“Probably feels right at home,” Sylvie had heard a grip mutter.
“A handshake,” she suggested. “When a dish is really spectacular.”
“In the unlikely event that situation arises for the first time in seven seasons, I’ll consider it.” She barely had time to wrinkle her nose before he added unexpectedly, “If you were nervous during your time on the show, you didn’t show it. You still prioritize flashy decoration over the essential foundations now, but you were never openly rocked by criticism. You took it on the chin and until that last fucking disaster”—a tinge of heat lit up his tone; clearly the unicorn hoof did still rankle—“you listened to all of us and your bakes improved accordingly.”
Good grief.
Apparently, bread-baking Sid was right on the money about the alien abductions. She didn’t know what they’d suddenly done with the original Dominic, but cheers for the substitute.
Sylvie could feel a reluctantly pleased flush creeping into her cheeks.
“To the extent of your ability,” Pod Dominic finished.
Before she could stand up and accidentally insert her metal straw into his nearest artery, a production assistant tapped on the door and approached with iPad in hand to take them through the upcoming schedule changes.
They had finally wrapped things up when Mariana glided in from the hallway and swayed into a chair, with suspiciously perfect timing to skip the tedious briefing. “Judge B. Judge C. How are we doing?”
Sylvie smiled, and Dominic did a sort of man-greeting chin jerk.
“Pretty appalling showing this morning, wasn’t it?” Mariana went on cheerfully. “I’m going to be tasting Adam’s custard for a week. Did this bunch have to so much as beat an egg during the audition process, or was it all about the weird sob stories this year?” She swiveled toward the silent presence Sylvie was going to consider Judge C. “So, how is that talented sister of yours?”
Sylvie had fully intended to spend the rest of their break elsewhere, but for some reason she was still sitting here and now listening to their conversation. Or, more accurately, to Mariana’s monologue and Dominic’s quiet breathing and obvious desire to not exist in this building.
“I framed the silhouette she made.” Mariana crossed her legs and admired her own shoes. “She doesn’t work on commission, by any chance? Because friends of mine recently got engaged and they’d love a dual portrait for their wedding invitation.”
“Pet works in a matter of minutes, usually while chattering a dozen words a second. I’ll give you her number. She’ll want to help, and she’ll try to do it for free. I’d appreciate if you didn’t let her. She has an incurable case of people-pleasing, frequently to her detriment.”
“Which one of you is adopted?” Mariana possibly didn’t mean to ask aloud, and a sound like a squeaky bicycle wheel escaped Sylvie’s throat before she could think better of it.
In an ideal world, the buzzer to summon them back to the studio would have sounded at that moment. However, it was an awkward three minutes of heavy silence before Aadhya’s assistant came to usher them back on set for the next round of stomachaches.
“Probably one of those think-before-I-speak moments my wife likes to mention,” Mariana murmured to Sylvie as they returned to the studio floor and gazed with equal dismay at the results of the blind bake. The early episode nerves really were hitting this bunch like a sledgehammer. Only one person had produced a dish that was recognizable as crème regis. Ten quid said the entry on the end, the dead ringer for cat sick, had come from Byron’s stove. “Speaking of which, she’s a big fan of Sugar Fair. She went to a party in your booze dungeon and still rhapsodizes about what she can remember of it. She’d like to meet you properly—I wondered if you’d like to join us for drinks later?”
“Any other day, I’d love to,” Sylvie said with genuine regret, “but I have a meeting at five today, and no idea how long it’ll run.”
A meeting she’d been doing her best to keep simmering in the back of her mind until the first significant event on today’s calendar was complete.
A meeting that had been arranged in person, via an inconspicuously dressed, smooth-speaking, plummy-toned stranger like something out of a ’70s spy flick.
A meeting at motherfucking St. Giles Palace, because Sugar Fair had been short-listed to bake the royal wedding cake.
She’d hoped like hell, she’d had faith in her team, her own skills, and Princess Rose’s badass love of Caractacus, but it still wasn’t quite sinking in that they’d crossed the first—huge—hurdle. Every time she thought about it, the prospect hopped and skipped around her mind like droplets of oil dancing in a hot pan.
It didn’t help that the only person she was allowed to tell at this stage was Jay, who wasn’t exactly cool under pressure. He’d rung her at three this morning to propose the hypothetical scenario in which they won the contract, spent months on the cake, and then unintentionally killed off the entire royal family with a lethal dose of listeria from bad eggs. Thoughts?
Her fricking thoughts were that it had taken half a bottle of concealer today to control her eye bags.
Speaking of bad eggs—
“The only dish that looks remotely correct tastes, for some ungodly reason, like onion soup,” Dominic was saying, with obvious exasperation, as they conferred privately over the anonymous dishes. He set down his spoon. “For my part, first place has to go to either the scrambled eggs or the congealed mucus.”
“The scrambled eggs are far too sweet.” Mariana made a gesture like an old-school game-show hostess presenting a prize. “Blue ribbon to the congealed mucus, it is.”
The congealed mucus belonged to Libby, who accepted her status at the top of the leaderboard with a self-deprecating blush. As Sylvie had guessed, Byron fell squarely to the bottom again, with his chunky, burnt mess. According to Aadhya’s murmured aside, even Hades would have wiped sweat from his brow at the temperature in that stove.
As Mariana delivered the results, Byron managed a wavering smile for the cameras regardless, but he seemed slightly puzzled. With an air of uncertainty, he looked from the row of unappetizing dishes to his fellow contestants, seated on their stools for the verdict.
Libby smiled sympathetically back at him.
It was probably an unwritten rule of her employment here that judges didn’t play favorites, but Sylvie had already ranked the bakers in her head—not from best crème regis to worst, but from morally-deserves-to-win-the-whole-shebang to probably-trolls-people-online. Her personal top spot was veering between Emma Abara, a knitter and pattern designer from Manchester, who’d sacrificed her own bake time to comfort a younger contestant who’d left the set in tears; and Adam Foley from Glasgow, an absentminded former professor straight out of a novel.
“Adam spotted Byron’s mistake with the oven temperature,” one of the production assistants whispered at her shoulder. “No comment, no fuss, just quietly corrected it. Unfortunately, it was too late to save it. Typical twenty-year-old wannabe ‘influencer,’” she added with a scathing glance at the depressed-looking Byron, “too busy admiring himself to get the job done.”