Free The Merchant of Venice Beach by Celia Bonaduce Page B

banging around either the tea shop kitchen or the Huge Apartment kitchen, whipping up new things
Suzanna followed the wonderful aroma into the kitchen, where Fernando stuck a warm confection under her nose. Suzanna inhaled. Heaven! But mysterious. Suzanna examined the tray in Fernando’s hands. Mercifully, it was the right color, but it didn’t really look like gingerbread . . . it looked like fudge.
From the look on his face, Suzanna could tell this was exactly the response he was looking for.
“OK, I give up!”Suzanna said.
“It’s medieval gingerbread,” he said, plunking the tray on the counter and sprawling on the large upholstered chair that sat incongruously in the corner of the kitchen.
“What’s wrong with regular gingerbread?” Suzanna asked, poking at the medieval-thing-on-a-plate.
“Boring . . . I know you think we have to stick with the tried and true Englishness of our tea shop, and I am looking for something interesting to do, you know, so that I don’t blow my brains out, and I found this recipe on the Internet. It’s from The Canterbury Tales. You don’t get much more English than that!”
Suzanna ignored his tirade and took a bite.
It did not taste like gingerbread, but it was amazing. Fernando and Suzanna had been tasting recipes together for so long that he didn’t even need to ask. By the rapt look on her face, he knew he had a winner. He jumped up and down on the chair like a gay Tom Cruise and told Suzanna that he had had to translate a recipe from the fifteenth century, which was full of terms he didn’t know, such as “throw thereon and strew thereon,” but he finally figured it out and came up with his recipe.
“I’ve tried making it with several different honeys,” he said, “because the honey really flavors the gingerbread, and I think jasmine honey will work the best for the shop . . . it will taste great with tea.”
Suzanna readily agreed that they should add this astounding new item to the menu, but she remained braced. She knew that the gingerbread sample was just a bribe. These late-night chats always came with an agenda and she waited until he decided to let her in on the latest inner workings of his brain.
“I have a new idea for the tearoom,” he said.
“You’ve already served purple bread and now you’re introducing medieval gingerbread, for God’s sake. Isn’t that enough?”
“No, it isn’t,” he said.
“Fernando, how many times do I have to tell you: tearooms, by their very nature, don’t constantly need new ideas. The whole point is to be stodgy. Our tearoom is a haven.”
“For the stodgy.”
“No . . . it’s comfort for the huddled masses.”
God, I sound pretentious. I sound like Erinn!
Luckily for Suzanna, Fernando was quite used to her pretensions, and the preposterous vision of Los Angeles’s huddled masses lining up for afternoon tea didn’t cause him to even bat an eye. She knew that Fernando would just keep throwing ideas at her until she caved in out of exhaustion. The gingerbread had weakened her resolve, but she tried to remain strong.
“Okay,” she said, “what’s your idea?”
Fernando jumped up and started pulling paperwork from under the dinner plates. The sales pitch was ON!

CHAPTER 7
“Eric!” Fernando called out as he started laying his papers on the kitchen table. Suzanna’s eyes widened in alarm.
Eric is in on this?
“I thought we’d redecorate,” Fernando said. “We’ll paint the tearoom cream—no more of that pastel we’ve got going on. The room is just too damn twee.”
Suzanna felt stung.
“It is not twee. That’s a horrible thing to say.”
They had known each other so long, their negotiating skills were well honed. When Suzanna started to whine, Fernando became a disdainful adult.
“May I continue?” Fernando asked.
Suzanna gripped the edge of the table and nodded.
“Think, Suzanna—the walls will be cream! Cream, get it? Cream in a tearoom? It’s so obvious, I don’t know why we didn’t think of