Now we have our dough,” she says.

She sprinkles our butcher-block worktable with some of the flour and places the mixture on the surface. “Now, comes the fun part. We get to knead it.”

We?I want nothing to do with this big glob of goo.

“Watch.” She plunges her hands into the dough and starts to push, pull, and fold it. “Kneading is great for releasing stress. Try it.”

Cautiously, I put my hands into the dough and copy her motions. It’s soft and warm. And you know what? It does feel good!

“I used to think that making bread was like making love,” says Winifred, her voice wistful.

A spark of interest kindles inside me.

“When I first got married, I would caress the dough and stretch it gently. Over time, I started to whack and squeeze it hard.”

Something in her relationship changed. Despite my curiosity, I let it go.

“Think about someone you hate and pretend he or she is the dough,” she tells me.

Shrink! Grimm! This fat chick and the rest of those pathetic loonies! I hate them all! To my surprise, I find myself tugging at the dough and bashing it. I break into a sweat as I work the dough harder and harder.

“Good job, Jane.” Winifred takes the dough from me and forms it into a round shape. Still flat as a board, it hardly resembles a loaf of bread.

“Do we bake it now?” I ask.

“No.” She places a towel over the dough. “We have to wait a half-hour for it to rise.”

What! Now, I have to hang out with her?

“Would you care for some chamomile tea?” she asks.

A cup of coffee would be more like it. Strong and black.

“Sure,” I tell her.

She boils some water in the cauldron and then returns with a tray holding two cups of tea and a plate full of biscuits. “Have one,” she says. “They must be left over from yesterday’s class.”

I bite into a tasty biscuit and notice she’s not eating one. She stares at me, salivating with envy.

“You’re so lucky you’re so thin. I bet you can eat anything you want and never gain a pound.”

I feel a tinge of pity. It must be awful to be that fat.

“My husband won’t make love to me anymore,” she says forlornly.

I wonder why she would ever want to make love to the creep who sent her here.

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