Page 58 of Sexy as Sin
“Which didn’t make your boss happy, I’m guessing.”
“No.” She knew she had to tell him. It had been a beautiful reprieve, here with him, but it had been a temporary one. “We got slammed on our Yelp page as well, and on Facebook, which I suspect you also saw. Over forty comments on Facebook, and six new reviews on Yelp, all one star, straight down the page. Somebody posted photos of those people, the old lady and the pregnant one, with tubes in their arms, and asked why the Food Authority hadn’t shut us down. Amanda deleted the photos from Facebook, but she couldn’t do anything about Yelp. She asked. They said no. It happened. It’s not a lie.” Another breath in and out, and the other thing. “And a customer canceled already, a good one. A wedding a month out. The wedding planner rang up and said they’d never get a good caterer this close to the date, like that was our fault, but she couldn’t risk the guests being ill. She asked for the deposit back. She won’t be using us again.”
“That’s one person,” Brett said. “Surely you mostly do destination events. Local gossip in Byron Bay isn’t even going to reach Brisbane. It’s certainly not going to reach Sydney.”
She had to admit it. “No. That’s where we want to get. It’s not really where we are now. We’ve been more local, but we were branching out.Iwas branching out. I had a luncheon tomorrow. Fundraiser for St. John’s, the ambulance charity. Too late for them to find somebody else, but they asked that Amanda do the cooking, even though the booking came through a wedding I’d done, and the menu was mine. I’ll go in and help her beforehand, but I can’t turn up at the venue.” The humiliation was there, burning hot in her chest, and the anger, too. “I didn’t do anything wrong, Brett. I sliced chanterelles.”
“If you didn’t,” he said, “and the supplier didn’t, then somebody else did, and slipped them into the bag at your kitchens or at the event itself. The question is: who? Why, and how? I’m guessing ‘why’ brings you to ‘who.’ Who were they targeting? The usual reasons for sabotage are money or sex. Possibly jealousy, or envy. Strong motivators.”
“Those last two are the same, surely.”
“Nope. Jealousy’s wanting somebody that someone else has, or worrying that somebody wants what’s yours. Envy’s wanting somethingthat someone else has. Envy’s ‘It’s not fair.’ Jealousy’s ‘She’s mine.’ They’re both pretty corrosive, though I’m going to admit that I’m understanding jealousy a little better than I used to. If I didn’t mention it...” His hand was on her bottom again, and he gave her a quick slap there. “I’m an exclusive guy, and I want you bad. Wait, though. Where were we?”
It took some focus to remember. “Money doesn’t make sense for anybody,” she said. “It’s Amanda’s business. Why would she try to destroy it? Why would anybody who works for us? That’s their job. The money doesn’t go anywhere but to her, to me, or back into the business. It’s set up as one of those, uh...”
“Pass-through entities,” he said. “The owners take a distribution, and they pay taxes on it.”
“Yeah. That.” This made her head hurt.
“She could be envious of you, though,” Brett said. “Though it’s hard to see her sabotaging herself. Why not just dissolve the partnership? I’m not forgetting that you asked to see the books last week, though, and she hasn’t turned them over.”
“Yeah.” She sighed. “Doesn’t make sense. We each take a percentage of the proceeds, but mine’s barely more than I’d make as an employee.”
He’d gone to full alert. “Barely more than you’d make as an employee? Why?”
“Because I bought in at twenty-five percent. Actually twenty percent, but five percent extra ownership because of my background, which I thought was good. I thought we’d grow it. It’s not like I could afford to set up on my own. And if you don’t mind, I already feel like enough of a fool just now.”
He sat and thought a while. She’d rather think about him being jealous, but she had to think about this, and she knew it. He finally asked, “What’s her husband like? Does he work for the business? I’m wishing I knew Australian marital law.”
“When did you meet him?”
“Hospital. He came in with her.”
“Oh. I forgot. He’s not bad. Fancies himself a bit, maybe. Gym body, tight jeans, artistic. Photographer. He has pieces in the galleries in town occasionally. The lighthouse, the beach, tourist stuff. He does the website and the food photos, and he helps on the admin side as well. But again—it’s his income he’d be destroying, and he’s a lazy sod, if you ask me. I doubt he wants to get a real job. Amanda thinks he’s brilliant, of course.”
“Why aren’t you doing the photos? You’re better.”
“You’ve seen my birds. That’s all.”
“I don’t care. His food pictures look greasy. Filmed from Mars, too, like the pictures on the window of a bad Chinese restaurant. I’ve seen your birds, and I’ve seen how you arrange things on a plate.”
“Plating,” she said, feeling obscurely better.
“Those pictures may have been good enough in the past,” he said. “They’re not good enough now, not if you’re aiming for the high end. When I looked your company up before our event, I wasn’t happy. I asked the PR woman why she’d gone with you. His work isn’t helping you one bit.”
She got a sick lurch low in her gut. “Rafe’s PA, Martin, the one who looked at the books before I bought in—”
“I know Martin.” Brett was still frowning. “A lot more capable than he lets on. I’d hire him away from Rafe, if he’d go. Don’t tell Rafe I said so. He said the books were all right?”
“Yeah. ‘Small potatoes, but everything adds up,’ is what he said. But he said the same thing you did about the photos.” She hated to admit this. She felt incompetent, back at the place she’d been for years, pushing against that glass ceiling and never breaking through, no matter how hard she’d trained, no matter how hard she worked. Passed over for the top spot, relegated to sous chef.
“You’re not temperamental enough,” her last executive chef, Louis, had told her at last when she’d left. When she’d asked. “Not in command. You’re a colonel, not a general.”
It was true. She didn’t want to be the one that all the egos battered against, the one who screamed out the insults, who bit and scratched her way to the top in the testosterone-fueled maelstrom of a high-end restaurant kitchen. Shedidwant to do the food the way she wanted to, though, and that privilege was the executive chef’s. It was why she’d gone into catering. It was why she’d gone intothis.With a woman, which, she’d thought, had to be better. “I’ve been thinking I could take that over,” she told Brett, with a sinking suspicion that he saw too much, because he always did. “So far, Amanda’s said no, that we’re fine, but I’ve been hoping to change that. And anyway—it’d be good to know what happened, but meanwhile, what do I do? The reviews are out there, so is the story, and I don’t know how to find out how it happened, other than that the mushrooms were in the cooler at Nourish, and then they were in the fridge at the bowling club. The venue.”
“Mm.” He was staring across the room, his straight dark brows drawn together. “Who opened the cooler, and the fridge? Who spent time with their head stuck in there? Who moved the bag of mushrooms that you know of, and who could have?”
She had to think back. “Heaps of people. You load up the van, and you unload it, besides making the food. Amanda, all four of the wait staff, and at the bowling club, the couple’s daughter-in-law, who was the client. She was in there constantly. One of those people who’s so convinced they have to make sure you do your job, you can’t do your job. Those would be the main ones. Other people, too, wandering in for drinks, even though we were serving. Feeling too comfortable, because it was their club. Too many people. I kept having to step around them.”
