LITMIR.BIZ

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did it matter who’d applied what to the damned thing? Besides, Chef Florenze had made it clear she would not actually leap through the real cake. Why ruin the best part of a dozen eggs, two pounds of butter, and all that confectioner’s sugar?

      “It will be a cardboard cake,” he’d said while she’d gawked at him. “You will pop from it cleanly.”

      Perhaps it was his incredible assumption that she’d even consider doing such a thing. Perhaps it was his solemn assurance that she wouldn’t have to contend with leaping through the butter-cream frosting. Whichever, a wild image had bloomed in Lucinda’s head. She’d pictured herself bursting from the top of a cardboard cake wearing the tiara, the thong, the barely-there excuse for a bra, and a jack-in-the-box mask.

      The first semi-crazed snort of amusement had burst from her throat. The chef, naturally enough, had misunderstood.

      “Ah,” he’d said with a beaming smile, “I am delighted to see that this little assignment is to your liking, Ms. Barry. I had, if only for a moment, feared you might, ah, might not be pleased with it.”

      “Pleased?” Lucinda had repeated, the urge to laugh buried under the stronger urge to connect her fist with Chef Florenze’s chubby triple chins. “Pleased with being told you want me to display myself, naked, to a mob of howling hyenas?” She’d looked down at the small white box that held the costume he wanted her to wear and shoved it back at him. “Have you lost your mind?”

      “Ms. Barry. I have explained the situation. The actress hired for the occasion—”

      “Actress,” Lucinda said, and gave another snort, though not of amusement.

      “She has fallen ill. And you must take her place. I’ve told you that three times.”

      “And I’ve told you that I’m here to cook, not to—to entertain a bunch of degenerates.”

      The chef drew himself up. “Degenerates, indeed,” he said coldly. “These men are drawn from the finest families in San Francisco. They are captains of industry.”

      “They are drunk,” Lucinda replied, even more coldly.

      “They’re celebrating. And a girl popping out of a cake is part of the celebration.”

      “Call a modeling agency. Call wherever it is you hired that ‘actress’ and hire another.” Lucinda folded her arms and looked the chef in the eye. “I’m not doing it.”

      Florenze waved a pudgy hand at the wall clock. “It’s almost ten at night. The agency is closed.”

      “A pity.”

      “Do you recall culinary lesson three? How to improvise when the soufflé falls?”

      “What has that to do with this?”

      “I am improvising, Ms. Barry. I am making do with the materials at hand.”

      Lucinda’s eyes narrowed. “I am neither an egg white nor a bar of bitter chocolate, Chef Florenze.”

      The chef smiled thinly. “Look around you. Go on, look. What do you see?”

      “The kitchen in which I’m supposed to be working.”

      “What you see,” he said impatiently, “are six students. Three men, three women, yourself included.”

      “So?”

      “So,” the chef purred, “I suspect we can agree that our guests would be less than delighted if Mr. Purvis, Mr. Rand or Mr. Jensen leaped from a cake tonight, hmm?”

      Lucinda said nothing.

      “Can we agree, too, that the venerable Miss Robinson would surely get hurt trying to extricate herself from anything other than an armchair? And that Mrs. Selwyn would never fit inside a cake unless it had the dimensions of Cheops’ pyramid?”

      “What you’re asking me to do is a barbaric, sexist, disgusting custom.”

      “So are half the things done on this planet, but we are not anthropologists, we are caterers.” The chef moved closer. “Our catering contract calls for roast beef, barbecued pork, filet of sole almondine, assorted salads and breads, coffee, beverages—and a giant cardboard cake that contains a young lady. Is that clear?”

      “A very strange contract for a catering firm, if you ask me.”

      “I’m not asking you for legal advice, Ms. Barry. I am telling you that you will put on that costume and do what must be done.”

      “I paid my tuition to be taught to cook.”

      The chef had smiled slyly at that, and Lucinda had, for the first time, felt the ground slip, ever so slightly, beneath her feet.

      “Which you have not learned to do very well.”

      He was right, but what did that have to do with anything? “I attended the specified number of classes,” she’d said coolly. “I passed all the exams. I earned my certificate.”

      The chef, damn him, had laughed.

      “All your exams but the last,” he’d said. “And you won’t get your certificate, if you fail tonight’s test.”

      Meaning, Lucinda thought as she looked into the mirror, meaning, she would have to pop out of that miserable cardboard creation or walk away from Chef Florenze’s culinary school without the piece of paper she so desperately needed.

      With it, she’d be a woman with a skill. She could parlay the cook’s job the school had lined up for her into a job as a sous-chef at a restaurant, and go from that into being a full-fledged chef with her own restaurant someday, or her own catering firm…

      Without it, she’d be back to waitressing.

      “That’s blackmail,” Lucinda had protested, and Chef Florenze had shown his teeth beneath his skinny excuse of a mustache and said yes, yes, it was, and she was welcome to try and prove any of this conversation had taken place because it hadn’t.

      “Just think of this as your fifteen minutes of fame,” he’d purred. “Your once-in-a-lifetime moment in the sun—”

      “Just give me the miserable costume and shut up,” Lucinda had snapped, and startled the both of them.

      And now, here she stood. In the wings, as it were, dressed in little more than a handkerchief and two halves of a diaphanous, spangled eggshell.

      “Lucinda,” she said aloud, “are you insane?”

      She had to be, even to have contemplated doing this thing.

      “Ridiculous,” she said, and quickly gathered her hair at the base of her neck.

      The audacity of Chef Florenze. The nerve! How dare he do this to her? She was a Barry, and Barrys had stood firm on their principles for more than three hundred years. Well, except for her father, of course. But other Barrys had always Done The Right Thing. Hepzibah Barry had been burned alive in Salem, rather than say she was a witch. Could she, Lucinda Barry, do any less in the face of misfortune?

      “Lucinda?” The doorknob rattled. “Lucinda, open this door at once!”

      The voice was faint but unmistakable. Miss Robinson was demanding entry.

      Oh, Lord. Miss Robinson. Eighty years old, at least. Tiny, ramrod-straight Miss Robinson, with her permed silver hair, her black dresses buttoned to the throat and wrist, her parchment-paper skin…

      “Lucinda! Open the door and let me in.”

      Lucinda undid the lock and cracked the door an inch. “Miss Robinson.” She took a breath. “I’m, uh, I’m kind of busy in here. If you need to use the, uh, if you need to use the facilities, I’m afraid you’ll have to—”

      “I’ve come to talk to you. Stop babbling and let me inside.”

      Lucinda grabbed a guest towel from the vanity, clutched

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