Page 66 of Burn for You (Slow Burn 1)
Add 3 cups of the flour to the egg/yeast mixture. Stir to combine.
Add the shortening and mix. Continue to stir while slowly adding the remaining flour until all ingredients are well combined.
Place dough on lightly floured surface and knead until smooth.
Cover dough with plastic wrap or towel. Let rise at room temperature for 2–3 hours.
Preheat oil in a deep fryer to 350 degrees.
Roll the dough out to ¼² thickness and cut into 2² squares. Deep fry in batches, flipping constantly, until golden. (If beignets don’t pop up, oil isn’t hot enough.)
Drain on paper towels.
Shake confectioners’ sugar onto hot beignets. Serve warm.
NINETEEN
BIANCA
I left the same way I arrived: in a cab, by myself, fraught with anxiety.
If my mother knew what I’d just agreed to, she’d slap me silly.
She knew I’d gotten the twenty thousand from Jackson for the catering event, but admitting I’d be getting a million for marrying myself off to him so I could try to save her life was another situation altogether.
Knowing there would be a nondisclosure in our contract was actually a relief. It meant I had a legal obligation to keep my mouth shut about my real reason for marrying the Beast.
Now I just had to figure out what fake reason I was going to try to sell.
“He’s so charming I couldn’t help but fall in love with him, Mama!” I muttered sarcastically to myself. The cabbie shot me a strange look in the rearview mirror, but I had more important things to worry about than his opinion. Before I left, Jackson told me that we had to be married and living together by his birthday, which was in just over two weeks.
Two weeks. I had to think fast.
“Unplanned pregnancy?” I mused, garnering another stare from the cabbie. I thought about it a moment, then shook my head. “Not unless you want to pretend you’ve been sleeping with a man everyone thinks you hate and then fake a miscarriage in a few months.” I sighed, watching sunlight glitter off the lake as we sped by. “Temporary insanity? Hmm. Probably the most reasonable explanation, other than suffering a recent head injury. Lord, this is bad. How am I gonna get anyone to believe I married him for love when all we do is fight?”
The cabbie, a young black man wearing a New Orleans Saints cap backward, said, “Slap, slap, kiss.”
Startled, I looked at him. “Excuse me?”
He grinned, exposing an impressive set of gleaming white teeth. “It’s a popular film and TV trope where the writers put two characters who can’t stand each other in close quarters and let them verbally spar, until one of them suddenly kisses the other, and they both realize they’ve had mad sexual chemistry all along and the fighting was just a cover for it.”
I stared at him with my mouth open.
He shrugged. “Just brainstorming with you. I’m a writer. Or trying to be. I spend lots of time studying this trope stuff. It’s actually how stories are told. Even Shakespeare is filled with tropes.”
I said drily, “You don’t say.”
“Oh yeah,” he replied vigorously, warming to the subject. “For instance, Much Ado About Nothing? That play is stuffed so full of tropes you could choke on them! But the bottom line is that two of the main characters, Beatrice and Benedick, have this history of seriously hating on each other, but everyone else can see they’re perfectly matched. I mean, the opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s indifference. They wouldn’t fight so much if they didn’t care so much, right?”
I said, “It sounds like a really dysfunctional relationship, if you ask me.”
The cabbie’s grin grew wider. “Yeah, but all the best ones are. It’s not true love if you don’t want to kick his teeth in every once in a while.”
According to that definition, Jackson and I were a match made in heaven.
I was silent for the rest of the ride home, grateful for the time to think. When I got home, I changed into my work clothes and headed over to Mama’s to check in on her before I went to the restaurant.
And nearly had a stroke when I saw the motorcycle parked at the curb outside her house.
