Bard stood with his shoulders rounded, his hips canted forward as he firmly held the long hard hot length in his hands. His palms were slick with sweat and juices; he almost dropped the flamethrower before he could bring it to bear on its hapless victim. God he loved his job. A wide grin spread across his face as he pulled the trigger, feeling the heat from the flames that issued from the nozzle roll over him. The raw destructive power in his hands added its own seductive heat to the experience. The carefully prepared crown roast on the stove in front of him crackled and darkened before catching on fire in its own right.
'Oh crap!' Thought Bard, realizing he had once again let his personal fetish ruin dinner, and tonight they had guests over too. Now what was he going to do? He had to think fast, before Sebastian swooped in to save the day yet again. It was a matter of personal pride now. So what could he do, the roast was still merrily burning away on the cooking tray, the fat and oils making little flickering flames and copious amounts of smoke. Then an idea popped into his head, formed from over half desperation, and the rest most likely insanity. He knew what he was going to serve for dinner.
Sebastian had a bad feeling about this. His young master had forbid him to go and check on the job the servants were doing in favor of shielding him from some of the more obnoxious members of high society. Tonight was a dinner celebrating the launch of a new line of pose-able trunk plush elephants by Funtum toys.
He cringed to think of the job Meylenne had most likely done in setting the table as they entered the dining room. Surprisingly everything seemed more or less in order, with very little evidence of breakage and spillage left behind. With a small sigh of relief he stood behind Ciel as he took the seat at the head of the table and the other guests seated themselves as well. Then he smelled it, the unmistakable stench of charred meat. Anger and frustration showed only by a slight tightening of his jaw and clenching of his fists.
"Are you sure you do not want me to go see what the cook has prepared for the dinner?" he whispered into Ciel's ear, but just then one of the major investors in the company, a matronly woman who seemed determined to mother-hen over the company's young president took the seat next to him.
"That will not be necessary, I am sure our cook can handle cooking a meal on his own. Either that or you made a dreadful mistake in hiring him." Ciel responded contemptuously.
Sebastian looked on as the Phantomhive household cook wheeled out a flaming atrocity on a silver platter. What might once have been a rib roast of some sort was now a smoking flaming mass of chared and burning fat with blackened rib bones poking out in odd directions. He tried to formulate some suitable, reasonable explanation for this but the cook had not completed his job of embarrassing the grand house he worked for just yet. Bard reached under the tray , brought out an armload of skewers with marshmallows on them and started handing them out to the guests along with their companies chocolate bars and some graham crackers. The butler pinched the bridge of his nose briefly warding off a headache before stepping forward and addressing the perplexed crowd.
"Since the new toy line we are launching is for children," he said and then smirked as he looked at Ciel and couldn't resist adding, "And because our president is also young. We have decided to dine as a many a child has dreamed of, having desert for dinner. Even better yet we will be cooking that dessert over the flames of the dinner that the oppressive adults would have forced us to eat before desert. Now what you do is to take the marshmallow like so and toast it over the flames…"
The cook was going to pay for this dearly.