“I’ll stay while you eat, then I’m afraid I have to run. I’ve got a couple other stops to make before I head into the restaurant for the dinner shift.”
She wasn’t hungry after a morning full of noshing while she tried things out, but she managed to eat half a sandwich and a couple of the chips, especially the purple potatoes, always a favorite. To her immense satisfaction, Caroline polished off her plate, leaving only a few edges of the ciabatta bread.
“That was...delicious,” Caroline said forty minutes later after their visit. “Oh, I wish you could stay longer.”
Alex smiled and kissed her friend’s cheek. “I’ll be back. You know I will.”
“You’re so...good to me,” Caroline said with a soft smile. “I don’t know...what I would eat if not for your delicious meals.”
Neither did Alex. Worry pressed down on her shoulders as she said her final goodbye, gathered Leo from a patch of sunshine in the yard and headed back to her SUV. Once the restaurant opened, she didn’t know how much time—or energy—she would have for these impromptu cooking sessions to fill the freezers of several of the older people she loved.
She would just have to make time, no matter how hard. People counted on her and she couldn’t let them down.
Her second stop was more brief. Two streets over from Caroline’s house, she pulled up to a small clapboard house squeezed in between a couple rehabbed four-unit condominiums. Wally Hicks used to be her family’s mailman, and his wife, Donna, taught her and Claire’s Sunday-school class for years. Donna had early-stage Alzheimer’s and failing vision, while Wally could barely hear and had a bad heart. Between the two of them, they could almost manage to take care of each other and they were always so thrilled when she dropped off a few meals for them and a special treat for their bad-tempered bulldog, Clyde.
The third stop was the shortest of all—and she definitely left Leo in the car for this one.
Frances Redmond lived next door to Claire and Riley and she didn’t care for dogs. Or most people, for that matter.
Claire did what she could to help Frances but the older woman was grumpy about letting other people in. She always said she didn’t want Alex to keep coming, but she persevered, partly out of guilt for a few pranks she had pulled on the woman when she was a girl and partly because every time she came, Frances had a box full of empty containers to give back to her, indicating she ate the food, Alex hoped. For all she knew, Frances might have just dumped it all in her disposal and ran the dishes through her dishwasher, but she wanted to think she was doing a little good.
“If you’re going to bring all this food, even though I’ve told you again and again not to, why can’t you leave out all the fancy froufrou ingredients? What’s wrong with good, hearty basic food?”
Apparently rosemary was considered froufrou these days. Alex sighed. “Absolutely nothing, Mrs. Redmond. You’re right, I love things that are simple. I promise, I only mixed a few herbs in a couple of the dishes. Nothing exotic, I swear.”
“No sun-dried tomatoes like last time?”
“Nope. You told me you like plain old tomatoes and that’s what I used.”
“I suppose you put some of that Dijon mustard in this chicken salad, too.”
Alex shook her head. “Plain yellow, just like you ordered.”
“Good.”
No thank you, no how kind. Alex wasn’t sure why she bothered. There were others in town who would appreciate her efforts more but, then, she didn’t do this to be showered with gratitude. She liked the warm feeling she received from helping others regardless of their reaction. Her mother and Claire had set a good example in that department.
Besides, she always felt a little sorry for Mrs. Redmond. Her life had been tough. She had lost a couple children and her husband had died young.
Some people—her sister Maura, for example—faced their sorrows with courage and grace and refused to allow hurt and loss to define them.
Others, like Mrs. Redmond, became angry and bitter, taking their internal pain out on everyone around them and keeping away anybody who wanted to reach out.
Alex considered her own outlook to fall somewhere in the middle. She could understand Frances Redmond’s desire to huddle over her hurts and keep anyone else from inflicting more. Maybe that’s why she could view her surliness with an exasperated empathy.
“I’ll see you next time. Have a lovely week.”
“It’s supposed to rain every day,” Frances grumbled.
“Then that soup I made will surely hit the spot, won’t it?” She grinned all the way back toward her car.
Just before she reached it, a boy riding past the house on a blue mountain bike braked when he spotted her.
“Hi, Aunt Alex!”
Her heart lifted at the name. Claire’s son had always called her Aunt Alex, even before his mother married her brother and made their relationship official. “Hey, Owen. How’s my favorite dude?”
The ten-year-old gave her a grin that she imagined would break a fair number of hearts someday. “I’m good. What are you doing here?”
“Just passing by. Why aren’t you in school?”
“We had early release today for some teacher work day thing and only had half a day. Riley is coming home early and we’re goin’ fishing. Mace and Mom are going shopping in a little while.”
Her wild, once-hardened brother had definitely turned his life around and had become a fantastic stepfather to Claire’s two children, Owen and his sister, Macy, from her first marriage. She never would have expected him to be so good at it but he had transitioned smoothly into Claire’s complicated life.
The two of them shared custody with Claire’s ex and his wife. So far they all seemed to be making it work.
“Wow. How manly of you both,” she said to Owen. “If you catch any trout, bring them by the restaurant and I’ll fix them up for you.”
She opened the door of her SUV and was greeted by a friendly “where have you been?” sort of bark.
Owen’s head swiveled around. “You got a dog! I didn’t know you had a dog!”
“Not mine,” she said. “I found him wandering the streets last night. I’m looking for his owners now.”
“What a great dog. You really just found him? Do you know his name?”
“I’m calling him Leo. It’s a long story.”
He seemed to accept that in his calm, unruffled way. “Cool. Hey, Mom,” he suddenly yelled, “Alex is here.”
She wasn’t technically there, she was next door. And she didn’t really have time to visit but she couldn’t be rude now that she saw Claire walking around the side of the house.
She looked voluptuously pregnant and quite adorable in a loose denim work shirt that was probably Riley’s, sleeves rolled up to her elbows, and a pair of rubber muck boots with green frogs imprinted on them.
“Hi! Did you ring the bell? Sorry, I must have missed it. I’ve been back in the garden. In a few months, I won’t be able to bend over so I figured I should probably do what I can now.”
“And after that, you’ll be too busy to keep up with the garden. Or anything else, for that matter.”
“I know. But isn’t it wonderful?”
She beamed and touched her growing abdomen. Alex was hit with a fierce, aching sadness. She forced it away. “Fabulous. I still can’t quite picture Ri with a newborn but I’m sure he’ll be great at it. I know you will. You’ve already raised two of the greatest kids on the planet.”
She rubbed Owen’s artificially blond-tipped hair he had horrified his mother with the last time he came back from staying with his father and stepmother.
“I was just finishing up. Have you got time for a cup of tea?”
“Better not. I’ve got to run to the restaurant. Technically, I wasn’t stopping to see you this time. I took a few meals in to Frances.”
Claire—who usually epitomized kindness and mercy—scowled. “I hope it was bland and tasteless.”
“I did my best but som
etimes my genius comes through anyway. Why are you mad at Frances?”
“Not mad, exactly, but she drives me crazy sometimes! Riley spent two hours at her house replacing a broken showerhead last week because she was too cheap to pay a plumber. And then the next day, she had the nerve to tell me she doesn’t like the way it sprays and wanted exactly the same kind she had before. Ugh!”
“What did you do?”
“I went to four different home improvement places until I found the right one.”
“Of course you did,” Alex said, hiding a smile.
“She’s a lonely old woman and we should have compassion, I guess, but she doesn’t always make it easy.”
Claire had plenty of practice with difficult women, considering her mother was the light beer version of Frances Redmond.
“So I heard a rumor about you,” Claire said, changing the subject.
“That Brazen is going to be named the best new restaurant in Colorado and the Food Channel will notice and pick me to host a new show on regional cuisine and I’ll put out a dozen cookbooks and retire to an island in the tropics, where I’ll spend the rest of my days wearing muumuus and drinking mai tais?”
Claire laughed. “No, I must have missed that one. This one is just as juicy, though. I ran into Frankie Beltran at the grocery store this morning and she asked me about the hot guy you were with last night at the Liz. I had to confess my glaring ignorance, which is rather pathetic considering we had lunch together two days ago with the book club and you never said a word about any guy, hot or otherwise.”
Yeah, only two days ago she hadn’t known Sam Delgado as anything other than a name and the cause of one more delay in opening Brazen.
“Um, you know that contractor Brodie hired to finish the restaurant?”
Claire’s eyes opened wide. “Seriously?”
She had absolutely no reason to feel weird about this. She had never intended her friendly invitation to turn into that hot kiss she couldn’t shake from her mind. Or so she continued to tell herself.
“What’s the big deal? He dropped by the restaurant the other day after everybody left. I thought it would be a nice gesture to show him around, welcome him to town, that sort of thing. We met at the Lizard for a game of pool and then we took a walk so I could point out the highlights of our little corner of paradise. I was strictly doing my civic duty.”
“I’m sure it didn’t hurt that he was, in Frankie’s words, hotter than a firecracker lit on both ends.”
He was all that and more. “He could have looked like a troll and I would still want to make sure he feels comfortable in Hope’s Crossing. He’s building my kitchen.”
It sounded like a lame excuse, even to her, but Claire didn’t blink. One of the things Alex loved best about her was Claire’s particular gift of letting people hang on to their own illusions without calling them out.
“Did you have a good time?” she only asked.
Good time? That was an understatement. She thought of his mouth, firm and determined, those hard, relentless muscles against her.
She sighed, then hoped the sound didn’t come across as wistful to Claire as it did to her own ears.
“I almost beat him at pool. I won one game but we were playing two out of three.”
“Wow! He beat you twice? Impressive. He must be fantastic, since you beat Riley most of the time and he’s the best billiards player I know.”
“Sam is pretty good.”
“A gorgeous pool-playing contractor. We don’t see those around Hope’s Crossing every day. How did Brodie find him?”
“I don’t know all the details but I gather Sam was working on a project at the hospital while Taryn was having some treatment, and the two of them struck up a conversation and have stayed in touch. He’s done a couple other jobs for Brodie. From what I can tell, he does good work. And fast, too.”
“So you had fun?”
Again, with the understatement. “Sure. He was with me when I found Leo here, isn’t that right, bud?”
Leo was currently sniffing noses with Chester but paused long enough to give her a happy look, almost as if he recognized his name. He apparently didn’t mind being used as a diversionary tactic.
Claire probably saw through her effort to change the subject but also didn’t seem to mind. “Evie put the poster up you emailed us and she’s been mentioning it to everyone who comes in. So far she hasn’t found anybody missing a chocolate Lab.”
“Keep looking. He’s too gorgeous not to belong to somebody, somewhere.”
“Are we talking about Leo here or Sam Delgado?”
Apparently diversions could only take a woman so far when it came to her best friend, who knew her better than anyone else on earth. But even Claire didn’t know all her secrets.
“Ha, ha. He’s actually a widower. Believe me, I asked. His wife died of cancer a couple years ago.”
“Oh, the poor man.”
“He was also an Army Ranger at one time, just like Dylan Caine. I guess he left the service after his wife’s diagnosis.”
“That’s admirable. Not many men would give up their career to take care of their ailing wife. So do you like him?”
Entirely too much. And the more she talked about him—and thought about him—the more she liked him. Annoyance with herself and frustration with the situation made her tone sharper than she intended.
“Last I checked, we’re not in junior high anymore. I’m past the stage of handing you notes about the cute boy in my social studies class.”
Claire blinked but her gaze quickly sharpened and Alex could have kicked herself. She might be sweet and kind, but Claire was no idiot. If Alex acted touchy and hypersensitive about just the mention of Sam Delgado, Claire would quickly surmise there was more simmering between them than casual friendship.
She hurried to make amends. “Sorry. That was mean. I miss being in junior high with you.”
“Life certainly seems easier when a girl is twelve.”
In some respects, not all. Claire’s father had been murdered in a torrid love triangle when they were young, and even then her own father had had one foot out the door, though they had all been too blind to see it.
On impulse, she reached out and hugged Claire, pregnant belly, gardening gloves and all. She dearly loved all four of her actual sisters but Claire was her BFF. In their case, the forever really meant something.
“Sam is a nice guy but that’s all. He’s building my kitchen and I’m not going to do anything to screw that up.”
Claire pressed her cheek to hers. “Like break his heart, you mean?”
Or let him sneak close enough to break hers.
“Something like that.”
After a moment, she eased away. “I really do need to go. Sorry I can’t stay, but my shift is starting soon and I left a horrendous mess in my kitchen at home. Leo, come on. You and Chester can hang another time.”
She shepherded the dog into the backseat again, hugged Claire one last time, blew a kiss to Owen—busy now, untangling fishing line in the driveway—then drove away.
This was the important part of her life, she thought as she headed toward Currant Creek Valley. Her family, her friends, the people she cared about in town. She was perfectly happy with her life and didn’t need anything else—especially not a man with serious dark eyes and a mouth that tasted like heaven.
CHAPTER SIX
NEARLY A WEEK after that stunning kiss, Sam had reached the inescapable conclusion that Alexandra was avoiding him.
She seemed to have unerring instincts for visiting the restaurant to check their progress just as he stepped out for lunch or left to pick something up at the building supply store on the edge of town.
His crew all seemed to like her, even Silent Joe, and reported that she had told them all how much she loved the way her kitchen was coming together. To him, she had left only a quickly scribbled note the second time he had missed her, which read, Looks great, Sam. You’re a genius with a hammer.
>
He might have resorted to stopping at her current restaurant up at the Silver Strike Resort just for an excuse to see her again, but every time he had considered making a reservation, he had decided against it.
After she had driven away so abruptly the other night without giving him an answer when he had asked point-blank to see her again, it had been easy enough to figure out that was her answer.
She obviously had her reasons for avoiding him. If that’s the way she wanted things, what the hell else could he do? He wasn’t some kind of creepy stalker guy. When a woman made it clear she wasn’t interested, he moved on.
That didn’t mean he had to be happy about it, especially after they shared a kiss that had rocked him to the core.
The gloomy, rainy morning matched his mood as he headed into her sister’s coffee place and bookstore for a midmorning caffeine jolt for his crew.
He just finished ordering for the guys from their complicated list—who knew Silent Joe liked café au lait, extra foamy?—when some gut instinct kicked in. It was probably the same sixth sense that had carried him to the other side of so many dangerous situations when he had been deployed.
He turned around and there she was a few spaces behind him in line at the coffee counter, talking with an older woman who shared the same green eyes behind trendy glasses.
He knew he shouldn’t be so happy to see her but he couldn’t ignore the delight that burst through him like the sun between those clouds outside.
He just liked looking at her, plain and simple. All that long, wavy blond hair, those deep jade eyes, the sweet curve of her mouth. Alexandra McKnight was one hell of an appealing package.
As if she felt the heat of his thoughts, she finally broke off her conversation with the woman and shifted her attention to him. When she saw him, something bright and glittery flashed in those eyes before she shifted her gaze down.
“Wow. Somebody must be thirsty,” Alexandra quipped.
He held up the carry tray with a half-dozen cups. “Making a coffee run for the whole crew this morning. Somebody’s got to do it.”
All he wanted to do was stand there holding the coffee and stare at her. He realized in that moment of seeing her again after all this time just exactly how much he had thought of her in the past week, half the time without even being fully aware.
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