by Anne Stuart
She opened her mouth to dispute that, but he held up a hand and said amiably, “While that’s a fascinating dilemma we really should explore—especially considering how I feel about you—we have more pressing problems at the moment. So don’t lose it on me because you think it’s impossible for a man to exercise self-control.”
“I’m not going to lose it,” she growled back at him, offended by the suggestion. “And I have no delusions about my sex appeal, believe me. I just remembered having that…dream.” She shifted a little uncomfortably, but held his gaze. “And I didn’t want you to think you were under any pressure because I’m your boss.”
“I don’t,” he assured her with unflattering swiftness. Then he added with a superior lift of an eyebrow. “And I thought we’d settled the hierarchy here. You’re not my boss this trip.” Then he laughed wickedly. “Not that that’d discourage me, anyway. It has an interesting, late-night-movie sort of appeal. If you want to dismiss what you said as the words in a dream, that’s okay for now. But we’ll have to follow them to the source of their inspiration when this is over.”
Then, mercifully, he dug a small silver flask out of his backpack and offered it to her. One small sip had an immediate warming, therapeutic effect. “I have four energy bars,” he said. “We’ll split one for lunch, one for dinner, then save the other two for the hike to Nugget.”
That made sense to her.
After they’d sipped at the brandy, he put it back in the pack and rummaged around in the back, looking for something to put between the seats to turn the buckets into a bench. The arms folded back, he said, and if he could fit a box or something between them, they could stretch their legs.
She thought that sounded like a worthwhile plan. As he worked, she dug a notebook out of her purse. She kept it there for notes to herself about things she had to do at the restaurant, supplies she needed for projects at home or any good idea she was afraid she’d forget.
Her heart ached at the knowledge that her father would be nearly hysterical with worry when she didn’t arrive home this afternoon. He’d probably call the linen company himself and they’d tell him she’d been there and gone. He’d undoubtedly call the airport afterward and they wouldn’t be able to tell him anything either. Just that they’d been lost somewhere.
He would be pacing the restaurant, alternately praying and swearing in Italian. She couldn’t help but wonder if he’d wish then that he’d let her take over the restaurant.
Then she dismissed that thought as petty and made some notes to herself about what she had to do when she got home.
“Keeping a journal of the experience?” Hal asked, pushing a long narrow box forward between the seats. Seawolf Rubber Boat was printed in bright green letters on the side of the box.
“I suppose if you’d carried skis instead of a rubber boat,” she teased, “we’d have crashed into the water.”
He sent her a look that was only slightly amused as he raised the aisle arms of both seats and fitted the box in tightly. “We didn’t crash, we landed—granted it was a little dramatic, but it was a landing.”
“Right. I forgot. No, I’m not keeping a journal— I’m making notes to remind myself of what I have to do when I get home.”
“Mmm.” He stood, leaning an elbow on the edge of each seat back. “I’m sorry your first airplane date isn’t going better.”
“It’s a business trip.”
“You haven’t forgotten The Royal Dragoon, have you?”
She shrugged noncommittally.
He looked into her eyes. “Stretch your legs out,” he directed, “and see if that’s more comfortable.”
She did as he asked. “It is,” she said, arching her back against something pressing into the small of it. “Just the door handle jabbing into me.” She reached for her purse, tucked it behind her, and leaned back again. “There,” she said, wriggling against it, testing it. “That’s better. If we just had a way to make coffee, life would be good.”
“We’ll just have to live on the memory of what you bought us this morning.”
They sat upright in their seats, using the box as a table as they shared an energy bar for lunch and half a bottle of water.
AS DARKNESS FELL, Hal watched her slip into a pensive mood. That worried him a little. So far she’d been either critical and combative, or supportive and helpful. But until now she hadn’t lapsed into the fatalistic hopelessness this kind of situation could inspire.
“What?” he asked, rooting through his backpack for the extra socks he always carried.
She blinked at him and almost smiled. “What? Are you asking me what’s wrong?”
He grinned back, finding the socks. “I know. Silly question under the circumstances. But I’ve seen you completely reorganize a banquet when the refrigeration died. It should have been a disaster, but you raided several supermarkets, and not only succeeded in providing an eclectic and completely unorthodox buffet instead, but pulled it off as a triumph. You’re not usually one to look defeated.”
“I’m just worried about how my father’s going to feel when he thinks I’m lost. That we’re lost.”
He sat down in his seat and handed her the socks. “Put these on over your shoes. If your feet are warm, you feel warmer all over. And put your scarf over your head. That’ll help, too.” His parents didn’t worry about him, because though he loved them dearly, they led a busy life in Florida and he sometimes went months without calling. But he knew Umberto kept close tabs on Kat. He’d be destroyed if he thought he’d lost her. “I’m sorry. We’ll have to make it up to him when we get home.”
Of course, he knew that Umberto wouldn’t be looking for them until tomorrow. He was trusting Hal to keep her out of the way while they caught Percanto in the act of breaking into the savings and loan.
He felt a little guilty now about that deceit, but this didn’t seem like a good time to tell her they’d been plotting against her to keep her safe.
“I grew up at his side—literally,” she said, a faint smile on her face as she apparently thought back. “When Giulio and I were toddlers, we were set up in playpens in the restaurant kitchen, and when I was still really small I started working with my mother. My father would be in and out checking on the kitchen all day. Giulio escaped a lot of that because he was a boy and athletic, but I’m not sure my father would know what to do if he looked up in the restaurant and didn’t see me there.”
Hal nodded. “I’ve watched you work. You can do anything.”
“I’ve covered everybody’s shift at one time or another.” She sighed, a look of grim acceptance on her face. “But my father’s convinced I can’t run the place. He thinks it’d die if I took over. He’d rather keep working, than turn it over to me.”
“He knows how consuming it is.” Hal said. “Maybe he knows if you took over, it wouldn’t leave you time for a life.”
“He had one.”
“Because he had your mother and you.”
She thought about that and sighed again. “That’s true. But all kinds of people live their dreams and find a way to have a personal life as well. I know I could do that, too, if I wanted to.”
He’d seen no suggestion of her having a life outside the restaurant in the two weeks he’d been there. “Why don’t you want to?” he asked.
She looked startled by the question. “I never said I didn’t want to. In fact…I tried.” She waggled her head from side to side in a gesture of reluctance. He remembered that she’d almost shared something of her past at The Royal Dragoon, then changed her mind. She said unhappily, “I was engaged to be married last year to a lawyer who came into the restaurant all the time at lunch. After we got engaged, my best friend was suffering through a breakup, and Dave and I double-dated with Cassie and one of his partners. But it was Dave Cassie was attracted to, and apparently the feeling was mutual because about a month before my wedding, she told me she was pregnant.”
“Dave’s baby,” he guessed.
“Right.
”
“I’m sorry. But you’re smart enough to know that there’s a broken heart in everybody’s life at one time or another.”
She nodded. “Of course, I do. But I’m a little…” She groped for the right word.
“Reluctant to trust?” he suggested.
“No.”
“Afraid to get hurt again?”
“No.”
He grinned. “Ticked off?”
“That’s it.” She laughed. “I felt used, abused and betrayed for a while, but I’m getting over it. So a life would be nice, but I’m sure I can have one and run the restaurant, too.”
“I believe it. Can’t you ask your brother to talk to your father?”
“I don’t want to put him in the middle. He’s doing what makes him happy, and I don’t want to upset that for him.”
“That’s very generous, considering.”
“Yeah, well, on good days I’m generous. On bad ones, I’m jealous and resentful and feel like I used to when we were teens and he used to get to go play football on weekends while I made salad and washed dishes.” She took a breath, then said with a sincere smile. “But he grew up into a very nice man who loves water and boats, and I love that he’s happy in Maine.”
Apparently done with her reminiscences, she looked into his eyes. “You must have had a similar background if your father had a restaurant, too.”
He had. “Very similar, except that my father was in partnership with a friend, and there were my sisters and me and two kids from the other family to fill in the same way you did. I got a job as a camp counselor in college to get away from the kitchen, one of my sisters went right into nursing school and the other got married. But, you apparently never wanted to escape.”
“No,” she agreed. “I love the work. But if my father wants to keep working, it may be time for me to strike out on my own.”
“Would you stay in Portland?”
“I’d love to have a restaurant on the coast. Seaside, or Cannon Beach, maybe.”
He could relate to either location. “They’re both great places in their own way.”
She smiled as she apparently focused on her dream. “I’d live on the cove in Seaside in a grove of trees.”
“With your husband and four little girls,” he said, remembering that moment after the plane had run through the trees, lost the right wing, then finally stopped. He’d had to practically pry his own fingers off the yoke, then turned to see her unconscious. He’d felt major panic until she’d told him in a quiet, dreamy voice to take her, to give her their first daughter.
She looked momentarily uncomfortable, then angled her chin and tossed her hair. “And a black Labrador for the backyard, and a tabby cat for the swing on the front porch.”
He could see it all in his mind. Three of the girls roughhousing with the dog, and the quiet one on the swing with the cat. Every family had a quiet one.
“A big swing set in the back,” he said, gate-crashing her dream, “and window boxes in the front. With pansies?”
“Geraniums would last longer.” She closed her eyes and leaned her head back. “A picnic table and a barbecue in a gazebo-sort-of-thing because you can never trust the weather.”
“A van in the garage.”
“Right.”
“A French nanny?” he suggested with a straight face.
Even with her eyes closed, she knew he was teasing. She smiled. “No nanny. I’ll be there when the girls come home from school.”
“Who’ll be overseeing the restaurant?”
“I will.” She smiled again. “I’ll be a formidable force whose power remains even when she’s away. And that’ll work as long as I don’t hire a waiter who ignores everything I say and does what he damn well pleases.”
“Not very subtle, Kat. If a customer likes me waiting on him, I should be able to wait on him.”
“Mr. Percanto liked me before you came,” she said, opening her eyes and rolling her head along the back of the seat until she could look at him. “I just resented him asking for the smart-mouth waiter who was giving me a lot of grief when I’d been standing on my head to make sure his table had everything he needed.”
Hal suspected that Percanto was as aware as everyone else of her eaglelike attention to everything that went on at Umberto’s. It was entirely possible he’d asked for Hal to wait on his table because Hal was new and Percanto thought he might be too focused on doing a good job to overhear anything suspicious or notice anything suspect.
“It’s a guy thing,” Hal replied lightly. “I’m sure it’s nothing to feel sensitive about. I probably remind him of his son or something.”
She folded her arms and said a little grudgingly, “You are a good waiter. You’re just not the kind of employee who’s easy to manage.”
“Some people just aren’t manageable.”
“Then they should have jobs where they don’t disrupt a well-oiled system.”
He couldn’t help but smile at that. She was serious, and probably wouldn’t like his amused reaction.
“You have an exceptionally fine and devoted staff. You don’t have to be watching every move to get a good performance out of them, and from what I’ve observed, you seem to know that. You leave them alone. But I’m a different story.”
“Because you never cooperate.”
“You never give me a chance. You’re telling me what to do every single moment, then telling me what I’ve done wrong even before I’ve done anything at all.”
“I am not.”
“You are. I think it’s just an excuse to spend time with me,” he said with a grin. “You can’t very well flirt when other people are within earshot, so you grumble at me instead.”
She gasped indignantly and grew so rigid that had he been able to get the plane in the air, she could have served as the other wing.
“That’s ridiculous!” she accused. “You’re smart-mouthed and contentious.”
“And yet you keep asking me to take you.”
“That was a dream!”
“Fed by something in your subconscious.”
“I…I…” she stammered. “I thought you were my…” She sighed and put a hand to her forehead, obviously unwilling to share what was on her mind, but needing to disabuse him of the idea that she had feelings for him. “I dream about a man. When I was unconscious, he came to me, and when you touched me, I thought you were him. That’s all.”
“Are you sure I’m not him?” he asked.
“Yes!” she replied firmly.
He’d have taken issue with that, but the sky began to spit snow. It would be dark by midafternoon, so if he was going to make them comfortable for the night, he should do it now.
“Explain me to your journal,” he said, pointing to the book still on her lap, “while I see what happened to the flashlight and a few other amenities when we came down.”
CHAPTER SIX
GOD, HE WAS AGGRAVATING, Kat thought. But she’d have hated to be alone out here, so she could put up with him. And he wasn’t entirely wrong in his conclusion. She had considered him handsome and competent when he’d first arrived, but he’d seemed completely uninterested in her and that had been demoralizing.
So she’d tried to talk to him in a personable way about providing attentive service to their patrons while still making sure that each course was promptly cleared away. That way the table could be turned over several times in an evening.
He’d told her in a very superior way that where he’d learned to wait tables, customers weren’t rushed along, but allowed to relax and enjoy their meals so that they’d return. She’d resented his attitude and gotten superior in return. After that they’d argued over everything every chance they got. Until she’d dragged him into her father’s office yesterday and been as good as told that her father intended to do nothing about it. That the fault was probably hers.
It had surprised her. Her father usually supported her decisions and opinions regarding the staff. But it was different with Hal S
tratton. She wondered if her father saw in him the son he’d wanted in Giulio.
She was suddenly very tired. She snuggled under the blanket and closed her eyes.
When she woke up, an emergency light hung from the ceiling of the plane, and in its eerie light, she saw snow swirling against the windshield. The temperature inside the cabin had fallen considerably, and she noticed that Hal’s jacket had been thrown on top of the blanket covering her.
Hal’s seat was empty and she heard no movement from the back of the plane. She wondered idly if he’d simply decided she was too cross and too much trouble and had just left her to try to make it to town on his own. She felt one moment of stark panic.
Then she came to her senses. He’d have never taken off in the dark, and he wouldn’t have left his jacket. The gesture would have been chivalrous but fatal.
“Hal?” she called.
“Yeah?” came instantly from the back of the plane.
“What are you doing?” She held her watch up to the light and saw that it was just after 8:00 p.m. There’d be a good ten or twelve hours until daylight. Great. And she was confined in a tiny space with a man who was convinced she had the hots for him.
And she did.
The sound of Hal’s voice in response to her call filled her with comfort and relief. His calm management of all this made Dave seem like PeeWee Herman.
The truth of her feelings for him came down on her in a swirl of confusion like the snow beyond the windshield. It occurred to her that this realization was a really weird thing to have happen to her in a crashed plane on a mountaintop—that is, a landed plane on a mountaintop.
This couldn’t have happened in the civilized atmosphere of the restaurant when she could have had a little space to think, could have had some connection to the real world, one in which she would know her feelings were irrational.
No. It had to come to her in the rarified atmosphere of the cockpit of a light plane from which there was no escape—at the moment, at least. A place disconnected from reality. A tiny space suddenly heavy with her awareness.