Page 25 of Slow Simmer

Right now, he couldn’t even think about it. He had a disaster to salvage, and he wasn’t even sure he could calm Samira down enough to help.

“Hey. Hey! You can fall apart later,” he said, Grasping her shoulders in his hands and giving her a gentle shake. “This is horrible, but trust Chef Monteil to get to the bottom of it and deal with whoever did it. You and I have a cake to fix. Now, I’m gonna strip off this icing and start fresh… how many sugar flowers do you reckon you can make in the next three hours?”

Samira gulped down a sob. “Twelve,” she said in a shaky voice after a moment’s consideration. “Maybe a couple more, if we can spare someone to help dry them.”

“We’ll find someone.” Filming his You Tube show would have to wait, but Gemma was a helpful sort. Once he filled her in, he had no doubt the photographer would be more than willing to stand by Samira and transfer sugar petals in and out of the dehydrators. “I can probably get another five or six done once I’ve re-iced. That’ll have to do.”

There had been over thirty originally. Maybe once the lunch rush was finished - and Suzannah was going to have to cover the jobs both he and Samira would normally be doing - they’d be able to get another couple of hands in. It wasn’t Suzannah’s forte, but she was absolutely capable of making the flowers too.

There was no time to waste. With another gentle squeeze on Samira’s shoulders, Carlo let her go and stepped forward to pick up the cake. “Thank God they didn’t just smash something heavy down on it. We’d be screwed.”

“It would have made too much mess.” Samira sniffed. “Oh… look!”

Now Carlo had picked the cake up, they could see what lay behind it; a discarded, empty bottle of food colouring and a pair of food handling gloves, green stains marking the fingers.

“I bet they wore those to crush the flowers, and then poured the colouring over it. What assholes! Who would do this?Why?” Samira’s cry was plaintive.

“I don’t know,” Carlo said grimly, “but I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes when Suzannah catches up with them.”

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