by Terri Osburn
Lauren refused to give up on him. “Yes, you are. Stay right there and run your right hand across the sand to the left. That’s right. Slowly. You’re so close.” His hand found the peg and this time took hold. “That’s it. Now pull up and you’ll feel another peg just above your left hand.”
Jackson pulled himself up between the two pegs and Lauren scooted sideways to get closer to him.
“What are you doing?” Mona said, panic in her voice.
“We have to reach him. Lower me down a little bit. Everyone hold on to the person in front of you and whatever you do, do not let go.”
Picking up on the closeness of her voice, Jackson said, “I’m almost there, aren’t I?”
“Yes.” She reached out her hand, ignoring the tiny pebbles digging into her knees. “Take my hand.” She smacked her palm on the sand to help him locate it. “Keep stretching. We can do this.”
Moments that felt like hours passed before they finally made contact.
“That’s it.” With a strength she didn’t know she had, Lauren yanked hard and yelled, “Pull, everyone!”
In an instant, Lauren was on her back, Jackson’s hand still in hers and the others were leaping for joy around them. She worked to fill her lungs and could have cried with relief. She’d done it. They’d all done it.
Deborah and Brit helped Lauren to her feet while Axel got Jackson off the ground. High fives were exchanged before Mona said, “Well, shit. Now how do we get down?”
Ignoring the profanity, Everette called up, “Turn around.” They spun as one to find a giant, inflatable slide coming off the other side of the hill. “Grab hands and take a leap,” he said.
Pilar’s kitchen staff exchanged uncertain looks before Lauren held out both hands. “You heard him. Let’s get the hell off this hill.” Hands were joined and when they were all at the edge, she said, “On the count of three. One, two, three!”
Lauren jumped, landing on her bottom, and laughed all the way down the slide.
11
Nick had just removed the chicken from the oven when, as promised, Lauren arrived on his threshold, six-pack in hand, at exactly ten o’clock. She wore leggings, an oversized hoodie, and Vans—all black. Her platinum hair was in a short ponytail at the base of her skull and her nose was badly sunburned.
“Tough day?” he asked, taking the beer and stepping aside for her to enter.
“I didn’t like you very much this morning,” she said in reply. “That place is way scarier than I imagined.”
“You’re here so I guess you aren’t holding a grudge.” He walked past her, adding, “The food will be ready in a few minutes. Go ahead and have a seat at the table.” She did so, settling gently into the chair. “Are you okay?” he asked, fearing she’d really hurt herself.
“My body aches in places I didn’t know I had.” She slowly relaxed. “I thought I was in good shape, but I was wrong.”
“Have you taken anything for the pain?”
“I don’t have anything on hand and didn’t make it to the store before it closed.”
Nick opened a cabinet next to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of pain pills. Popping the cap on his way to the table, he said, “Here.” She held her palm up, revealing nasty blisters. “Did you wear gloves?”
“Obviously not, but Jackson’s hands look worse than mine.”
Real worry set in. “Let me dish up this chicken, and then I want to hear the whole story.”
Two minutes later, the plates were on the table, along with silverware, napkins, and two beers.
“I know I brought the beer, but if I have that, you’re going to have to scrape me off the floor. Can I have a soda?”
“Sure.” Nick retrieved the drink and returned to his seat.
Lauren examined the food with her fork. “Is this stuffed chicken Valentino?”
“Yes, ma’am. So what happened today?”
She struggled to cut her chicken with the sore fingers and Nick took pity on her. Reaching across the table, he cut the food for her.
In a moment of obvious weakness, she said, “That might be the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done for me.” Sliding the first bite between her lips, she chewed twice and stopped. “Holy crap. Dis is awesome,” she said around the food.
“I’m glad you like it. Now back to today.” The suspense was killing him. “Did you leave there a cohesive team or are you about to be running that kitchen by yourself?”
She loaded up her fork with another bite. “This is where you get to say I told you so. It absolutely worked. I mean, we were barely tolerating each other for the first hour, but they made us do this hill thing. Mona and I were at the top and everyone else was blindfolded. We had to talk them up the hill past all of these buried obstacles.”
“The tether test,” he replied.
“You’ve done it?” Lauren asked, stopping with the fork halfway to her mouth. “Dude. That shit was scary. Jackson went last and he almost took both of us over the side, but Mona grabbed me and everyone else jumped on to create some human lifeline. I still can’t believe we didn’t end up in the water.”
He’d never seen her so animated. “I’ve only ever watched others do it, but it sounds like you guys figured it out.” Pointing out the obvious, he said, “So you learned to trust them.”
Blue eyes went wide. “I didn’t say that.”
The woman had entirely missed the point. “You just said the team formed a lifeline. What happened after they did that?”
“I scooted down the hill until Jackson could reach my hand, and then we pulled him up.”
“So you trusted them to keep you safe while you gave someone else a reason to trust you.”
The old cliché of a light bulb going off over someone’s head came to life in that moment. Every thought rolled across her face, from denial to acceptance and about three steps in between.
“I trusted them,” she mumbled, speaking more to herself than to him.
Nick held his tongue while she processed the revelation. He’d had one of his own earlier in the day and understood how off-balance she must have felt. Though he also wondered why she’d been so distrusting in the first place. He knew his own reasons for his faulty thinking, but in Lauren’s case, the causes were likely more traumatic. No one was born refusing to trust people.
“Are you glad you went then?”
“I am.”
“You’re from Boston, right?” He knew the answer but wanted to get her talking again.
“Worcester, technically, but the Boston area.”
Reaching for his beer, he asked, “What made you want to be a chef?”
Lauren moved a piece of chicken around on her plate. “Mom had to work a lot, so I had to take care of Knox. That’s my younger brother,” she added. “He’s in the Army now. At some point I got tired of chicken nuggets and mac and cheese so when a neighbor tossed some cookbooks out by the dumpster, I swiped them.”
“How old were you?”
“Nine, maybe. That’s when I made my first full meal, which came out of a box, but considering I’d had to stand on a stool just to reach the faucet, I felt pretty accomplished.”
Nick tried to imagine what it would have been like to be responsible for Mia at such a young age and couldn’t even picture how that would have gone. Though Dad had put him in the kitchen pretty early, he’d not been cooking anything solo before fourteen or fifteen years old, and even then not without adult supervision.
“Where was your dad?”
She put her fork down. “I never knew my dad. Neither did Knox. They weren’t the same guy.” Messing with the string on her hoodie, she said, “How did you end up on Anchor Island?”
Accepting the change of subject, he said, “Mia and I moved here to take care of Nota. She visited for a vacation years ago and fell in love with the place. Within six months she’d made it her home, but then a couple years ago she fell and broke her hip. We decided she needed family around, so here we are.”
“Where
were you before?”
“North Jersey. As you know, life in a busy kitchen gets old. After fifteen years, I’d had enough, so getting word the spot was open at Dempsey’s made the decision an easy one.”
Lauren watched him closely. “You don’t regret it? This island must get boring after a while.”
“Have you been bored yet?” he asked.
“I’ve only been here for five weeks, and those have been spent trying to get this restaurant where I want it.”
Asking a leading question, he said, “Did you go out much back in Boston?”
“Working eighties hours a week doesn’t leave much time for a social life.”
“But you weren’t bored?”
Getting his point, her lips curled into a half smile and some of the earlier light returned to her eyes. “You like to be right, don’t you?”
“Don’t you?” he returned.
“I think you know the answer to that.”
Nick reached for his beer. “Yes, I do. Your food is getting cold over there.”
Eyes on her plate, she said, “Do you mind if I take this home for later? I don’t feel like eating right now.”
Sensing he’d crossed a line, he said, “I’m sorry that I brought up your family. I didn’t mean to pry.”
Lauren shook her head with a resigned expression. “I don’t like to talk about the past, that’s all.”
“Not a problem.” Rising to his feet, Nick picked up both of their plates.
“You aren’t done yet,” she said, reaching to tug her plate back. “Go ahead and finish.”
He would not sit there and eat in front of her, especially when he’d been the one to send her appetite packing.
“It’s fine. Go ahead and sit on the couch while I clean this up.”
“I can help.” She hopped up and immediately groaned.
Chuckling, he carried the plates to the counter. “Like I said, have a seat on the couch. This won’t take long.”
He slid her food into a glass bowl and clicked on the lid as she asked, “What’s this?”
Nick glanced over to see her looking at the photo album on the coffee table. “Mia made that for me for my birthday. A kind of our-family-through-the-years thing.”
After his lunch with Nota, Nick had finally taken the time to flip through it. His collection contained more pictures from their childhood, showing that Mia had personalized the books according to who they were for. He assumed her own looked much like his.
“Can I look at it?” Lauren asked.
“Sure.” Once the leftovers were in the fridge, Nick joined her on the couch. “That’s my dad,” he said as she examined a picture taken in front of the restaurant.
“Is that you beside him?”
“That’s me.” Knowing what she was thinking, he said, “I was going through a chubby phase.”
Her laughter was all the better for how rarely she shared it. “You were just big-boned,” she said, trying to be kind.
“I believe husky was the word on my jeans.”
Lauren turned the page. “Mia hasn’t changed a bit. How old is she here?”
Nick had to look closer. “I’d say about twelve. That’s when she got her braces and started smiling like she was trying to hide a hamster in her mouth.”
“Spoken like a mean big brother.” She scanned the next page, smacked a finger on one picture in particular, and cut her eyes his way. “A white tuxedo?”
“I was fourteen and Lorinda Witherspoon, my date to that dance, picked it out.”
“Then I am judging Lorinda and her middle school taste.”
She turned the page again and caught a blister on the corner. “Ouch.” The damaged digit shot into her mouth.
“We need to put something on those.”
As he lifted off the couch, she tried to argue that she was fine, but couldn’t speak clearly for the finger between her lips. Nick ignored her and proceeded to the bathroom to snag petroleum jelly from his medicine cabinet, but he couldn’t find the bandages. He’d recently used the last in a box, but he was certain he’d bought another when the first had gotten low. The hunt took longer than he’d planned, but he finally found the full box under the sink.
“Here we go,” he said, returning to the living room to find Lauren slumped over and sound asleep.
Leaving the first aid items on the kitchen counter, he grabbed a blanket off his bed, lifted her feet onto the couch so she wasn’t twisted at an odd angle, and then tucked her in. This was not how he’d planned to end the night, but she was in this condition thanks to his suggestion, so he only had himself to blame.
Collecting the items off the counter, he went to work on her hands.
Lauren heard a distant voice calling her name and fought to drag herself out of the darkness. Shifting to stretch her limbs, she moaned in pain and opened one eye. The small effort was for naught since wherever she was, the room was pitch-black.
“Come on, sleepyhead. We need to get moving.”
Brain finally starting to function, she recognized the voice. And immediately panicked.
Jerking upright, she looked around, ignoring her screaming muscles.
“Hello?” she said.
“Over here.” Following the sound, she found Nick in the chair at the end of the coffee table, the glow from his cell phone screen lighting his face. “How do you feel?”
“Like I’ve been hit by a truck. What happened?”
His sexy laugh should not have been so arousing in her half-conscious state.
“You passed out so I let you sleep. The pain pills are on the table in front of you next to a bottle of water. I put a fresh toothbrush on the bathroom sink, and you’re welcome to use anything else you need.”
The pills were a must, but the rest she’d take care of at home. “You should have woken me up and sent me home.” Pulling the band from her hair, she scratched her scalp, counting on the darkness to hide how awful she must look.
“You were exhausted. You didn’t even wake up when I put the ointment on your hands.”
Lauren flexed her fingers and felt the Band-Aids for the first time. “Why would you do that?”
Nick’s phone light went off. “They’ll be worse if they dry out. We pull out in ten minutes. Do you need help getting up?”
Pull out? “You don’t need to drive me home. I can walk.”
“You aren’t going home. We’re going to get some fish.”
Fishing? The man expected her to go fishing with hands full of blisters and a body she could barely move? All Lauren wanted was a hot bath and a soft bed. The man could go fishing all by himself.
“There’s no way.” Lauren pushed herself off the couch and the agony nearly sent her back down. She wavered but Nick caught her before she could crumble. Shoving him off, she said, “I can stand on my own.”
He held on despite her efforts. “If I let go, you’ll be in a heap on the floor in seconds. Just give yourself a minute.”
Pride made her want to push him away even harder, but Nick was right. Her legs were like overcooked noodles and her head was spinning.
“You didn’t eat enough last night. I’ve got a protein smoothie in the fridge. You can have that until we get some solid food into you.”
Lauren couldn’t remember the last time someone took care of her like this. Or if anyone ever had. She’d never considered curling into another human being, but that’s all she wanted to do in that moment. Tuck herself against Nick and let him carry the weight of the world for a while.
Instead, she took several deep breaths, allowing her mind to come fully awake and her legs to steady.
“Thank you,” she mumbled, loosening the grip she had on his sleeve. “I’m not used to leaning on people.”
“I can tell.” Loosening his hold around her waist, he said, “Better?”
“Yeah.” She tested her legs and was relieved when they held her up. “I can make it home.”
“If you insist on going home, I’ll drive you, but y
ou’ll be missing out.”
Her experience with fishing was limited to a summer in her childhood when one of her mom’s boyfriends—possibly the only one who had ever shown any interest in her children—had taken Lauren and Knox out to a lake and taught them how to bait their own hooks. In the evening, they’d cooked what they’d caught and her love of cooking over an open flame had been born.
She hadn’t touched a pole since and was in no shape to do so today.
“I can’t go fishing, Nick. I’ll be lucky if I can hold my knives at work.”
“I didn’t say we were going fishing. We’re going to pick up some fresh fish. No poles involved.”
Lauren looked over to the sliding glass doors and saw nothing but moonlight glinting off the water. “Where are we going to find fresh fish in the middle of the night?”
“It’s six a.m. The sun will be up soon. And we’re surrounded by fresh fish, remember? We’re on an island.” He thought he was so cute. “Are you in or not?”
He had her curious now. “Which way is the bathroom?”
Nick took her by the shoulders and turned her to the right. “Walk straight ahead. I’ll have the smoothie waiting when you come back.”
Careful not to trip, she staggered across the room, hands outstretched to find the bathroom doorway. Once inside, she patted around for the switch and Nick called, “It’s on the left.” So he was a chef, a nurse, and a psychic. Was there anything the man couldn’t do?
Maybe if she hadn’t fallen asleep, Lauren would have discovered more of his talents. Then again, considering her current condition, it’s likely her body would have cramped up at an inopportune time and humiliated her much more than she already was.
Locating the switch, she flipped the light on and nearly blinded herself. “Motherfu—”
“You good?” called Nick.
“Sure,” she called back. “All good.”
Lauren closed the door, paused to let her eyes adjust, and then quickly took care of the necessities. Minutes later, she exited the bathroom feeling presentable if not totally human. Pretending that every step didn’t hurt was difficult, but she did her best not to whimper as she returned to the kitchen.