Once again, Jack Frost had brought me to a boiling point.
"You're back late," Nina said when I quietly came into our shared room. "The competition is tomorrow."
"I know." I lay down on my bed and closed my eyes. It wasn't my imagination. Jack Frost wanted me. It was very obvious. I opened my eyes. Nina was looming over me.
"You have to tell me everything," she said, her eyes wide in the darkness.
She gasped when I told her how he had grabbed me.
"Hartleigh is going to flip her lid," she said. "Oooh, this is too good!"
"She can't know about me and Jack! What if she tries to, I don't know, have me kicked out of the competition?" I said, panicking.
"You can't keep this a secret!"
"I could lose my one shot at being a famous baker!" I protested.
"You want him, though," Nina said. "Jack's a billionaire; he could solve all your problems." She looked thoughtful for a moment. "I guess your cookies really are magical."
"I don't know," I said with a frown. "Maybe he's just bored."
"Or frustrated. Or high on sugar," Nina said.
"I can't deal with this right now," I said, lying back down and pulling a pillow over my head. A part of me wished I had stayed, while the other part was glad I’d left.
* * *
I feltas if I was charged with electricity as I prepped my station the next morning. Anastasia walked in, looking perfect as usual, with Jack trailing behind her. Both of them were elegant New York City money types.
I looked down at my apron. It was streaked with sugar from two days ago because I hadn't had the energy to wash it, and my hair was a rat's nest. What did Jack really see in me? Maybe he was just teasing me or playing a game. Sleep with the baker, another candy cane in the billionaire's collection.
Zane came over to film reaction shots.
"I can't today," I complained, hiding my face. "I'm a mess."
He smiled. "You look great!"
"For today's contest," Anastasia said, "we're making a dessert for the ages. The Middle Ages, that is."
Then we had to pretend to go shopping and come back with the bags of food we had bought yesterday.
While I unpacked my ingredients, I started to envision the dessert in my head. I also thought about how I could make it so that Jack would love it.
The dessert I was planning was supposed to make each person feel as if they were having Christmas in medieval times. Skewers of cheese and fruit were a common Christmas dessert during that time period. I was going to make something similar but pump up the volume. To really evoke the feel of the period, each plate would have a spire made of colored melted sugar like stained glass, and the plan was to pump smoke under each one.
The timing on this dish was everything. I needed to make sure all my ingredients were prepped. I would have to fry the bits of fruit and cheese then quickly place them under the spires and pump in the smoke. They would need to go to the judges immediately.
I laid out little molds using square dowels, melted the sugar, colored it then poured it. While the pieces cooled, I made a spiced wine reduction to drizzle over the skewers and carefully cubed my cheese, apples, and pears.
"What's all that bacon for?" Nina asked, looking over from candying rose petals and various fruits.
"The smoke," I said. "The Middle Ages were all about fire. They didn't have ovens or gas or even chimneys in their houses, just big open fires. Smoke was everywhere, and I want my dessert to capture that."
"Do you need my smoking gun?" she offered.
"No, I want real smoke. Those little smoking guns make cool smoke, which is fine, I guess, but I want to burn wood and char meat."
I pulled out another piece of equipment from Platinum Provisions. Unlike the little smoking gun, this one was much larger and looked similar to what one would use to smoke a beehive.
