by Cara Adams
Werewolf Castle 4
Two Wolves and a Cook
Where can an IT geek take two chefs on a date? Ion Varga is a werewolf and a Dom. Evan Huber is also a wolf, but Anastasia Golubev is human. Apart from that, they start work insanely early each day and work a seven-day week. By the time Ion solves that riddle, trouble has broken out in the Castle Kitchens.
It’s the height of the tourist season at Werewolf Castle, Anastasia has three big, bossy, older brothers, the new banquets are creating an enormous amount of work, and Evan thinks Lev is spying on them all. Ion worries Lev wants Anastasia for himself. Anastasia just wants them to take her down into the dungeons for some nice relaxing BDSM scenes. Lucky for her, Ion knows exactly how to please her and teach her and Evan some new games. But can his IT skills help solve their problems? Or will Lev’s people succeed?
Genre: BDSM, Contemporary, Ménage a Trois/Quatre, Vampires/Werewolves
Length: 35,760 words
TWO WOLVES AND A COOK
Werewolf Castle 4
Cara Adams
MENAGE EVERLASTING
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK
IMPRINT: Ménage Everlasting
TWO WOLVES AND A COOK
Copyright © 2013 by Cara Adams
E-book ISBN: 978-1-62740-673-4
First E-book Publication: November 2013
Cover design by Les Byerley
All art and logo copyright © 2013 by Siren Publishing, Inc.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
About the Author
TWO WOLVES AND A COOK
Werewolf Castle 4
CARA ADAMS
Copyright © 2013
Prologue
Somewhere in the south of Europe, where the summers are hot and the winters are mild, is a large castle nestled against tall mountains. The mountains are wild and untamed. And so are the werewolves who live in them. Including the ones in the castle. Werewolf Castle. Where the dungeons are the setting for intense scenes of BDSM punishment, love, and orgasms. And the partnerships are always in threes. Two werewolf men and one human woman.
Chapter One
Despite the old, solid, thick, stone walls, it was hot in the kitchen and Anastasia Golubev’s hair was sticking to her face and neck. She took a moment to rub her wrist across her face, hoping to wipe away the sweat, and was grateful her hair was so short. Long hair in this heat would be even worse. She stretched her back out straight and glanced around. Everywhere in the huge old kitchen people were concentrating on their tasks. The first of the midday banquets was being held today, and Evan Huber, the chef, was concentrating on it, leaving her to supervise the usual meals served to the tourists and staff of the castle.
Werewolf Castle was not just the home of the mountains’ werewolf clan, it was also a successful tourist attraction. People came from all over Europe to see the medieval building from the top of the north tower right down into the dungeon, complete with quasi-medieval torture implements. And every single one of those tourists needed feeding. Which was her job.
An enormous pot of werewolf stew was bubbling on the stove. The stew was immensely popular and was served every day without fail. As was their own medieval flat bread to eat with it. Actually, the bread wasn’t as full of husks as it would have been a few hundred years earlier, but it was as close as Evan was prepared to make it to ensure the tourists would enjoy it. It was a lot more filling and nutritious than many types of store-bought bread, anyway. And no, it wasn’t really a secret that the meat in the werewolf stew was actually beef, not werewolf. But the vegetables were time appropriate as was the spicy sauce it was cooked in.
The slowest part of the menu was the spit-roasted lamb. Even though the spit was a mechanized one inside a commercial oven, instead of the lamb being roasted over the fire with a person turning the spit by hand, a side of lamb big enough to feed eighty or so people took quite a few hours to cook. It was the first thing Anastasia had started cooking at six this morning, and it would be finished just in time for Evan to carve it with a medieval flourish, at the banquet.
Although the guests would be seated in two different ancient rooms, side by side each other, Evan planned to have two men carry the lamb in on a tray and display it for both groups to see. He’d talk very briefly about the lamb and how it was cooked, before actually carving it. What neither tour group would know was that after they’d been served, the remainder was to be used for the regular tourists as an extra item on the Castle Kitchen menu.
Anastasia loved cooking and food. As a small girl with three older brothers who all liked to eat plenty of food, she’d joked that she had to help cook as it was the only way she could be sure she’d get anything to eat. But her brothers, while all big and bossy, had always adored her and would never ha
ve let her go hungry in reality. She just enjoyed being in a kitchen surrounded by a thousand different scents, chopping and dicing, sautéing and grilling, and then watching the pleased faces of those who ate her creations.
Which brought her back to her current tasks. In medieval days people had hated eating raw fruits and vegetables. They’d insisted food be cooked so even the local seasonal fruits had been preserved in honey or baked into pies. The castle used both items on their menus with a range of different pies and honeyed fruits. The tourists were often a little skeptical about honeyed fruit, but curiosity frequently won out, and once one person in a tour group tasted a honeyed pear or an apple baked with cinnamon and rolled in honey, others wanted to try them as well, and sales were good.
At the banquet, many dishes were to be offered, but there would only be a small quantity per person of each item, a little more than a taste, but not as much as a full serving. This was in the tradition of the meals at the time, where even the rich couldn’t be sure there’d be enough food to last through winter, so they normally ate sparingly. The very poor, of course, sometimes starved to death. But apart from following tradition, it also made sense, as with a taste of everything the guests would be able to try a lot of different dishes, and come away with a better idea of how meals tasted hundreds of years ago.
With the banquets to prepare, more workers had been needed in the kitchen, and more servers as well. Several of the older men and women had been keen to become servers. It was hard work, but only for a few hours a day so was ideal for people in their fifties and sixties who no longer wanted to work a long, physically tiring day from eight in the morning until six in the evening, the hours the castle was open, seven days a week.
Kiril Engel and Magnus Adler, who’d previously worked for the Alpha in Germany and Vienna, but had been recently recalled to the castle, were the new kitchen hands. It wasn’t work either of them was familiar with, as they’d been working in construction. But they were both solid, muscular wolves, plenty fit and strong enough to lift twenty- or even fifty-pound bags of potatoes, onions, turnips, and crates of cabbages, to load and unload the commercial dishwashers, or scrub pots and pans.
Anastasia watched Kiril, who was dicing carrots for her. He was doing a good job, the pieces coming off the blade of his knife in regular, neat portions. Magnus was wearing a pair of swimming goggles as he diced onions. Everyone had laughed when he’d brought the goggles into the kitchen on his second day on the job, but it did seem to help him not cry while he chopped, so it was all fine by her.
Over on the long work table, Kady Balan was rolling pastry in long, thin strips ready for the pies. She and Kady had spent a lot of hours Googling the various types of pies and ingredients in them, then how to make the pastry look just like it had in medieval days. They’d found a few new recipes to expand the menu, and they also decided on a simple w for the decoration on the crust. The w was already embroidered on the table runners and on the pockets and collars of the musicians’ clothing, so since more decorative food presentation was only just beginning in the late Middle Ages, they’d decided to stick with the castle motif for the time being.
Evan was checking on his team of people for the banquet, and the rest of the kitchen staff seemed to be doing fine, so Anastasia was about to get back to work on her tray of apples to be baked, when the back door of the kitchen opened and Lev stepped inside. He didn’t work in anything associated with the food side of the business, so she wondered who he’d come to see. He walked first to Kiril, who clearly gestured to him to go away, then he went to Magnus, who pulled down his goggles and didn’t seem pleased to see him. Lev was waving his arms around, obviously trying to make a point, and Magnus was shaking his head, just as obviously refusing whatever Lev wanted. Finally, Lev left. Anastasia shrugged and turned back to her food. Who knew what the man had wanted, but it clearly was nothing she need worry about. The apples, however, she did need to attend to. By eleven o’clock people would start lining up for their lunches, and the baked apples were a popular menu item.
* * * *
Evan Huber wasn’t sure whether he was excited or terrified by the fact that today was the very first ever banquet at Werewolf Castle. Years ago, when the Alpha had first decided to turn the castle into a tourist attraction, he’d asked to be allowed to go to one of the top cooking schools in Italy. Since food would be an integral part of whatever the castle offered as a tourist attraction, the Alpha had not only agreed but paid for his course and for his accommodation while he completed a further two years in a highly regarded restaurant in Paris.
He supposed he’d become stuck in a rut to some extent. Oh yes, he changed around the menu with the passing seasons and added new dishes from time to time, but basically his life was in his kitchen and he was pretty happy about that. Until the idea of the banquets had been suggested. The concept was brilliant and perfectly suited to the castle. They had the space to hold the meals, they had the staff to offer entertainment and service, and suddenly he had the motivation to experiment with new meals and new tastes. And now it was all about to happen. He’d rehearsed his servers, making them carry trays piled with plates or heavy pots filled with water, to get used to the weight they’d be holding.
Evan had even convinced forty wolves to sit around the tables and pretend to be eating as the servers moved around the room removing plates then serving them again. He was confident his staff was as ready as they could be. But this was still their first banquet and he was filled with nerves about the myriad things that could go wrong.
Because the banquets were being incorporated into existing tours, the meal could only last an hour, the time the tourists had been allocated originally for their meal break. Where there was space available, other non-tour guests would be allowed to share in a banquet as well, but the first few dates were solidly booked up. It wasn’t worth cooking so many extra dishes for less than a complete tableful of guests. Each of the two identical rooms had a long table that held up to twenty-two guests. The meal would be either the conclusion of a morning tour group’s activities or the first item on an afternoon tour.
Just then, Damask entered the kitchen. “Hi there, Evan. The tourists are being seated now, then Jairus as Master of Ceremonies will speak for about three minutes. Will you be ready by then or does he need to keep talking?”
Evan grinned. “Tell him to save his terrible jokes for later in case something goes wrong. We’ll bring in the bread and pottage in exactly three minutes.”
The bread was waiting on several large trays covered with linen towels to be period correct, and the pottage was keeping warm on a cooktop. He was cheating a little here. The large metal pots were not medieval, although pottage then would have been cooked in metal cauldrons.
He waved to his team of servers, and they collected their trays. Kiril held the door open for them and they followed Evan out of the kitchen and into the inner courtyard. The two rooms being used for the banquet were very close by because they’d originally been food storerooms. He stopped at the doorway to the first banquet room and Jairus smiled at him, finishing what he was saying and exiting the room. Jairus would be giving the same speech in just a few minutes to the other banquet room. His servers would return to the kitchen as soon as they’d served what was on their tray, and then bring a fresh tray to the second room and do the same thing again.
Evan took a deep breath, stepped into the room, and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m the chef here at Werewolf Castle. Your first course today is pottage. Sip it slowly and savor the spices. Chew your bread slowly and notice the different texture from what you would buy in a store. Then when you finish your pottage remember this—that was all a peasant would have eaten in medieval times. A bowl of pottage and piece of coarse bread. Fortunately, you have several more courses still to taste, as we’re serving you a meal a noble person would partake of. Enjoy your meals.”
Each time Evan returned to his kitchen, everything there was going as smoothly as normal. Anastas
ia was doing a wonderful job supervising the staff for him. She was the perfect sous-chef, talented with food and able to manage the team of staff or work alone, whatever was required. She’d started working summers for him three years ago and had been full-time now for almost two years. At first he’d been very aware of her lithe body, sparkling gray eyes, and blonde head, but more recently he’d hardly noticed her.
She was so good at her job, he only needed to mention something to her and he knew it would be done. Like today. The regular food for the tourists was completely under control even though Magnus and Kiril still needed a lot of help and instruction. At least Kady knew what to do. Like Anastasia she was a trained chef, although neither of them had worked internationally. They didn’t need to. They were more than good enough already.
Anastasia. She was a very attractive woman, but so quiet and efficient he’d forgotten about her for months on end. Likely he should stop doing that. It was really time he found himself a mate and settled down, and she was a human. As a wolf, he and another wolf would have to join together to partner a human woman. The entire program sounded insane, but it worked. When wolves kept marrying other wolves for generation after generation, the number of female births gradually declined. Nowadays, only about a quarter to a third of all births to wolves were females. Yet when a wolf mated a human, the births climbed back to fifty percent. Not that the statistics had worked in her family’s case. She had three older brothers, two of them wolves and one human like her and her mother. Evan shrugged. It was all in the genes. The baby either got the wolf gene or it didn’t. That was how it happened.