Skinny Bitch Gets Hitched (27 page)

“Obnoxious, obnoxious, obnoxious!” chanted the audience.

The Huffingtons both shook their heads in utter disgust and sat ramrod straight.

The lights dimmed and Joe “Steak” Johansson came onstage to thunderous applause. He gave his spiel and spit out the rules: nineteen audience members would be randomly selected as judges to taste-test both dishes without knowing whose was whose. If Keira won, she—and the charity of her choice—would collect twenty-five thousand smackers each. If Joe won, twenty-five thousand would go to the charity of his choice.

“And now,” Joe said, “a smokin'-hot woman who needs no introduction!” I thought about his responses to number seven on Jocelyn's list, all the good reasons he loved her. I went from hating the sight of him to . . . liking the dude.

“Sara! Sara! Sara!” the audience chanted.

Sara came out from backstage in a cute sundress and red Chucks, waving and smiling. She scanned the audience and finally found me, giving me a little wave.

“D'oh!” Joe yelled. “Did you catch that, folks? My lovely fiancée is waving at someone in the audience. Her roommate—a former challenger of mine who narrowly beat me. You might remember the skinny vegan who managed to make the panel of judges vote for her because they felt bad that she eats nothing but plants all day. Well, our challenger is a trainee at her plant restaurant. Learning to cook plants!”

Okay, I might love that he adored Sara, but my intense dislike of him was back.

Sara put her hands on her hips. “Who ate vegan last night? This guy.” she said, jabbing her elbow in Joe's direction. “I made him a primavera pasta with roasted veggies and he gobbled it up and asked for seconds. All vegan.”

“Low blow, Joe!” the audience shouted, the standard chant when he was called on something.

“She tricked me!” Joe called out. “She told me there was steak in it and turned the lights real low. I was
bim
boozled!”

“Bimboozled!” the audience chanted back, hooting with laughter.

I chanced a glance at the Huffingtons, who looked absolutely horrified.

“Would you like to meet my challenger?” Joe said. “This chick with a bad dye job thinks she can make a better lasagna than me. And check this out—her lasagna? No ground beef. No sausage. No ricotta cheese.” He snorted. “I even think she'll be using wheat noodles. Ewww!”

“Ewww!” the audience chanted back. “Eww. Eww. Eww!”

“Okay, challenger, come on out. Folks, meet Kei-rah-rah Huffington!”

Keira, in white, skinny jeans, shiny red ballet flats, and a chef's jacket, her hair in a low ponytail, came dashing out, waving her arms above her head. “It's
Keira
,” she said, making a comical face at Joe and at the audience. “Keir-a.”

“I've already forgotten it,” Joe called out. “Now let's meet her assistant, some hipster dude with another bad dye job and skinny jeans.” Joe rolled his eyes and snorted. “Here he is, Gunnar GunnaLose Fitch!”

“We're gonna beat your trash-talking ass!” Gunnar shouted, jogging out and throwing his hands up in the air like Rocky Balboa.

“Yeah, we are,” Keira shouted, nodding her head at the audience to get them on her side. She wasn't doing a half-bad job so far.

“LOL, guys,” Joe bellowed. “This skinny thing with the messed-up hair thinks she can make a lasagna better than I can?”

“The messed-up hair is called ombré,” Keira said. “Get with
the times. Oh, and the eighties called. They want back that hideous, loud Hawaiian shirt.”

“That's all you got?” Joe shook his head. “Sad, om-head. Very sad.”

“Ommmm! Ommmm!” the audience chanted.

“This isn't gonna be pretty,” I whispered to Zach.

“Go, Keira,” Zach yelled. So sweet, my man.

“Go
home
, you mean,” Joe called back to chants from the audience. “Go home. Go home. Go home! And that skinny Gunnar-lose dude with you!”

“Gunnar rules!” Alanna screamed at the top of her lungs, and I had to smile. Those two were definitely involved.

Two screens on either side of the audience allowed us to watch Keira and Joe cook. Gunnar sliced and chopped away, shouting back at Joe whenever Joe tried to frazzle him and Keira. She'd remembered to add the garlic only after the onions were tender. She added the pinch of agave nectar. She didn't overknead the dough for the lasagna noodles.

So far, so good.

The more Joe tried to heckle her, the more she ignored him, focusing on layering the lasagna, letting Gunnar shout back zingers. He was pretty good at it;
quelle surprise
.

Fifty-five minutes later, a bell rang. “Five-minute warning!” Sara called out. “Chefs, begin plating!”

The producer called out a random name from the audience: “Zach Jeffries, please stand up and state five numbers between one and fifty.”

Zach picked his numbers, as did four other audience members. Since Zach was selected as one of the people to choose numbers, I knew it wasn't rigged. The people with those nineteen numbers were then called by name to be the judges.

“Okay, time to judge!” Joe shouted. “Who made the better lasagna? Me, who eats lasagna for breakfast half the week? Or the couple with the bad dye jobs and fake meat and cheese?” Joe mock shivered. “Don't those two look like they could use some iron in their blood? Eat a steak, peeps,” he said to Keira and Gunnar.

“I could bench-press
you
,” Keira shouted back.

“You couldn't bench-press a tomato, vegan trainee!”

“Trainee! Trainee!” the audience chanted.

The voting began and I held my breath and squeezed Zach's hand.

By the second to last vote, it was a tie. Good for ratings, I guess, but we were dying. Whoever got it would win the $25,000.

“What's it gonna be, chickadoodle,” he said to the woman, who picked up her fork and tried a bite of both again.

“No contest,” she said. “The winner is . . . plate number one!”

“Noooo!” Joe yelped, mock-stabbing himself through the heart. “That's the vegan trainee's lasagna!”

I jumped up. I couldn't help it. “Yeah. Hellz yeah. Oh hellz yeah.”

“Joe blow blew it!” the audience shouted. “Vegan, vegan, vegan!”

Keira jumped in Gunnar's arms and he spun her around.

“Oh, God, don't tell me they're dating,” her father muttered.

“They're not,” Alanna said assuredly. Which meant that she and Gunnar were.

“This is for you, Violet!” Gunnar said into the camera. “This is for my baby girl!” That baby girl would have been in the audience, but no one under eighteen was permitted because of all the trash-talking, not unlike my own, and the occasional bouts of violence that broke out in the audience.

“She's not expected to split the money with that man, is she?” Dominique said. “Though I hope so because she wouldn't have the money she needs for school.”

Ha—Dominique was sooo hypocritical! I had no doubt Gunnar was talking about the experience of being on the show, his daughter's favorite. He did it for Violet—and as a favor to Keira. But it just figured Dominique would suddenly give a fig about the money and Keira's plans for it.

“Mom, seriously?” Zach said to her. “Can't you be proud of her? She made something happen for herself for a very good cause.”

Dominique gave Zach the most condescending look I'd ever seen. “Oh, Zachary. Just once, please stop rooting for the underdog.”

“That'll always hold you back,” Keira's dad said to Zach.

That was absurd since Zach was a wunderkind CEO. He smiled at me and shook his head.

Keira came running over and grabbed me into a hug. “I owe everything to you, Clementine. For giving me a chance in the first place. For helping me out. You rock.”

Dominique glared at me.

In the parking lot, as Zach and I headed to his car, Dominique came storming over.

“You knew how I felt,” she said to me through gritted teeth. “You actually influenced her against my wishes.”

“Dominique, come on. Keira won! She showed such moxie. She found a way to earn the money to pay for her education, her future. The future
she
wants.”

“Oh, please. She's twenty-two years old. She's been everything from one of those perfume sprayers in Nordstrom's cosmetics department to a dog walker. She has no idea what she wants. Culinary school isn't for her. Trust me, she'll drop out in two weeks.”

“Mom, she just stood up against Joe ‘Steak' Johansson and beat him with a vegan lasagna,” Zach said. “I think she'll be fine. And I think she'll do great in cooking school. Obviously.”

“Obviously, you don't know Keira as well as I do,” Dominique shot back. “She made a fool of herself. She'll never get a decent position in fund-raising or philanthropy with that video out there. Trash-talking or whatever you people call it. It was embarrassing.”

“Dominique, you can't control her. She's an adult. A pretty great one. Let her make her own decisions.”

“You don't tell me what to do, young lady. And you know what? Plan your own damned wedding. I'm through with you.”

Dominique swiveled on her four-inch-high Louboutins and stormed back to Sir Paul, sitting inside their BMW.

So she'd finally quit as wedding planner. Thing was, I wasn't as relieved as I should have been.

“Unbelievable,” I said to Zach as we drove home.

Silence.

“Zach?”

“I'm sure she'll calm down and be harassing you about gowns and centerpieces tomorrow morning. Don't give it a thought.”

“
What?
So she gets away with trying to run Keira's life and taking out her anger on me?”
And she quit! She finally quit! I'm free!

He let out a harsh sigh. “Clem, she's my mother. She's meddling in Keira's life, yes, but that doesn't have anything to do with you.”

“She made it about me!”

He pulled over on the side of the road and took my hand. “Remember how you helped me butt out of Jolie's life when she got engaged and finally see her as adult? Maybe you can
help Dominique with Keira. If you got me to see the light about my sister, you can work that magic on my mother.”

“I've tried. She's a nightmare.”

He didn't blink. “So take it on as a challenge. I know you care about Keira. And my mother respects you. You actually might get through to her.” He pulled on the ends of my hair. “Please, Clem? I don't have the time or energy to deal with a war between my fiancée and mother. I'm up to my eyeballs in problems at work. Just fix this, okay?”

“Right now, I'd rather fix
us
.”

He turned away, frustrated as all hell, I knew, but too bad. Enough was enough.

We needed time alone together. Away from LA. We needed the adventure that Jocelyn had written about on her list. “Let's go away together. Can you take off midweek? Even just a couple of days?”

“Now's a really bad time.”

“Just two days, Zach. I think we need to go off on some adventure together, somewhere we can get away from everything and not even talk about what's going on with us, with work.”

“I don't know, Clem. It's a
really
bad—”

“It's always going to be a bad time. Let's go to the desert.”

He took my hand and held it tight, and for a long moment he just looked at me. My heart started booming.
He's going to tell me the wedding's off. That he's changed his mind. That he fell in love with some VP of Finance or something. That he's back
with Vivienne. That all my talk of the Outpost made him realize he can't marry me, after all
.

“Fix things with my mother and I'll go wherever you want.”

I had no idea how to make that happen, but whatever, I'd do it. “Deal.”