by Clover Hart
No use in lingering, so I turn away from them and take Grace by the arm, ushering her back to a mythical land where people actually get work done. I might or might not feel eyes on the back of me, and a little shiver runs down my spine. But if McMuscles is watching us go, his gaze is no doubt on Grace.
Like I care.
I get all the way past the swinging door and into the kitchen with my sister before letting go of her. Then I sarcastically take her hand in mine and give it a hearty shake.
“Hey, girl, great to meet you,” I say. “I’m one of the people who’s currently working her tail off on the busiest night of the week out there. Who are you?”
Grace puts on the sweet, innocent smile that has the power to charm the Levi’s off a cowboy. In back of her, Mom is shooting around the steamy kitchen, barking orders to our other cook, Irina. Mom looks like she’s a character who’s sweating out the last chapters in a Steinbeck novel, with bags under her reddened eyes and her bobbed, graying blonde hair stuffed willy-nilly under a baseball cap that’s seen much better days.
“Wipe that smile off your face and just look at her,” I say to Grace. “She’s busting her buns because Seamus is out sick. I’ve even been doing double shifts to take up the slack, and you’re out there as if you’re leisurely interviewing candidates for your next date.”
“I’m only making those contractors working at the Climax Vineyards site feel welcome in Cherry Valley. Then again, I do happen to be free next Monday night.” Grace lifts her eyebrows, trying to charm me, but I’m not having it. “Aw, Gwen, simmer down, okay? We’ve both been working way overtime. Tonight’s supposed to be our night off. You’re overworked right now, and you should get home and grab some sleep before you keel over or, even worse, tear off some poor unsuspecting person’s head.”
“You know whose head I would dearly love to tear off right now?”
Grace holds up a finger. “Ah-ah. I said unsuspecting. I can see very clearly that you’d love to rip me to shreds. You are so c-r-a-n-k-y, cranky.”
I close my eyes and count to five, and when I open them again, Grace hasn’t gotten the hint and gone back to work. She’s still there, staring at me with her big, baby blue eyes.
“Gracie,” I say. “Think about it. If I go home, who’s going to run the counter and register?”
She shrugs. “I’ll just recruit some of those cute guys out there to bus tables, run plates, and generally help out while I take over your duties.”
What pisses me off isn’t her breezy attitude — it’s that she definitely has the skills to pull a Tom Sawyer, and she could very well have a bunch of guys whitewashing picket fences for her in a heartbeat.
“Seriously, Gwen.” Grace is already on her way out of the kitchen. “Get some shuteye before you collapse.”
As she disappears back into the diner, I stew. She’s right. I look like a disaster, and I feel worse, but I’m not leaving Mom here to soldier on while I take a beauty rest.
Out of my peripheral vision, I see Mom slide a couple more plates onto the window’s counter. “Order up for table eight!”
All right, I have a choice here: I can mainline a cup of coffee to get my motor running on high, but caffeine and I are mortal enemies, and I’d be jittery all night. Or I can employ a weirder yet more practical approach to this problem.
Lifting my hands to my ears, I quickly massage the outer rims of them.
I stop when I feel Mom watching me. Then she nods, vaguely smiling because she’s the one who showed me this trick that wakes up all your body’s energy centers. She hustles back to the frying station where Irina is making a batch of fried Snickers for someone’s dessert, then nods her head and slides back into cooking action. In spite of how we’ve struggled to keep this diner open for years and years, before and after all the bullshit my dad laid on this family, we’re still here. I only wish Mom didn’t look like she’s about to collapse herself. But you know what? I’ve seen her in much worse shape, thanks to my rat bastard dead father.
I’ve seen a lot of worse things, thanks to him.
But I’m not one to dwell on the past, so with my ears tingly and warm, I shake off my blahs and head back out to the front of the house, queen of the counter once again.
Master of everything that’s ever tried to bring me and my family down.
Chapter 2
Quinn
When the first blonde came out of the kitchen, my pulse jolted. But she wasn’t the twin I want to see. Instead, it was the perky, fun blonde who introduced herself as “Grace” while she was hanging out with Miguel and me a few minutes ago. Ever since then I’ve been subtly watching for the other one — “Gwen,” Grace told us. She’s the ice queen who’s been manning the counter tonight, the hell-in-her-eyes woman who dragged her giggly sister into the backroom as if there’d be some shit to pay for slacking off on the job.
As Miguel sits across from me poking at the barbecued ostrich testicles he’s been avoiding like the plague during our previous visits here, I recline in the booth, resting my arms on the top of the worn vinyl-upholstered seat. Grace has already moseyed over to some of the truckers, and she seems to be sweet-talking them. A few get out of their seats, adjusting their hats and keeping their eyes on her ass as she walks away and gestures toward some tables that need to be cleared.
Meanwhile, I’m still rooting for the quiet blonde, the one who doesn’t wear much makeup, to reappear. With every visit to Milton’s, I’ve noticed that there’s something more than pretty about Gwen. I’m not sure what it is, but whenever she’s in my sights, a knot pulls tight in my belly, heating me right up.
“Goddammit, Quinn,” Miguel says, finally pushing his plate away. “All I asked you to do when I went to take a piss was order me a regular burger. That’s what I wanted — a burger with chili and cheese, not any of these wacky animal private parts dishes. Even now I’m dreaming about a chili-cheese burger like it’s starring in a porno, and it’s knocking at my door in one of those old-fashioned nurse uniforms and giving me fuck-all-night eyes.”
“All this conversation is telling me is that you need to have a serious talk with your wife, Miguel. Now eat what’s in front of you. It’ll be good. Trust me.” I’m still looking at the swinging door to the kitchen, and then …
It opens.
Quiet Gwen calmly walks out as if she didn’t just haul her sister back there like a sack of happy grain. Then she begins checking in with the customers at the counter. Watching her move around shouldn’t be so fascinating, but her apron does a poor job of hiding that body underneath. She’s long-legged and slim in her faded jeans and white henley, and her hair is twisted and clipped into a barrette that isn’t quite doing the job, because there’s one strand that’s escaped and is hanging in front of her face. Her cheeks are flushed and she looks real tired, and there’s a wrinkle between her eyebrows that never seems to go away.
Complicated, I think, just like the knot that’s tightening even more in my gut.
Miguel snaps his fingers in front of my face. “Get your eyes off that blonde and back here.”
As I focus on him, I see Miguel looking at Grace, who’s also behind the counter now. She’s pointing the truckers toward the kitchen, their hands full of dishes. Miguel glances back at me and raises a dark eyebrow. He thinks I’ve been checking out this twin and not the other one.
I gesture toward the ostrich balls. “Eat. Eileen will throttle me if you go home hungry after a hard day of work.”
He chuckles. “I’ve seen electrical wires that have less spark than you’ve got in your eyes right now.”
“Keep the electrician chatter for the job site. I’m off work.”
“Quinn Maxwell digs the chatty blonde from the diner. Hell, I knew there was a reason you kept bringing me here for lunch everyday and even a few dinners.” He’s a dog with a boner for answers now. “You come here for the view, don’t you?”
I don’t correct his assumption that I’m into the vivacious twin. “Milton�
�s isn’t far from the site and it’s fast. Plus, I happen to enjoy the food. Now chow down.”
I also don’t add that the unpretentious grub here reminds me of my own humble upbringing. The diner is actually unpretentious to the point of being outdated, if you ask me, but Miguel is right about the other reasons I’m here: when I saw that the place was run by a couple of pretty girls, I was sold. I was also impressed and surprised, because I wouldn’t have expected creatively-prepared animal parts to come from the minds of these two. I expected more of a rough-and-ready Paul Bunyan type to own the diner, or even a backwoods extra from a Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie. But the Milton twins are obviously smart and hardworking enough to pull this kind of joint off. Or, at least, the credit goes to the quiet one who isn’t flitting around the diner like a social butterfly.
Miguel is still giving the barbecue plate a disgusted look before he finally digs in. Then he nods as he chews. “Tastes like chicken. Not bad.”
“And you almost didn’t trust me.”
As Gwen rings more customers up, I stop trying to catch her eye and start eating, too. Now that I’m not distracted by her, the long day at the Climax Vineyard build finally sets in, and Miguel can obviously read that all over me.
He points his fork at me while still eating. “You’ve been relatively quiet.”
Miguel is a big believer in spilling your guts at the end of the day so you can approach things in a better way the next. And he’s right about that. That’s just a good way to approach life in general. Hell, if I hadn’t been able to start over myself, I’d still be back in the same shit neighborhood where I grew up just outside of Marloe, doing the same shit things. I wouldn’t be getting any kind of second chances like the one I found on this job here in Cherry Valley.
“What’s up, Quinn?” Miguel is relentless.
I shrug. “Today, the new guy I brought on as a favor to a friend back home cut the tile wrong because he didn’t abide by the old ‘measure twice, cut once’ rule of thumb. I had to fire him and then lay in to my friend about even recommending him. I had to cut the rest of the tile myself, then order new tile, which will take a minimum of a week to be delivered unless I send some of the crew to drive eight hours one fucking way to pick it up. It’s a waste of time and money.”
“Ouch.” Miguel sucks in a breath, then takes a quick drink of his beer. “Nobody told us there’d be days like these in construction, huh?”
I wash down the barbecued ostrich gonad with some beer, too, then say, “Don’t get me wrong. I like what we do. I’m grateful for the Climax job and the fact that the Hollisters would give someone like me a chance on it.”
Some Johnny Cash kicks in on the jukebox, and Miguel and I fall to silence. An outlaw country song seems real appropriate right about now, because even though I did my time for making choices I’m always going to regret, there’re days I still feel like the same dark song follows me around. Luckily, my reputation as a contractor precedes me, and people like the Hollisters care about that more than my history.
Someday, maybe I’ll even get over all those dark days in my past.
By the time an old Judds song plays, I’ve polished my plate. Miguel is still sopping up some barbecue sauce with his cornbread, so I lean back in the booth to finish off my beer. Grace, the flirty blonde, pulls up to our table again and flashes a dazzling smile.
“Anything else I can get you boys?” she asks, looking directly at me.
My gaze slides to the counter, where her sister is refilling some plastic glasses with soda. I’m pretty sure what I’d like most isn’t on the menu, at least from the impression I’m getting. And that just makes me even more curious about Gwen.
Miguel pipes up. “We’re good here, thanks.”
When I look at him, he’s staring at me, trying to figure out why I haven’t flirted back with the fun twin all evening. Grace is still trying to capture my attention, and she steps in my line of sight, blocking me from seeing her sister. I grin up at her, and she tears off a piece of paper from her order pad and then eases it onto the table.
“Whenever you’re ready,” she says with a gleam in her blue eyes.
As she sashays away, Miguel keeps staring at me. Then he says, “You usually like talking to her whenever we’re in here.”
“Sure I do.” I look at the check, and my blood stirs because getting the check means I’ll be going up to the register to pay for our meal soon, and that means I get to talk to the quiet twin if she stays in one place long enough to notice me. Not to be cocky, but I’m not used to the brushoff from women, especially since I’ve been in here everyday for a while now and there should be some action with Gwen at this point.
I glance over at her again.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Miguel says. “Suddenly I see.”
“See what?”
He waggles his dark eyebrows. “You don’t have a hard-on for the talky twin. It’s the other one. That’s why you’re sitting here playing it so cool. You think she’s going to come out from behind that counter someday to discover the irresistibleness of Quinn Maxwell, international stud, and you’re only biding your time.”
“As you recall, she did make it over to this table tonight so …” I grin. “Progress.”
“She didn’t even give the slightest indication you existed. That is the opposite of progress. Actually, that’s like no movement at all, which is even worse, because if you were at least moving backward, she might look up and notice you.” He laughs. “Fuck, this has got to be killing you. I think I might have to go over and congratulate her for doing the impossible.”
“Which is what?”
“Sticking a pin in your ego.”
I don’t appreciate the imagery. I don’t deflate. Ever. I didn’t even back during my worst days. “Okay, smartass. Maybe I am partial to the quiet twin. She looks like the type who would kick you with those cowboy boots she’s wearing and spit in your eye if you glance at her the wrong way.”
“And that’s a turn-on for you?”
I only shrug.
He exhales, because my history with hotheaded women isn’t the best, either. “Thank God I’m going home to my wonderful wife who never spits at me unless I ask her to.”
Right. I’ve promised myself that there will be no more hellcat women in my life. Shit, you’d think with all my troubles I’d know better. But here I am again, lusting after another possibly dark one. And here I am, getting out of the booth with heat burning me up from the inside out as I think about finally appearing on the quiet twin’s radar when I pay the check.
But when I stand in front of the register, she’s already gone into the kitchen, and Grace steps into Gwen’s place, smiling up at me as if even she knows that it’s a bad idea for me to be chasing the troubled one.
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About the Author
Clover Hart loves to geek out over stories, whether they’re in books, TV shows, or films. She’s a romance fan, a scary movie connoisseur, and a pop culture addict who also loves to cook, travel, take walks, and practice yoga. In her spare time, she’s written close to one hundred books, novellas, and short stories under various (very busy) pen names.
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Books by Clover Hart
The ABCs of Love:
Aroused
amzn.to/2vhOKEL
Breathless (July 2018)
Climax (August 2018)
Delicious (September 2018)
n Archive.