by Terri Osburn
“Hey,” he said, his hands tucked deep in the front pocket of his jeans. The ever-present scruff along his jaw was darker than usual, as if he’d decided to let it grow out. She hoped that wasn’t the case. “Can I come in?” he said.
Send him home, ordered her rational, sensible side.
“Sure.” Lauren stepped back to let him enter and the scents of salt water and woodsy pine mingled like an erotic cocktail that evoked both clean and not so clean images in her mind. “What can I do for you?”
Help you take that shirt off perhaps?
Lauren closed her eyes and told her libido to calm down. The man kissed you one time. Chill the hell out.
Nick seemed to be assessing her furnishings, which weren’t really hers at all. The place had come furnished, of course. The coral-pink couches, navy coffee table, and Kelly-green bureau were more colorful than she’d ever pick for herself, yet she’d gotten used to the splashes of color, which stood out against the all-white walls.
“You left in a hurry last night,” he said.
If in a hurry he meant in a dead run like the coward that she was, then yes she did.
“You had a call so I showed myself out.”
Brown eyes caught hers. “Are you really pretending that nothing happened before that call?”
“We kissed,” she said matter-of-factly. “Since you said you don’t date chefs, I thought I’d save us both from this conversation.”
Partially true. She’d really wanted to save herself from looking like a fool when he reminded her of his dating policies. Not that she wanted to date him. Lauren didn’t do relationships. But a woman needed to scratch an itch now and then and she’d bet anything that Nick would be an excellent scratcher.
“There are exceptions to every rule,” he mumbled, walking farther into the house. “Nice place. I haven’t seen the rentals since they were redone after the hurricane.”
Still dazed by the exceptions comment, Lauren said, “The hurricane?”
“Hurricane Deloris. Tore through in November and left a good bit of destruction in her wake. I lost some shingles but this cottage and the next two were ripped up pretty good.” He glanced into the room off the living room, which was her bedroom. “Looks like they updated during the renovations.”
Uncomfortable with the man so close to her bed, she pulled the bedroom door closed. “That explains why everything looks so new.”
Nick proceeded into the kitchen as if on a tour and Lauren followed close behind, still pondering the exception thing. Was he suggesting that he’d make an exception for her?
“Jackson says you took my advice.”
“Your advice?” she said, struggling to keep up. Did she want to be an exception? Hell, yes, her libido responded.
“About the adventure park. He’s pretty freaked out actually. The man’s afraid of heights.”
“Yes, I heard.”
Running his hand along the edge of the countertop, he said, “Nice prep space but the electric stove is a shame.”
Lauren had felt the same when she’d moved in. Chefs preferred to cook over an open flame. Better control that way.
Unable to take this much longer, she said, “Nick, why are you here?”
He leaned his exceptional ass against the edge of the counter and crossed his arms. “I don’t do relationships,” he said, tossing her off-balance once again.
They had that in common. “Neither do I,” she replied.
“Really?”
“You aren’t the only one with policies,” Lauren explained. “Relationships require trust and I’ve already told you that I don’t trust anyone. Given the opportunity, people will let you down every time. Life is less messy if you don’t give them the chance.”
Strong fingers scratched his scruffy chin. “That’s a cynical view of the world.”
“That’s called lessons learned,” she corrected. “Now you know my reason. What’s yours?”
He took several seconds to consider his answer and finally said, “Mine is similar but reversed. I don’t want anyone to get attached when I know I’d let them down.”
An enlightened answer, especially for a man. “Very evolved of you.”
“So we’re on the same page then?” Nick asked, and she assumed he meant they’d just agreed to nip this kissing thing in the bud.
“We are.”
“Good.” Shifting off the counter, he closed the space between them to stand entirely too close. “How about you come to my place tomorrow night and tell me how the day went?”
“But we—”
“Are two grown adults who know exactly where we stand,” he finished for her. “I’ll have a late dinner ready. Ten o’clock?”
Realizing he was offering the no-strings-attached scratch that she most desperately wanted, Lauren relaxed.
“I’ll bring the beer.”
9
A storm moved through overnight, stirring the seas and leaving a chill in the air. Lauren blamed the weather for keeping her awake, but the real culprit was Nick Stamatis and his promising invitation. She couldn’t pinpoint exactly when he’d gone from aggravating nuisance to potential bedmate, but she’d definitely turned that corner if her overactive imagination was any indication.
She’d given up her futile attempts to sleep well before dawn, opting for a lukewarm shower and a strong coffee before heading to Pilar’s for the meetup. When Lauren arrived, the sun had yet to come up and she found Axel Stedmeyer waiting alone on the entrance stairs. She hadn’t expected the quiet young man to be there before her.
The day before had gone well enough considering the entire team had been on edge. Lauren made some compromises regarding the layout and flow of the kitchen, and Axel had offered one of the better suggestions while also backing Lauren several times. He seemed to be a hard worker, spoke only when necessary, and ignored the opportunity to flirt with the dishwasher who batted her eyelashes whenever he was around.
Surfer boys with man buns were clearly the girl’s weakness, but Axel either didn’t notice or simply wasn’t interested. So long as the unrequited love didn’t cause problems in her kitchen, Lauren was happy to let the pair work things out on their own.
The rest of the crew trickled in, all well before the given time of six thirty. Another of the Navarro entities—a water sports business called Anchor Adventures—provided the shuttle bus that carried them up the Outer Banks to their destination. The trip should have taken less than three hours, but the ferry had been delayed due to rough waters and they reached the adventure park fifteen minutes late. Lauren had called ahead and the staff assured her that they’d honor the reservation.
When they stepped out of the van, the realization of what they were about to do hit home. Off in the distance stood a tangled monstrosity the likes of which Lauren had never seen before. The pictures on the website had not prepared her for the real thing.
A five-story round tower loomed in the center with a dozen poles standing in a circle around it. There must have been hundreds of ropes running not just between the poles but crisscrossing to and from the tower at different levels. The letters OBX hung between two poles.
Not until she moved to the area had she learned that this was the local abbreviation for Outer Banks.
“What fresh hell is this?” mumbled Mona, holding a hand above her eyes to block the sun.
“An adventure park,” Lauren replied, trying to sound confident. As if the sight ahead didn’t make her want to pee her pants. “They don’t call it Defying Gravity for nothing, I guess.”
Lauren always assumed she was fine with heights, but that theory had never been tested. As a kid, there’d been no money for anything that could remotely be called an adventure, and from the age of eighteen she’d been working in restaurant kitchens, often up to eighty hours a week, which left no time for vacations. She’d never been to an amusement park or even gone hiking.
“We’re going up there?” Jackson muttered with a mixture of awe and fear in his voice.
“It looks fun,” Axel said.
Nothing about this looked fun and a wave of nausea threatened. Closing her eyes, Lauren breathed through her nose. This was no time to show weakness. She was their leader, and today she would have to prove it.
Opening her eyes, she spun to face her team. “Are we ready?” Her voice cracked but she put on a brave face.
“Have any of you been here before?” asked Hermie, their driver. After a collective no, he said, “You can’t take phones or anything that can fall out of your pockets. Take your IDs but leave the rest in the bus and I’ll make sure they’re safe.”
“Where will we put our IDs then?” asked Dodge Caldwell, one of the younger chefs.
“I’ve got my fanny pack,” Penny Lee offered, pointing to the bright-pink pouch on her hip. “Y’all can stick ’em in here.”
Of course Penny had a solution. She’d been working under Deborah in pastry for more than a year, having moved up within weeks of being hired to bus tables. When Axel’s apron had ripped the day before, Penny had retrieved a needle and thread from her car and sewed him up. When Deborah’s hair band had broken, Penny offered the spare one from her wrist.
Deborah called her the kitchen Girl Scout, prepared for anything, and the nickname fit.
“Are those chairs?” Brit Davenport asked as they started walking toward the check-in center.
“Chairs of death,” Mona answered. “Are we really doing this?”
“We are,” Lauren replied.
Fifteen minutes later, they were harnessed up with helmets in place, standing on the observation deck that was the last stop before entering the eye of the storm. Literally. That’s what the park called the center tower. Every pole sported a bright-red flag, all of which were whipping in the wind. In ground school—the quick training they’d gone through to prepare them for their day—they’d learned that the top-level course was closed due to the high winds coming off the water.
Jackson had breathed an audible sigh of relief, and Lauren echoed the sentiment, though silently.
“It’s time to break into teams,” said Everette, their escort.
Lauren had not been aware of this tidbit. “But we’re here to do team building exercises,” she reminded him. “As a whole team.”
“There are exercises you’ll do later on the ground that will include everyone, but for the courses you have to be in teams of three or fewer. As you learned earlier, there can be no more than two people on a platform at once.” He pointed up to a small disc-looking thing wrapped around the closest pole. “That’s a platform. And there can only be one person on the course at a time.” Everette indicated a series of blue half-barrels strung together between two poles. “Anything between the poles is an obstacle.”
“We have to walk across those things?” Deborah asked.
To which Mona mumbled, “Oh, hell no.”
Before Everette could answer, a child no more than ten years old breezed across the barrels and gave a whoop of joy on the other side.
“If a kid can do it, we can do it,” said Axel.
The group murmured their agreement with little conviction or enthusiasm.
“You three on a team,” the escort said, indicating Jackson, Penny, and Axel. “Then you three.” He pointed at Dodge, Deborah, and Brit.
This left Lauren and Mona as the final, two-person team.
“I’ll go with Deborah,” Mona said, physically edging Brit out of the way.
“Sorry,” he said, “that’s not how it works. You don’t get to pick your teammates.”
“Why not?” Mona demanded.
“Because you’re more likely to pick a person you’re already comfortable with and that defeats the purpose of team building.”
As much as Lauren would rather not team up with Mona, she couldn’t argue with the logic.
They made their way down the narrow pier-like walkway into the center tower, where they were connected to the belay system, the lifeline that ran through the entire structure and kept them from plummeting to their deaths. Only staff could disconnect them so there was no turning back now.
“The team who gets through their course the quickest gets an advantage in the ground challenges,” Everette said, “so keep that in mind.”
“We’re competing?” Brit asked.
“You are.” To Jackson’s team, he said, “You guys can start out that way.”
Axel was in the lead and as he stepped out, Jackson tossed one last save me look Lauren’s way. She gave him an uncharacteristic thumbs-up, as much for her own benefit as for his.
“Team two can head out that way,” Everett said.
Deborah went first, with Dodge and Brit close behind. That left Lauren alone with Mona, who looked more likely to throw her off a ledge than to work with her.
“You two start that way.”
Lauren was in front and before she took two steps, Mona asked, “What if we get stuck?”
Everette, who had clearly encountered plenty of scaredy-cats in his day, smiled as one would when trying to calm a spastic three-year-old on a sugar rush. “Keep putting one foot in front of the other and you’ll be fine, but if you decide you don’t want to continue at any point in the course, there’s a zip line from every post that leads right back here.”
Mona tugged on the strap that connected her to the belay. “This is going to hold my ass?”
His grin grew wider. “It will hold all of you.”
They moved into motion again and as Lauren set foot on the ledge that led to the barrels—because of course they’d gotten that one first—Mona leaned close and whispered, “If I go down, I’m taking you with me.”
Her competitive side coming alive, Lauren said, “If we go down, then the other teams win. Do you want that to happen?”
After a brief hesitation, her partner replied with a succinct, “No.”
“Me neither. Let’s do this.”
A week had passed since Nota’s doctor’s appointment and Nick hadn’t spoken to his grandmother since, but she’d left a message on his phone the night before asking him to come for lunch. The invitation had been more of a demand than a request. He hadn’t avoided her on purpose. As April progressed, more tourists arrived on the island. That meant more business at the restaurant, which extended Nick’s hours in both the kitchen and the office, making sure they had the supplies they needed to meet the demand.
He was still annoyed that she’d involved Alex Fielding in his personal business, but Nick also knew her intentions were in the right place. She cared about him. She wanted to see him happy. To her that meant with a wife and family, but that simply would not be his reality. The memory of the day his father died never left him.
Due to running the restaurant, his father hadn’t been in the bleachers for his baseball games or there to pat him on the back when Nick had won the science fair thanks to his love of gastronomy. But those things had never mattered. What mattered was their time in the kitchen together. Moments when Nick had cooked a chicken marsala just right or created the perfect Bolognese sauce and Dad had beamed with pride.
He'd lived for that look. That approval. And then it was gone. Nick couldn’t imagine inflicting that pain on a child of his own.
Mom was never the same either, and her new husband was nothing like the man she’d lost. Gus was quiet. Unassuming. An insurance salesman who would rather sit on the couch watching inane television than do anything else. Deep down, Nick suspected she’d only married him because she didn’t love him.
She’d needed someone to take care of her so she’d found a man who wouldn’t ask for much, who would keep her safe with a roof over her head, and who would be easier to lose when the time came. The suggestion made her sound heartless, but she was really heartbroken and found the best way to cope that she could.
Aware that he needed to bring a peace offering, Nick rang Nota’s doorbell with a bowl of his homemade Tiramisu in hand. She answered the door looking more tired than usual.
�
��Nota, are you okay?”
She waved his concern away. “I’m fine. Just a little flare-up.”
The arthritis was flaring up more and more lately. “Is the medication Fielding gave you not working?”
“It’s fine.” She led him into the kitchen and took a seat at the table. “Sit with me.”
In front of her was a photo album just like the one Mia had given Nick for his birthday. He had yet to open his past that first page.
“Where did this come from?” he asked, reluctant to travel down this memory lane.
“Mia made us all one.” When Nick remained several feet from the table, she patted the empty spot next to her. “Sit, my boy. We need to talk.”
Resigned to his fate, he slid into the seat and pushed the Tiramisu her way. “I brought you something.”
She lifted the lid to see the dessert inside, then clicked it shut. “Thank you. That will be good with my coffee in the morning.”
After placing the treat in the fridge, Nick returned to his seat. “So what are we talking about?”
“The family.”
Tension tightened the muscles across his back. “What about them?”
Nota opened the book, ran a finger gently over the first picture, and then turned the page. There Nick saw a scattered collection of black-and-white photographs. Leaning toward the album, he spotted the year 1955 at the bottom of several of them.
“Is that you and Grandpa?”
“It is. That’s the year we started dating.” Pointing to the image in the top right corner of the page, she said, “This was our first date. I turned eighteen the week before and Papa finally let him take me out.”
Nick looked closer and marveled at the resemblance between father and son. The image could have easily been of his dad.
“He was three years older than you, right?”
She nodded. “We met two years before, when I was sixteen and he was nineteen. I fell in love the moment I laid eyes on him, but your Papa Karras wouldn’t even consider letting me go out with a boy. Especially not one so much older.”