by Helena Ray
“Me too! I didn’t work that far from Sprüngli, and it was always so tempting to go over and indulge.”
“Really? Where did you work?”
“On Dreikönigstrasse, near—”
“Bürkliplatz? God, I loved it there. We also worked at the Mövenpick Restaurant on Beethovenstrasse, and sometimes we would take our lunch there.”
Marta rested her head against the wall and smiled up at Phil. “Okay, so you worked there. Can you tell me what it is with all the Mövenpicks in Zurich?”
“I don’t know, I mean, there’s the restaurants—”
“The hotels—”
“The ice cream shops—”
“They’re everywhere!” they exclaimed in unison and then dissolved into laughter. Whatever her professional or personal relationship with Phil, Marta secretly rejoiced at having found a fellow Switzerland enthusiast in Savage Valley. Knowing she would have some sort of intellectual company for the foreseeable future went a long way toward soothing her.
“Well, fuck me up the ass.” Marta turned to find the speaker of the vulgar words and saw Sam slamming the door to his office. He stormed forward, his eyes darting only briefly in her direction as he approached Phil. “Norman’s on his way.”
Phil closed his eyes as Sam strode out onto the main floor of the diner. He took a deep breath, opened his eyes, and rested a hand on her shoulder. Her skin seemed to burn through her uniform where he rested his hand. The softness of his face was still there, but marred by a streak of concern furrowing his brow.
“Don’t mind Sam. He’s about to have a very difficult confrontation.”
“What sort of confrontation?”
Phil looked behind him toward the front of the diner then squeezed her shoulder. “It’s hard to explain. It’d probably be best for you to go back to work now.”
Confused by the sudden shift, Marta swallowed the lump growing in her throat. She tried to turn away, but Phil kept his grip on her shoulder. “I’ll tell you all about it later. Maybe next week?” When she looked into his eyes, she thought she saw tenderness, but he still seemed preoccupied. “I have to go away for a few days.”
She mustered a smile in return. “Okay, next week.”
He let go of her shoulder but let his hand slide down her arm, leaving a trail of frenzied nerve endings where his fingertips brushed over her skin. She watched his hand, slightly embarrassed at the way her hairs stood on end in the wake of his touch.
Finally, he disappeared back into the diner. Marta took a breath to steady herself and then returned to the coffeepot awaiting her. She returned to the man she now knew as Clayton Abbott.
“No creamer this time.” She let a small smirk play at the corner of her lips.
“But an hour and a half to get my coffee.”
Marta was in the process of formulating a clever, typical small-town-diner response when a hush fell over the diner. The music, a classic country tune she quite enjoyed, stopped, and she turned around to protest. The intimidating presence of the man who had entered Savage Hunger trapped her words in her throat.
Rita gingerly stepped toward him, robbed of her usual uppity demeanor.
“Hi, Mr. Norman. Would you like a table today?”
The bald man dressed impeccably in a designer suit and shiny leather oxfords smiled at Rita, revealing a set of synthetically too-white teeth. The smile did not reach his eyes, though, and looked more like a primal display of aggression.
Sam pushed past Rita, though, showing none of the sudden reticence of the diner’s patrons. He used his body as a shield in front of the older woman and looked his visitor square in the eye.
“Ulysses, you know what my answer is.”
“Why, Samuel, you didn’t even allow your lovely hostess to seat me. What sort of a greeting is that?”
“It’s a greeting given by a man who’s goddamned exasperated, that’s what.”
The bald man narrowed his eyes at Sam. “It was a rhetorical question.”
Sam quirked one eyebrow. “I know.”
Something flashed over the corporate type’s features, turning his otherwise unremarkable features into a twisted, sinister countenance, but it faded quickly. “Samuel, if you we could talk about this somewhere more private, I could show that financially—”
“Anything you want to say to me can be said in front of my patrons.”
“Really?” The man smirked, revealing his shark teeth once more.
“Really.” Sam narrowed his eyes, his muscles tensing like a predator about to attack.
“Calm down, Mr. Pope,” he admonished. He straightened his suit jacket and began a slow circle around the front area of the diner, taking in the framed pictures and newspaper clippings that adorned the walls. “This place does have a certain rustic charm, but if you want the real money—the luxury-chalet crowd—you’ll need to do some improvements.”
“We don’t want any different crowd. These people are our family, Norman. And family takes care of each other. No way in hell would we abandon these folks.”
Sam’s comment was met with several murmurs of appreciation from the patrons. Marta looked to the kitchen to see if any orders were up, but the kitchen staff appeared as enthralled with the interaction as everyone else.
Norman stopped in front of a faded snapshot showing two men with their arms around a young woman. The size of everyone’s hair indicated it was probably taken in the early 1980s.
“Huh.” Norman turned to face Sam. “It’s funny that you claim to be a family business. I would never bring my precious Jamie to an establishment such as this. Most would agree that bigamy hardly qualifies as a family value.”
Norman’s statement clearly upset the diners, and sharp whispers punctured the silence. Sam, however, remained impervious to whatever slight Norman thought he was making.
“If you’re here to convince me that you have my best interests in mind, you’re hardly doing a good job.”
The blinding flash of white shone from between his thin lips again. “Oh, but I am, Sam. No matter how much I disagree with the lifestyle your family has chosen to lead, I have a great appreciation for what you’ve done with Savage Hunger. My company only wishes to enhance the results of your work.”
“Bullshit.” Sam crossed his arms and took a step toward Norman, his impressive height dwarfing his nemesis. “If you wished to enhance Savage Valley, you wouldn’t have had your goons damn near kill my best friend’s fiancée in a fire.”
“Oh, that?”
“Yeah, that.” He spit out the word like an arsenic-laced watermelon seed.
“Rest assured that the men who perpetrated that despicable act—not on my command, by the way—have been transferred to a different branch of NormCorp.”
“You didn’t fire the bastards?”
“That action is pending the results of their criminal trial.”
“And yours?”
Sam’s words appeared to sting Norman, for he flinched at their utterance.
“My trial has little to do with this proposition, Mr. Pope,” he said, once more straightening his jacket, visibly shaken by Sam’s remark. “I hope that you will consider my offer on its own merits and not on hearsay regarding my company’s actions.”
“Please leave my restaurant, Norman.”
He raised a hand to his chest in what even Marta could tell was feigned offense.
“But Mr. Pope, I was hoping to sample some of Philip’s infamous flank steak with polenta corncakes.”
“He can whip you up something to go.”
Sam took another step toward Norman, and the bald gentlemen turned toward the door.
“There will come a day when the business that comes through here won’t be enough, and NormCorp will be glad to take the diner off your hands. One call to my secretary, Mr. Pope. That’s all it takes.”
When the door to the glass door to Savage Hunger shut, the patrons burst into noisy chatter. It took a few moments for the entire interaction to register in M
arta’s brain, but a few words stuck out, something about Norman nearly killing someone in a fire. Oh, god. The horror of the situation sank in.
This was the man behind NormCorp, the business Chelsea had told her about. Only a few weeks earlier, an ordinance to prevent Norman from developing a part of Savage Valley’s wilderness was gaining support from the town. When it was about to pass, two of his cronies set fire to the Woodland Den, the lodge at the western edge of town, a tragedy that nearly took Chelsea’s life.
Okay, now she understood the tense resentment that settled on the diner when he entered and why Sam had been so upset about the offer to purchase the diner. With Chelsea and her handsome bosses the targets of the pretentious suit’s rage, Marta shared in the anger.
This was personal now.
Chapter 3
“Seriously?”
Marta examined the dollar bills and coins she had dumped onto her bed, the only piece of furniture in her one-room apartment, save for the chair jammed against the makeshift kitchen counter and a tiny writing desk. She counted the scant cash that made up her first two weeks’ tips once again and cursed when she came up with the same paltry figure.
She rose from her bed and crossed to her virtually empty kitchen. However, a single bottle of cheap red wine, a housewarming present to herself, stood in a lonely cabinet.
“There you are.” She took the bottle down from the cupboard and rummaged through the drawers for a corkscrew. Leftovers from previous tenants filled the drawers, and the best Marta could find was a flimsy corkscrew attached to a can opener.
“Hard times call for hard measures,” she muttered to herself as she worked to pull the cork out. After several tugs, the damned thing wouldn’t budge. She gave one final tug, and the corkscrew dislodged itself from the can opener with a soft click.
That was the final straw. Everything had gone wrong for Marta that day. After initially loving the small-town feel of Savage Hunger, the monotony of the job had started to feel confining. Marta abandoned the bottle of wine and flung herself with great flourish onto her bed. She curled into the fetal position and stared at the pink glow cast on her wall by the single floor lamp that lit the space.
When she was completely honest with herself, she knew that the diner wasn’t what was behind her ennui. No, it had more to do with the owners of the diner than the diner itself. On her first few days at Savage Hunger, Sam and Phil had been friendly, outgoing, attentive, and if Marta wasn’t mistaken, quite flirtatious. But quick as a railroad switch being pulled, they closed off to her. Phil had limited his interactions with her to only the necessary barked orders from the kitchen, even finding excuses to run away when she offered to reminisce about the wonders of Zurich. Sam, on the other hand, had transformed into a ghost. She only saw him when he rushed in and out of the diner, always running out the door with an armful of papers.
Perhaps naively, Marta had imagined a new life for herself in Savage Valley that involved one—or maybe even both—of the Pope brothers. Sure, Chelsea had been an invaluable resource since Marta moved, visiting her and showing her around, but her fiancés kept her busy, and Marta’s extra shifts at the diner made ladies’ nights impossible. But that vision of new life coming to fruition seemed highly unlikely.
Shouting outside Marta’s apartment interrupted her rumination, and she pulled her pillow over her head to block out the noise. Her attempt at thwarting the sounds proved unsuccessful, and she cursed to herself as she pulled herself out of bed, slammed her feet into slippers, and tossed her hair in a messy ponytail. Today was not the day to mess with her.
She pulled open the door and marched out onto Treaty Lane where it met with Kwitakusix Cove.
“Excuse me, but there are—”
Her words were cut short by what she saw. Three men stood in the empty lot next to her rickety fourplex surrounding what appeared to be some sort of large copper pot with a series of twisting tubes on top of it. It wasn’t the oddity of the sight that stopped her in her tracks, though. No, it was the three men themselves. Two of them were around Marta’s height with dark hair, bright blue eyes, and chiseled cheekbones. They had to be brothers, if not twins.
But the most impressive of the trio had to be the tallest. He appeared the classic rebel, wearing a faded black leather jacket over a tight white T-shirt and dark-wash jeans that hugged what Marta immediately identified as a delectable, tight ass. He was bent over the strange contraption that appeared straight out of a Victorian industrial fantasy, and shaggy jet-black hair hung around his face, providing a striking contrast against ruddy cheeks.
One of the shorter men jerked on a thin, copper tube that rose in spirals from the larger vessel. He went stumbling backward, cursing to himself as he landed squarely on his ass.
“How are we supposed to salvage the parts if they keep breaking off?” the other shorter man said as he held out a hand and pulled his probable twin to his feet.
Marta was about to sneak back into her efficiency to see if she could continue to spy on them through the single window in her apartment, but the man who had just plummeted to the ground spotted her.
“Well, well, who do we have here?”
It was only at the sound of his slurred voice that Marta noticed the brown glass bottle clutched in the other twin’s hand. She laughed a bit to herself when she saw the white label on the bottle, visible even in the pale purple of dusk, with “X X X” written in black marker. That certainly explained the copper pot. A whisky still. She should have known.
“I don’t know, but we should introduce ourselves.”
“After all, it’s only small-town hospitality.”
“What’s your name, gorgeous?”
“You single, pretty lady?”
Their leering comments overlapped each other, and Marta backed toward her door, wondering what exactly she had gotten herself into.
“Damn it, guys. Cut it out.” With a clang of metal, the tallest of the three raised himself to his full height and turned toward Marta. If she had thought he was impressive before, she now thought he could blow the socks off any of the perfectly coiffed models she had met in Europe. His smooth skin was peppered with dark stubble that framed full, luscious lips. His eyes, though, nearly stopped Marta’s heart. Their ice-blue color was unlike anything Marta had seen.
She found herself suddenly unable to breathe as he walked toward her, a cross between an apologetic expression and a smirk across his classically attractive features.
“Don’t mind Ezra and Cleve, the Yeats boys. They’ve been drinking a bit too much of the product.”
Despite the slightly shady circumstances, Marta couldn’t help but indulge her curiosity.
“When you say product, do you mean…moonshine?” She whispered the last word and darted her eyes toward the copper still.
His expression turned fully into a smirk, and he quirked one eyebrow.
“Why? Are you interested in purchasing some?”
After a moment of hesitation, she decided to play along.
“Maybe. How much are you guys selling it for?”
“Well, this is some very, very high-quality whisky. We can’t just give it away.”
“Why couldn’t I just go buy some at the Savage Convenience?”
“You’d be hard pressed to find such a fine liquor.”
“Sweet or sour mash?”
“Sour, of course.”
“Then what keeps me from going to Steamboat Springs and getting a bottle of Woodford Reserve?”
His eyebrow quirked again.
“A woman who knows her bourbon. I like it.”
Marta shrugged. “What can I say? It’s my drink.”
“That’s because you haven’t tried our stumphole, gorgeous.” One of the brothers staggered toward them. Without looking, the taller man held out a hand and stopped his advance.
“Stumphole?” Marta couldn’t keep the incredulity from creeping into her voice. “Great marketing term there.”
Her conversationa
l companion mocked offense. “Well, excuse me for using one of the several traditional names for the coveted beverage. If you’re not interested, then I believe we’ll—”
“Wait.” Marta couldn’t let her sarcastic tone push him away. “I’m interested.”
His full lips curved into a smug smile, and his eyes glinted with unmistakable mischief.
“I knew I had found a fellow adventurer.” He stepped closer to her, and she could smell an intoxicating woody, spicy male musk. Her heartbeat raced, and she realized she didn’t care if he noticed her body’s visceral reaction to his nearness. God, since when did she ever want someone so badly?
He closed the distance between their bodies so that he stood less than a foot away. She backed onto the small porch in front of her complex, and he continued his pursuit. His smell overwhelmed her as he took her hand in his.
“I’m Mel.”
His long fingers stroked along her palm, and she had to suppress a shudder.
“M–Marta. I’m Marta.”
“Well, M–Marta,” he mocked, and Marta crinkled her nose in response, “I do so enjoy welcoming newcomers to Savage Valley.”
“How do you know I’m a newcomer?” she challenged before realizing the answer was plain.
Mel looked at her blankly for a moment. “A bit fewer than three thousand people live in this town. Trust me, we notice new faces.”
“And new other things, too.” The two brothers stumbled forward at the interjection.
Mel closed his eyes and sighed deeply before opening them. “Allow me to introduce my inebriated companions, Cleve and Ezra Yeats.” He acknowledged each as he spoke.
“Believe me, we’re quite delighted to meet you,” Cleve said before stumbling a bit and breaking Marta’s contact with Mel. A bizarre pang of longing pierced her gut as soon as his hand retracted.
“I apologize for their behavior. Unfortunately, I must admit they’re always this uncouth.”
Marta chuckled at the exasperation in Mel’s voice. He shook his head, allowing his black locks to fall over his forehead and provide a sheer curtain for the brilliance of his eyes beneath. His gaze found hers, and for what seemed like an eternity, his eyes pinned her to where she stood.