Page 5 of Slow Simmer

Chapter Three

Suzannah couldn’t settle to anything once Carlo and Luke had left. She managed to curdle a sauce for the first time in years, burned her wrist on the edge of a hot pan and for the final straw dropped a carton of eggs pulling them out of the fridge. Staring down at the oozy, sticky mess running over her shoes, the cardboard container and the floor, she heaved a deep sigh and closed her eyes.

“Suzannah?” a voice said behind her, and then asked in her native French “Are you all right?”

Opening her eyes she looked around and found a smile for Edouard, the restaurant sommelier. A charming, handsome Frenchman some ten years her senior, she guessed the rest of her staff had probably recruited him to approach her, and with any luck get her out from underfoot before she did something disastrous.

“I think I’m having an off night, Edouard,” she replied in the same tongue.

“So I see.” He cast an amused glance down at her feet. “Dinner is almost completed. Why don’t you call it a night? I’m sure your sous-chefs can handle whatever is left.”

She knew they could. She’d trained them to her own exacting standards, after all. Looking around the kitchen, she saw a hive of ordered industry, everyone very studiously paying attention to their assigned tasks and not watching her at all.

“You might be right,” she said. “It’s been a long few weeks. I haven’t had a night off since I sacked Vicky.”

“You haven’t had a morning off, either,” Edouard pointed out dryly, taking a clean towel from a drawer and dropping it on the floor behind her. “Here. Step on that and clean your shoes off. Angelica,” he snapped his fingers at one of the apprentices, who dropped what she was doing and rushed over at once. “Clean this up, please.”

“Yes, sir!” The girl practically genuflected, hurrying to get cloths as Suzannah stepped onto the towel and wiped the egg white off her shoes. They needed cleaning properly, but she didn’t want to remove them in the kitchen.

“We’ve got this, boss,” Julie, her most senior assistant chef, called across the kitchen. “Go have an early night. God knows you deserve one.”

“All right, all right.” Suzannah surrendered to the inevitable. “Julie, you’re in charge.”

“I won’t let you down, boss!” Julie’s look of determination made Suzannah smile. The other woman would be a hell of an executive chef one day, and a lot sooner than she realised.

“Just a moment,” Edouard said, heading for the door, and when he returned he had a bottle of wine in hand. “Here. Take this with you and have a glass or two to help you relax.”

The wine had been opened and re-corked, Suzannah saw as she accepted the bottle. Her brows went up as she read the label and she looked a question at Edouard.

“A customer last night ordered and paid for it, but only drank half, and said he didn’t want to take it with him.” Edouard gave her a very Gallic shrug, and a wink. “It’s too good to give it to you heathens to cook with.”

Suzannah laughed, and tucked the bottle under her arm. “Thank you, Edouard.” She put a friendly hand on his arm. “I’ll enjoy it.”

Edouard smiled warmly back at her, urging her towards the rear door. “Go. Get some rest. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

* * *

Outside in the warm, jasmine-scented darkness, Suzannah slipped her sticky shoes off and stuffed her socks into them. There was grass alongside the paths which led back to her cabin, and she revelled in the soft coolness under her tired feet as she walked slowly through the night.

Crickets chirped in the bushes, and the soft strains of a piano being played at one of the resort’s bars drifted to her on the soft ocean breeze. It was an absolutely beautiful night, fragrant and serene. A night for lovers, Suzannah found herself thinking as she walked, and snorted aloud.

It was Carlo’s surprise arrival which had her thinking about lovers, of course. While he wasn’t the last man she’d shared her bed with, he was the last - indeed, the only - who’d left a lasting impression. The only serious relationship she’d ever had, in those long-ago days of first love she’d daydreamed of the two of them getting married and running a restaurant together someday. To her at age twenty, that had seemed the pinnacle of ambition.

Carlo, however, came from a very different background to Suzannah. She was the daughter of a working-class single father from one of the poorer districts of Paris, learning to cook when she wanted better than the simple meals which were all her weary papa could make when he arrived home tired from work. She got her first job aged thirteen at a cafe near their small apartment, and graduated from waiting tables to working in the kitchen a year later.

School had never been something she particularly enjoyed, but in the hum of a busy kitchen, Suzannah found her place in the world. The cafe owner saw the passion in her work and encouraged her to become a professional chef, setting up a savings plan for her and matching her savings when she was offered a place atLe Cordon Bleu.

Suzannah came from a working-class, hardscrabble background, and at just eighteen was thrust suddenly into a world she’d never realized existed. Most of the kids at the prestigious culinary school were from wealthy, even aristocratic backgrounds. Few of them had the ambition, drive or talent which propelled Suzannah to the head of the class almost immediately. Out of all her classmates, only Carlo could match her… and that was only because of his background, as the son of a wealthy Milanese family with an already-famous restaurant, one whose kitchen Carlo had literally grown up in.

She’d watched him with fascination, this assured Italian man - for even at nineteen, Carlo was definitely not a boy - whose hands were as confident as his attitude. Handsome, cockily sure of himself and his place in the world, Carlo never seemed to have doubts about anything he did, whereas Suzannah was constantly questioning and second-guessing everything from whether she had put too much pepper in the soup to whether she belonged among the well-heeled, wealthy crowd she was thrust into.

There were always girls hanging off Carlo, from the school and from other places, attracted by both his looks and the charisma he exuded as effortlessly as breathing. Invisible - or so she thought - Suzannah watched with both fascination and envy as the parade of beautiful, designer-dressed girls never seemed to end.

She hadn’t thought Carlo was even aware of her existence, such was her own inability to blend in with her classmates, until he looked across at her cooking station one day, catching her surreptitiously watching him, winked and said “You’ll want to watch that sauce, Red. I can smell burning.” He sniffed theatrically.

“It’s not mine,” she snapped back instantly, though she did take a moment to check. “I never burn things!”

“I know. I’m envious.”

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