Whipped: A Facile Restaurant Short Story

By Jacey Conrad and Gia Corona

Whipped is the seventh installment of Jacey Conrad and Gia Corona's Facile Restaurant series. Each story in the ten part series focuses on a different couple.

Facile’s chief pastry chef Lydia Conner has watched the jerk at Table Seventeen run her fellow kitchen staffers ragged all night with his special requests and substitutions. But she knows she can sweeten his sour mood with one of her legendary desserts. No man alive can resist her special flourless chocolate cake.... Except for the jerk at Table Seventeen.

Mark Ferrell just wants this godforsaken evening in the armpit of the South to be over. But his partners are drawing out this client dinner as if they are being paid by the course. Still recovering from a relationship with a vigilante vegan, Mark’s afraid Facile’s rich food might actually kill him. To compound his misery, he gets a visit from the enraged, sizzling-hot pastry chef whose work he’s just rejected. Mark is about to get a chocolate-dipped lesson in what it means to indulge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeanette Battista
• Release date: Jan 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310974106

Jacey Conrad

Jacey Conrad is a sushi-loving, pop culture nerd living in semi-rural Kentucky with her high school sweetheart husband and two impressionable children. She delights in horribly made mutant shark movies and watching Sean Bean die in his various cinematic incarnations.

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WHIPPED

A Facile Restaurant Short Story

Jacey Conrad and Gia Corona

Copyright © 2015 Jacey Conrad & Gia Corona

All rights reserved

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Table of Contents

Whipped

About the Authors

Whipped: A Facile Restaurant Short Story

Patissier Lydia Connor stood at her station, watching eight ramekins of bread pudding brown to just the right level of caramelization. This was a delicate phase of the baking process, just toasty enough to evaporate most of liquid custard away, but not quite enough to dry it out. Her caramel bread pudding was almost as finicky as a soufflé when it first came out of the oven, and just as likely to collapse at loud noises or jostling.

Surgeons were less exacting in their movements than Lydia. She dropped the oven door, seized the baking pan between her padded hands and slid it out of the heat with precision and style.

There was a reason Lydia was a more careful chef than God’s-gift-to-the-kitchen Remy Billodeaux with his devil-may-care, pinch of this, dash of that approach to cooking. Baking was an exact science, chemistry and physics, all in one. If she wasn’t precise, her cakes fell flat, chocolate didn’t temper and icing went grainy. But still, she believed that cooking and eating were something to be enjoyed.

A long-lapsed Catholic, Lydia wasn’t exactly religious, but she didn’t believe God would give people senses unless He wanted them to enjoy themselves. She believed in indulgence. She enjoyed the taste of a man on her tongue almost as much as she enjoyed the velvety smoothness of properly torched crème brulee. She believed in slow, wet kisses in doorways and waking up to the sensation of a lover’s beard stubble scraping her thighs. But now was not a time for those thoughts. She was working.

Facile was one of the hottest restaurants on Bourbon Street and Lydia knew that her dessert recipes played a small part in