Brave the Tempest (Cassie Palme) - Karen Chance Page 0,78

quality they’d had lately; the face had filled out slightly, back to its usual square-jawed stubbornness instead of being gaunt and full of unfamiliar shadows; and the hair . . . well, the hair was a disaster, but I probably wouldn’t have recognized him otherwise. In short, he looked fully healed instead of like the hollow-eyed, half-dead man I’d been visiting when he stayed put long enough.

But that wasn’t why I was staring.

I was staring because he was sitting on an armchair that looked like the one from Rhea’s room, helping a tiny child put something on a skewer almost as long as she was.

I think my brain broke. People were moving about, putting things on various tables and rearranging the chairs, stools, and ottomans that had been dragged out of the suite and clustered around a firepit, while I just stood there, holding broccoli. And staring at Pritkin, the big bad muscle-y war mage, and the teeny tiny tot.

She had a head full of red curls and big gray eyes, and despite the fact that she couldn’t have been more than three, she already boasted a face full of freckles. It was a very serious face, though, because there was serious stuff happening. Stuff involving what appeared to be every ingredient on earth.

“What is all this?” I asked Rhea, who came over to take the veggie platter.

She sighed and shook her head.

“Victory!” Fred crowed from behind a table crowded with ham and sausages and various meats on platters and what looked like every cheese on earth.

“And that means?”

“S’mores for dinner!”

I raised an eyebrow, or at least I tried to. “S’mores are a dessert.” I looked at Rhea. “We’re having dessert for dinner?”

She sighed again. “It’s complicated.”

“It’s nothing of the kind,” Fred said, and the next thing I knew, he’d bustled over with something that he popped into my mouth before I could protest.

It wasn’t dessert. I wasn’t sure what it was. But my stomach suddenly woke up to express vigorous approval.

“Huh? Huh?” Fred asked. “What about that?”

I swallowed. “What was it?”

“S’mores!”

“We’re stretching the term,” Pritkin informed me, green eyes amused, as he steadied the marshmallow on a stick that the little girl was holding.

It went over the fire, and I watched it slowly brown. There were other sticks with other offerings already there: cubes of cheese getting goopy and melty, cherry tomatoes with their little bottoms turning fatter and redder, pieces of bread getting toasty, tiny party sausages bursting with juices that sizzled and popped over the open flames, and chunks of blackened red pepper starting to smoke. And laid out on the tables was an amazing assortment of other ingredients for the truly crazy concoctions that I guessed were passing for dinner.

There were a lot of them.

“Are you in on this?” I asked Tami, who’d just come out of the suite with a platter of gingerbread, homemade chocolate chip cookies, and graham crackers.

She rolled her eyes. “I was outvoted.”

I know the feeling, I thought, when I suddenly found myself plopped down onto a hassock with a stick and a plate and told to get creative. So I did. Hot honey, brie, thin-cut figs, and prosciutto on a toasted baguette was nice. Salami, tapenade, mozzarella, and roasted tomato on an herbed cracker was better. And mushroom, blue cheese, and bacon in a potato skin was to die for.

Of course, things got a little crazy when the guys got involved, with Marco pretending to be mortally afraid of the fire, which resulted in him lounging on a chaise and being fed a steady stream of marshmallows by concerned little girls. Roy was trying to mix the adults cocktails to go with their crazy creations, and doing surprisingly well at it. Ophélie and Anaïs, the two French girls, were wafting around looking very sophisticated with the Shirley Temples he’d concocted for them. While Tami’s son, Jesse, and Jiao—one of the kids who had come with Tami’s group—were attempting to outdo each other with the weirdest combinations possible: chicken, dark chocolate, and hot sauce on a waffle, anyone?

And then came the guess-the-recipe game.

Fred was obviously going to win. Fred always won any game that involved food. But tonight, he had some competition.

The setting sun had been turning the balcony orange and gilding the undersides of the clouds when I’d first come out, but it was full-on dark now, and the vamps were feeling frisky. The flames of the firepit were splashing everyone’s faces with light, from the excited, overly stuffed children still