by Meg Benjamin
“We’re here,” she said.
He looked up. His truck was parked at the curb. Her porch light gleamed in the darkness. A couple dozen steps, and she’d be home. He pushed the front gate open, then followed her through.
Okay, you’ve got this. No problem. Except, of course, that he didn’t. He hadn’t felt this awkward since middle school.
She turned on the top step, looking down at him, or as down as she could look when they were basically nose to nose. “This is where I say I had a great time and thank you. Which is true. I did have a great time. And I do thank you. But it still sounds sort of weird to me.”
He frowned. “Why weird?”
She gave him a slightly rueful smile. “Because it’s such a routine thing to say. I feel like I should come up with something better.”
He shook his head. “I’ll take it.” His right hand moved to the back of her neck, almost without his thinking about it, and he drew her lips down to his.
Random thoughts drifted through his mind. She was so soft, so warm. How long had it been since he’d touched a woman like this? Kissed a woman when it wasn’t just a prelude to something else, when kissing was the main event?
He moved his hand up to the back of her head, let his fingers slide into her hair, trace the shape of her skull. He changed the angle of the kiss, brought his tongue to her mouth and tasted her.
Honey. Sweetness. A hint of fragrance. Gracious Lord above.
His arm went around her waist, pulling their bodies tighter, soft breasts against his chest. She gave a soft hum deep in her throat.
Okay. Time to stop.
He lifted his head slowly, pausing to rest his forehead against hers until he caught his breath. Oh yes, Gracious Lord above.
“I want to see you again,” he murmured.
She nodded, her forehead pressed against his collarbone. “Yes. Me too.”
“There’s a band in the beer garden Sunday night. Come sit with me.”
“I can do that.”
“Okay, then.” He raised his head slowly, reluctantly, then dropped a quick kiss on her forehead. “Good night, Andy.”
“Good night,” she whispered.
He touched her cheek once, lightly, then turned back down the stairs. But all the way down the walk to his truck he was aware of her still standing there. Watching him from her front steps.
Chapter Seven
Darcy inched down the final fifty feet to the bridge that led to the King’s place with her hands wrapped in a death grip on the steering wheel. She was a good Midwestern girl. She’d been driving since she was fourteen. And she’d still never encountered a road quite this bad. She decided to park on the far side of the river, pulling off next to the King’s food truck.
This time she slammed the door before she headed over the bridge and across the meadow, following her nose toward the smell of smoke. A few yards beyond the trailer she saw a concrete-block building, maybe a storage shed of some kind. Although it seemed a little large for a storage shed.
Porky came galumphing in her direction again, yipping joyfully. Apparently, one meeting was enough to establish her as a beloved buddy.
She heard another door slam and turned back. The Barbecue King stood outside his trailer, grinning down at her. He wore another T-shirt with torn-off sleeves, this one stained with sweat. The afternoon sunlight caught red highlights in his dark hair, and she saw the flash of an earring in one ear. The Pirate King, this time around. “Hey there, Ms. Darcy. Got my sides?”
She nodded. “Back in the SUV.” She narrowed her eyes, nodding toward the concrete block building. “What’s that?”
“Kitchen,” he said shortly. “Let’s get those sides into the refrigerator. Then we can start the day’s lesson.”
Kitchen? Darcy glanced back over her shoulder as they headed back across the meadow again. The storage shed looked less like a kitchen than anything she’d ever seen.
Porky lolloped ahead of them, long ears flying. “How old is that dog?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Hard to say. Somebody dropped him off back here a few months ago. We adopted each other.”
She grimaced. “I hate that. Abandoning animals along back roads is low.”
“Better than drowning him.” The King’s jaw firmed.
At her SUV, she opened the back door and reached for the eight-quart plastic container of potato salad. The King beat her to it, lifting the container into his arms. “Which one’s heavier?”
She shrugged. “Probably that one. The slaw doesn’t pack down as tight.” Actually, she found the idea that he’d save her from lifting the heavier container a little touching. She spent a lot of her day wrestling hotel pans full of food from one table to another. Nobody had offered to give her a hand for several years now.
Of course, if they had offered, she probably would have spat in their eyes.
She hefted the coleslaw into her arms and followed the King and Porky back across the meadow toward the concrete block storage shed. He rested the potato salad on one hip while he dug out a set of keys.
Darcy frowned. “You keep the shed locked?”
He shrugged. “Only thing around here that’s worth significant money is the meat and the cooking equipment. When I’m working up here I keep it unlocked. But when I leave or go inside the trailer, I lock it up.”
He pushed the door open and she stepped after him. He slammed the door before Porky could follow them, earning a mournful woof. Fluorescent lights blinked into life, and she stared around the room. A kitchen. It wasn’t large, and it definitely wasn’t fancy. On the other hand, it looked efficient as hell.
One wall was lined with a couple of freezers, along with a restaurant-size refrigerator. Another side had a double sink with stainless steel counters. Storage shelves lined the walls on the other two sides, filled with containers of spices, salt, oil, and vinegar, along with bags of beans and anonymous cans. An air conditioner hummed somewhere in the background.
“Quite a place,” she murmured.
He shrugged. “Passes health code inspection.”
“Where do you get the power?”
“We’ve got power out here. We’re not that primitive.” He gave her a dry grin.
She shrugged. “No offense.”
“None taken. I’ve got my own generator too. For emergencies.”
He opened the refrigerator door, placing the potato salad inside, then reaching for her container of coleslaw. As he took it from her, he paused, peering down through the plastic lid. “You didn’t use mayonnaise?”
She shook her head. “You serve brisket and sausage, right?”
“Yeah. And chicken.”
“Then you need slaw with vinegar dressing to cut through the richness. Makes for a better contrast.”
She lifted the coleslaw out of his hands and set it on a shelf in the refrigerator. Thank you, Mom. If he deigned to try it, he’d find pretty damn good slaw, if she did say so herself.
The other shelves were lined with rings of sausage, along with bottles of ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, pickles, and some mysterious plastic containers. Four or five loaves of sandwich bread sat on the lowest shelf.
“If you leave bread in the refrigerator, it dries out,” she said.
“If you leave it on the counter around here, you’ve got penicillin in a couple of days. That’s just the leftover slices from today on the truck anyway. I’ll use it up tomorrow. The rest is in the freezer.” He grabbed a couple of the mysterious containers, then pushed the refrigerator door closed.
Darcy folded her arms across her chest, surveying the kitchen. “I never understood the whole sandwich bread thing. Why not serve rolls?”
He shrugged again. “History. Tradition. I’ll go over the background sometime, but right now, we got stuff to do.”
He placed the containers on the counter, pulling off the tops. Darcy stood on tiptoe to look over his shoulder. Each container held a massive cut of meat, bright red with spice rub. “Brisket?” she
asked.
He nodded. “Yep. Packer cut. They need a few minutes to warm up to room temperature before I put them on the fire. Speaking of which, come on.”
He headed out the kitchen door again, turning up a winding path beside the kitchen without looking back. Darcy fell into step behind him with Porky bringing up the rear.
The path curved across the meadow, coming to a stop at another structure, this time a kind of lean-to in a grove of live oaks. It was open at the sides, with a cement slab as a floor and a corrugated tin roof supported by posts at the corners.
Four smokers of various sizes and stages of dilapidation were equally spaced across the slab. Two of them were oozing smoke from their stacks. The King stepped up to the first, raising the lid slightly and sliding a hand underneath for a moment, shaking it when he pulled it back. “Looks like we’re ready to go.”
“Ready?”
“To cook. Come on.” He headed back across the meadow toward the kitchen again.
Darcy trotted along behind him. “What about the other smoker?”
“If one’s ready the other one is too, more or less. I started them at the same time.” He opened the door to the kitchen, motioning her through, then closed it behind him before heading back to the refrigerator. “Beef cooks longest, so we put that on first. Chicken I do tomorrow morning before I head to town.”
She frowned. “What about that smoker on wheels down near the river? Is that for the sausage?”
He shrugged. “I’ll use it to cook the sausage and to keep stuff warm when I get downtown, but I do most of the real cooking out here. Beef takes eight to ten hours. Chicken takes around three. Sausage takes around forty-five minutes. I usually get the smoker set up down there around ten so the smoke can start making people hungry early on. But I don’t spend enough time down there to actually cook anything except the sausage and sometimes the chicken. It’s mainly for show.”
“So you cook it here and refrigerate it?”
He nodded. “Wrap it in foil when it gets close to done. Some of the old guys just toss it into a picnic cooler then until they’re ready to serve, just skip the refrigeration altogether. I’ll do that if it’s close to time for me to head to town—keeps the meat at the maximum point of delicious. But it’s too big a risk if it’s more than a half hour or so.”
Darcy nodded, thinking of the probable reaction of all the health inspectors she’d ever known. “So now what?”
He grinned. “Grab a brisket, sweetheart. Time to cook.” He hefted one of the plastic containers and started back toward the door. She grabbed the next one and staggered slightly.
The King turned. “You gonna make it? I can come back and grab it myself.”
Darcy gritted her teeth to keep from snarling. “I’ll be fine.” She hefted the container into her arms, boosting it with her knee, then stepped resolutely toward the door. She could feel the King grinning at her, almost as if his grin had a temperature of its own.
Porky danced around her feet, yipping ecstatically. His friend was back and she had meat!
“I didn’t know how heavy it was,” she muttered. “That’s all.”
“Comes in at twelve to fifteen pounds. Cheap but tasty.” He stepped by her and headed up the path, the container resting on his shoulder. Porky tumbled along behind him.
Show-off. She wrapped her arms more firmly around the container and followed them.
At the lean-to he placed his container on a small table at the side. She did the same. “Any problem with Porky going after these?”
He shook his head. “He only likes sausage, thank the good Lord. Now we put them on.” He stepped to the smoker, flipping up the top. The smell of wood smoke filled the lean-to as he turned back to the table and lifted the meat out of the container. Darcy watched him heft the brisket into his arms and then lower it onto the grill. “Come here a minute.”
She stepped beside him at the grill, staring down at the fire. Or where she thought the fire should have been. Instead the brisket rested over two aluminum pans. She saw glowing coals heaped at the end of the smoker, away from the meat.
“You use indirect heat with this,” he explained. “It’s got to go for eight or nine hours to get tender. If you give it too much heat to begin with, it dries out and you’ve got something like barbecued jerky. Some people put water in the pans. I think that dilutes the flavor.” He lowered the lid and headed toward the second smoker, raising the lid.
He turned back to look at her over his shoulder. “Bring that other one over here, sweetheart.”
He gave her a guileless grin. Darcy gritted her teeth again and lifted the second brisket out of its plastic container, ready for the weight this time. She walked toward the smoker, hoping Porky would stay in his corner.
“Just set it on there,” the King said easily. “Over the pans.”
She turned toward the grill, gritting her teeth again. Lowering the brisket slowly onto the grill would take a lot of biceps strength plus endurance given the heat of the fire, but thumping it down would make her look like an amateur. She took a breath, bent her knees and brought the brisket as close to the smoker as she could, then let it roll onto the grill.
The King chortled. “Nice. Now we let it go for a while.” He lowered the lid, then pulled a paper towel from a drawer in the table. “Here you go.”
Darcy wiped her hands, blowing out a breath. Obviously, she’d passed a test. Also obviously, it wouldn’t be the last one of the day.
She worked hard—Harris would give her that. Of course, he hadn’t expected any less. She was a trained chef, used to working in big, high-pressure kitchens. No whining, no excuses, no expecting anybody else to take up the slack or do her work for her.
She’d toted a three-gallon pot of beans from the kitchen to the smokers without complaint, although he knew for a fact the damn thing weighed at least ten pounds. Then she’d hefted it up to the grill, asking only where he wanted it placed.
After they’d gotten the smokers set up for eight hours of cooking, he led her back to the trailer, pausing to refill Porky’s water dish at the kitchen sink. He needed a break himself and he was willing to bet she did too, although he was also willing to bet she’d never admit that she did. She had that over-developed competitive quality that would keep her working until she dropped rather than tell anyone she needed to stop.
He pulled a couple of Lone Stars from his small refrigerator and handed her one. “Sit down. We won’t need to check the meat for another hour or so.”
She sank onto the bench at his rudimentary kitchen table, moving her shoulders to loosen her spine a bit. “You do this every day?”
“Every day except the weekend.” He shrugged. “Sunday’s my day off unless I’ve got a catering job someplace.”
“And you do it on your own?”
“Yeah. Never had anybody who wanted to be my assistant before.” He gave her a grin that he hoped was roguish rather than creepy. After he’d been working awhile it was sometimes hard to tell the difference. “You want a sandwich? I’ve got some pulled chicken.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Does it involve that sandwich bread from the big kitchen?”
“Same brand. Unopened package.”
She sighed. “Okay. And maybe you can explain why you have to supply the kind of bread I could mash up in one fist.”
Fortunately, it was a very narrow trailer. He reached into the refrigerator from his seat and pulled out a plastic bowl of chicken, then the loaf, then the jar of sauce. “How much sauce you like? Wet or sort of semi-dry?”
“Are we heating this up?”
He nodded. “Microwaved.”
“Semi-dry, I guess. Your sponge bread’s liable to disintegrate if we make it wet.”
He pushed himself to his feet, grinning a bit more realistically. God, he loved sparring with this woman, although he couldn’t say precisely why. “Now that’s a typical non-Texan response. No appreciation for tradition. You got to have sandwich bread, lady. It’s part of
the mystique.”
He grabbed a bowl from one of the cupboards and a spoon from a drawer, then dumped chicken into the bowl, spooning sauce on top.
She frowned. “What’s in the sauce?”
“Oh, this and that.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I’m here to learn, remember?”
“You can learn all you want about the process of making barbecue, but my sauces and rubs are my sauces and rubs.” He shrugged. “It’s part of what makes my barbecue mine. I don’t share. None of us do.”
She raised her eyebrows, but said nothing. He wasn’t sure whether that was a sign of acceptance or a sign that she was getting ready to stage a sneaky counterattack.
The bell sounded on the microwave and he pulled out the bowl of chicken. Darcy helped him bring the chicken, bread, pickles and butter to the table, along with some sliced cucumbers and onions in vinegar he’d been hoarding in the refrigerator for a few days.
He watched her pile chicken on her plate, then butter a couple of pieces of bread. “You’re going to eat my bread sponge?”
“Sure. I’m hungry.” She dug her fork into the pile of chicken, then took a bite. He watched her as his own shoulders tightened.
Nervous? You’re nervous about what Ms. Darcy might have to say? That was ridiculous.
She looked across the table, her forehead furrowed slightly. “Not bad. Tasty.”
He let his shoulders relax. Ridiculous.
She took another bite. “Ketchup of course,” she said slowly. “Extra vinegar to go along with it. Maybe a little mustard too. And brown sugar.”
She dragged her fork through the puddle of sauce on the plate, then touched it to her tongue. “Something citrus. Probably lemon?”
She raised an eyebrow in question. He kept his expression studiously blank.
Another bite. “Some of the richness comes from chicken fat, but some of it’s added. Butter? Maybe margarine?”
He narrowed his eyes. “No margarine in my kitchen.”