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When Ambrose wandered back out again at last, he didn’t walk straight back to his own table. Instead, he approached another table where a group of shiny and fashionable young women who were probably Instagram influencers or something were eating.
“Hi, ladies,” he said. He put both hands on their table and leaned forward. “My name’s Ambrose.”
“Is he—?” Kelly’s mother’s mouth dropped open. “Oh my God.”
“Ambrose is very sociable,” Kelly said. “People love him.”
A ticking vein in her father’s temple called her a liar.
Liam saw the way that Tom started to strangle his linen napkin, and hurried over to the influencers’ table. “Excuse me, sir,” he said to Ambrose. “Can you please return to your own table?”
Ambrose gave him finger guns, and sauntered back over to join Kelly and her parents.
What the everlasting fuck? And Liam obviously wasn’t the only one thinking it. Kelly’s mum looked close to tears, and her dad looked half a heartbeat away from either a stroke or a homicide. In the event he actually did murder Ambrose, Liam decided to tell the police it was justified. Hell, at this point he’d probably give the guy an alibi. And the murder weapon. And a bucket of bleach to clean up the scene.
Kelly, though, just beamed at Ambrose like she was under some sort of spell. “I missed you, boo.” She blew him a kiss.
Ambrose shrugged. “Have we ordered yet? I’m starving. Service here is soooo slow,” he said loudly, stretching his arms over his head and attracting stares from the other tables. “Probably can’t get decent staff.”
Liam seethed and wondered if he and Tom could come to some sort of agreement regarding mutual alibis and body disposal. The walk-in freezer out the back would be a good place to store a corpse while they figured out their next step.
Liam woodenly went through the specials, which nobody ever ordered anyway, then took their menus back and excused himself. He’d only made it a few steps away from the table when the obnoxious click of someone’s fingers pulled him back again.
“Garçon!”
Ambrose. Of-fucking-course.
“Hey, change Kelly’s order to a garden salad,” Ambrose said. He grinned at Kelly. “We don’t want you getting too chunky, right, babe?”
That vein in Tom’s temple looked about ready to pop. “Kelly can eat what she bloody well likes,” he hissed in an undertone.
“A salad sounds great, actually,” Kelly said. “Ambrose knows what’s best. Babe, tell them about your business ideas.”
Ambrose straightened up, his eyes gleaming. “Have you guys heard of multi-level marketing?”
This time it was Liam’s jaw that dropped. Kelly was a business major.
“So,” Ambrose said to Kelly’s stone-faced parents, “what you do is, you have a product, and you recruit people to sell it for you. They’re called a downline. Like, some people say that it’s predatory and cult-like, but I’ve been in a cult, and ha! You won’t fool me like that twice! Well, three times. Did you bring your chequebook, Tom? I mean, I can take cash if you want to get on board too, I guess. Like, what do you think? Five grand?”
Liam stared at Kelly for a moment, wondering who the fuck she even was, then escaped to the kitchen to put in their orders before he finally snapped. He managed to resist the urge to tell the chef to spit on the seafood, but it was a close-run thing.
Things hadn’t really improved by dessert. As the level in his bottle of Dom had dropped, Ambrose had become steadily more obnoxious and his volume levels had risen—Liam had been able to hear him from all the way across the restaurant.
He came out with such gems as, “No, I’d never want kids. I want my partner’s sole focus to be me, and they’d need to work so we can afford for me to pursue my dreams. Plus, y’know, I’ve banged a few cougars and I can tell you now, the body never quite bounces back, does it?” Here he turned to Kelly’s mum. “You know what I’m talking about, right, Jeanette?”
“Jesus Christ,” said Alastair softly in Liam’s ear.
Alastair was one of the other waiters working tonight. He hadn’t quite believed Liam’s “I have the worst fucking customer ever” story when Liam had told the first part of it in the kitchen between courses, and he’d come to see for himself.
“I know, right?” Liam murmured back. “Wait until he calls me ‘garçon’ again.”
“Fuck off, he did not.”
Liam nodded grimly. “Snapped his fucking fingers and everything.”
Alastair shook his head. “I don’t know why you even put up with this shit. Why do you work here again? Aren’t your parents loaded?”
Liam suppressed a sigh. “They own a winery. It’s not the same thing. Besides, I’m twenty-three. I can pay my own way through uni. I don’t need my mum giving me pocket money.”
