Picture Me and You: A Devil's Kettle Romance, #1

by Sey, Susan

  Matty smirked across the table at her. “You know we don’t get to order Monday Brunch, right, Addy?”

  “Of course I know that.”

  “Then why are you staring at the menu?”

  Because Jax’s thigh was pressed up against hers, and she could still feel judgment radiating off him like smog. Plus his scathing dismissal of her hurt for some inexplicable reason, and she was suddenly and uncharacteristically pissed off about it. So she could either burn him to cinders with her laser eyes or she could pretend to read the menu.

  She didn’t think she should say as much out loud, however.

  “Oh, you know me. Always checking out the marketing.”

  “Whatever,” Matty said, and Gerte appeared at the edge of the table, a pot of coffee in one hand, an oversized mug in the other.

  “Well now,” she said, cheeks pink, apron frilly. “Look who the wind blew in.”

  “Blew in is right,” Bianca said. She gave one of Addy’s curls an affectionate boing. “Brisk out there today, hmm, Addy?”

  “Hush, now, Bianca,” Gerte said stoutly. “Don’t you listen to a word of that nonsense, Addison. Your mother-in-law’s always been more interested in what’s on a person’s head rather than what’s in it, that’s all.” She gave Bianca a sugary smile and awaited return fire. Bianca only gazed back at her with the bemused curiosity a queen might extend an uppity peasant. Finally Gerte turned back to Addy. “We love you just the way you are, dear,” she said warmly. “Don’t you change a thing.”

  “I doubt I could.” Addy smothered a grin. Gerte could bait all she wanted but Bianca wasn’t the queen of Devil’s Kettle for nothing. “It’s the curse of the naturally curly. My head is a weather vane.”

  Georgie gave her a languid once-over. “Your head is a crow’s nest.”

  “Because it’s windy,” Addy reminded her.

  Georgie arched a skeptical brow. “It’s not that windy.”

  “Like you’d know?” Addy turned up her nose. “Your hair is like Teflon. You don’t even have to try. You just wake up like—” She fluttered her fingers Georgie’s way. “—that. All perfect and stuff.”

  “Mmm,” Georgie murmured and fingered a silky-straight lock with smug satisfaction. “And yet I own a comb and use it regularly.”

  “I comb.” Addy reached a furtive hand to her hair and winced. It really was windy.

  “Like Jax combs, I’m sure.” Georgie gave her brother a once-over of his own. “It’s a good thing you didn’t fall for him instead of Diego. Your children would look like troll dolls.”

  “Good thing,” Jax muttered.

  A strange stab of something sweet and piercing went clean through her soul. Grief, maybe, for the children she’d never have. Possibly just another pulse of high-octane rage, this time at Jax’s disgusted response to the idea of their imaginary kids.

  Addy said, “It’s windy.”

  “Sure is sunny, though,” Gerte said. She set the mug down in front of Matty and every confusing emotion grappling around inside Addy was replaced by pure envy. Because there was hot chocolate in that mug, topped with a minor mountain of whipped cream and sprinkled with shaved curls of the extra dark chocolate Gerte special-ordered from Sweden. She watched with resignation as her own mug was filled with coffee.

  And she knew with soul-deep bitterness that Jax was wrong. Not everything was a choice. Sure, she could reject the coffee Gerte had just poured her. She could explain that she hated coffee, hated every burnt, slippery, oily drop. She could ask for a hot chocolate or a tea or a blessed, blessed Diet Coke. But everybody knew that coffee wasn’t about coffee. Coffee was a ritual, an offer of hospitality and friendship. When somebody poured you a cup of coffee, you didn’t push it aside and ask for something else. You said thank you, and you drank it. Period.

  “Gerte,” Jax murmured as he lifted his own coffee cup and buried his nose in the rising steam. “Love of my life, light of my eyes. When are you going to marry me?”

  “Oh, never.” She laughed. “You’d only leave me for Lainey whenever sweet lefse day rolled around.”

  “Has it?” Addy asked with naked hope, her cold hands wrapped around her warm cup. “Has sweet lefse day rolled around, Gerte?”

  Gerte grinned. “It has.”

  “Jax is all yours,” Addy said promptly. “For sweet lefse? I’m marrying Lainey myself.”

  “You probably would,” Jax murmured, barely loud enough for her to hear. She scowled at him but he never even looked her way. He was too busy smiling at Gerte. “You’re the lady with the coffee pot,” he said and held out his now half-empty cup. “I’m yours forever.”

  She grinned into her collar and topped off his mug.

  Addy waited until had Gerte had swished away on her sturdy shoes, then said, “So, I spent some time this weekend brainstorming solutions to our…problem.”

  “So did I,” Bianca said unexpectedly.

  Addy blinked at her. “You did?”

  “Yes, of course.” She gave Addy a beatific smile. “You didn’t expect me to drop the whole problem in your lap, did you?”

  “I did,” Jax said. Bianca leaned around Addy to deliver an icy glare to her eldest son who grinned back unrepentantly. “What? You asked.”

  “I asked,” Bianca said pointedly, “for everybody to give the situation some thought. And as I have no desire to move to Duluth — even temporarily — I included myself in everybody.” Her lips curled into a cat-like smile and Addy’s heart rate clicked up a few beats per minute. “As it happens, I came up with something.”

  “You did?” Jax put a hand to Addy’s shoulder and nudged her back into the bench seat so he could see his mother more clearly. Addy swallowed. Why was he touching her so darn much suddenly? And why couldn’t she get used to it?

  “I did,” Bianca said and turned in her seat to face them all more fully. Georgie emptied a packet of fake sugar into her coffee cup and picked up her spoon. She didn’t stir, however. She paused with the spoon suspended over her coffee, and drifted into another mental vacation.

  Addy frowned and wondered, not for the first time, if Georgie was mildly epileptic. She’d read about stuff like this, where some unmotivated dreamer finally gets a CAT scan and his parents are shocked to discover that all those daydreams were actually violent electrical storms hijacking the poor kid’s brain.

  Then Georgie grinned, tipping her spoon this way and that, playing with the tiny needle of sunlight that had somehow shot all the way to the back of the diner and into the bowl of her spoon.

  Addy sighed. Nope, Georgie was fine. She just wasn’t paying attention. As usual.

  Jax’s phone beeped and Addy jumped. He checked the screen. “Ah, crap,” he said. “Paul’s out. His grandson gave him pinkeye. I’ve got to go cover the shift.” He rose and dropped a twenty on the table. Pointed at his mother. “I want to hear about this idea later.”

  “Of course, Jackson,” she murmured. “Go.”

  He went. Addy sighed with abject relief and scooted over into the luxury of all the space Jax’s departure had provided. Space that smelled like coffee and clean laundry, and still burned with his astonishing body heat. She couldn’t help herself; she snuggled into it. She was chilled all the way to her bones, and he ran hot. And he smelled so good. She really needed to find out what detergent he used.

  “So, Bianca,” she said. “Let’s hear about this big idea of yours.”

  “Well Georgie and I were talking this weekend about how we’d like to freshen up the gallery for the season,” she said, her dark eyes sparkling. “Not just put a fresh spin on the paintings we’re already displaying but do something new. Something novel. Something people have never seen before that’ll really drive tourist traffic.”

  “You came up with something?” Georgie asked, finally stirring. “Who are you thinking of spotlighting? Tessa MacAdams has been doing some really interesting stuff with wood cutting lately, and David Belvin’s blown glass work is—”

  “I
was thinking of Diego.”

  “Diego?” Addy’s mind went the pure blue blank of the sky outside, empty, bright and cold. “But you said you wanted something never seen before.”

  “I did. I do.” Bianca’s lips curved into that cat-like smile again. “And I found it.”

  Addy’s heart stumbled to a halt. Oh mercy. The grenade in the garage. Bianca had found it.

  “You did?” she managed weakly.

  “I did. And it’s been right in front of me all along!” Bianca laughed, a delighted bubble of sound that froze the blood in Addy’s veins. “Well, not in front of me, precisely.” Her eyes danced merrily, and she lifted her coffee cup for a delicate sip. “More like in the gallery’s storage room.” She chuckled again. “To think I’ve been sitting on this display for nearly fifteen years!”

  Addy’s heart began, tentatively, to beat again. Her doomsday option was in the carriage house, not the gallery. But if Bianca hadn’t found Diego’s little…legacy, what had she found?

  Georgie stared at her mother. “You wouldn’t.”

  Bianca smiled. “I would.”

  Matty frowned. “Would what?”

  Gerte arrived, her arms lined with large china plates of sweet lefse, and began dealing them out onto the table. She paused. “Where’s Jax?”

  “He’s on call,” Addy murmured, her heart still decelerating from panic mode. “Paul got pinkeye.”

  “Oh, dear.” Gerte shook her head and slid the extra lefse toward Matty. “Can you do double duty, young man?”

  “No problem.” Matty drew the additional plate his way. It was piled high with paper-thin lefse, stuffed with what looked miraculously like Gerte’s North Shore triple berry pie filling and mounded with whipped cream and — glory be — a generous helping of those dark chocolate shavings Addy had envied so cravenly on his hot cocoa. He barely looked at it, his eyes still pinned to his mother, and Addy sighed. Oh, for the metabolism of a thirteen-year-old. “You would what, Mom?”

  Georgie laughed, a merry peal of wicked amusement, and shook her head in admiration. “Show those paintings. Of course she would.”

  Bianca smiled like a cat in cream. Gerte’s baby-fine brows shot nearly to her hairline, but all she said was, “More coffee?”

  “No, thanks.” Georgie waved her off with an elegant hand. “We’re good.”

  “What does that mean?” Addy asked cautiously when Gerte had moved reluctantly to another table. “Those paintings?”

  “Diego’s early stuff. From when he was, what?” Georgie glanced the question at her mother. “Thirteen? Fourteen?”

  “About Matty’s age, yes,” Bianca said, her eyes resting on her son with a thoughtfulness that had Matty ducking his head and scowling. “When all he thought about was sex.”

  “And all he painted was boobs and asses,” Georgie added cheerfully. She plucked a strawberry from the edge of her plate and nibbled at it, still smiling. “Boobs and asses, asses and boobs.”

  “It was a youthful obsession,” Bianca admitted with an indulgent shrug for Matty. “Like your thing with the comic books.”

  “Graphic novels,” he muttered.

  She ignored him with easy serenity. “Only Diego got over it.”

  Addy choked back a burst of wholly inappropriate laughter. Not really. “So,” she said with careful composure, “you want to fill up the gallery with Diego’s early nudes?”

  “The Boob and Ass Period,” Georgie said helpfully.

  “Georgie, please.” Bianca lifted patient brows. “I raised you better than that. There is a world of difference between erotic art and cheap porn.”

  “True enough.” Georgie’s eyes danced. “Diego was a lot of things, but he wasn’t cheap.”

  “Amen,” Addy murmured, and sipped her bitter coffee. Diego had been the most expensive gamble of her life. She was still paying him off. “I wouldn’t mind seeing these paintings. Maybe tonight?”

  “Of course, dear,” Bianca murmured and picked up her fork. Addy did the same.

  In what seemed like moments, her plate was clean. Not quite licked clean but she’d been shamefully tempted. She leaned back, riding the mother of all sugar rushes, happy enough to think about tackling the last swallow of her lukewarm coffee. She was just about to reach for it when a man she’d never seen before appeared at the edge of their table and took her plate.

  He wasn’t tall but he wasn’t short either, and had one of those bones-and-tendons builds that suggested either hard times or an ultra-marathon habit. He was probably around thirty, and wore a black t-shirt, an apron, and a pair of those indestructible canvas pants that had clearly been on the business end of a construction site or two. His hair was buzzed down to a mere shadow across his scalp, leaving the bones of his face brutally exposed.

  She immediately wanted to see it better, that face. There was a story behind it. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she did. Besides, since when did strangers bus tables at the Wooden Spoon? That was probably a story in and of itself.

  “Thanks,” she said automatically. “You must be new in town. I’m Addy.”

  “I know,” he murmured and wedged the dish tub between his hip and the table, and began gathering their empty plates.

  Bianca lifted a brow at this, and even Georgie sat up. Matty continued to plow his way through his second plate of sweet lefse with single-minded devotion.

  “You do?” Addy tipped her head and studied him. “How?”

  He glanced up at her and his eyes were shockingly, brilliantly blue, set wide over the hard angles of his cheekbones. She blinked, startled. He wasn’t handsome, not by any stretch of the imagination, but those eyes were downright beautiful. They’d show every bruise, though, eyes like that. Or they once had, probably. Now they were a gorgeous blank. Her throat tightened in sympathy. Not a good story, then.

  He said simply, “I’ve been in town five minutes. And you’re Davises.” He cleared the table like it was a military operation — no hesitation, no waste. He simply eyed the situation, formulated his strategy and implemented it.

  “So you must also know my mother-in-law Bianca?” Addy gestured to her left while the stranger deposited the plates and silverware in his tub, and scooped up the napkins. “My sister-in-law Georgie? My brother-in-law—”

  “—Matty, yes.”

  They were down to coffee cups now, and curiosity was roaring through her like wildfire.

  “And you are?” Addy asked.

  “Busing your table.”

  And he was, too. He left Bianca and Georgie with their coffee cups, but swept Jax’s abandoned mug and Addy’s last lukewarm swallow into his tub.

  “Eli!” Gerte appeared with the coffee pot and gave the stranger an exasperated look. “You’re not supposed to clear the mugs until I’ve done one last round of refills!”

  Eli — it fit, Addy decided — turned those unreadable eyes on Gerte and nodded toward Bianca and Georgie. “Go ahead,” he said.

  “You took Addy’s mug,” Gerte pointed out.

  He shifted those eyes to Addy and the urge to squirm took her by surprise. It was a tough gaze to hold. “She was done,” he said. He hefted his tub and moved off.

  Gerte shook her head and followed him with her eyes. “That one’s an odd duck,” she said, and began topping off the remaining mugs. “Lucky for us he turned up, though.”

  “How so?” Addy leaned in on her elbows. Gerte’s gossip habit could be a dangerous thing but sometimes it came in handy.

  “Oh, didn’t you hear?” Gerte set her coffee pot on the table and settled in for a chat. “Josh Martin got a stress fracture in his foot. Took a bad step at lacrosse practice on Friday or something?” She glanced at Matty, who grunted a confirmation while shoveling one last enormous bite of lefse into his mouth. “We thought we’d be out a bus boy for at least a month.” She glanced across the thinning crowd at Eli and his dish tub. “Then Eli walked in off the Superior Hiking Trail looking for just enough work to resupply and move on.” She lifte
d her shoulders. “He passed the standard background check, and lord knows he’s efficient.”

  “Not big on conversation, though.” Addy grinned.

  “Tell me about it.” Gerte sighed. “Aside from yes, ma’am and no, ma’am, I doubt I’ve heard him speak a dozen words altogether.”

  “There’s a story there,” Addy murmured, and watched the stranger move through the tables with that machine-like precision.

  “I think so, too,” Gerte said, her mouth a dissatisfied pout. “I just wish he’d tell me what it is.”

  Addy laughed. “I have no doubt he will.” She patted Gerte’s arm. “You’re irresistible.”

  Gerte grinned. “Oh, you. You’re getting to be as bad as Jax, flattering old ladies.”

  Bianca — Gerte’s exact age, give or take a few months — serenely declined comment once again. Her eyes fell briefly to Gerte’s very practical shoes, however.

  “Flattery?” Addy snorted. “Truth. You’re ruthless, Gerte. When it comes to getting the dirt? Bloodhounds only wish they were you.”

  Gerte patted her hair modestly. “I do enjoy staying current.” She nodded across the room to a raised hand at another table and scooped up her coffee pot. “Got to run, dear. I’ll let you know if I ever do get that story.”

  “You’re the best, Gerte.” Addy watched her fondly as she trotted across the diner on her thick white runners.

  “Speaking of the best.” Bianca lifted her freshened coffee and eyed Addy over the rim. “Didn’t you have an idea you wanted to share with us? A weekend brainstorm?”

  Addy smiled. “I did, actually.”

  “An idea that doesn’t involve lowering myself to teaching?” Bianca asked, her eyes bright with sudden hope.

  “Mmm,” Addy said carefully.

  “Well?” Bianca said. “We’re all ears, dear.”

  Addy reached for her bag, for the numbers and her beloved spreadsheets. Then she stopped. “You know what? I think I should show you.”