Arabella

I moaned in relief as I kicked off my stiletto heels the minute my hotel suite door shut behind me. When I’d signed on to be a judge for the reality television cooking show that had jump-started my career when I’d won it less than two years ago, I’d been excited about the opportunity to work with the other judges. Owen Walker, especially. The celebrity chef had amazing skills in the kitchen, and he wasn’t too bad to look at either. But today’s taping had been insane. Jude, the producer, had been fired yesterday, and everything took longer as his replacement took over.

All in all, I couldn’t complain too much about the firing since Jude was a slimy flirt who gave me the creeps. And that was before I’d known that he was sleeping with one of the contestants. She’d been kicked off the show for breach of contract, at Owen’s insistence since apparently sleeping with the producer hadn’t been enough for her. She’d also been trying to land Owen in her bed, and she’d been horrible to his new fiancée.

The whole thing was a mess, and it had taken a lot of the excitement out of the project for me. Luckily, we were more than halfway done with taping, and I had a month-long break in my schedule once I was finished. I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do with all that free time, but it didn’t make me look forward to it any less. Odds were good that I’d pop over to London to see my little sister for part of it. Almost as though she heard my thoughts from across the world, Celina’s face popped up on my cell phone’s screen alerting me to her incoming call.

“Are you spying on me again?” I teased as I answered.

“Maybe,” she laughed. “Why? Did I call right when you were going to call me again?”

“No, but I was thinking about you.”

“Good thoughts, I hope.”

“Absolutely! I was thinking about—” I trailed off at the sound of three hard knocks on the door. “Hold on a second.”

I padded across the room and pulled the door open, surprised to find a guy who looked familiar standing there. He was holding a big, brown paper bag with a white slip of paper stapled to it. The scent of Chinese food wafted up, and my stomach growled in response. My voice dripped with disappointment as I said, “Sorry, I think you’ve got the wrong room. I didn’t order dinner.”

He looked down at the receipt and back up at me. “Room 2039? Arabella Green?”

I took a small step backwards, a little freaked out. “Yes?” I answered cautiously.

“Then this is yours.” He thrust the bag at me, and I latched on to prevent it from crashing to the floor.

“But I didn’t—”

“It’s already paid for,” he tossed over his shoulder as he turned and moved quickly down the hallway.

“Arabella!” My sister screeched through the phone that was now pressed against the brown bag.

Grumbling to myself, I toed the door closed as I lifted the phone back to my ear. “I’m here.”

“What happened?”

“Food delivery.” Dropping down on the couch in the sitting room, I tore open the bag and found egg rolls, crab rangoon, pork fried rice, and chicken with snow pea pods inside. It was exactly what I would have ordered for myself, which made it even stranger. “Any chance you ordered it for me?”

“No,” she drawled. “Why?”

“Because I’m staring at all my favorite Chinese dishes, and I haven’t ordered dinner yet.”

There was a moment of startled silence over the line. “That’s super weird, Arabella.”

“Tell me something I don’t already know, Miss Obvious,” I joked. I was trying to make light of the situation, but Celina was like a dog with a bone once her mind was set on something. She just wouldn’t let go.

“Is it a restaurant you’ve ordered from before?”

I yanked the receipt off the bag, recognizing the name of the at the top of it. “My second night here.”

“Was it the same delivery guy?”

I thought about it and realized that was why he’d looked familiar. “Now that you mention it...I think it was.”

“Same order, too?”

“Yeah,” I confirmed.

My little sister had one heck of an imagination, along with a tendency to worry. “Well, that’s good, I guess. At least you know the food wasn’t delivered by some stalker who tampered with it first.”

“I agree that it’s weird, but there’s no need to jump to the conclusion that I’ve got a stalker or anything like that. It was probably just a computer glitch, and the restaurant accidentally duplicated my order from last time.” The handwritten order slip that had been underneath the receipt, and was still stapled to the bag, caught my attention. “Or maybe not.”

“What do you mean?”

“It looks like someone had to have called the order in.” Glancing at the receipt again, I noticed something I’d missed earlier. “Or walked in to place the order since it was paid for in cash.”

“So what you’re telling me is that someone you don’t know, walked into the restaurant you ate at your second night in town, and ordered you the same stuff?” She’d started off whispering but was yelling by the time she was done.

“Yup,” I agreed before I opened the package with the crab rangoons and took a big bite out of one of them.

“Forget super weird. That’s flat-out creepy.”

“Mmhmm,” I mumbled.

“Tell me you aren’t eating it!”

“Umm.”

“Arabella!”

I reached down for an egg roll. “What? You even said it; the delivery guy was the same one as before so the food couldn’t have been tampered with. It’s not like I’m going to let a delicious dinner go to waste while I’m starving.”

“Stop thinking with your stomach and use your brain,” she scolded.

“I’m a pastry chef, Celina. My stomach and brain are connected.”

“Fine,” she huffed. “But after you die from poisoning because you wouldn’t listen to me, don’t expect me to come all the way to California to claim your body.”

“Exaggerate much?”

“As long as you can tell me nothing else weird has happened since you’ve been there, I’ll let it drop.”

“Of course nothing—crap.”

“That’s what I thought. Hindsight is twenty-twenty.” I rolled my eyes as she repeated one of our mother’s favorite sayings. “Now that you’re actually paying attention; what else happened?”

“I’ve gotten a couple of gifts delivered to set. They didn’t have notes attached, so I assumed they were from the network. But now that I think about it, there was other stuff from them. A welcome basket that first day. Nothing tailored specifically for me, though. And the other gifts definitely were selected with me in mind. Both were my favorites—a box of chocolates and a bouquet of flowers.”

“Champagne truffles from Pierre Marcolini and hydrangeas?”

“Yes.” I dropped the egg roll back into the package, my stomach twisting.

“You need to talk to the network. Ask them for additional security. Or just leave the show. After what you told me happened yesterday with the producer, there’s got to be a way out of your contract.”

I leaned back against the cushions and squeezed my eyes shut. “That’s not an option, Celina. If I bail on the show at the last minute, I’ll burn all my bridges in the television industry.”

“And that would mean giving up your dream of getting a show of your own,” she sighed.

“Exactly.”

“Then you’ll just have to get some security.”

“It’s not that simple. The network isn’t going to want to spend the extra money without a solid reason to do so,” I explained.

“If they won’t do anything about it, then I’ll call Carissa. Vaughn’s got to know someone who can help.”

Celina and Carissa had gone to boarding school together for years, so I knew her well. But I’d only met her husband Vaughn once when they were in London for their wedding about two years ago. I’d flown out and made their cake, but I’d had to deliver it the morning before the ceremony because I’d needed to be in LA the next day to appear as a contestant on the show I’d gone on to win. “Don’t bother him with this. He barely knows me.”

“Too late. I just texted Carissa, and I already have little bubbles showing me she’s typing her response.”

“Celina,” I groaned.

“She said that she’d get Vaughn on it right away, and she’ll make sure he has someone at your hotel by tomorrow morning. What time do you need to head to the studio?”

I banged the back of my head against the cushions before I answered. Resistance was futile when Celina was like this. “Seven.”

“Don’t leave until he gets there.”

I wouldn’t. Not because I didn’t want to. I did. But I knew I’d never hear the end of it from my sister if the muscle Vaughn sent to help me had to track me down. I sometimes wondered if she forgot that I was the older sister, not her.