Battered to Death (Daphne Martin Cake Mysteries) Read Online Free PDF Page A

wondered again about Chef Richards. Was he as harsh as he’d tried to come across today in class? He’d greeted us all nicely—I wouldn’t go so far as to say warmly—when we got to class. He hadn’t been impersonal or unfriendly. Then he’d begun the class and behaved like a complete ass. Was it part of his performance as the caustic celebrity chef? Could he turn the attitude on and off as if it were a light switch? Did he employ it only when he was onstage—with any venue in which he was performing as the celebrity chef serving as his stage?
    He’d been critical of Gavin Conroy’s appearance. Yet Chef Richards’s own assistant had an unconventional hairstyle and fashion sense. Had Mr. Conroy been planted as a student in order to give Chef Richards someone with whom to argue? Given that Fiona had done almost all of the actual Australian string work, I had to wonder how much of Chef Richards’s celebrity was due to his bluster and how much was to be credited to actual talent.

3
B Y THE time Ben arrived to pick me up for dinner, I’d showered, put on a plum-colored wrap dress, reapplied my makeup, and felt like a brand-new woman. I’d even talked myself out of dreading tomorrow’s class with Chef Jordan Richards. So what if the guy was a jerk? The rest of the class and I had survived the first day. We’d get through the second. Plus, I was learning some fantastic new techniques.
    “You look beautiful,” Ben said.
    “You look pretty hot yourself,” I told him. And he did.
    Ben was gorgeous. He had wavy light-brown hair, sky-blue eyes, and a lopsided smile. He worked out at the gym every other day and had once won the Sexiest Male Editor of the Year award. Okay, I’m joking about that last part. To my knowledge, there was no such award. But had there been, my Ben would have won it. Tonight he wore navy dress pants, a light-blue shirt that brought out those eyes, and a tan sport coat.
“I have a surprise for you,” I said.
    “I have a surprise for you . I made reservations at that little Italian place outside of town,” he said. “I hope that’s okay.”
    I smiled. “You know I love that place.”
    “Yeah, I do.” He kissed me. “Now what’s your surprise?”
    I stepped over to the island and retrieved the white box tied with a red velvet bow. I handed the box to Ben.
    “Wow. What’s the occasion?” he asked.
    “It’s nothing much. I guess the occasion is that I just wanted you to know I was thinking of you when I got home this afternoon.”
    He opened the box. “Oh, man . . . These are my favorites!”
    “I know,” I said.
    He took out one of the cookies and bit into it.
    “You’ll spoil your appetite,” I warned.
    “No, I won’t,” he said. “Did you have fun in class today?”
    “ ‘Fun’ isn’t exactly the word I’d use to describe it,” I said. “But I don’t want us to lose our reservation. Let me tell you about it on the way.”
By the time we pulled into the parking lot at Geppetto’s, Ben had heard the whole saga. He shook his head. “Chef Richards is lucky that the guy he called sloppy didn’t punch him in the face . . . unless he was planted there, like you said. But you weren’t planted there, and he wasn’t kind to you. Someone will eventually put that man in his place. Bullies usually wind up meeting their match one way or another.”
    “Well, forgive me for saying so, but I hope I’m around to see it when Jordan Richards does meet his match.”
    Those words would eventually turn up on a plate served with sides of fear and regret, and I’d be forced to swallow them whole. But tonight, I was having pasta.
    T HE G EPPETTO’S HOSTESS showed us to an intimate table for two by a window that looked out upon the river. It was a lovely late winter’s night. The sky was clear, and the moon was full. The hostess told us that our waitress, Kaitlyn, would be right with us, and then she returned to her post to seat the next arriving patrons.
    While we awaited