Sexy as Sin (Sinful, Montana Book 3)

by Rosalind James

  “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. She did want 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 into this. 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.”

  “Right. Problem for another day, then. Here’s what you do now. You contact everybody you’ve cooked for in the past six months, since you bought into the company, and you ask them to leave a review on Yelp and a comment on your Facebook page. And a testimonial on the website, too.”

  “Email them, you mean,” she said. “What if they ask why, assuming they don’t already know?”

  “What have you lost?” he asked. “You need positive reviews up there, positive thoughts to counteract the negative ones. Some people will be scared away, maybe, by all this, but when nothing else happens, they’ll forget, especially once the negative comments get buried. You should be able to get six or seven reviews right away, and they’ll help. From the consortium’s PR woman, for a start. She’s not going to be gushing over anybody. Immensely critical woman. Four star with lots of detail, you can bet, which will be believable. And, no, you don’t email them. You call them, and you follow up with an email with the links. If they know about what happened, you acknowledge it, tell them there’s a suspicion of foul play, that it’s being investigated—you don’t say by whom—and meanwhile, all you want from them is an honest review of their event. And from now on, you mail every client a customer satisfaction survey card after every single function, small or large, and send them an email with a link to the same thing, that goes directly onto your website, and you follow up if you don’t hear back, which you usually won’t. And don’t tell me that you don’t know how to write the survey or the follow-up. I know how to write it. You put a spot for comments on there, too. You get all that going now, because this is survival mode. You pull out all the stops. And you don’t have enough reviews up anyway, not for the number of events you do and how good you are at it. That needs to change.”

  “Amanda won’t want to do any of it,” Willow admitted. “She keeps saying to lie low, and it’ll blow over. And that word of mouth is what grows the business.”

  “Sure it is. And sometimes, you have to goose word of mouth along. Anyway, is that good enough for you, to sit here and wait to see what happens?”

  “No. It’s not.” All the rage that had been building for the past three days rose to the surface. “I want to know who. I want to know why. And then I do want to bloody poison them.”

  He smiled, but when he went on, he was serious. “Then do it. Don’t ask for permission. Do it. I’m going to say something else, too. What if it wasn’t anything at all to do with you, or Amanda, or Nourish? What if Amanda’s personality is getting in our way? If nothing like this has ever happened before, why would it happen now?”

  “Dunno,” Willow said. “Why, besides me being in the picture now?”

  “Maybe it had nothing at all to do with the caterers,” Brett said. “Maybe it had everything to do with the guests.”

  It was two o’clock the next afternoon, and Brett’s morning calls and meetings were long since over. He still had a long list of things to check off today, and he was doing none of them. Instead, he was in the back of the car with Dave driving, on his way to the bowling club, and thinking about Willow.

  He’d nearly forgotten about Azra the night before, but when he’d gotten out of the shower with Willow and was in bed with her again and on the verge of drifting off to s
leep, the memory had caught at him, the way unfinished business always did, and he’d asked.

  He could feel her pulling away from him even while she was in his arms. He was sure he’d done that to somebody, and more times than he cared to admit. It wasn’t a great realization. “Her father wants her to come back to London,” she finally said.

  “Oh,” he said. “Is she going to go?”

  “She thinks she has to. She’s on a working holiday visa, and you can only work for the same firm for six months out of the year. It’s expiring in a month. Wollongong has offered to take her on permanently, but getting the visa sorted will take time. Lucky she’s a UK citizen, or she wouldn’t have any shot at all, but in any case, she’s going to have to go home first, and I’m not sure she’ll come back if she does.”

  “She has to leave Australia, anyway,” he said. “What if she doesn’t go home at all?”

  “She’s cut off, I guess. He wants her married, he wants her mum to arrange it, and he wants her staying there. All Azra wants is to design, and who knows if she’ll have the opportunity there, if she’s married? She’s so good, Brett. She loves it here, and she wants to try. Surely everybody should get to try. Surely nobody should have to get married if they don’t want to.”

  “Where’s her family from originally?” he asked.

  “Egypt. She’s spent nearly twenty years in the UK, but it doesn’t matter to him. She’s the only daughter, and he told her last night that she’s his shame. His shame.” Her voice was full of all that passion of hers, and he wrapped her up tighter. She put her head on his shoulder, sighed, and said, “Her brothers are saying the same thing. That she’s an embarrassment. I’d want to run fast and far. Her father told her she’s too old already, too fat and too dark, and that nobody will want her at all soon enough, and I can see her curling up under that. I told her I’m thirty, five years older than her, I’ve got all the opposite issues, and bodies are good for what you do with them, not just how they look to somebody else, and she just said, ‘You don’t understand.’ I should’ve stayed with her tonight. All this has been brewing for a long time, but it’s come to a head. She said to go, but . . .”

  “First thing in the morning,” he promised. “I’ll tell Dave six-thirty. How’s that? It’s nearly ten now,” he pointed out when she hesitated. “And there’s something in all of this that’s bothering you personally, too. What is it?” Besides that you think you’re—what? he didn’t ask. Too tall, too thin, too redheaded, and you throw yourself into life too hard? How could any of that be bad? Unfortunately, he knew how. People carried their baggage with them, and it could be a heavy load.

  She sighed. “If she really does leave in a month, I need a new flatmate, because I can’t do it alone. I can get one,” she hurried to say, like she wanted to make sure he didn’t feel too needed. She drove him nuts. “That’s not the issue. Housing’s hard to come by in Byron, and cheap housing’s harder than that. But she won’t be Azra. That’s the selfish reason. She’s a little bit of home, and good mates aren’t easy to find.”

  “No,” he said. “They’re not. And here’s a question for you. Why are you paying for an apartment at all when Rafe has a house here that he’s surely not in much, and that I’ll bet has room for you? I’ve wondered about that since I first found out who you were.”

  “How do you know Rafe has a house here?”

  “You told me.”

  “When?”

  “Sometime. Doesn’t matter.”

  “Bloody hell, mate,” she muttered, “remind me to guard my tongue better around you,” and he smiled. “Because . . .” she said, and stopped.

  “Because?”

  “Because he offered, but he’s Rafe. Because he and Jace have always known what they wanted to do, and they’ve made it happen. Because he isn’t . . .”

  “Because he isn’t really your brother, and it would feel like living in your parents’ basement anyway,” he said, and could feel the truth of that right through her body. “And when he was here, you’d think you were in the way, especially since he’s married Lily. I wonder if you give him enough credit.”

  “Oh, probably not,” she said. “It’s hard to give Rafe enough credit. The bloke’s perfect.” And he thought, How do I fix this one?

  He’d find a way. He always found a way.

  First things first. Right now, Dave turned into a parking lot, pulled the car to a stop insultingly close to the entrance, and said, “This is it.”

  A low, white building that surely wasn’t big enough for the purpose, shaded by palm trees. Pool-table-flat green grass around it like soccer fields, a few older people dressed in white moving around them, and not a single bit of neon. Brett asked, “Are you sure this is the bowling club?”

  Dave gave him the usual stare in the rearview mirror, as if Brett were a not-very-bright goldfish dumped into the tropical fish tank, and said, “I ought to know, mate. I told you, my brother-in-law practically holds the place up by himself. Boring as fuck.”

  Brett got his crutches and began the process of extricating himself from the car. “Your brother-in-law, or the club?”

  “Both. You said you wanted to come, though.” He waited for Brett, then walked to the front door beside him and held it. “More fool you.”

  “Mm.” Brett kept himself from laughing with an effort and followed Dave into a room halfway between a lounge and a restaurant, with a wooden bar along one end, a couple casual groups sitting at tables drinking beer, and big windows looking out at the soccer field, or whatever it was. “Wait. Where are the lanes?” Where was the noise, too?

  More astonished stare. “Lanes?”

  “Bowling.”

  He hadn’t known Dave could laugh. Everybody in the room turned to look. “Lawn bowls, mate,” his driver told him around his grin. “It’s not bloody tenpin. Who’d have an anniversary dinner in one of those? That what they do in the States, then? Take the missus out for a romantic night of chips and beer?” He was still shaking his head. “Lanes. That’s a good one.” He was headed toward one of the groups, then, and Brett followed after and thought, Icebreaker. That’s good, in order not to feel quite so stupid.

  Dave pulled out a chair at a table with three older men sitting at it, plopped himself into it, jerked a thumb at Brett, and said, “Brett Hunter. I’m driving him. Daft bastard asked to come with me today. He thought the bowling club meant tenpin, with the noise and the neon and all.”

  Another excuse for some jolly laughter all around, and one of the men, a hefty guy who was balding on top, said, “Reckon you’re out of luck, mate, not that you could be doing much bowling of any sort, from the looks of you. Fortunately, we’re all just here for the drink.” He stuck a meaty hand out across the table. “Seamus O’Donnell. Married to Dave’s sister, for my sins.” He inclined his head toward the open window. “That’s the missus out there. With her cousin.” He made a face. “We’ll let them get after it. Can I shout you a beer?”

  “A round for the table, maybe,” Brett suggested.

  “Won’t say no,” a leaner guy, dressed in white shorts and shirt like everybody else, said, and Brett took himself over to the bar to buy it. Dave followed, still grinning, carried the bottles back to the table, and handed them around.

  Brett levered himself down again and asked, “Question for you all. Does anybody actually drink Foster’s in Australia? I’m confused.”

  Another round of laughter and some comparisons of beer to various bodily fluids, and Seamus said, “You’re in God’s country now. New South Wales. Tooheys it is, or James Squire if you want to be posh. Now, Aidan and Dave here hail from Victoria and will be polluting their guts with Carlton Draught if you don’t teach them better. Better than Four-X up in Brisbane, but it’s marginal.”

  “Ah,” Brett said. “Regional preference. Got it.”

  “Don’t you do that in the States, then?” asked Aidan, the thinner one, while the fourth man, a watchful type, listened and said nothing.

&n
bsp; “Not so much,” Brett said. “If you’re broke, you drink what you can get. If you’re lucky, you drink something better.”

  “Truth,” Seamus said. “Bit like closing time in the pub that way.” He closed one eye. “The girls all look prettier during six o’clock swill, but the fatter your wallet, the better you’ll pull.” The comedian of the group, apparently.

  Dave was back to looking wooden again. “Hunter’s here to check out the scene of the crime, really,” he said. “He heard about the poisoning the other night. Knows one of the girls who was doing the serving.” A masterful piece of duplicity that Brett appreciated.

  “Ah,” Seamus said. “That was a pity. I never touch mushrooms, myself. You’ll never get poisoned by a good meat pie, says I. That was why I wasn’t the one with my head down the dunny all night.”

  “You were at the party, then,” Brett said.

  “Of course,” Seamus said. “Both Aidan and I were, and so was the missus. With her head in the dunny afterwards. Pity for Calvin and Myra Attenborough, having their night spoilt like that. Somebody should lose their license to serve meals, if you ask me.”

  “Mm,” Brett said. “A shame, after a special family event.”

  Aidan snorted faintly on his other side. “Or no?” Brett asked, and took a pull on his beer. It wasn’t bad, though a little thin for his taste. He didn’t drink during the day. Never mind. Research.

  “Some of them may be,” Aidan muttered.

  “Ah, mate,” Seamus said. “She can’t help herself. Fenella Attenborough,” he told Brett. “Married to Frank, Calvin and Myra’s oldest. Frank and Fenella. Sounds like a sitcom, and if it were funnier, it’d be one. Got to have her way, and to hell with anybody else. She’s run afoul of Aidan’s missus lately, and nearly every other soul in the place at one time or another. There’s always that one hen in a flock looking to outshine the rooster.”

  “She’s the one who’s pregnant now?” Brett asked like a man who was interested.