She huffed a little laugh and licked her lips. “Okay. You’re right.”
He sat down in the midst of the awkward silence that breathed between them, but he was satisfied that the past wouldn’t leap out at him anymore, ambushing his plans for the inn.
“You want something to drink?” she asked, heading for the cabinet above the fridge. She stood on tiptoe and pulled down a bottle of red wine.
And, despite himself, he watched her move. Her pale skin glowed in the half light. She’d lost some of the lush curvy weight she’d carried in happier days. Her arms were muscled from the hard work of running a kitchen, but the rest of her was a whipcord.
She looked as if she’d missed too many meals. She looked tough.
“I thought you might be hungry,” he said. She hadn’t even glanced at the stove even though he knew she could smell the tomato soup.
“I ate at work,” she said and he didn’t force the issue. He’d bet the inn she was lying.
“Wine?” she asked, holding up a bottle.
“I’d love some.” He forced himself to be warm to her, cordial. Due to years of practice, he could slip into gracious without batting an eye. It was a suit he donned when he needed it. “I’ve got Oreos.”
That made her smile, and the tension in the room cracked and he could breathe again.
“I met your roommate,” Gabe said, watching her uncork the bottle like a professional. “Nice guy.”
He tried to steer the conversation toward her situation, remind them both, no matter how unsavory, they needed each other.
“He’s clean and pays the rent on time.”
“Sounds like the proper arrangement. How was work?”
“Why don’t we just cut to the chase here, Gabe.”
She popped the cork, poured a perfect four ounces in each glass, grabbed a cookie from the package on the table, then retreated across the kitchen. She hoisted herself onto the counter, sitting in the shadows. He could only see the gleam of her skin, the shine of her eyes and her shaking hands as she lifted her glass to her mouth and drank like a woman in need.
Again, his gut told him to get out of that kitchen, away from the quicksand of Alice’s pain.
“Go ahead, Gabe,” she said. “Give me your pitch.”
He rubbed his face, wondering how he’d ended up here, of all places.
“Having second thoughts?” she asked, her voice a sarcastic coo from the darkness by the stove. “Wondering if your ex-wife might be drinking a bit too much? Thinking maybe she’s just a little too much trouble?”
“Yep,” he told her point-blank. She poured herself another glass, not even trying to assuage his fears.
“Well, you had to be pretty damn desperate to come find me. So unless things have changed since this afternoon, you’re still pretty damn desperate, right?”
He nodded.
“Let me tell you, drunk or not, I’m still the best chef you know. So, give me your pitch.”
“I can’t ask you to do this if you’re…not stable.”
“I’m plenty stable, Gabe. I just drink too much after work. I drink too much so I can live in this house and not go crazy.”
He understood that all too well, but it wasn’t enough. He couldn’t jeopardize the Riverview Inn with a bad decision, and Alice could be a very bad decision.
“But Zinnia? What happened there?”
“I didn’t realize I was applying for a job. You came to me.”
“Yeah, I came to you in a parking lot at Johnny O’s. You’re the best chef I know, but something’s happened to you and I think I need to know before I make you an offer.”
“I’ll worry about me, you worry about your inn.” She stared unflinchingly into his eyes and he knew from years of hard experience that he wouldn’t get any more from her.
“I could leave,” he said, a warning he knew he really couldn’t follow through on.
“You have before,” she said. “But I think you’re too desperate to walk out that door and—” her smile was wan “—I’m too desperate to let you. Tell me what the job is.”
Honesty again, when he’d least expected it, and as usual when she was real with him, he couldn’t refuse.
“The position is executive chef at Riverview Inn. Opening day is May 1.”
She choked on her Oreo. “That’s a month away. Cutting it close, don’t you think?”
“No one knows that better than me right now.” He smiled ruefully. “As bad as that sounds it’s actually worse. I have the Crimpson wedding in June and—”
“Crimpson? Crimpson frozen foods?” she asked and he nodded. “Well, that’s quite a feather in your cap.”
“Right, so it’s pretty important that the event be flawless.”
“Two months?” she asked. She leaned over the stove and waved the scent of the soup up to her nose. “Opening day in four weeks and a wedding in eight?”
“After the event you can walk away,” he told her. “And I imagine it would be best if you did.”
She dipped her pinkie in the red liquid and touched it to her tongue. “I imagine it would, too.” She hopped down from the counter and opened the cupboard to the left of the gas stove. She sprinkled the soup with balsamic vinegar and a couple of twists from the black-pepper grinder and tasted again. She nodded, so he guessed it was better.
“Staff?” she asked.
Gabe didn’t answer and her black eyes pinned him to the wall. “Staff?” she repeated.
“A young guy with some excellent past experience.” Gabe watched the wine in his glass instead of meeting her eyes and hoped that kid who’d been fired from McDonald’s could be trusted around knives and headstrong chefs.
“I’ll need more,” she said.
“You going to take the job?”
“Not so fast,” she said, pulling down the kosher salt from the cupboard and giving the soup a few hefty pinches. “What are you going to pay me?”
He braced himself. “Twenty—”
“Nope.”
“You’ll only be there two months.”
“I won’t be there at all for twenty grand.”
“Okay.” He sighed, having expected that. His budget for a far less experienced chef was forty grand for the year. He was blowing everything on this gamble—he’d have to take money from the landscaping funds to pay another chef when she left. “Thirty. For two months’ work, I won’t give you more.”
She tasted the soup again, nodded definitively and took it off the burner.
“Are you going to have any?” Gabe asked, gesturing to the heavy pot.
“Nope. And I won’t go to your inn for thirty grand, either.”
“Thirty-five and some shares in the place.”
Her eyes burned fever bright. He knew what shares represented. Income. Success. And after two months she wouldn’t have to work for it.
It would help, maybe after they split ways again. Make it so she wouldn’t have to work at a terrible job or share her house with a stranger.
“You know it’s a good deal. I’ve never had a restaurant not turn a profit.”
She rubbed her forehead and he knew he had her. It was just a matter of sealing the deal.
“It would be a fresh start, Al.”
Her nickname warmed the air.
“It hardly seems fresh.” She laughed. “You’re my ex-husband and this is an old plan of ours. It feels like trouble.”
“I couldn’t agree more.” He laughed, too. “But you’d have total run of the kitchen.”
She scoffed. “Right.”
“I’m serious, I’ll be very busy—”
“Getting in my way.” She looked at him for a brief moment and all the problems in their relationship—the fights and clashing egos—for some reason, in this room with the wine, he felt…nostalgic for them. Those nights when he made her so mad she threw things at him, broke plates against the floor and ruined meals with her temper. The long days when he wouldn’t talk to her, giving her a silent treatment so cold
and deep that the only way to thaw both of them…
She cleared her throat, seeming uncomfortable, as if she’d been thinking the same thing. “I’ll do it.”
Gabe felt both jubilant and wary. Is this the right thing? Am I making a deal with the devil? “I’m so glad.”
“But—” she held up a finger “—I’m out of there the second that wedding is over and I run the kitchen. Not you.”
He nodded, stood and held out his hand.
“I’m serious, Gabe. I won’t have you trying to take things over. You hired me to be executive chef—”
“I promise.” He put his hand on his chest and bowed his head slightly. “I absolutely promise to stay out of your way as long as you promise to try to be a team player. My dad and Max—”
“Your dad and Max are there?” she asked, bright joy filtering through the dark clouds on her face.
“They are and they’ll be very glad to see you.”
She smiled and held out her hand. “I can be a team player.”
“And I can stay out of your way.”
They shook on it and Gabe had to wonder who was going to break their promise first.
4
Patrick Mitchell watched his oldest son walk away whistling.
Whistling! And after the bomb Gabe had just laid on them, watching him whistle was akin to watching him hit himself in the head with a ball-peen hammer.
“Alice?” Patrick, incredulous, turned to his youngest son. “Max? Alice was your idea?”
Max ignored him, or pretended to, and poured more eggshell paint in the trays. He practiced being oblivious as though there was a contest.
“Son.” Patrick tried again as Max dipped his roller in the paint and began applying their last coat on the last wall of the kitchen. “I leave you alone with him for ten minutes and this is what you do? Are you trying to ruin this inn?”
“He needed a chef.” Max shrugged, but there was a smile on his lips. “Alice is a chef.”
Patrick nodded. “She is, sure. But she’s also pure trouble for that boy.”
“I thought you liked Alice,” Max said.
“I do. I love her like a daughter but they are trouble for each other and she is the last thing your brother needs.”
“Please.” Max looked at him out of the corner of his eye, but still that devil’s smile was on his lips. If the situation weren’t so dire, Patrick would be happy to see Alice. “They’re grown-ups. They can make it work. At least we’ll eat well while she’s here. I’m about a week away from liver failure after eating your cooking for the past few months.”
Patrick’s mouth dropped open. “Where did I go wrong?” He pretended to be upset, when really these past few months had been the happiest of his life. This teasing was their old shtick. Kept them from ever having to address anything head-on—such as emotion. Such as the past. “I’m supposed to be growing senile on a porch somewhere with grandkids on my knee. Not working manual labor for one son and roommates with the other.”
“Right, because living with my dad is exactly what I want to be doing,” Max said without heat, and Patrick yearned, absolutely longed, to ask his boy what had happened to him. What was wrong. What was still hurting him so badly from the shooting last year that sent him into this tailspin. It wasn’t as though he was that different—the scar on his neck was new, sure. But he still laughed. He still made every effort to get the best of his brother. But it was as though he did those things because he was supposed to, not because he wanted to. Something had happened to leach the joy out of his boy, and he wanted to know what that was.
But if he asked, Max would probably fall on the floor in heart failure or shock. The Mitchell men didn’t ask probing questions.
So, they worked, the way they always did, instead of saying the important things. And Patrick hoped that whatever Max needed he was getting in some way.
The back door to the kitchen opened, letting in a warm breeze and a shaft of bright spring sunlight.
A woman stood in the doorway but it wasn’t Alice. The woman didn’t give off the kinetic energy that had surrounded his daughter-in-law.
Ex-daughter-in-law.
“Excuse me?” she said, stepping from the bright doorway into the kitchen. The door shut behind her and her features emerged from silhouette. “I’m looking for the chef.” She had a pretty smile that turned her plain face into something quite lovely.
“She’s not here,” Max said.
And his dumb son watched the paint dry in front of him rather than look at the pretty girl to his left.
Patrick despaired for the boy, he really did.
“She’s supposed to be here Monday,” Max said. He darted a quick look her way, then returned to the careful application of a second coat of pale cream paint on a pale cream wall, as though failure could blow up the building.
“Maybe there’s something we could do for you?” Patrick asked, stepping into the breach.
“Well, is Gabe—”
“Hello?” Gabe ducked his head out of the small office he’d built off the kitchen. “Hi!” He caught sight of the woman and Patrick knew his eldest son would appreciate how she appeared plain but somehow interesting all the same. True to form, Gabe smiled, the old charmer, and shook the woman’s hand. “I’m Gabe.”
Patrick shot Max a look that said, “That’s how you do it, nincompoop.” Max just rolled his eyes.
“I’m Daphne from Athens Organics. We talked briefly on the phone yesterday. I was hoping to meet with your chef about being a supplier for your kitchen.”
“Of course,” Gabe said, “My chef isn’t here yet, but I’m so glad you stopped by. Come on into my office.” He opened the door for her and she smiled girlishly and Max rolled his eyes again.
Silence filled the kitchen after Gabe shut the office door. Patrick watched his son paint and Max ignored him.
“You’re a virgin, aren’t you?” Patrick asked.
“Shut up, Dad.”
“It’s the only thing that explains why you’re such an idiot around women.”
“I’m not an idiot, I’m just not…Gabe. And that’s fine by me.” He smiled, that sharp, wicked smile from the corner of his mouth. It made Patrick feel as though the boy he remembered with the temper and the laugh that could light up a room was still in there somewhere. “And it’s pretty okay by the women I have sex with, too.”
“Thank God.”
Max laughed, sort of. And Patrick’s heart leaped.
Now, he wondered. Is now the right time? The letter he’d been carrying in the front chest pocket of his work shirt felt like deadweight against his chest. At night, it sat on his bedside table and glowed with a life of its own.
He couldn’t sleep. He didn’t eat. He took a hundred bathroom breaks a day so he could sit down and reread the words he’d memorized.
The office door opened and Gabe and Daphne stepped back into the kitchen. Her color was high and her smile ready as they shook hands. Gabe walked her out the door to her car.
“Maybe he’s going to start working on those grandkids you want,” Max said, nodding in the direction his brother had gone. “It’s about time, the guy’s been thinking about a family since he could walk.”
I just want them to know love. To know love like I knew it, is that so hard? Patrick wondered. So impossible?
The subject of love was a sore one among the Mitchell men. Had been since Iris walked out on them thirty years ago.
Not that he was counting.
“You know—” he dipped his paintbrush into the can of paint he’d set on the top step of the ladder and watched Max for a reaction “—when you lost your mother—”
“Dad.” Max practically growled the word. “What is this new fascination with Mom? You haven’t mentioned her in years and now every time I turn around you’re bringing her up.”
“Maybe it’s because I’m living with her son, who is just as moody and muleheaded as she was.”
Max fell silent. Any reminder of b
eing like his mother could turn him off like a light switch.
“When you lost her—”
“You make it sound like she died!” Max cried, finally setting the roller down. “Or like we misplaced her somewhere. She left. She walked away. I don’t want to talk about her. If you want to reminisce about the past, talk to Gabe.”
Gabe had given him the same reaction every time he tried talking about Iris. Patrick couldn’t blame them—Iris had walked away from them, which, as Gabe had told him, was worse than if she’d died.
She didn’t want us, Dad. She didn’t want any of us, he’d said.
It wasn’t true—entirely. She had wanted them, but there had been things happening that the boys were too young to understand or remember. They didn’t understand why Patrick didn’t just get over it. Over her.
He’d held out a thin ribbon of hope that maybe, just maybe Iris would realize she’d made a mistake and she’d forgive his. Ignore his foolish anger and pride. For years he’d held on to that ribbon. Two weeks ago she’d finally picked up her end.
5
Monday morning Alice opened the kitchen door of the Riverview Inn and stepped into a dream. Her dream.
Doubt, second thoughts, worry that she’d somehow screw this up the way she’d screwed up Zinnia, had plagued her for the past three days, since taking the job. Uncertainty had dogged her as she drove down from Albany. But now, as she set down her bag and tried to catch her breath, worry vanished.
This kitchen was hers. Meant to be hers. It was as if Gabe had opened her head and pulled out the daydreams and plans she’d been accumulating over the years.
A south-facing window overlooking a brilliant green forest filled the room with sunshine. The pale cream walls seemed to glow in the clear morning light and the appliances sparkled, clean and unused.
Racks of pots hung from the ceiling. She reached up and carefully knocked the saucepan into a sauté pan and reflected light scattered across the far wall.
It was the most beautiful kind of chandelier.
Wedding At the Riverview Inn Page 4