Let Them Eat Stake: A Vampire Chef Novel by Sarah Zettel Read Free Book Online

competitive eating in its purest form. If your eyes water as you chew, you lose.
    Letting my gaze slide straight past them as if they were an uninteresting part of the scenery, I pulled up a stool at the bar. “Hi, Mama. Kidneys and a Heineken.” Hey, I was hungry too.
    “Special for the bar!” Mama bellowed toward her husband on the other side of the pass while opening my beer bottle and plunking it on the counter.
    “Yo, Chef C.” Minnie Perez, a line cook I’d known on and off forever raised her shot glass to me.
    “Yo, Cook M. How’s it going?” Minnie was a medium tall, medium brown woman with close-cropped hair whose ancestors came about evenly from Ecuador and Haiti. We weren’t the only women in the place, but it was close. The gender gap in the kitchen is closing, but it’s closing slowly.
    She shrugged and downed the shot of crystal clear something. “I’m quitting. I’m going back to school and getting my accounting degree.”
    “You’vebeen saying that for what, five years now?”
    “Yeah, but this time I mean it.” She pushed the glass back toward Mama Charlie, who shook her head and filled it up again with a distinctly non-top-shelf vodka.
    “You know what’s up with the cock party over there?” I nodded toward Oscar and his boys. I meant it as a play on “hen party.” Really. Stop looking at me like that.
    “You’d know more than me.”
    “Aren’t you going out with one of Perception’s fish guys?” It’s tough for a cook to have a social life. We’re up all night, asleep all day, and working holidays and Sundays. Unless we’re into nightbloods, we’re stuck dating one another.
    “Nah. He decided he was going to trade up for some pretty little thing working the door at Moody’s.”
    “Sorry.”
    “Don’t be. She can have him. Guy was useless. Still.” She grimaced as another burst of laughter exploded from the Simmons environs. “They do seem to be having a good time over there. Wonder who he screwed this time?”
    That was indeed the thousand-dollar question, but I just shook my head, and drank my beer. My kidneys arrived, piping hot and smelling richly of cayenne and cardamom. Other colleagues came up to us for an exchange of hellos and gossip. I heard from Ted that he’d been promoted to saucier at Savorings. I heard from Peter that the head housekeeper at the St. Francis had quit and management was making everybody’s life hell as a result. Colon was out of work again and trying to put the moves on Minnie anyway.
    All the while, I was aware of the way Oscar kept looking at me out of the corner of his famously photogenic dark eyes. I ate and laughed and drank and groused, and waited.
    Finally, Oscar heaved himself to his feet and sauntered over to the bar. Or, he would have sauntered if there was room for it. As it was, to get between the tables he sort ofhad to turn and scoot and suck in his gut, which was starting to overhang his belt just a little. Too many good dinners are ever the professional hazard of the working chef.
    “Charlotte Caine.” Oscar’s British accent is smooth and rich, with just a hint of the Gordon Ramsey temper waiting in the wings.
    “Good morning, Oscar.” I lifted my Heineken to him. “How’re things on the celebrity-chef circuit?”
    “It’s quite good, isn’t it? We’re developing our own line of exclusive products.”
    “Congratulations.”
    “Branded marketing, Charlotte. It’s the way of the present. I could put you in touch with people.”
    Those photogenic eyes made a slow and thorough appraisal of my person. They weren’t looking for weaknesses exactly, more like signs of wear. If I was honest, except for the telltale softening around his middle, Oscar still looked good. The gray streaks in his hair lent him gravitas, and his square, heavy-boned face was aging gracefully. Someone would have to look hard to see this man never stopped making calculations about who he was with and what were they good for. I looked hard,