A Cowboy In The Kitchen. Meg Maxwell

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СКАЧАТЬ Letty smiled and followed after Lucy, who pulled her by the hand. “You go ahead,” Letty said to West.

      He hugged and kissed Lucy goodbye, told Letty he’d pay her extra if she’d clean up the dinner dishes, which got him a wink and a sure thing, and then got in his pickup. Time to learn how not to screw up fried eggs.

       Chapter Two

      Yesterday, when Gram was reminding Annabel of how the restaurant worked, Essie Hurley had made clear that Mondays were a real day off—no prep, no cleaning, no ordering supplies. In fact, family who lived in the Victorian were only allowed in the kitchen on Mondays to cook simple meals for themselves. So at five-thirty, Annabel was surprised to come down the back stairs into the kitchen and find her younger sister, Clementine, kneeling in front of the sink and meticulously cleaning the little red rooster cabinet knobs. Twenty-four-year-old Clementine wore gray yoga pants and a long pale pink T-shirt, her feet in orange flip-flops and her long dark hair in a high ponytail.

      “Clem?” Annabel said, watching her sister dip a rag into a small bucket of cleaning solution and go over the rooster’s tiny tail.

      Clementine turned around and shot Annabel a tight smile. “I forgot to clean these last night,” she said, moving on to the next cabinet knob. “Aren’t they cute? Georgia sent them from Houston a few months ago.” She smiled again and returned to work, scrubbing at the rooster’s crown.

      Something was wrong. Annabel had been gone for seven years, and she and Clementine had never been as close as Annabel had hoped, even when they’d lived under one roof, but she knew when Clementine was holding back. Maybe Clem was angry at her for staying away so long. For leaving the restaurant and Gram on her shoulders all these years. It was hard to tell with Clem. Clem was a “fine, everything’s fine” kind of person, the sort who’d tell you “no worries!” with a bright smile and then go off alone to cry over something dreadful that had just happened to her, like when her birth mother had stood her up for their twice-a-year reunions, only to text an hour later to say something had come up. Annabel’s parents had adopted Clementine when she was eight from a bad foster-care situation, and though Clem’s birth mother was cagey and distant, Clementine had worked hard, often fruitlessly, to keep up some kind of relationship with the woman.

      If Clem was cleaning cabinet pulls—and on a Monday—something had happened.

      “Is everything okay with you?” Annabel asked.

      “I’m fine. Just worried about Gram.” She glanced back at Annabel. “I’m fine, really.”

      Annabel wished her sister would open to her. But Annabel knew she couldn’t rush things. This morning she and Clementine had taken Gram to an appointment at the county hospital; three hours later, after testing and poking, they were sent home, Gram told to rest as much as possible until the test results came in. Clementine had been quiet on the ride to the hospital, quiet there, quiet on the way back.

      Now she glanced at the big yellow clock on the wall above the stove. “I promised Mae Tucker I’d babysit the triplets tonight. See you around midnight.” With that, Clementine bolted up, dumped out the bucket and stored it away, then dashed up the back stairs.

      It’ll take time to rebuild your relationship with Clem, Gram had said during lunch earlier. Don’t give up on her.

      Annabel wouldn’t. Ever. She’d never give up on family.

      And she’d never give up on Hurley’s Homestyle Kitchen either. Since the restaurant wasn’t doing well, it was up to Annabel to keep the kitchen going. Folks counted on Hurley’s to be open Tuesday through Sundays for lunch and dinner, and Annabel didn’t want to let her Gram down.

      West Montgomery wants to learn how to cook, does he? Gram had said that afternoon, taking a nibble of the potato chowder Annabel had made her. Teach him everything I taught you, Essie had added. The tips and secrets. The things you can’t learn by a recipe alone. I know he hurt you, Annabel. But I’ve seen him around town with that little girl of his and it would melt the heart of Constance Brichard. Constance Brichard was the grumpiest person in town, an elderly widow who was always threatening to sic her mean little Chihuahua on kids for making too much noise at the bus stop across the street from her house.

      Which made things worse for Annabel. If West could get Constance Brichard to crack a smile, what would he do to her?

      Annabel put on her favorite yellow apron and glanced at the clock—ten minutes till West walked through the door, daughter-sized handprint apron on.

      She pulled the list she’d made from her jeans pocket. Breakfasts: cheese omelet, scrambled eggs, quiche Lorraine, French toast. Bacon. Biscuits with apple butter. Tonight’s cooking lesson would be about breakfast. Annabel was about to open the walk-in refrigerator for the eggs and milk and butter, then realized if West was paying her a thousand dollars to learn how to make an omelet and biscuits, he could probably use a tutorial about the ingredients themselves, what to buy, how to store them.

      A rap sounded at the back door and Annabel glanced out the window. There he was, right on time. She held up a hand and went to the door, taking a deep breath before she opened it.

      “Got my apron,” he said, clutching it in one hand.

      She smiled and held the door open for him, willing herself not to stare at him, not to look too closely at his handsome face or the way his broad shoulders filled the doorway. He wore a navy blue T-shirt and low-slung jeans, a brown belt with a bronc buckle. He’d filled out from the nineteen-year-old boy she’d known. He was tall then, but now he was muscular from years of ranch work. “Come on in.”

      He hung his hat on a peg by the door, then stood at the huge center island.

      Speak, Annabel. She cleared her throat. “Since you said you want to learn the basics, I thought we’d start with breakfast—scrambled eggs, omelets, French toast, bacon.”

      “Lucy loves scrambled eggs and French toast, and I love bacon, so all that sounds great.”

      “So Lucy is six?” she asked. Six. It just occurred to her that in all this time, all these years, of course he hadn’t given Annabel two thoughts. She’d been so focused on how he’d dropped her like a hot biscuit for sexy Lorna when she should have realized it had been fatherhood that wiped his memory of all that had come before. One hour in the hayloft in his parents’ barn where they’d groped and kissed? How could that even register amid the birth of a baby, the first cold, the first steps, the first day of school? How could it register against daily life with sweet miracles in the form of a toothless smile or a child’s pride at learning to read?

      She’d been a dope to wonder these past seven years if he’d thought about her. Of course he hadn’t.

      But that hadn’t stopped her from tossing and turning for hours last night, remembering how it had felt to be in his arms, to be kissed so passionately by him. At around three in the morning, she’d made herself promise she wouldn’t be sucked back in by his face, by his incredible body, by his...story. He had a story seven years ago. She’d responded and had her heart broken and her life set on a path she hadn’t expected. She’d left her home, left her gram and her younger sister and had lived in a kind of emptiness, of going through the motions.

      He had a story now. She might not be able to stop herself from responding; he was standing in her kitchen, after all, awaiting her help. But she would respond only so much, only so far. She wouldn’t СКАЧАТЬ