I wasn’t really a “spread the word” type, but I nodded, mostly because I needed to end this conversation before trouble could give way to temptation, something I was not going to let happen.
The walkie-talkie on my hip crackled. “Chief? I’ve got a fender bender up at Butte and Lakeview,” Marta reported. “Locklear’s on a call already.”
“I’m on it,” I spoke into the radio. Our department was so tiny that even calling it a department was a bit of politeness. Three officers including me, a dispatcher, and some part-time office help, that was us.
Mason blanched and dug out his phone. His family lived down Butte Road, way on the outskirts of town. His face brightened as he tapped around on the gadget. “Good. It’s not Jimmy.”
“This time,” I added, because that was the way of it. Might not be Mason’s brother tonight, but it would be some time again soon. Seemed like I couldn’t go a week without a Hanks causing some kind of commotion, and I’d do well to remember that.
Two
Mason
Flint was back. He sat at the same table—by the window and near the door. It was Tuesday, shortly before close. We had a grand total of four other people in the place. Two of them were tourists—a pair of men from Ashland doing the Highway 101 scenic coastal drive on their way to Lincoln City. Wonderfully chatty, they’d been the first to find us via one of the ads I’d taken out on LGBTQ travel sites. Go me.
Flint had been in twice over the weekend, ordering exactly the same thing each time and eating with grumpy efficiency that didn’t invite small talk. Not that I was eager to talk to Flint, but Adam and Logan kept making me wait on him, and Flint had a way of acknowledging my presence the same way one might a raccoon who raided the trash cans.
“Hanks.” He nodded as I came over with a menu.
“Mason.” God, I hadn’t even been back two months, and I was already tired of being a Hanks. I was not one of the Hanks boys, never had fit that mold. “Would you like to hear this week’s specials?”
“The usual is fine.” He leaned back in his chair, not touching the menu. I hadn’t expected more from him, but I didn’t need him pointing out my service shortfalls if I forgot the menu again.
“Late night for you?” I asked as I wrote the order ticket.
“You could say that. Busy week and a call right at dinner time.” He made a pinched-in face, one that made me think he needed a shoulder rub or something. And that was exactly the wrong sort of impulse to be having around him.
“Well, we’re happy for your business.”
“Liar.” His smile was unexpected and hit me like a punch. Damn. That thing was lethal. Nash Flint had dimples. Dimples on that granite face just didn’t fit, and yet it completely transformed him into someone approachable—and lickable and…
No. Can’t think like that.
“We are.” Seriously. It had been a slow, slow opening weekend. I’d happily take whatever cash Flint wanted to throw our way.
“You’re probably worried I’m gonna scare your customers away.”
“You’re not the health inspector.” I smiled back at him. Felt weird as fuck, bantering with Flint, but it also made my chest warm.
“Now that would have broken my poor father’s heart.” He made a little shooing motion with his hand. “I haven’t eaten since eleven. Not to be rude but—”
“Going.” Duly dismissed, I scurried off to the kitchen window.
“Order,” I called to Logan. “It’s for Flint, so whatever you can do to hurry—”
“Tell me he didn’t order his usual.” Logan came over to the window. His blond hair was sweaty, not in its usual careful style, and his apron was splattered with the remnants of a full day of cooking.
“He did. What’s the problem? I know we’ve got bread.” I saw to that myself, working on the bread in the morning while Logan prepped for food. My specialty might be back-of-the-house management, but I hadn’t endured the long hours of culinary school for nothing.
“Not the bread. The burger patties. Remember how Sunny Skies called and asked if they could deliver tomorrow morning instead of today? Well, I’m out of beef patties.”
This was the problem with working with small, local suppliers. I’d been happy to accommodate when Zeb at Sunny Skies had said his truck was acting up, but now someone was going to have to try to coax Flint into ordering something else. As a group, we’d decided to go local as much as possible, but the responsibility of sorting out all of it fell to me. My back tightened. I couldn’t shake the sense that I was letting people down—Flint, who just wanted his burger, and Logan, who deserved reliable supply deliveries.
“You want to come out, tell him about the specials? Maybe hearing it from the chef—”
“Ha. He scares me.” Logan was every bit as bad as Adam.
I groaned. “You didn’t even grow up around here. And you drive like a grandma. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
I’d met Logan at culinary school. In the years after, he’d complained about always getting sous chef jobs and never the executive chef position he desperately wanted. I’d convinced him to go in on this place with Adam and me. With us, he had freedom to craft his own menu at last, but I knew small-town life would be an adjustment for the Portland native.
“Still. I better stay back here. You handle Flint. Tell him my chicken’s top notch.”
Grumbling the whole way back to Flint’s table, I dreamed up a number of punishments for Logan and Adam as a distraction from the gnawing sense of guilt that the supplies weren’t running as they should. But still, next family with six kids who came in was all theirs. Flint was looking at his phone when I got to his table.
“Chief?”
“Yeah?” He looked up, mouth quirking as if he already knew he wasn’t going to like what I had to say.
“How do you feel about chicken?”
“Chicken?” He sounded as if I’d proposed cockroaches.
“We’re out of beef patties, see, but Logan makes this amazing crispy chicken sandwich with a sun-dried tomato aioli—”
“I don’t much care for chicken. Or tomatoes.” Flint shook his head, and I felt his disappointment all the way to my toes. I hated not being able to deliver what he wanted. I’d never admit it, but watching Flint devour our food was a near-sensual experience for me. He never really complimented it, but he ate with such gusto that it was hard not to feel a little bit proud.
“How about pizza? We’ve got a few on the menu. One’s a white sauce with sausage and mushrooms. You might like that.”
Flint’s skeptical eyes said that he doubted that very much, but he gave a heavy sigh and nodded. “Guess that’ll do.”
“Great.” I turned to head back to the kitchen.
“And my water?” Flint called after me.
Crap. Some server I was. But I had something I thought might make up for the lack of a burger stashed away in the bar fridge. I hurried up and got him a glass and raced it back to his table in record time.
“What’s this?” Flint eyed the glass with clear distrust.
“Tea. Lipton. I brewed a pitcher just in case…” You came in sounded a bit desperate. “Just in case,” I repeated. Lame.
“Ah. Well…thanks.” Another Flint smile, just as disarming as the first, and enough to make me want to brew gallons of tea to earn more.
Right then, the travelers from Ashland finally got up from their table, heading for the door. “Have a safe trip,” I called.
“Oh, we’ll try.” They slowed up, the taller of the two speaking to me. “Thanks again. The burger was amazing.”
Next to me, Flint’s groan was almost audible. The Ashland traveler’s eyes skimmed over him, going wide with obvious appreciation. “And, I must say, what a progressive and inclusive community you have here.”
Oh, crap. I knew what the guy was assuming, and I wasn’t sure how to deflect it.
“We try.” A muscle worked in Flint’s jaw. “You all drive safe now. Watch that light up at
Lakeview and 101.”
“Will do. And thank you for your service. Always a pleasure to see one of the family in blue.” And with that, the couple was gone, and I was left dying on Flint’s behalf.
“Tourists,” Flint muttered. “What did he mean by ‘family’…?”
Heck. I was absolutely not going to be the one to tell Flint that they’d misread him as gay. That would drive him away for sure.
“Tourists,” I echoed lamely. “I’ll have the pizza right out to you.”
He nodded, effectively dismissing me. As I walked back over to the kitchen window, a little question danced in my head. What if…
What if the Ashland couple had been right about Flint? I’d never really stopped and thought about it before, other than my extremely guilt-ridden macking on his hotness in uniform the last few times he’d been in. But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered. He’d never once been linked to a girlfriend that I could remember—he was the consummate bachelor cop, totally married to the job. The town was liberal enough that I didn’t think Flint would be fired for being gay, but his father was even more of a hardnose than Flint, so maybe that played a factor. Who knew?
On a whim, I glanced back over my shoulder, and to my surprise, Flint looked away fast. “Maybe” and “what if” joined forces to dance in my gut, but I silenced both with a heavy dose of “oh hell no.” It didn’t matter what Flint was—he wasn’t for me.
Nash
I didn’t like pizza. Thin crust. Thick crust. Meat-lover’s. Hawaiian. None of it worked for me. Too messy, juggling crust and sauce, and it always seemed to leave me hungry again an hour later, probably because of all that work trying to not end up wearing it. But I hadn’t wanted a whole thing with Mason, what with him reciting the menu and being helpful and me being picky. My father always made sure that I ate what was in front of me. Not that he would have been a patron of Mason’s tavern or a fan of its brand of upscale bar food—or the idea of our town as “inclusive.”
I’d played dumb with the tourists and Mason, but I’d known what they were implying. There were risks in patronizing this place, but truth was that Rainbow Cove needed Mason’s big idea to succeed more than I needed to feel comfortable. And like Steve had always harped on, maybe I cared a mite too much what others thought or assumed. The tourists were on their way up to the more populated parts of the coast with a favorable impression of our little town. That was what mattered, or so I told myself.
By the time Mason brought my pizza, I was the only one left in the dining room, and the Ringer boy had started wiping down tables and sweeping up, all while giving me a wide berth. I sighed. I knew he still wasn’t over me catching what he’d been up to in high school, but I wasn’t the one who’d outed him, no matter what he might have thought. My job had been making sure him and Mason didn’t break their fool necks with their pranks, nothing more than that.
Not that they were boys any longer. Ringer had had the lumberjack thing going on for several years now with a full beard that matched his red hair and bulky muscles, and Mason…well, the time past puberty had been very kind to him. He was wearing another Rainbow Tavern T-shirt and tight jeans, ones better suited to that bar in Portland I’d let myself visit last time I went up to see my mother. Lord, but that had been overwhelming, an unqualified mistake.
“Here you go.” Mason set the steaming pizza on one of those little pizza-rack things, sliding an empty white plate in front of me as well. “If it’s not what you had in mind, it’s on us, okay?”
“It’s food. It’s hot. And I’m hungry enough to eat my Jeep.” I grabbed a knife and fork and set to cutting up a slice.
Mason raised an eyebrow at me using silverware to eat a pizza, but I didn’t much care what he thought. I had a uniform to keep neat. So I gave him a hard stare, one that sent him back to the bar area. Finally in peace, I tried the pizza and it was…
Portland folks were always using “orgasmic” to describe food or drink—something I’d never seen the logic in. But as I chewed on my first slice, I could finally see the appeal of gushing over a food product. My tongue had seldom known such rapture—the sausage was crisp and savory, the sauce creamy and well-spiced, and the cheese a snowy blanket over the pie. I ate the whole thing before I even realized what I’d done.
“Not bad, right?” Mason was back, clearly not scared away for good by my grumpiness, and why that pleased me I couldn’t say.
“It hit the spot,” I allowed. “You got the check? I figure Ringer’s about to run me out so you can close.”
Ringer regarded me from across the room with cool blue eyes, not disputing my assessment. Yup, still not over high school, that one. He said something to Mason when he went over to the bar to run my card. Whatever it was, it made Mason’s cheeks pink.
Damn, but I liked a man who blushed. It was a…thing, I guess you could say. A thing I had. Steve had been a blusher, something I used to tease him about privately, and I got a major kick out of trying to make him go red. I hadn’t missed Steve in ages, filing him away under “chapter closed,” but longing hit me all over again right then, watching Mason.
I’d say I needed a Portland weekend, but that had been such a disaster last time. No, I was better off simply tamping down whatever strange urges Mason Hanks brought out in me.
Resolved, I headed out into the windy summer night as soon as I got my card back. I’d parked in front, coming straight from a call about a suspected vandalism over at a jewelry gallery near 101. So that meant moving my official Jeep a whole half a block down to the parking lot behind the station, which was really just a glorified annex onto City Hall.
This time of night, we kept the door locked, so I used the keypad to enter the building.
“Evening, Chief.” Marta looked up from her knitting. In her late sixties, she’d been a dispatcher for my father, back before that was even a full-time position around here. She dispatched the police, fire, and rural ambulance crew, holding down the fort at a wooden desk in the station’s main room. “Candace isn’t in yet.”
“That’s fine. I’m in no hurry,” I lied. Candace, my fresh-as-a-calla-lily junior officer, was always running a step or two behind. But we’d had a dickens of a time filling the third officer slot, and I wasn’t about to chase her away.
“You get food?” Marta asked, not missing a stitch as her fingers flew.
“Yup. The tavern again.”
“That place.” She made a face. “It’s never going to be the same. You need to go clear out to Rowdy’s on Lakeview to get a decent hamburger now.”
“Food’s actually not bad.” I was many things, but a liar wasn’t one of them. “You should check out their house burger sometime.”
“I won’t be going in there, thank you very much.” She made a tsking noise, and her needles clanked. “And you should be careful, too. Don’t want people getting the wrong impression.”
Or the right one. I rubbed my jaw as the image of the tourists from earlier popped into my head. “It’s good to give them business. It’s what the town needs—fresh ideas.” She wasn’t going to agree with me on that, but I tried, anyway. The town was half-full of aging hippies, but Marta was one of the die-hard traditionalists, upstanding singer for the First Evangelical choir, and loud objector to the whole gay tourism plan.
She shook her head. “We’ll just have to agree to disagree. And to think it’s one of those Hanks boys to boot. That whole family never amounted to a hill of beans.” On that last bit, we were in agreement, but I kept my mouth shut, same as I always did when she got to gossiping. “Surprised he even serves you, after you went and locked away Freddy.”
“He got a fair trial.” I shrugged because who knew? Maybe Ringer wasn’t the only one with a grudge against me. Mason seemed hungry enough for business that he might not care that I’d been instrumental in convicting his fool of an older brother for felony criminal mischief. Regardless, it was another reminder of why I couldn’t go getting too friendly with him. He might not
spit in my food or turn down my cash, but the whole damn Hanks family had swung far away from me the day Freddy got sent away. We were never going to be friends.
Three
Mason
Adam came into the kitchen where I was helping Logan plate a big order. He had a shit-eating grin on his face, which immediately put me on edge. We finally had a decent dinner rush, and it had me and the two teenagers we’d hired as weekend waitstaff hopping. Thank God.
We had a grant that had covered the renovation and that would, in theory, get us through the lean early months, but we did need to start showing profit at some point. We’d each invested a huge chunk of savings in the endeavor, and the weight of knowing that Adam and Logan had their futures riding on this idea kept me up at night.
“Tell me nothing’s wrong,” I ordered Adam because I wasn’t sure I could handle a screw-up on what was supposed to be a good night.
“Flint’s got a date.” Adam’s grin got wider.
“He’s got a what?” I almost dropped the bread I was adding to a salad plate. Saving it, I loaded the finished plate on the tray.
“A date. Flint just walked in with Curtis Hunt. Not in uniform.”
Logan looked up from the grill. “The crazy woodcarver guy with the gallery in the old gas station?”
“The crazy, gay, recently single woodcarver guy.” Adam hopped from one foot to the other. “I better get back out there, but I put them at Flint’s regular table.”
Carrying the tray of salads out to the table full of couples in the center of the room, I took a long look at Flint. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen him out of uniform before. He looked good. Light tan polo shirt that made his eyes look greener than usual, dark blue jeans. The working-man kind, not the designer kind that Logan and I wore clubbing in Portland. His short brown hair looked damp—shit, if Flint had showered first, maybe this was a…something.
Not a date. Flint didn’t date, right? But ever since the other night when the tourists had put questions in my head, I’d found myself wondering where exactly Flint went to get some. And, in a sign of the coming apocalypse, he was actually reading the menu. And laughing. I distributed the salads then headed over to their table.
Trust with a Chaser (Rainbow Cove Book 1) Page 2