Chapter Sixteen
Ransom
It was almost eleven by the time Bethany and I made it downstairs to the breakfast area, but it still felt too early to me when some of her former classmates called out to us to sit with them.
“We’re on again,” I muttered to Bethany, and she gave me a quick, meaningful look before she slipped her hand in mine, leading me over to the breakfast buffet.
“As long as you remember that you’re passionately in love with me, your name is James, and you’re a caterer, I think we’ll be okay--I don’t think anyone is going to be asking any really probing questions this morning,” Bethany murmured back.
I snorted and looked over the buffet. For a hotel offering, it was actually pretty decent: the eggs in the chafing dish looked like they were actually made of egg instead of powdered egg substitute, and the bacon looked crisp. Bethany and I helped ourselves to food and then gave into the demands to sit with her former “friends.”
“Anyone heard any updates on the events for today?” Bethany asked.
I dug into my eggs--and they were real eggs--and waited for the response to Bethany’s question.
“Since the weather’s taken a turn, they’re moving some of the events around, is the last I heard,” one of the women said.
“Some of the stuff they’d had in mind was outdoors, so that makes sense,” Bethany agreed.
“I guess we can say goodbye to the luau,” one of the guys said.
“You’re glad of that, because they were going to make you take a turn being pit master,” his girlfriend--or maybe his wife--countered.
After some speculation about what the committee was going to come up with instead, people started chatting about general things again, and I made myself pay more attention, since that was my cue to be “on.”
“So, have the two of you taken any vacations yet? I mean, I know you’ve been together what--a year now? Probably too busy for something like that,” someone, whose name I thought was Charlotte, or something close to it, asked.
“I actually brought Beth with me on a couple of business-related trips,” I said quickly. “Mingling business and pleasure, you know?” I grinned at her.
“Oh? Where did you go?” she asked.
I saw the deer-in-headlights look on Bethany’s face, but she was looking straight at me.
“They don’t want to hear our silly vacation stories,” Bethany said, her voice covering for the panic I could see in her eyes.
“They asked, babe,” I pointed out, and reached under the table to give her leg a quick squeeze that I hoped was comforting. “One of the trips was to meet up with a friend of mine from culinary school, since he was starting at a big restaurant in Paris,” I explained.
“Paris? Oh wow!” Murmurs of shock and envy around the table, just like I’d hoped.
“I’ve been a couple of times, but it’s always nice to see the city in the eyes of someone who hasn’t been there before,” I said. “Of course, I think Bethany ended up going on a gym-frenzy when we got back, because what do you do with a chef in Paris?”
“Restaurants,” someone at the table said, almost breathing the word. I pointed at her in a “you got it” gesture.
“I hauled her to so many places on that trip that we got back every centime of our metro passes,” I joked. “We barely had time to do the usual tourist things, and I don’t think we even bothered with the Eiffel Tower, but we made it to all ten of my favorite spots.” I rattled off a few names of restaurants I’d been to in Paris, most of them a bit higher-scale, and thanked the gods that I knew enough to be able to jabber about the place at least somewhat knowingly.
“You said more than one trip?” Charlotte asked.
I shrugged. “I had a big-ticket client who wanted me to come with him to Martinique, to help supervise the catering for an event,” I said.
“Martinique? Where’s that?” someone asked.
“It’s in the Lesser Antilles, in the Caribbean,” I explained. “Not a bad plane ride, all things considered, and of course once you’re there, it’s beaches and tropical food day and night.”
“Oh man, you are so lucky,” one of the other women told Bethany.
“I really am,” she agreed.
“We hiked a bit in the jungle, and I had to practically bathe in aloe after a day on the beach in Les Salines,” Bethany said, and I wanted to cheer her for having at least some clue what to say.
“Any other vacations on the horizon?”
I shrugged off the question. “I mean--if I can get her away from work for longer than a weekend, I’d love for us to go to Italy,” I said. “One of my friends from culinary school went to do an apprenticeship in Sicily, and of course there’s the glorious food in Rome and Venice…” I let my sentence dangle, since I didn’t have as good an idea about what there really was of interest in Italy, beyond the most obvious tourist things.
“This is my only vacation for the next couple of months,” Bethany said, sounding regretful.
We were saved from further questions by the arrival of one of the class officers--I didn’t pay attention enough to find out which office he occupied--to let us all know what the revised agenda was going to be.
“We’re bringing the luau indoors, so those of you who volunteered to work the pit are still on tap,” he explained. I thought the luau sounded like a mild-mannered good time, and something that Bethany would probably want to do. “We’ll have a hula class, of course--the instructor is staying close to the hotel already, so she can go to the school and teach there, just as well as she could do outdoors.”
The guy continued talking. Apparently the “Phys Ed Olympics” event was going to be changed into an indoor Olympics at the hotel, and instead of the expected nineties costume parade, they were going to have the costume party at a local house, which was only a couple of blocks from the school.
One of the other class officers arrived on the scene and took over. “We’re going to have sign-up sheets for all the events, so make sure to put your name down so we know how many people to expect,” she said, in the chipper kind of voice that made me wonder if she taught kindergarten.
“We’re putting copies of the sheets here, at the school, and at the other hotel most of us are staying at,” the first guy explained. “We’ll be collecting them every morning, so get in early.”
I turned to Bethany. “What do you want to do, sweetie?”
She looked at me in surprise, as the rest of our table went to start signing up for different activities. “I figured I’d go to a few different things and watch.”
“I want to see you hula, girl,” I told her, grinning. “And I definitely want to see you dressed up like a nineties chick, dancing to The Cure and Nirvana.”
“I don’t even have anything that would fit into that,” she told me tartly.
“I think we can figure something out. I have a flannel shirt, and even if the weather isn’t great, we can probably find an open thrift store with some grungy jeans or something,” I countered.
“If I do it, then you have to do it too,” Bethany said.
“I’m game,” I told her. “I think you’ve been working too hard and not letting yourself go too much.”
She blushed, and I knew she was thinking about what had happened the night before.
I couldn’t quite get my mind off of that turn of events, either. With effort, I pushed it out of my mind and gave Bethany a nudge to stand up and head toward the sign-up sheets. “Let’s find some fun things to do while we’re being social.”
“I’m not good at any of these things,” Bethany protested.
“The point isn’t to be good at them, first of all,” I explained. “The goal is to have fun. Were you ever a kid?”
Bethany’s glance showed I’d pushed a little too hard and I grabbed her by the waist, using the excuse of my role to pull her close to me so I could kiss her.
“If you have a terrible time doing any of the things we’re signing up for, we can leave early and just go get drunk again,” I suggested.
Bethany gave me a long look but then nodded, and I led the way to the sign-up sheets. The kinds of activities that the committee had planned were not exactly my idea of the best way to spend a long weekend, even one among strangers, but they were pretty tame. There were parties of different kinds going on at all hours, in different locations--but all of them were within about two miles of each other, close enough to drive even in the iffy, cold weather.
I took one of the pens and started signing us up for things, ignoring Bethany’s protests that she’d never made a basket in her life and she hadn’t intended on starting at almost thirty, or that she was not going to learn hula. I figured the more we interacted with her former friends, the more she’d make the point that she was successful and well-rounded, and the more that we’d be able to show off how in love we were with each other.
We went back to the table where a few of the classmates were still working on coffee and pastries, and Bethany and I finished off our breakfasts as she good-naturedly complained about the ambitious schedule I’d set for the weekend. I grinned as people encouraged her to go through with it anyway, and when Jess arrived, she added her voice to the chorus until Bethany agreed to it. I thought to myself that I knew exactly how the two of them had been when they were in high school together. In fact, I could almost see them in my mind--Jess pushing Bethany to try things, and Bethany moping that she wasn’t already naturally good at them so why should she embarrass herself? Jess seemed to be the one at the table that Bethany was closest with--and I thought she might know what the deal was between me and Bethany.
We went back up to the room to get changed for the first event for the day, which was going to be a “fun fair” at the school, and I told myself that my major job that day would be to make sure that my fake girlfriend had some real fun.