I went through to the café, suspecting that the whole place was empty, but what I saw instead made me gasp as shards of ice scraped through my veins. My eyes couldn’t tear themselves away from the horror, the incomprehensibility of what was before me.
Joel was sitting with Dan.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. They were laughing! Joel was patting Dan’s back like he was some ol’ drinking buddy.
“Kylie!” Dan called out as soon as he spotted me. “Baby, get over here.”
I studied Joel’s face after Dan called me “baby.” His smile never wavered and his eye didn’t so much as twitch. Instead he hid a smug, knowing grin behind taking a sip of his iced tea.
“What are you doing here, Dan?” I asked, full of hesitation and suspicion. Dan was not above torching my bridges for me. After our divorce, he destroyed every couples friendship he and I had shared by calling them up and telling them terrible deeds that I had done against them—mean, hurtful things that weren’t remotely true.
“We didn’t get the chance to finish our… conversation.” He turned and gave Joel a salacious wink, one that made me wish for a rusty spoon so that I could dig his eyeball out of his head.
I racked my brain for what conversation he might mean, and then it came to me. “Oh! Do you mean that conversation where you were asking me for advice on how to save the company we built together because it’s now circling the drain because of your ineptitude?”
Yep, that did it. Dan’s smile was gone. But Joel’s was bigger than ever.
To Dan’s credit, he raised his own iced tea in salute to me and said, “That’s the one.”
His lack of self-defense made me blink. Who was this person?
I dropped some of my prickly guard and moved behind the grill’s counter to stand before where they both sat. “I’m not sure there’s any more to say on the matter, Dan, not until you implement some of the changes we talked about. The situation can be reassessed then.”
“Masterson and Montgomery have offered to buy me out,” he said in a quiet voice. For a moment he looked like my Dan again. Handsome and vulnerable, the way I knew him when it was just him and me. “We’ve gone through initial negotiations and the lawyers are hammering out a deal right now.”
I thought about how much the buyout offer would have to be for Dan to even consider it. It would be a number followed by a lot of zeros. I was surprised to find a lack of bitterness in me about it. Dan hadn’t built Hibbert Air from almost nothing–we had built Hibbert Air from almost nothing. It would not have been nearly as successful without both of us pouring every ounce of ourselves into it. Now he would reap all of the rewards, and I’d have none. But I didn’t care. I had something better. Complete and absolute autonomy. The only one pulling my strings was me. I was free of him and the second-guessing of any man.
“Are you sure that’s what you want to do?” I asked.
“Only if I can’t talk you into coming back, Kylie.”
I heard the sound of a sharp crack. It wasn’t loud, but it was near. I glanced around and then froze when I saw the thin line that traveled up the side of Joel’s glass of iced tea. It was cracked, and the cold liquid within was seeping out between Joel’s clamped fingers. He wasn’t looking at me. He wasn’t looking at anything. He was just staring straight ahead.
“Let me get you another glass,” I said as I gently coaxed the glass from his hand.
I escaped into the kitchen where I found Melanie filling a bowl with steaming white chicken chili. Her lovely heart-shaped face was framed by her loose, bouncy curls. She gave me a shy smile.
“What’s that about?” I asked with a laugh as I dumped the contents of Joel’s cracked glass before throwing it away.
“You,” Melanie said. “How do you do it?” She put the bowl on a plate and positioned crackers around it.
“Do what?” She had me genuinely at a loss. I didn’t have a clue as to what she was asking about.
“All those men, how do you make them like you so much?” Her pretty mouth pouted down at the corners. “I can’t even get Sam to notice me.”
I gasped then grinned like a silly goose from ear to ear. “You like Sam?” He was the other half of my waitstaff. He and Melanie were all I had.
Melanie blushed, but her smile returned to pull at her lips. Her eyes were large and her lashes long, and everything about her face telecasted the thoughts and emotions bubbling inside of her. “Don’t you tell him,” she said.
“I won’t,” I promised. Then I remembered her comment about “all those men.” I had to set the record straight. “And those two out there, there’s only one of them that I have fond feelings for, and it’s not the guy I was married to.”
Melanie playfully rolled her eyes. “Maybe you’re not wowzing for him anymore, but he sure is for you.”
She had her chili and was out the kitchen door before I could think of anything to say. I knew she was right. I knew that Dan was hoping I’d forgive him and give us a second chance, but there was no way. Even if I could forgive him for all the cheating, I could never trust him to protect and care for me. When we split, he turned on me. He went from my best friend to my worst enemy. If that was his way of expressing his love, then I wanted no part of it.
I got Joel a fresh glass of iced tea and headed back out to the grill. What I saw when I went out was almost as jarring and chilling as finding Joel and Dan together, hanging out as friends. I had a newcomer, one that haunted my dreams to turn them into nightmares.
“Here comes the hussy of the hour,” my ex-aunt Dorothy said. She held her mouth in its usual pinched state, adding to the deep grooves that feathered from her lips. She was wearing flowered capri pants and a short-sleeved lavender button-up shirt.
“Aunt Dorothy,” Dan chided.
I gave Joel his glass of tea.
“Don’t Aunt Dorothy me. You’ve got no business bein’ here, Daniel Michael Hibbert. Every time I turn around, you’re sniffin’ up her skirt. Quit bein’ such a useless hound dog before you get castrated.”
Well… Aunt Dorothy. Don’t hold back. I didn’t know whether to be pleased or insulted by her speech. If she got Dan to leave me alone, I’d opt for pleased.
“Kylie,” Dan said, turning his focus on me and ignoring his aunt, “Mom’s invited you to dinner tonight.” He wagged his phone in the air to let me know that’s how he’d talked to her. “You’re not going to make me have to break her heart, are you?”
Emotional blackmail. That always was Dan’s go-to move. Sadly, it was one that almost always worked on me.
I opened my mouth to speak, but it was Dorothy’s voice that came out.
“I’d like to talk to you. Alone. In the”—she pointed toward the kitchen. “In there.” It was like she thought she’d get food poisoning just from saying the word.
“I’m busy right now.” The woman was a witch badly in need of a house to fall on her. I wasn’t interested in spending time alone with her, but that didn’t stop her from marching right into the kitchen without me.
No way was I leaving her in there by herself. She’d pour a pound of salt into the chili to ruin it out of spite.
“What’s this about?” I asked as soon as I stepped through the door.
Dorothy planted her feet wide and crossed her arms over her chest. “Roberto hasn’t been visited by the police.”
I felt like there should be a question in there somewhere, but I wasn’t seeing it. “So?” My mind drifted… if I stuck her head in the pot of chili to drown her, would anyone hear?
“So, I want to know what your game is. If you think you can hold this over him and make him your toy, then—”
“What do you want, really?” I asked, cutting her off. “Get to it or get out.”
I thought that Dorothy would be aghast and indignant at being spoken to that way. Instead her lips stretched in a minuscule yet evil smile and her eyes narrowed. If anything, she seemed pleased to have an adversary stand up to her. “Stay away from Dan
and don’t mess with Roberto.”
“That it? You plopping down orders or are you bartering something?”
Her smile got bigger, less evil and more saccharin. Made me think of the smile on a snake’s mouth. “I’ll call a truce.”
“A truce? And what will that look like?”
“I’ll leave you—and your customers—alone.”
“Ha!” I croaked out a laugh. “That’s not a truce. That’s a ceasefire. This little war you’ve been waging against me, it’s all been one directional. You against me.”
She shrugged one shoulder, cool as a cucumber. “And wouldn’t you like it to stop?”
I paused. She had me there. I would like it to stop. Plain and simple. “And all you want is…?”
“No charges against Roberto for trying to use the banquet hall, and stay away from Dan.”
“No,” I said.
Dorothy’s mouth hardened in response to my reply.
“No charges against Roberto, you keep Dan away from me, and not one more ill word about me passes your lips.”
Dorothy tilted her head, considering my counter offer, and then she stuck her hand out for me to shake.
“And not one more ill word about my food, either!”
Dorothy’s lower jaw worked itself from side to side and her hand trembled in the air before falling to her side.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and punched in the numbers 9-1-1, but I didn’t hit send. “I wonder how long it would take for the police to show up at Roberto’s place of work.”
Dorothy’s hand shot back into position.
I slapped my palm into hers and squeezed in a tight, hard shake that she returned with surprisingly bruising strength. I knew I should let go, but it felt too much like crying uncle, so instead I stepped closer and clamped my hand harder around hers. She did the same, and my eye twitched as I felt my bones shift painfully in her powerful grasp. I was ready to let go, then I saw her eye twitch, too.
Ha! In your face! I didn’t even know what that meant, but it was the battle cry of triumph that filled my head.
“Do we have any more of that peaches and bourbon ice cream you made?” Melanie’s sweet voice asked as she entered the kitchen. “Somebody’s asking for it.”
It was the white flag that Dorothy and I had needed to let go in unison. I resisted the urge to rub my sore hand as I stepped away.
“No,” I told Melanie as Dorothy disappeared out the kitchen door. “Tell them I’ll make some more when I get some more fresh peaches in.” I was too busy fuming over Dorothy to even celebrate that someone was asking for a dish that I had made myself.
I headed back out of the kitchen to find Dan and Joel on their feet, heading for the café’s front door. They were still talking, still buddy-buddy, and my overwhelming sense of panic returned. If Dan figured out that Joel and I liked each other, he’d do everything he could to ruin it. Joel was one of the first friends I’d made when I moved here. I didn’t want to lose him.
Dorothy was nowhere to be seen.
Dan lifted his hand high in the air as a wave goodbye. “Sorry you can’t make it to dinner, Kye. I’ll let Mom know.” Joel was right behind him as they neared the door.
“Joel, can I see you a minute?” I called after him, but Dan’s arm slapped down around his shoulders.
“Sorry, Kye,” Dan answered for Joel. “Bro night! Catch ya later.”
And just like that, they were gone. I looked around me. The café was almost empty. There was still a murderer on the loose, and one of the nicest guys I’d ever met was going out for a “bro night” with my conniving, cheating, no-good ex-husband.
I wanted to go to bed. I could pull the fire-battered princess coat that I used as a blanket up over my head and pretend that the world didn’t exist.
Sage jumped up onto the barstool nearest me, stepped to its very edge and then stretched a paw out toward me.
“I still got you, kid,” I said, finally smiling again. I nuzzled the top of her head with my nose as I stroked her cheek. “Let’s go make dinner.”
26
Getting the café up and running the next morning went smooth as silk—as smooth as a chocolate silk pie, that is. Patty had come in to whip up some macadamia and white chocolate cookies, and I talked her into making a pie, too. Her inner voices were talking nice to her today, and she was in a smiling and chipper mood.
I made biscuits from scratch and plenty of sausage gravy to go with them. It was a dish I was actually good at. But I made scrambled eggs to go with the biscuits and gravy and added too much milk, which made them runny. Then I cooked them forever until they dried up. The result was rubbery, so straight to the Oops Board they went.
As for Jonathan, I had him work with Patty. I wanted him to soak up all the knowledge he could from her. He was a natural in the kitchen and managed to nail recipes on the first try, instead of the seventh or eighth try like me. Since Patty was only with us on days she felt good, it made sense to have Jonathan work with her so that her skills could be here through him even when she wasn’t.
“Two more orders,” Sam said as he came through the kitchen door. He was tall and lanky with hair that got thicker and taller instead of longer. He was nerd-cute, hardworking, and an all-around nice guy.
It was everything I could do not to pull him to the side and gently pick his brain with a sledgehammer to find out what he thought of Melanie. They were close to the same age, both in college, and both amazing, smart, and lovely to be around. But I didn’t want to ruin things for Melanie. As fun as it would be to meddle in their potential forever-love, I’d have to settle for being a spectator.
“Joel’s out at the grill bar,” he said. “Want me to serve him?”
My heart actually went pitter patter, I kid you not. “Joel’s here?” I sounded like a giddy school girl asking about her big crush.
Patty, Jonathan and Sam all stopped what they were doing and looked at me.
Heat flooded my face. “I mean, yeah, sure. I’ll take care of him. Don’t worry about it.” They all continued to stare. They weren’t buying my nonchalant act. I gave up all pretense. “Oh! Like none of you weren’t ever sweet on someone!”
Sam snickered and left. Patty and Jonathan smiled and went back to work.
Biscuits and gravy was the one dish I could make that Joel really loved. Without even asking if that was what he wanted, I loaded up a plate to take out to him. I even got Jonathan to fry a sunny-side-up egg to go on top, since I didn’t quite trust myself to fry it up right.
Yes, yes. I’d made the biscuits and gravy on purpose. I’d hoped he’d come in. But the truth was, I had a secondary agenda besides wooing Joel’s heart through his stomach. I was burning with the need to know what had happened between him and Dan last night.
Armed with a plate brimming over with delicious food, I headed out the kitchen door to the grill’s bar… and faltered in my step. Joel was sitting at the far end of the counter. His head was hung low, his broad shoulders were slumped, and he was wearing dark sunglasses. His hair was mussed, and I wasn’t sure he was actually awake.
I approached him with a gentle step and slid the plate in front of him.
“Coffee,” Joel groaned.
I got him a cup of the hot brew with a chilled container of cream and a side dish of sugar.
Without bothering to put anything extra in the coffee, Joel picked up the cup and took a sip. Then he groaned again.
Moving with care, I slipped his sunglasses off his face. Joel’s eyes were bloodshot.
“Why didn’t you tell me that Dan could drink like a Russian sailor?” Joel asked in a hoarse whisper.
I gasped. “You tried to outdrink Dan?” If that was the case, I was surprised Joel was even able to get up and walk around this morning. “Why aren’t you still in bed?”
“Haven’t been.”
“You’ve been up all night?”
“Mmhm…” He took another sip of coffee, then looked down at his plate of food.
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“Want me to take it away?” I asked sympathetically. I imagined that his stomach might feel queasy after last night’s debauchery.
He studied the plate a moment, then picked up the fork, cut off a section of gravy doused biscuit and stuck it in his mouth. He chewed slowly, then perked. “No,” he said with surprise in his voice. “This is good. It can plaster up the hole the whiskey ate in my gut.”
I shook my head in disbelief. Dan had been famous at frat parties in college. Those had been before the days that he and I had been together, but I’d seen the pictures and had heard his fraternity brothers recount the stories. “I can’t believe you tried to outdrink Dan.”
Joel’s gaze lifted and his lips stretched in a lazy smile. “I did outdrink Dan.”
“Noooo,” I gasped again. “How?”
His smile got bigger. “I tipped the bartender at Madame X to water down my drinks.”
I threw back my head and laughed, then noticed Joel’s pain filled wince. “Sorry,” I whispered, hoping it was easier on his hungover eardrums. “But why did you do it?”
He stared at me for a long minute. His bloodshot eyes focused on mine in a way that made me want to look away, or at the very least blush. Then he reached across the counter to hold my fingers in his. “Just figured Dan needed some reminding of reasons he wouldn’t want to stay here… like a DUI.”
My eyes went wide, and I pulled my hand free from Joel’s. “You let Dan drive drunk? What if he’d killed himself? What if he’d killed somebody else?”
Joel reclaimed my hand. “He barely made it out of the parking spot before Brad swooped in for part two of Operation Vámonos.”
It was my turn to smile. “Brad was in on it, too?”
Joel wove his fingers into mine. “Of course, babe. No way I was going to let that idiot out on the roads drunk.”
My smile grew. “And now Dan has a DUI?”
“Yep. He’s been stuck down at the police station all night in the holding tank. According to Brad, Dan’s bellowed all night about how he can’t wait to blow this town and get back to Chicago.”
I was smiling from ear to ear. Brad and Joel had conspired together to get rid of the one man I’d be okay to never see again. Then my smile flatlined and my eyes narrowed. “And what about you? How did you get home?”
A Berry Home Catastrophe Page 17
