Shrugging, Dani turned her attention to clearing the empty chafing dishes and bowls. The college crowd’s love life wasn’t her problem; the party’s desserts were.
After a few trips back and forth to the kitchen, Dani was putting down the last trays of banana-coconut upside-down cake and dark chocolate truffle tarts when Vance spotted the sweets. He and Regina had been whispering a few feet away, but he grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the food.
As he lumbered drunkenly toward the cake, he stumbled against one of the bamboo torches that Regina had insisted bracket the buffet. The torch snapped in half and fell across the tabletop. The fuel canister’s lit wick touched the raffia skirt, which burst into flames.
Dani’s pulse raced, and for an instant, she froze as the dried grass fiber blazed. Then instinct kicked in and she dropped to her knees. Searching under the table for the fire extinguisher she kept handy anytime she used Sterno to keep the food in her chafing dishes warm, she nearly cried in relief when her fingers brushed the metal canister.
Yelling for everyone to stay back, Dani held her breath and sprayed the flames until the foam ran out. Shakily, she put the extinguisher down and sucked air into her starving lungs.
Before she could catch her breath, Regina marched up to her and demanded, “Clear off this table, and get new trays of desserts out here right now.”
Dani blinked. She’d been expecting Regina to thank her, not issue impossible orders. “I beg your pardon?” Drawing on her HR experience to help keep her cool, she calmly said, “I can bring out the selection that you asked me to put aside for you.”
“Absolutely not.”
“All the other desserts were on the buffet. There are no more.”
“You don’t have any backups?” Regina screeched. “What kind of incompetent moron are you?”
“The kind who just saved your party from going up in an inferno.”
“You…you…” Regina waved her hands in the air as if she were signaling a jet to land.
One of the bartenders passing by with a tray of Jell-O shots stepped up to Regina and asked, “Are you okay, miss?”
“Of course I’m not okay, you idiot.” Regina snatched the tray from his hands and dumped the contents over Dani’s head.
Shocked, Dani stiffened, then grabbed a napkin and wiped her face. Turning back to Regina, she said, “That does it. I’m out of here.”
Regina stomped her foot and screamed, “If you don’t come up with a hundred servings of dessert, I’ll ruin you. You’ll never get another catering gig.”
Ivy, Tippi, and Starr rushed to Dani’s side and began to help load equipment onto a cart.
Regina jerked her away from the others and said, “I should have known that a loser like you would hook me up with a worthless company.” Regina sneered, “Stick to math, because you certainly will never be anything but a nerd who the popular girls use to pass their courses.”
“But…” Tears pooled in Ivy’s eyes. “I thought we were friends.”
“In your dreams.”
Ivy swallowed a sob and ran for the exit. Tippi, Starr, and Dani quickly followed. The last thing Dani heard as she shut the van’s door and drove away was Elvis singing “Blue Hawaii.”
Chapter 6
After the horrible way her first big catering gig had ended, Dani took Sunday off, attending church and going to brunch with some of the other parishioners. And by Monday, she was almost able to put the SummerPalooza disaster behind her.
Still, Dani had been tempted to skip making the lunch-to-go sacks. But she knew her regulars had already started depending on her for a nutritious midday meal and the idea of letting them down had forced Dani out of bed.
Chatting with her satisfied lunch customers had lifted Dani’s spirits. Several of her clients who had been at the luau told Dani that her food had been the best part of the party, and by the afternoon, her usual optimistic mood had returned and she resumed her quest to find the perfect trio of desserts for the garden club’s event.
Now, stepping back from the stainless steel countertop, she sighed contentedly. After spending seven years working in a career to please her father, she was finally doing what she wanted to do, cook. No more routine. No more mountains of useless documents. No more suits and heels.
Yes, she had to keep records of expenses, have clients sign contracts, and complete various tax forms. However, all of that was for her own business—not simply to comply with a busywork mandate from a faceless CEO.
Smiling, Dani refocused on her next project and picked up the recipe for her latest culinary experiment. With her boarders sprawled around the kitchen table doing homework, she was about to try her hand at a croquembouche. The tower entirely constructed of cream-filled puff pastries and decorated with caramel and spun sugar was complicated to construct but would evoke a sense of elegance and sophistication.
The chocolate-espresso dacquoise that she’d already put on the menu represented decadence and guilty pleasures. If the croquembouche was a success, she’d have to find a third dish that epitomized sunshine and innocent delights. However, the trick was that it couldn’t be something so down-to-earth and easy to make that the club members would feel like they could bake it themselves.
As Dani waited for the water, butter, salt, and sugar to come to a rolling boil, she pondered the possibilities for the remaining dessert of the threesome. Maybe a selection of tea cakes. No! Macarons. Their perfectly smooth and shiny shell was bright and inviting, but the cookies were anything but simple to produce. She vowed to spend the evening browsing the internet for the ultimate recipe.
Refocusing on her current project, Dani spent the next hour working on the dough for the croquembouche. She had finished piping the pâte à choux onto the parchment-lined baking sheets and was brushing the pastry puffs with egg wash when the kitchen’s silence was interrupted by the doorbell’s clamorous ring.
Unable to stop what she
