Above all, you have to be able to read people – can this guy reel home safely, or do you need to call a cab? Is that guy lying when he says it wasn’t him that gave his girlfriend that huge shiner of a black eye? Are the out-of-towners at that table really over twenty-one, or did they invest their money in top-of-the-line fake I.D.s?
If you give this stranger in your truck a chance, can you trust him to be a nice guy and not some weird-ass pervy serial killer?
“Dave?”
“Yes, Cassie?”
“Do you know how to cook?”
He chewed his lower lip, and then looked up at me with one eyebrow raised. “I know how to eat – does that count?”
“Close enough, you’re hired.”
“Are you serious?”
That stunned, gorgeous face and those eyes and that low, sexy rumble of a voice were going to be my doom somehow, I knew it.
“You have no clothes, no car, no money, nobody to come get you, and for some mysterious reason you can’t go home. In my book, that leaves you with two options – going to jail, or doing what I say and getting your ass in my kitchen now. So do I call the sheriff, or are you going to be a good boy and figure out how to use the deep fryer?”
“You want me in your kitchen naked?” He flashed that lopsided grin again, and what it did to me was … well, it was probably illegal in a place like Kansas.
Stop it, Cassie, and right now. Whoever he is, this mouthwatering hunk of male awesomeness is way out of your league – he probably has a whole pack of size negative-ten sluts with helium breasts and hourglass waists waiting for him back home in Chicago, and no guy this hot would bother looking at a real woman with a real body anyway. So this situation in front of you needs to be business first and no pleasure later. Deal with it.
“Nope, we’ll have to find you something to put on – otherwise, it’d be just my luck that the health department would happen by for a snap inspection, and I’m pretty sure a cook wearing nothing but his skin and a smile gets you an automatic fail from those guys.”
A quick trip around the bar to the storage shed out back produced a pair of Dad’s work boots that might do for now, along with an old set of his overalls – they’d be a tight fit on such a tall guy, but at least they’d keep my new employee’s naughty bits covered until he could scrounge up some clothes of his own. Plus I had a stack of t-shirts on a shelf under the bar – bright red, with our slogan “Eat, Drink, and Be Merry at the Jayhawk Tavern” over an idealized little drawing Mom had made of the building – and I guesstimated that one of the 2X ones would stretch over the powerful muscling of his broad chest …
Cassie, get a GRIP.
So I stopped inside for a shirt and hustled back to the truck. I faked an impatient sigh and looked the other way – almost – while Dave Somebody got himself dressed and decent, and then I shrugged for him to follow me as I headed back inside. I’d solved the no-cook problem and the naked-guy-in-my-truck problem all at one shot, and it was past time to wrestle with all the new problems waiting for me on this Friday night from hell.
Would I ever catch a break?
***
I’m a big planner. That probably comes from studying architectural engineering – learning to look at skyscrapers and see the metal skeletons underneath, figuring out the hidden structures of electrical wiring and plumbing, working out the best way to distribute a building’s weight along its inner network of girders and support beams, that kind of thing. It’s like playing with a giant puzzle, a real-life game of Jenga, and I think it’s fascinating.
My father did not agree. My father built our family’s fortune on breaking things down, not building them up. He was all about destruction, not construction, and he had plans of his own – plans for my future, plans that I didn’t get to vote on, plans that had me scampering through a maze like a trapped rat.
And the goal of all those plans, the reward waiting for me at the end of the maze?
I’d get to be a monster, just like him.
So I ran away.
I could have sworn I had it all planned. I worked out a mental blueprint of how to run, where to run, places I could stay and ways I could get by while I mapped out a future that didn’t involve selling my soul – and then one flat tire blew all those careful plans right out the window.
Now I was walking across a gravel parking lot in a forgotten corner of the prairie, following this spitfire of a girl toward a future nobody had planned.
She knew I couldn’t cook. She knew I was lying – sort of – about my name. What else did she know?
Did she know who I was? Did she know what I was running from? Did she know I was desperate and lost, with no idea of what to do next?
Did she know what those fierce blue eyes and that wild mane of red hair and the ripe, full curves of her body did to me?
3
Dave was a disaster.
That first night was the apocalypse, I swear. The guy acted like he’d never been in a kitchen before, like he’d never washed a dish or mopped a floor in his life, and he burned himself three times trying to use the deep fryer. Burgers charred black in his presence, he fumbled with a bag of frozen chicken fingers and spilled them all over the floor, and how did he manage to lock himself inside the cooler?
His second night wasn’t much better. He did figure out how to grill a cheeseburger without burning it into a solid block of charcoal, I’ll give him that – on the other hand, he somehow did it while melting the cheese slices into bubbling yellow puddles, and did he have any idea what that stuff cost?
You’d think a college guy would know his beers backwards and forwards, but he rolled a keg of Coors Light up front when I’d asked for Budweiser, and offered his opinion – which I didn’t ask for – that I should give away free pretzels with the beer, because wasn’t that something bars did? I pointed out that free equaled no profit for Cassie, and that no profit meant no money to pay my new cook, who in future needed to confine his opinions to subjects he knew something about.
He didn’t argue. He didn’t fuss or whine or get all attitudinal about a woman telling him what to do – he just hit me with his goofy, crooked smile, and then swapped out the wrong keg for the right one without another word.
Stop it, Cassie. Stop feeling all warm and special when some homeless guy you just hired smiles at you. Not even you can possibly be that pathetic and desperate, and besides, he’s just being nice – he’d smile like that at anything with two X chromosomes and a pulse, since he’s a straight guy who presumably has standard-issue guy plumbing between those sleek, muscular thighs …
Stop it right now, Cassie. It’s Saturday night, and you so do not have time to indulge your lonely hormones with fantasies about your runaway college boy cook who happens to look like a Viking warrior.
So I struggled through that Saturday from hell somehow, because what other options did I have?
I broke up a fight between Random Cowboy One and Random Cowboy Two, who tried to tear each other’s heads off after One accused Two of hitting on his girlfriend; I chose not to mention to either of them that I noticed said girlfriend licking her lips, smiling, and looking like it didn’t matter one bit to her which one came out the winner.
Shana brought her trim little ass through the door three hours late, no surprise there – she had a new guy, after all, and what was more important, doing her job or exploring how many weird sex positions she could bend herself into with her stud of the moment?
The jukebox died and refused to come back to life no matter how times I kicked it. The lights flickered and dimmed off and on through the night, which was one thing – but when the power dipped to nothing and we lost the TV for five crucial minutes during the Kansas State game? Jesus, I almost had a riot on my hands.
Dave tried to clean out the kitchen’s grease trap and I was less than surprised when we ended up with slimy, reeking grease all over the floor instead.
Two rival biker clubs parked their Harleys outside my door and cam
e inside to make sure everyone knew how much they hated each other and my regulars, although they did love spilling cheap beer on my pool tables – but their money was green, and that was all I could afford to care about.
It was three in the morning by the time everybody had cleared out and I’d counted down the register. I could barely see straight, I was tired to my bones of dealing with life’s sick sense of humor, and how had Mom and Dad survived this crap day after day, year after year? At least Dave insisted on sticking around long enough to make sure I got out to my truck and on my way home okay, although I was so exhausted it never occurred to me to wonder where he’d spend the night.
Since our county was stuck in the Stone Age, the law kept me from opening on Sunday, no matter how much I needed the money. So I slept until some fuzzy midpoint of the afternoon and then enjoyed a bracing breakfast of Captain Crunch, because on some things I refuse to grow up. I settled in to watch The Walking Dead on Netflix and decided to cheer for the zombies this time. I entertained a vague thought about maybe dusting something but decided against it, and I polished off the last dollop of Ben & Jerry’s left in my freezer because God created all those contented cows for a reason.
I thought about Dave.
Why did he run away? I knew next to nothing about him, but it seemed clear he’d left a plush existence behind him in Chicago, or at least one way more comfortable than the prairie hobo lifestyle he was living here in Eli Springs. Why was he so nervous about the possibility of his family tracking him down and dragging him back to all that luxury?
Why did I care?
After a year with no sexual outlet except my vibrator and a few well-worn fantasies, I’d given up on the male of the species. In my world, men existed as problems who needed to be dealt with in order for me to survive – men were beverage suppliers who raised prices, cooks who got deported, farmhands who nursed one Budweiser all night, cowboys who came in off the range smelling like a cow’s ass, and out-of-town, too-good-for-you guys getting all snotty and critical because my dive bar in the middle of nowhere didn’t offer whatever obscure microbrew craft beer they liked to drink back in the big city.
Men – employees or customers or random handsome strangers, whatever – were lost causes with legs and dicks attached, and not worth two seconds of my time.
But Dave wasn’t confrontational, or lazy, or a problem in any of the million and one ways I was used to men being problems. He did what I told him to do, he did it with a smile, and he didn’t complain. He fumbled with stuff in the kitchen, sure, and I had the feeling he wasn’t used to dealing with the practical side of life – no surprise, he probably let his girlfriend back home pick up after him, like any other pretty asshole of a guy – but he always put in his best effort, and that was more than you could say for a lot of the cooks I’d hired.
So why was I thinking about him on a Sunday afternoon? Why did I play back the last two nights at the bar in my mind, imagining that he’d stolen glances at me whenever he could, feeling as if his entrancing green eyes had followed me everywhere? Why was I wondering if he might, by some impossible gift of fate, like girls with curves and healthy appetites?
Probably because you’re a love-starved sap, Cassie, and you need to grow up, get real, and stop obsessing about the new guy – his being a ripped and gorgeous hunk of delicious man candy is no excuse, and you know it.
Life lets you down every time, girl, and so will he.
Two minutes later, a loud meow outside my front door announced that I was letting somebody else down.
I hauled myself off the threadbare thrift-store couch that dominated my microscopic living room, trudged to the door, and opened it to find Mr. Snuggles waiting for me, right on schedule and demanding a meal like the aggressive four-footed panhandler he was.
Tail held high, my neighbor’s black cat stared up at me, willing me to hand over the goods and now. He belonged, sort of, to the harried woman who lived across the hall – but what with her three half-wild kids and a husband who never came home if he could help it, her idea of cat care was to let Mr. Snuggles out the door each morning and then forget about him until he howled to be let back inside that night. In between, he made the rounds of my dingy apartment building, going from door to door like a furry little hustler and working tender-hearted people like me for all the handouts he could get.
Half a can of tuna served up on a paper plate later, Mr. Snuggles licked his whiskers, decided I would be allowed to live, and then strutted on down the hallway looking for his next victim.
But he wasn’t the only cat in Eli Springs living on freebies from yours truly, and his routine visit reminded me that closed or not, I needed to stop by the bar and set out the usual daily feed for the half-dozen or so stray kittens and cats who made the Jayhawk Tavern their on-again, off-again home. I didn’t own them as such, and like Mr. Snuggles, they cheated on me with a few other soft touches around town – but helping out those furry little guys was about the only part of my day when somebody seemed genuinely glad to see me, so I wasn’t going to miss out.
Two minutes later, I climbed into my truck and everything was okay.
Ten minutes after that, I swung into the bar’s deserted parking lot – and the second I opened my door and stepped down onto the gravel, I knew something was very wrong.
I heard a voice. Somewhere behind the building, someone was talking – and life being the joke that it was, my mystery guest who was about to be shot sounded like he was somewhere near the storage shed back there, the shed where I kept the cat food. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, not quite, but I did hear a chorus of warbling meows answering him – was this unknown asshole pestering my crew of homeless kitties?
That settled it. I’d shoot him, skin him, and dump his body in the road. Stealing from my storage shed was one thing, that had happened before and would doubtless happen again – but messing with my four-footed babies? Not on my watch, you bastard.
I nudged the driver’s door shut so it wouldn’t make a sound. Now, should I slip inside the bar and grab Dad’s old shotgun? Nice thought, but I judged it would be next to impossible to open the front door, get the trusty Remington, and then make it back outside without being heard – and while some people might think it best to not surprise a potential burglar and cat-harasser, I am not one of those people.
A tire iron, though? That would put the fear of Cassie into this asshole – and if fear made him stupid instead of smart and he came at me, I’d give him a few broken ribs to remember me by. Or I could pop his kneecap and cripple him …
Why yes, I do get a little overprotective and confrontational when it comes to helpless, adorable little scraps of fur – guilty as charged, your honor.
I grabbed the tire iron hiding under a tarp and a tool box and some other crap in the bed of my truck, brushing a few flakes of rust off the thing as I hefted it in my right hand. Then I light-footed it across the gravel parking lot, making like a mouse as I headed for the far right corner of the building.
Once there, I took cover behind the battered green dumpster that huddled between the bar and the county road. I breathed deep, focused, and then peered around the metal bulk of the dumpster to scope out the area behind the bar and see what was what with this jerk who had to mess up my Sunday.
The door to the storage shed stood open. Three tabby kittens sat in a row next to the shed, with a cautious orange tomcat hovering behind them and a white cat with a chewed-up ear standing off to one side, tail lashing as it evaluated the situation.
They all stared straight at the man of the moment. He faced them and the open shed, his back was to me as he started to say something and then sneezed, and I’d know those broad shoulders and rippling muscles anywhere.
“Dave?”
My cook looked around at me, and that easy, lopsided grin of his would have made a weaker woman drop her panties right then and there. Me, I am not that weak, not one bit.
Well, maybe a little bit.
“Hi,
boss – say, I hope it’s all right to feed these guys, I saw the bag of Friskies and then when they …”
He wrinkled his nose, made a face, and then a huge, ratcheting sneeze burst out of him. The white cat bolted, the orange tom hissed, and the kittens held their ground, looking puzzled but hopeful.
“Sorry, I think I’m coming down with – “
Two more earthshaking sneezes followed the first, and were his eyes watering?
“Dave, you aren’t coming down with anything – it looks more like you’re allergic to cats.”
“You think so?” He shrugged, unconvinced, and then sniffed and coughed as he fought off yet another sneeze. The middle kitten meowed at him like an impatient customer demanding service and right now, thank you very much.
“That’s what I think, but what I know for sure is that you and your vital organs have an appointment with this tire iron – that is, unless you have an airtight explanation for breaking into my storage shed?”
I waved the tire iron in a way that I hoped looked casually violent, and prayed he had the alibi of the century. You hate to think you’ve misjudged someone, particularly when your livelihood depends on reading people and gauging which way they’ll jump in a tight situation … and I swear that was the only reason I wanted Dave and his crooked smile to be innocent of whatever was going on here.
His hands went up, but that smile didn’t go anywhere. “Wait up, warrior woman – I got naked in your truck the other night, sure, but I didn’t break into this shed. It was unlocked and standing open, and I know I probably should have kept my nose out of it anyway, but –”
Shit, I’d come out here to grab those overalls and boots for Dave on Friday night – had I forgotten to lock the shed back up? Was anything missing?
I looked past him. The boldest kitten had led the other two into the shed and then jumped up onto the shelf holding the bag of cat food. He nosed and pawed at it while his buddies sat on the cot watching him.
No Dreams Allowed: A Billionaire Romance Page 3