Chapter Twenty-Nine
Y ou wanted to see me, boss?”
Julia stood in the doorway of Stephen’s office, waiting for him to wave her in, even though she’d been summoned. Deanna hadn’t been the kind of showrunner who liked being called “boss” by her subordinates, but Stephen had proven he enjoyed those little reminders of his power. He smiled slightly as he lifted a hand to gesture her toward the chair opposite his desk.
“I’ve been thinking about the finale problem,” Julia said as she moved toward the chair he’d indicated.
The “finale problem” was something all of the producers had been brainstorming nonstop for the last few days. Since they’d had to stop filming for a week thanks to the Sanderson lawsuit, and since the original contract for use of the King Arthur facilities had been tightly scheduled, if they continued on the current schedule, they were going to lose their filming venue on the day before the finale was supposed to shoot. All options were being considered—shortening the season with double eliminations or shorter challenges than had been originally planned—and Julia was hoping her current suggestion was good enough to divert attention away from whatever Stephen had called her here to take her to task about.
It probably had to do with Mac and Magda. They very clearly didn’t hate each other anymore, and that was probably antithetical to all of Stephen’s archrival plans.
“You have a solution?” he asked, half of his attention still on his tablet.
“What if we used Pine Hollow?”
He frowned, still only half listening. “What’s that?”
“It’s the town not far from here where Mac and Magda both grew up. Apparently it has a cute little town square where they do festivals and whatnot. We could book it—and if Mac and Magda are both in the final—”
“And if they aren’t?”
“It’s still a cute town. Built-in audience for the filming. People cheering them on as they bake live in the square.”
“Hm,” Stephen said noncommittally. Then he tapped something on his tablet, still not looking at her, and said with icy calm, “I’m considering firing you.”
Her mouth went dry. “Why?”
“I’m assuming you have a very good reason for not telling me that Mac and Magda are now engaged in a romantic relationship. A PA caught them kissing?”
Julia’s face heated. Shit. She should have said something, but she’d hoped they could just focus on the baking. That Stephen would never have to know. “It was the night we heard about the lawsuit. I came here to tell you about it, but we had so much going on, and at that point I wasn’t even sure there would be a show—”
“And when we came back?” Now he was looking at her, his pale eyes steady on her, and Julia wished he would look back at the tablet.
“There was so much good material without it—”
She fell silent as Stephen suddenly leaned forward, steepling his hands on his desk. “Julia. I know you’re one of Deanna’s. I know you’re used to being part of a team, and making warm, fuzzy, boring television. But this isn’t Deanna’s show anymore. It’s mine. I’m building a narrative. I’m making America love these people and loathe them. I want every bake to be dramatic not just because a freaking chocolate whatever might collapse, but because we desperately want one particular asshole’s chocolate whatever to collapse. I’m a storyteller—you understand that, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then why would you try to hide some of my story from me?”
“I didn’t mean to hide it—”
“That’s even worse. If you’re going to sabotage my show, at least be bold about it. Own it.”
Her stomach curdled. She was absolutely being fired. And beneath the anxiety and panic that thought inspired, there was also the tiniest whisper of relief.
Stephen stood. “I’ve decided to give you one more chance. And I need you to do something for me.”
Her stomach knotted queasily. “What is it?”
He rounded his desk, extending his tablet toward her. “I need you to play this for Magda. Tomorrow. On camera.”
She looked down. It was an audio file. No video. “What is this?”
“Go ahead.” He waved toward the tablet, and she pushed Play.
Mac’s voice came through, clear as a bell. “… needy. Desperate.”
Then she heard her own voice, “And you don’t like needy.”
“Needy is too much responsibility.” A brief pause. “I can’t stand people like that. Just pathetic.”
Julia frowned, tapping the Stop button. “You edited this. He only used the word pathetic when he was talking about how badly he’d done at the cupcake challenge—how he was nearly eliminated.”
“Does it matter? We’re building a story.”
“You want me to tell Magda he said these things about her—but we don’t need this. People are going to love them together. They’re going to want them both to go forward because of the showmance—”
“Maybe. But we don’t have any usable footage that really sells that story. So you either get me that—them confirming their feelings for each other in the confessionals, really adorable shit—or we have this. Either way, I want you to show it to her on camera. We might need that reaction footage if the lovebirds angle doesn’t pan out. Better to cover our bases.”
“You don’t need this,” Julia pleaded. “People tune in for the bakes and the wholesomeness.”
“Julia. The show was stagnating. Same old format, same old ratings. And in this business, if we aren’t growing, we’re failing. This is harder, I get it. But the rewards are worth it. You’ll see. This is where the good shit is.”
“You’ll be lying to them.”
“No. You will. If you want to keep your job.” He took his tablet back from her. “I’ve emailed you the file. Make sure you show her tomorrow.”
“Stephen…”
“If they’re really together, they’ll clear it up. Don’t worry. When you’ve been in this business as long as I have, you won’t even blink at something like this.”
Julia rose and walked numbly out of the room with a single thought ringing loudly in her mind.
I certainly hope not.
“Have you seen Magda?”
Mac frowned at the note of panic in Julia’s voice. Their usually calm producer looked almost frantic as she continued to scan the Proving Room. “Greg just grabbed her,” Mac answered. “He said he had to show her something.”
Julia swore under her breath, and then her eyes focused on Mac. “Stephen figured out you two don’t hate each other anymore, and he wants to poke the bear. He made this edit of you saying all sorts of crap about Magda—things taken out of context—and he must have told Greg to show it to her if I didn’t.”
“Shit.” A hard knot of dread tightened in his chest. Magda already didn’t fully trust him. Last night, after the “preview” she’d given him, he’d felt pretty good about where they’d left things. He’d gone back to his room restless, but it was an eager restlessness, looking forward to two weeks from now, when they could just be together and figure this out. Though part of him had worried that when they got back to Pine Hollow things wouldn’t be the same as they had been inside the show bubble.
And now this. She was already primed not to trust him, and now they’d taken his own words and twisted them to trick her?
“Where are they?” he demanded, standing up. “Where does Greg film his confessionals?”
Julia hesitated for only a moment before nodding. “Come on.” She started toward the rear door—but it opened before they’d made it two steps. Magda entered, with Greg at her side. She was frowning, and Mac tried to read every nuance of that frown.
He took a step toward her, hearing Julia’s soft curse a fraction of a second before one of the other producers called out, “All right! It’s time! Into the kitchen!”
Mac tried to fall into step next to Magda on their way into the kitchen—it wasn’t hard. There were only five of them now. Zain and Eunice moved behind them while Tim strolled confidently ahead.
“Hey,” he murmured, acutely aware that cameras were watching them walk into the room and they were both miked.
“Hey,” she mumbled back, with a quick not-quite-genuine smile. Did that mean she’d seen the video thing? He didn’t know what he’d supposedly said, so how was he supposed to defend himself?
“Julia said Stephen took a bunch of stuff out of—”
“Quiet, please! Time is tight today, kids. Let’s get to our marks!”
“Mags—” Mac tried, but a producer was suddenly there, redirecting him toward his station.
“You’re in the back today, Mac. Magda, you’re up front.”
It was almost like Stephen was actively preventing him from being able to talk to Magda before or during the challenge—which, given the impression he had of Stephen, didn’t sound all that far-fetched.
“Good luck,” she said over her shoulder as she moved toward her station.
That was a good sign, right? If she hated him, she wouldn’t wish him luck. Maybe Julia had been wrong, and Magda hadn’t seen it. Though if she had, she’d probably play it cool while they were on camera, wouldn’t she?
He was distracted as Flanders and the judges took their positions at the front of the room to announce this week’s challenge. Agitated music buzzed in his head, refusing to resolve into any one song.
“Welcome to Sugar Week, bakers!” Flanders began, and Mac nearly groaned. They’d just made it through Chocolate Week, and now they had another week of fiddly sculptures and fancy decorations. He was good at flavors, good at the actual bakes , but this fancy stuff was a whole different animal.
“Since we’re getting closer to the semifinal, the judges really wanted to test you with today’s Skills Challenge—which, as you know, is always judged blind, so we have to shoo them off.” The judges filed out—as if they hadn’t just been marched in to stand around silently for five minutes. “Now that we’re alone”—Flanders waggled his eyebrows—“the judges have assigned for you this week the classic cream puff and caramel magnificence of the croquembouche! And they are looking for perfection for those who want to make it to the next stage of the competition.”
Mac nearly groaned. He’d barely survived pastry week, after his éclairs had been rock hard and his crème patissière had been runny. Now he had to repeat the pate à choux and crème pat misery, while adding caramel to the mix and making all the little cream puffs stick together in a caramel-glued tower.
“You have two hours.”
He just had to focus. He could do this. Sort of. But his thoughts scattered in every direction with the words “Your time starts… now!”
Mac forced himself to yank the cloth off the covered ingredients and stared at them blankly. They’d been given a tiny laminated card with the “recipe”—though the first instruction was simply “Make choux pastry.”
Right.
How did one make choux pastry again? It was heated, right? But not as heated as Magda could be.
Did she hate him again? What had they told her? What could he possibly have said that could have been taken out of context? He’d talked so much in that confessional—words on top of words on top of words—often when he was tired and not really thinking after five hours of baking and judging and waiting. What was the worst thing he could have said?
A clatter at the front of the kitchen made him look in that direction—and then suddenly his view was blocked by a camera—as if they’d homed in on his paralysis.
“How are you feeling about the croquembouche?” a junior producer asked from beside the cameraman.
“Like I have no idea what I’m doing.” The producer winced, and Mac instantly went again, without having to be prompted. “I’ve never made a croquembouche before, and I have no idea what I’m doing.” He paused for a moment, staring blankly at the ingredients. “I’ve seen them.” In the window of Magda’s shop, from time to time. “And I know I start with choux pastry.”
So he’d better start making that. Two hours. He just needed to focus.
He reached for the butter. Trying to ignore the impending sense of disaster.
Someone’s caramel was burning.
Magda was all the way at the front, and she resisted the urge to look behind her and see who had smoke rising from their station.
“Ten minutes remaining!”
The acrid scent of burnt caramel hung in the air, but she focused instead on carefully constructing her cream puff cone. Not enough caramel, and the little filled puffs wouldn’t stay in place; too much, and it would look sloppy. She wanted to win this one.
Over the last few hours, her hands had never stopped moving—which had allowed her agitated brain to slow down and settle into calm.
She’d felt sick when Greg had first played the audio file for her. It had sounded like Mac was giving voice to all her fears—that she was pathetic and desperate and unimportant—but even as she’d listened, even as her stomach had roiled with each new word, she’d reminded herself that this audio could have been from weeks ago. A time when she’d doubtless said worse about him. A time when she’d sabotaged him and nearly smacked him in the face. Of course he’d said some awful things.
It had to have been from before the kiss. Before everything changed. Perhaps that was why it was just audio—because the video would give away the fact that it had been filmed weeks ago. That was just the kind of bullshit Stephen liked to pull. Pitting them against each other. Always trying to get a dramatic response. And the only way to win was to not give him the satisfaction.
He’d probably played a similar file for Mac. She’d felt a queasy anxiety, reentering the Proving Room after Greg had given up on getting anything other than “Well, we did come here as rivals,” out of her. They’d been instantly ushered into the kitchen—such an obvious tactic from Stephen to make her cook when she was off-balance. But then Mac had fallen into step beside her, and his low “Hey” had instantly reassured her.
He’d said something about Stephen taking things out of the show, and she hadn’t had time to ask what he meant—just to offer good luck as she was rushed to the front of the kitchen.
As she’d made her pate à choux, her brain had cleared even more and she thought of another reason why it had only been a sound recording—for all she knew they’d hacked together a Frankenstein’s monster of patched-together clips, and he hadn’t even been sitting there ranting about how pathetic she was. But even if he had, they were different now. And she trusted him.
Trust.
It was a funny way to realize she trusted him, but even listening to the tape, even hearing his voice saying those words, she’d still found herself remembering all the things he hadn’t had to do. Covering for her with the almost-slap. Letting her use his oven. And other things, little things—like telling her he thought she could win. He didn’t have to do that. If he were really playing the game, he’d be undermining her. There was just no advantage to bolstering her confidence when they were alone and talking trash behind her back to the cameras. If it had been the other way around, she might have thought it was about protecting his image, but he was sweetest to her when there were no cameras, no audio, when it was just them. Sitting at the Furry Friends fundraiser, hearing him call her a beast in the kitchen, telling her she could win the whole thing…
They might drive each other crazy, but Mac would never hurt her, or let anyone else hurt her if there was anything he could do to stop it.
“One minute! One minute left, bakers!”
Her croquembouche was complete. She even had time for a few finishing touches—decorative strings of caramel swirling around the tower of cream puffs. When there were only fifteen seconds remaining and she had literally nothing left to do, Magda let herself glance over her shoulder, let herself consider the competition for the first time.
Tim was directly behind her, and dang it, his croquembouche looked amazing. Eunice behind him was a little messier, her caramel a shade too dark, but it still looked respectable. Zain’s cream puffs looked too pale—perhaps not cooked fully? But Magda looked past him to the rear station, and her heart sank as she realized where all the smoke had come from.
Mac was scrambling as Jeffrey Flanders counted down from five in his usual dramatic fashion. His tower wasn’t complete—a full third of it was missing. His caramel was much too dark—clearly burned and globbed heavily on some puffs while being virtually nonexistent on others.
Flanders called time. Mac backed away, shaking his head. And then he looked up, his eyes locking on hers across the length of the kitchen, and she realized with absolute certainty that she didn’t want him to go home.
And unless a miracle happened in the next bake, he absolutely was.