Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors

by Sonali Dev

  “That’s okay,” she said, then she matched his mumble with, “It’s not like you need a photographic memory to cook food.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Trisha Raje was without a doubt the most insufferable snob DJ had ever come across in his entire bloody life. He’d been the poor boy at a Richmond private school. He’d worked at a Michelin-starred place des Vosges restaurant for ten years. He’d seen far more than his fair share of self-important, overprivileged gits. But it had never bothered him. Not like this. Her snootiness didn’t just get under his skin, it chopped up every bit of pride he’d ever managed to gather up and flung it all over the place like a blender you forgot to put the lid on.

  People were usually arrogant and snobby because they wanted to show you that they were superior to you. Trisha Raje’s sense of superiority was so inherent, so absolute that she couldn’t even seem to process why the oceans of other people’s approval may not automatically part for her. She actually had the gall to be impatient with the world for not getting how amazing she thought she was.

  It’s not like you need a photographic memory to cook food? Really?

  He’d been known to remember everything from allergies and pet peeves and wine preferences to the names of girlfriends and wives—which he never mixed up—after having cooked for a client just once. He could recite every one of Wordsworth’s poems from memory, thank you very much.

  Gritting his teeth, he turned his attention to Nisha again as she beckoned him to follow the sisters into the bedroom. Getting into tussles with Trisha Raje was the last thing he needed. The woman literally held Emma’s life in her hands, and her family currently held his career in their hands. Why was he having such a hard time with this? The thing he prided himself most on was his even temper.

  His mother had insisted on him keeping his head down and being nonconfrontational no matter what the provocation. Through his childhood he’d complied because he didn’t want to be one more thing that didn’t go her way. At seventeen he’d had enough of being a pushover, though, and had let his anger out. And it had tangled him up with a bunch of boys who thought nothing of setting things on fire when something made them angry. That had been the end of it. After that he’d never had to struggle with his temper. Until of course Trisha Raje had walked into his kitchen and knocked over his caramel.

  Now here he was, struggling to curb this urge to damn all good sense and unseat her from her pedestal.

  Unlike her, the rest of her family was terrific. Even so, it was clear that the Raje blood wasn’t just thicker than water—it was thicker than glue. They seemed to share this bond, as though they were their own galaxy, an eternal, perfectly stable system no outside force could ever breach or unbalance.

  It’s how families were supposed to be.

  He tried not to think of his grandmother, who, after her son died, had thrown his widow and her two grandchildren out of their home.

  Trisha Raje tucked the fluffy, pure white quilt around her sister and pushed her hair off her face, ignoring his presence in the room entirely.

  “I’m sorry, I should have warned you not to unzip the food bag in front of me,” Nisha said with the sweet grace that seemed to characterize everyone in the family except the one glaring exception. “It has nothing to do with your cooking, of course. I seem to have caught this awful stomach bug and food smells are making me sick.”

  Great. All that effort working on his preparations for days down the drain. “Please don’t apologize. It’s not your fault that you got sick. Rest now. We’ll figure the tasting out later.”

  Nisha sank back into the cloud of pillows. Trisha took her wrist as if to check her pulse. No doubt to prove to him that he must never again forget about her being a doctor and whatnot.

  He kicked himself for needling her. Because of course he’d offered to take Nisha to the doctor to get a rise out of her. Ah, sod it all, the satisfaction of seeing her turn shades was totally worth it.

  With any luck, she was only here to check up on her sick sister and it was time for her to leave.

  She settled in next to Nisha.

  Well then, it was time for him to leave. “Just text me when you’re better, and I’ll be back with the sampling.”

  The fund-raiser was a month away and he needed that much time for refinement and prep. Plus he had engagements on all the interim weekends so he had to work around those, too. Not that any of them mattered in the face of the fund-raising dinner, which was a two-hundred-person dinner at five thousand dollars a plate and was going to put a goodly dent in his financial troubles.

  He hated being poor. Given how much experience he’d had with it early in life, he should be better at dealing with it. But ease spoiled you fast. You forgot how to deal with all the little compromises of poverty the moment you made any money at all. Andre had called this morning asking if he was interested in the position of executive chef that had just opened up at one of his Vegas restaurants. But even if leaving Emma right now were an option, the idea of working in a restaurant again made DJ sick.

  He threw a despondent look at the door. In the kitchen sat the food he had spent days on. Being able to do this, to create food to fit an exact situation and an exacting audience—he wasn’t ready to give up on that dream yet.

  “Oh, we are doing the tasting today,” Nisha said, sinking deeper into her bed. “Trisha will work on the menu with you.”

  “No!” he said before he could stop himself. The urge to run for his life was overwhelming. “I mean that’s not necessary. Truly.”

  He couldn’t bring himself to look at the woman in question, but something told him she was glowering at him. This was that pound of flesh thing happening to him again. “I’ll wait until you’re better. Really, I don’t mind cooking all the food again next week when you’re better.”

  “You’d rather cook everything over again than have me taste it?” The haughty offense in Trisha’s tone wrapped up all the reasons why she was absolutely right. He would definitely rather cook the entire sampling menu ten times over than deal with her.

  “I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant at all.” He met her gaze, reaching for all the politeness that had been drilled into him since birth and failing wholeheartedly. “I got the impression you’d rather not do this either.”

  All her uppish airs intensified into a glare. He imagined her eyes turning into red lasers—and burning him down in one shot. “You’re right; I’d rather not. But I will if I must.”

  Dear Lord, please, why? Why? He’d spent hours, no, weeks trying to get these recipes just right. No way was this . . . this . . . self-aggrandizing snob getting at his food with that attitude.

  Nisha cleared her throat. “DJ, I’m sorry but I’m not going to be leaving the house for the next few weeks. I’m going to need you to help me out. Trisha is also going to have to go to San Francisco next week with you to review the arrangements at the ballroom.”

  God, he hoped the groan that ripped through him hadn’t escaped. But the pissiness on Trisha Raje’s face told him it had.

  Nisha turned to her sister. “Could you wait outside so I can talk to DJ for a moment?”

  “Really? He’s the one who needs convincing?” Her whine befitted the brat she was. “You know what? Whatever. I’ll be outside digging into his precious food. I’m starving.”

  “Please don’t touch my food.” The distress in his voice was pathetic, but he didn’t care.

  She looked at him as though she wanted to flip him off. However, being Ms. Fancy Pants, she restrained herself.

  Something he needed to start doing, too, and fast. “I mean, I’ll be out in a minute and we can do this right.”

  “Yes, the Checklist Manifesto as it applies to the fine art of putting food in your mouth,” she said grandly, to the exact effect of flipping him off. Then she flounced away and he imagined her devil’s tail swishing behind her.

  He almost followed her. There was no doubt in his mind that she had every intention of helping
herself to his food.

  “She won’t touch the food,” Nisha said to him. Then more loudly: “Trisha, don’t touch the food, please.” Then back to him, “She’s usually really nice.”

  He grunted without meaning to and then tried to turn it into a cough. But all that accomplished was to make him look stupid.

  “I think she’s hungry. Have you heard the term ‘hangry’? That would be her. Seriously, she’s usually the most easygoing and lovable of all of us, and we’re all rather adorable.” Nisha smiled a tad desperately, mirroring everything he was feeling. “Okay, so we’re not; but Trisha is only like this when she’s hungry and I’ve never seen her be like this with anyone outside the family.”

  “I’m honored,” he wanted to say. But for all of Nisha’s kindness she was still the one with all the power here, and they were the Raje Galaxy after all. He didn’t quite feel brave enough to risk a missed step. “It’s fine. I didn’t think Dr. Raje wasn’t being nice.” Just do not make me work with her, please. He buried that last part under his best smile.

  Nisha responded with a grateful, albeit unconvinced, smile of her own. The woman really was lovely. “I promise Trisha will be easy to work with.” The woman was also a dreamer.

  But she looked exhausted and ill. “Of course. I’ll be happy to work with whomever you want me to work with. Your sister seems like a perfectly nice person.”

  Being a pathological pleaser had always been a great asset in the service industry. It was called the service industry for a reason. Yes, he loved the spark of joy his food brought, but people were often idiots, and a professional didn’t treat the idiots differently from the good ones. Nisha was certainly one of the good ones.

  To her credit she laughed. Even as her eyelids drooped. For a moment she seemed so frail he was tempted to ask if she was okay again. But she had made it abundantly clear she’d told him all he needed to know. With a deferential nod he left her, trying to ignore the feeling of being forced to walk the plank.

  When he reached the bedroom door, he heard some scrambling. Really? The good doctor had been eavesdropping on them?

  He found her perched on a barstool at the breakfast bar.

  Perched and . . . munching on one of his crunchy corn-and-lentil papads.

  Red. His vision actually turned red. It had taken him three attempts to get the crunch exactly right, to get the corn and lentil to balance out, to get the wafer-thin chip to curl just so.

  “This is really delicious,” she said and he imagined her smacking her lips and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand like a vampire who had just fed.

  Reminding her that he had asked her not to touch his food would be useless, because evidently she didn’t put much value on processing simple requests from lesser beings.

  He tried to paste on his most amicable smile. And failed. “Glad you like it. Would you like to taste it the way it’s actually meant to be eaten?”

  Her shrug was followed by a suppressed smile. She was humoring him.

  The smile he forced out fought him hard. Whatever it was about her that made his civility crumble, he would not let it win. He started to plate the food the way it was meant to be presented and tried to keep his focus on the dinner he was going to blow into the stratosphere in a month.

  Her gaze settled on him. The strangely discomfited feeling he always got from unwanted attention crawled along his skin. He knew women found him attractive. Everyone seemed to expect him to be all cocky about it, as though it made him somehow a bigger man and being uncomfortable with unwanted female attention made him somehow less of a man. He had never been able to bring himself to give a rat’s arse.

  He put a pan on the stove and roasted the rumali roti quarters for half a minute on each side just until the butter in the dough sizzled, then placed them on a plate and trickled them with truffle oil. Then he placed a paper-thin slice of heart of fennel dusted with roasted cumin over them. In a bowl next to that, he laid out chicken in the simplest Mughlai sauce of steamed onion in cream with the slightest hint of saffron. Finally, he tucked a perfectly curled papad into the bowl.

  He slid the platter toward her, a ridiculous nervousness making him want to pull it back. It felt like exposing a piece of his heart to a mythical monster from one of Ammaji’s stories.

  That amused smile still danced around her too-wide mouth, but when he looked into her eyes, she stiffened, unsettled enough to sit up a little bit taller. Or maybe it was disdain for this incredible love he had for something as rudimentary as food. No surgeon’s hands here. He removed his plain old chef’s fingers from the edge of the plate and tried to loosen the giant knot lodged between his shoulders. Her opinion was nothing. If she didn’t like it, there were a thousand adjustments he could make. She was a client. Pleasing clients just so was what he did best.

  “Is there a particular way to eat it?” she asked, taking him completely by surprise.

  He narrowed his eyes, taking the mockery on the chin. “You put it in your mouth and chew.”

  “Thanks.” She cocked her head just a little bit, dislodging a lock of curls from behind her ear, and turned her attention to the plate. “But just dip it? Layer it? Or one bit of this, then another of that.” She pointed to things as though words were not enough.

  Something stirred inside him. It was the feeling of being faced with his own stupidity.

  You’re a chef? she was saying. And I have to explain these things to you?

  “The chicken first, because saffron is a lazier flavor in terms of how long it takes to surface and register. Then the roti, because truffle oil and fennel both can overwhelm, unless tempered by a palate already coated with a softer spice.”

  Her eyes were huge, slightly upturned at the corners, and soft—completely at odds with her personality. She blinked and looked away from him and back at his food. Then she did exactly as he had asked.

  Her neck was the first thing he’d noticed about her. She had the longest neck he’d ever seen, with delicate tendons bracketing the hollow that dipped at the base of her throat where all the luminescence of her skin seemed to gather. Sitting at the kitchen island on those tall, elegant stools that seemed like an extension of her body, her neck stretched as though she were reaching into his flavors with her entire being. He stood over her unable to look away as she chewed and swallowed and closed her eyes on a sigh.

  “Oh my God,” she said, her eyes fluttering open. Her pupils were dilated, that finely boned jaw moving in slow savoring beats, those long, sensible surgeon’s fingers dancing in front of her lips as though she wanted to lick the taste of his food off them. “You cannot possibly feed this to people.”

  He swallowed.

  “What about it bothers you?” he asked, knowing full well that he was fishing. Like a pathetic little boy trying to please his mother. All the bloody time.

  “The fact that you made me only one.” She was an entirely different person in her moment of wonder. “Won’t we bankrupt ourselves if people ate this, because how would they stop?” Her lush mouth parted in the center.

  “I can always try to make it less delicious.” He bit his lip, because he would not smile.

  “You have to at least try,” she said breathlessly as he put another one together and she ate it exactly the way he loved his food to be eaten. With reverence. Slowly. As though every bit meant something. Sparkles of warmth started in his chest, rippled across his skin, and traveled down his arms to the tips of his fingers.

  She ate like that for a while. No words for his stuffed peppers. None for his mint cucumber relish. None for his smoked pomfret rolls. Just eyes suffused with pleasure, the brown melting into amber with each swallow. The disdain in them smoked out of their depths, gone without a trace.

  Gone temporarily, he reminded himself, rubbing the warming sensation off his arms.

  “What do you think?” Nisha shouted from the bedroom after the silence had wrapped around them too long.

  It took a beat for either of them to register
Nisha’s voice. A beat in which their gazes caught and held and then acknowledged the breaking of a spell. A spell he had woven with his food.

  He imagined himself dusting off his hands, and blowing on them, his job done.

  Hired help, my arse.

  “I think I’ll help you with Yash’s fund-raiser,” she shouted in response. Then she went back to eating.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Do not change your mind about her. Do not change your mind about her just because of how she ate your food. DJ was fully aware that letting his guard down because Trisha Raje finally seemed impressed with him made him a complete and utter knobhead.

  “Nice car,” she said when she walked him to Emma’s hot-pink Beetle after the food he had brought with him had been thoroughly sampled and approved. And by approved he meant cleaned out, every last morsel of it. The woman could eat. Who would have guessed it?

  The delighted amusement that flashed across her face at the sight of the car was enough that he got a fleeting glimpse of why her family seemed to like her so much. Maybe Nisha was right and she was only insufferable when she was hungry.

  “I’ve dreamed of a hot-pink Beetle since I was a little boy.” He inserted the key in the door lock—yes, the car was that old—and unlocked it, causing Trisha Raje to smile as though he were the quaintest thing since the Queen’s shoes.

  “It does look like every little boy’s dream.”

  He was about to smile at that but she seemed to realize that she was being nice and her smile faltered. “Thank you for being flexible today. But I have to warn you that I know absolutely nothing about food or feeding people.”

  Shocker that. “Maybe you can ask someone else to do it. Mrs. Raje or Ashna perhaps?”

  Her smile fell off her face so fast it was like a magic trick. “Listen, we weren’t kidding about not letting anyone find out that Nisha isn’t feeling well. It’s absolutely crucial that no one finds out. Most certainly not our mother. But not even Ashna. If you can’t keep this to yourself, we’re going to have to find someone else to do it.”