Fearless Love

by Meg Benjamin

  She closed her eyes, leaning her forehead against the wall. He was probably really impressed. A genuine salt of the earth type here.

  Six months ago, she’d worn suede boots. Six months ago, her hair had highlights. Six months ago people were beginning to know her name. Hell, six months ago, she’d been… Not nearly as impressive as she’d thought at the time.

  What you were isn’t important anymore. It’s what you are now that you need to concentrate on. It’s all you’ve got.

  She sighed. She needed to spread some wood shavings around the nest boxes to make it harder for the hens to track in mud. And she should add some more ground oyster shells to the feed.

  Ah yes, the glamorous life of a Hill Country chicken farmer. But if nothing else, it took her mind off her troubles. Even though those troubles were a big part of this life now.

  If only Grandpa had left her advice on how to deal with Great-Aunt Nedda, who was a hell of a lot more dangerous than Robespierre could ever be.

  Nedda Carmody turned on her computer, watching the screen slowly turn from black to gray. A new computer would boot up more quickly, of course, but a new computer qualified as a frill, as far as Nedda was concerned. Given her choice, she’d ignore the computer altogether, but she knew better than that. These days you couldn’t run a business without one, and Nedda had no intention of putting Pedernales Properties at risk.

  Her spreadsheets opened slowly too, but that gave her time to look at the figures as they appeared on the screen. The bed and breakfast bookings were a little thinner than usual, but it was September, toward the end of the summer season. They’d pick up again when the wineries started releasing their new wines, and they’d peak when the Wine and Food Festival rolled around.

  The rentals were a little slow too, but most of them were up to date on their payments. The punk renting the cabin near the railroad tracks was a week late, but she didn’t expect much from him. Sooner or later, she’d probably have to start eviction proceedings if the little pissant didn’t light out on his own.

  Her gaze moved down to the final items on the list. The office building on Main with the store on the first floor. The empty lot on Spicewood she was planning to sell. The farm.

  She stopped, studying that entry. The farm. Harmon’s farm. Correction: the Carmody family farm that used to belong to Harmon. Still down by a payment, the one Harmon had missed after that first stroke. Why Harmon chose to saddle that silly child with the place was something Nedda would never understand. There was no way she’d make enough money from chickens to pay off Harmon’s debts.

  Or rather, she did understand what Harmon thought he was doing. She understood all too well. But it didn’t make any difference. Whatever Harmon had wanted to do, he’d still been stuck in the end—not enough money and not enough time. Maybe he didn’t want the farm in Nedda’s hands, but it wasn’t like he had much choice in the matter. He could try to postpone it, but he couldn’t change it. And, of course, he was dead. Which meant that whatever he’d planned was irrelevant.

  Nedda studied the numbers on the screen again, letting her lips slide into a rare smile. Harmon had already lost, and she was going to win. Finally, after forty years, she was going to win.

  Chapter Two

  Joe had debated dropping the eggs off in the kitchen before he got his shower, but finally decided against it. He’d made a deal with himself back when he’d climbed out of his own personal pit—he’d never again show up in a kitchen in anything less than top shape. And that included being in chef’s whites. His pants might be black canvas with the Saints logo up the sides, but he held onto the white jacket as the mark of professionalism. For a while, it had been all he had to show that he was back on his game.

  Now he walked into his kitchen, black chef’s beanie in place, bandana knotted around his neck. The tall white toques French chefs wore struck him as slightly ridiculous—the beanie was good enough to confirm his status as the chief rooster in this particular kitchen. Rooster made him think of his new egg producer, which in turn made him smile as he put the egg cartons on the counter.

  Ms. MG Carmody looked a lot better than most of the chicken farmers he’d had dealings with over the years, even if she did give the impression of someone who wasn’t sure exactly of what she was doing. She also looked like someone who badly needed a second source of income. Twenty-five hens weren’t going to bring in enough to keep her farm going, unless she started producing something else along with the eggs.

  He nodded toward one of the line chefs, Darcy, who was washing micro greens for lunch. “Morning.”

  Darcy raised her head far enough for him to see the bright green tips of her hair and mumbled something that might have been a greeting or a curse.

  He sighed. Darcy had wanted the sous chef position that he’d recently opened up in the kitchen, although she hadn’t actually applied for it because he hadn’t actually asked her to apply. Of the three cooks at the Rose, she was the most qualified for the job—she had a culinary degree, her cooking skills were first rate and she worked like a son of a bitch. On the other hand, her people skills were virtually non-existent. And the sous chef would be in charge of the kitchen when Joe wasn’t watching. He figured if he’d hired Darcy, his other two cooks would have quit within a week.

  Of course, Darcy herself might quit now, given how pissed she was about the whole sous chef deal. The manager at the Silver Spur had already hired away Joe’s prep cook, and he happened to know Leo and Jorge were both getting offers. Fortunately, the salary and benefits package at the Rose was decent. Still, he needed to do something to smooth Darcy’s feathers. She might be a pain in the ass sometimes, but she was a hell of a cook.

  “Found us a new egg producer.” He opened the cartons, checking the eggs for dirt. “She lives down the road here. Small operation, maybe eighteen or twenty eggs a day.”

  Darcy raised her eyebrow but said nothing, keeping her focus on the greens.

  Joe felt like sighing again. The hell with it—time to face the problem head on. “Okay, Darcy, let’s talk this out.”

  She turned to look at him, her chin elevated mutinously.

  Joe raised his hands in what he hoped with a calming gesture. “Look, darlin’, I know you’re pissed about not getting the job, and I know you’re a smokin’ cook. Hell, we both know that. If it was just cooking, you’d be a shoo-in. But that’s not all the job involves. Right now, you can’t talk to other people for shit, and we both know that too. If you want to be sous chef, you need to learn how to get other people to work with you. And at the moment, you’re not ready to do that.”

  Darcy froze, chin up, back rigid.

  Oh crap, don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.

  “How am I supposed to learn to do that?” she said between her teeth. “I’m spending half my time washing fucking greens and peeling potatoes, for Christ’s sake.”

  He shrugged. “Okay, I know, we’re down on staff. We need somebody to do prep work, but prep cooks aren’t thick on the ground around here. I’ll work with Kit to find somebody long term, and maybe I can find someone to do the crap part of the job now—washing and peeling and slicing. I agree, you shouldn’t get stuck with all of this.”

  Darcy’s back relaxed slightly, and she looked him in the eye for once. “You think Kit will go for hiring more help?”

  “Sure, why not? We lost Herb to the Silver Spur, so we’re down by one. And we’re always scrambling back here anyway. I’ve got a standing order for more cooks.”

  She blew out a breath. “So who did you hire for the sous chef?”

  He shrugged again. “New guy. From Austin. He should be here after we finish lunch service.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Todd Fairley.”

  “Fairley, huh?” She stared down at the greens for a moment, then grimaced. “Hope he turns out to be fair himself.”

  You and me both, sugar. “I guess we’ll find out in a couple of hours.” He turned back to his eggs. At lea
st they seemed to be a neutral topic.

  Three hours later, after the lunch rush had died down, Todd Fairley arrived wearing khakis and a knit golf shirt, and Joe felt the first stirrings of unease.

  Fairley didn’t exactly look like his idea of a chef. No gut, for one thing. No tats. No facial hair or visible piercings. No rat tail. He looked like he got his hair cut regularly, in fact, and he’d obviously shaved within the last four or five hours.

  The two times he’d met Fairley previously in Austin, he’d been dressed for the dinner crowd in his chef’s coat. The food he’d turned out had been respectable—more than respectable if Joe was feeling generous. And he’d come across as a normal member of the kitchen brigade, if there was such a thing as normal where the kitchen was concerned.

  But now he looked really…wholesome. Joe couldn’t imagine him wielding a cleaver to scare off a kitchen rebellion, which was what one of the sous chefs of his acquaintance had done. On the other hand, he looked like the kind of anal retentive type who’d make sure that nothing left the kitchen for the dining room in anything other than the best possible shape, which was what the kitchen at the Rose really needed right now. Since Joe was cooking, he couldn’t expedite at the same time.

  And then there was the fact that Fairley had come very highly recommended by the chef de cuisine at one of the more trendy restaurants in Austin.

  But for a sous chef, Todd Fairley had a more than passing resemblance to an insurance salesman. Brown hair and eyes, warm smile, pleasing manner. He’d probably be a whiz with the customers at Applebees. Whether he could work with the collection of culinary pirates in the Rose’s kitchen was another question.

  Knock it off. You hired him. He had. And he still thought it was a good decision.

  Fairley shook hands with everybody in the kitchen, managing not to blink at the tattoo of an exploding wine bottle running from Leo’s biceps to his elbow. Jorge’s tats were more subtle, but Jorge also wore his shoulder-length hair in a bun on the top of his head that reminded Joe a little of a sumo wrestler. Fairley took it all in stride, or at least he seemed to.

  Joe found himself tensing when Fairley reached Darcy’s station in his tour around the kitchen. The neon-green tips of her hair were just visible beneath her beanie. Her own tats were hidden beneath her chef’s coat. She kept her earrings down to a single pair of studs on the job, although off the job she sometimes had four or five running up the side of her ear. She looked like a certified kitchen warrior, ready to go to battle with a whisk and a chef’s knife. Joe only hoped Fairley knew enough not to screw around with her right off the bat.

  “Darcy Cunningham,” he said, gesturing toward Darcy. “She’s on line, usually sauté and grill. Sometimes saucier.”

  Fairley gave her an automatic smile. “Nice to meet you, Darcy. Always nice to know you’ve got experienced line cooks backing you up.”

  Darcy stiffened slightly, and Joe did a quick review. Okay, maybe saying she was there to back Fairley up wasn’t exactly subtle, but it was no less than the truth. He turned to the rest of the kitchen. “We’ve got service starting in an hour and a half, people. Let’s get on it.” He gestured Fairley out of the kitchen ahead of him, then into his small office at the back.

  “She doesn’t like me, does she?” Fairley said genially.

  Joe shrugged. “She’ll get used to you. Just stay out of her way. She’s a hell of a cook.”

  Fairley’s brow furrowed slightly. “Stay out of her way?”

  “You know what I mean. She’ll do her job, and she doesn’t need a lot of supervision. Once she’s used to you, she’s somebody you can rely on to get things done and done right.”

  Fairley glanced back toward the kitchen. “What about the other two?”

  “Jorge and Leo?” Joe shrugged again. “They’re good. Not as good as Darcy, but still good. Leo was with me in Dallas. Jorge hired on when I moved down here.”

  “They speak English?”

  Joe managed not to frown. The question wasn’t as left field as it might have seemed, and it didn’t necessarily say anything about Fairley’s attitude toward his employees. Lots of kitchens required the chef to handle two or three languages. Joe could do Spanish, but his Vietnamese was shaky. “They’re both from Texas, so yeah, they speak English. The new dishwasher, Placido, is a little more problematic, but he can get by.”

  Fairley nodded. “Not a problem. My Spanish is okay.”

  “Good.” Joe pushed himself to his feet. “We’ll start you off tonight. Menu’s posted in the kitchen. Prep’s already underway—should be mostly complete by now. Service starts at five thirty.”

  Fairley smiled again, pushing easily to his feet. “Someplace I can change around here?”

  “Staff room down the hall to the left. There’s a men’s room next door if you’re feeling shy.”

  “No problem for me.” Fairley turned toward the door. “Any problem for Ms. Cunningham?”

  “Darcy can handle it.”

  Fairley gathered the hangers with his chef’s jacket and pants from the back of the office door, then headed off down the hall. The jacket had been so white it made Joe’s teeth ache. And he had the traditional black-and-white checked pants to go with it.

  Joe was willing to bet he had a toque too.

  Still, his clothes weren’t a problem. He’d look like a chef was supposed to look, which might give him an advantage in the kitchen. And Fairley could probably find a place to hang his clothes in the staff room—it was big enough to provide them all with closet space.

  Considering that Darcy had been sharing that room with Leo, Jorge, and Joe himself for the past year, he doubted that sharing it with Fairley would present any new difficulties. On the other hand, something about the way Fairley had asked about her made Joe feel faintly itchy.

  In fact, there was something about Fairley’s bland perfection that made him more than itchy—it made him wonder if he’d made a mistake after all.

  Recommendations. Experience. Anal retentive. All good qualities in a sous chef. All good reasons for hiring Fairley. He had every reason to believe the guy would be a great addition to his kitchen.

  And if he doesn’t work out, I can always fire the son of a bitch.

  Joe sighed. Just his luck to hire the perfect guy and have him turn out to be perfect for somebody else’s kitchen.

  MG studied the contents of the refrigerator and tried not to sigh. At least she no longer had to eat eggs. In fact, she had no eggs to eat since she’d sold them all to Joe LeBlanc. Which left her with bologna, sandwich bread, some slightly rusty lettuce, and a jar of mayonnaise that might or might not last the week.

  She flopped two pieces of bread onto a plastic plate her grandfather had probably bought at the dollar store, then smeared on mayonnaise and layered a piece of bologna and a half-leaf of lettuce (ripping off the part that was too brown even for her). She poured some tea from the pitcher in the refrigerator into a green glass tumbler that probably dated back to her grandmother, then took her seat at the aged wooden table in the corner.

  She wasn’t entirely sure what had become of her grandmother’s good furniture and dinnerware. Her grandfather had claimed he was trying to simplify his life, get rid of stuff he didn’t need any more. But she suspected he’d sold a lot of things she remembered from her childhood—her grandmother’s china and silver, the antique dining room table and breakfront, the rockers that had been used to pacify generations of Carmody babies.

  All of it had undoubtedly gone to the various antique stores around Konigsburg. She just hoped her grandfather had gotten a fair price for it. And that it had helped to pay down the medical bills left over from her grandmother’s last, catastrophic illness.

  The bologna tasted like it contained more filler than meat, but she guessed that was what you got when you went with the super value brand. What would she rather be eating? Pad Thai maybe. A margherita pizza. Roast chicken with cornbread stuffing.

  Well, at least you’ve got the chic
ken.

  She winced. Her grandfather had killed and plucked his chickens without a qualm, but she’d never watched him do it. She wasn’t exactly sure how to go about it herself, and it wasn’t something she felt like researching. Not even for Robespierre, Rooster From Hell.

  Still, she had to come up with some other way to raise some cash and do that fairly soon. The eggs obviously weren’t going to be enough on their own, and she doubted the farm had much else that would be worth selling.

  Except, of course, for the farm itself.

  She blew out a breath. Her last promise to her grandfather had been to hold onto the farm. Or at least to try. She couldn’t do much at the end beyond keeping him comfortable, but she’d tried. And she’d promised. And she’d do it if she could. She owed him that much.

  Her accounting skills were minimal, but she didn’t exactly need much skill to figure out the accounts for the farm. One very large mortgage. One middling to small inheritance consisting mainly of insurance. One great-aunt ready to gobble up the farm and spit out the bones.

  She could make the payments for a couple of months out of the small amount of money Grandpa had been able to pass on. But once that ran out, her options dropped down to zero. The eggs sure as hell wouldn’t pay enough to pacify Great-Aunt Nedda. And she had interest piling up on the one payment Grandpa had missed when he’d first gotten sick.

  Obviously, she needed a job, and she needed one fast. She glanced down at the copy of the Konigsburg Herald-Zeitung that she’d spread on the table earlier in the day. There wasn’t much there right now in the way of jobs for someone with limited office skills—some openings for hotel maids, one ad for a convenience store clerk in Johnson City, a counter job at a fast food place out on the highway, plus somebody needed a waitress in Marble Falls. All of them minimum wage, of course—probably the best she could hope for anyway.