Brunch at Bittersweet Café

by Carla Laureano

  “Wow.” Melody nodded thoughtfully. “Why a fractional? Why not one of the big airlines?”

  “Seniority is a big deal, and had I gone to a major, I’d still be working my way up the first officer ranks. Maybe I’d make captain by fifty, if I was lucky and a bunch of pilots retired. Instead, I hired onto AvionElite as a captain. The advantage to being in the first wave of new hires after a fleet expansion. No waiting.”

  She smiled. “I’m impressed.”

  “You should be. It’s very impressive.” He shot her a grin, and as he’d hoped, she laughed.

  “Somehow I don’t think you need another woman stroking your ego. I’m quite certain you get enough of that already.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  Melody rolled her eyes. “Come on. You’re telling me you don’t have women falling all over you the minute you say you fly jets for a living?”

  Well, to be fair . . .

  She took his hesitation as confirmation. “I thought so. But in case you were wondering, I’m not the type.”

  “Didn’t say you were.” She was making it pretty clear which side of the line she was on, and there was a line. Half the women he met thought dating a pilot meant spontaneous trips to Paris. The other half—the ones who instantly dismissed him—automatically assumed he had a woman in every city.

  Neither was the truth, at least not completely. He had zero autonomy in where he flew, so Europe on the company dime was out. As far as women went, he’d learned a long time ago that casual flings had a way of turning out to be not so casual. He didn’t need the complications or the guilt. A few dates to pass the time, no strings attached? Sure. But the minute anyone tried to attach expectations, he was out. If he’d learned anything from his parents’ failed marriage, it was that this job didn’t lend itself to long-term commitment.

  Which was exactly why he needed to stop thinking of the best way to get Melody’s phone number. Anyone who confessed her deepest dreams after thirty minutes of acquaintance surely didn’t do casual.

  No reason he couldn’t tease her a bit, though. “I have a confession to make. I’ve wanted to ask you something since I got here.”

  She instantly went on guard. “Okay?”

  “Do you think I could have one of those mini quiches over there?”

  She let her breath out in a relieved laugh. “Help yourself.”

  “You won’t get in trouble?”

  “No, I’ll just ring it to my account.”

  “Thanks. I haven’t eaten since lunch yesterday.” He found a plate and grabbed a savory pastry from the cooling rack. After that he limited his questions to her process of forming the endless loaves of bread until the hands on the big institutional clock edged toward six. From the front of the café he heard rattling as someone unlocked the front door.

  “There’s my relief. Finally.” Melody pushed her last proofing baskets onto the rack and began scraping bits of dough off the wood tabletop with her steel cutter thing. She gave the whole surface a wipe-down with a wet rag and then yanked her apron off over her head. Only when she took her down parka from the hook beside his overcoat did she seem to remember his presence. “Do you want me to just drop you at home on my way? I assume you live around here.”

  “LoHi,” he said. “But I don’t want to put you out. You already saved me a very cold night in a very old car.”

  “It’s no problem.”

  Her expression said she meant it. He knew he should probably just go wait for the tow truck, but who knew how long it would be before it came along. At this point, he’d been awake for twenty-six hours and felt nearly dead on his feet. Too dead to resist the impulse to spend a little more time with Melody.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “Thanks.”

  Melody nodded and marched out to the front, where a short-haired woman was flipping on lights and unlocking cash registers.

  “Louisa, I’m going to take off. When Patrick gets in, have him put in the baguettes and the quiches. Everything’s ready to go.”

  “Thanks, Mel,” the woman said absentmindedly, throwing a glance over her shoulder. She did a double take when she saw Justin there . . . triple if you considered the way she looked him up and down with interest.

  Melody sighed. “This is my friend Justin. He got stuck in the neighborhood and needed a ride home. We’re going to take off, all right?”

  Louisa’s expression changed, and she nodded. “Thanks again for covering last night. We all owe you one.”

  “No problem.” Melody strode back into the kitchen, and Justin followed her to the back door, where she grabbed her purse and keys before breaking out into the frigid, but no longer snowing, morning. “I’m over there. That Jeep.”

  She gestured to a battered blue Wrangler that had seen better days, mounded with snow. He revised his impression of her once more as she retrieved a snow brush and began clearing the white coating from the windows. Then she hauled herself up into the cab and leaned across to unlock the passenger side.

  As he climbed in, she pulled the knit beanie from her head and took out a pair of clips. Blonde hair spilled over her shoulders, just as long and thick as he imagined it would be. She ran her fingers through it before pulling the cap over her head again.

  Just kill him now.

  She shifted into reverse and twisted to see out the rear window panel, bracing her hand against his seat as she did and reigniting that earlier spark of interest. Wow. Since when did he find driving to be sexy?

  She was a good driver, though, and he always admired a woman who could handle a stick, especially in bad weather. The Jeep’s big tires didn’t flinch as they plowed through the snow. Neither did she, for that matter.

  “You take this thing off road?”

  Melody shot him a glance. “Occasionally. Why?”

  “Just wondering. I’m rethinking my initial opinion of you.”

  “Which is?”

  “Artistic and capable. Now I’m going to add ‘a thwarted sense of adventure.’”

  She chuckled. “That’s not too far from the truth, actually.”

  Now he was wondering what other sorts of adventurous things she was into. She didn’t strike him as a mountain climber. Skydiver? White-water rafter? World traveler? And why did it matter to him anyway?

  They drove slowly through the downtown streets, the roads eerily silent in the dark. On a stormy Saturday morning, no one would venture out until after ten, when the sun would come out and begin to melt the snow and ice that coated the city. He was suddenly glad he’d taken her up on her offer.

  “I don’t suppose I could borrow your phone?”

  She didn’t hesitate, just rummaged one-handed in her purse and handed it to him without looking.

  “Thanks.” He pulled out his roadside assistance card, dialed the number, and canceled his request for help.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Doesn’t make much sense to have a tow truck come when I’m already home. I’ll go back and pick it up when the roads clear.”

  “I guess it doesn’t do you any good until the plows are out anyway. How are you going to get around?”

  “I have an SUV. I just got duped by the weather report before I left, figured I should run the Mustang so the gas doesn’t get stale. I don’t take it out much in winter for this very reason.” He shrugged. “You didn’t think I was dumb enough to purposely drive it in a snowstorm, did you?”

  “I don’t know you well enough to make that judgment.” But her tone and her slight smile said that was exactly what she’d been thinking. “Project car?”

  “Precisely. I’d intended on selling it when I was done, but I couldn’t bring myself to let it go.”

  “Sentimental, then. Don’t worry; I won’t tell.”

  Justin buried his smile and only then realized he was paying more attention to her than their progress through the snowy streets. He was supposed to be giving her directions. “Turn here. And then right at the second light.”

 
; Melody followed his directions silently, but when he told her to pull up at the curb in front of an old brick building, her head whipped toward him in surprise. “This is it? When you said LoHi, I thought—”

  “One of those huge new developments? No. I’m still paying off my loans. Sorry to disappoint, though.” He got that a lot. One more disillusionment from the glamorous lifestyle people thought he led.

  A slow smile spread across her face. “Who said I was disappointed?”

  His breath caught for a moment at her expression. Call it sleep deprivation or just a loss of his senses, he found himself leaning closer to her. She didn’t move away, just sat there, her eyes wide, those luscious lips parted in surprise. At the last minute, he pulled himself together and grasped the door handle. “Thanks for the ride, Melody Johansson. I owe you one.”

  He hopped out of the Jeep before she could reply and stepped back onto the snowy curb. She gave him a little wave through the window, then pulled back out onto the street, ice crunching beneath her tires. Justin watched her go for a minute, then turned and trudged toward the entrance of his building. He’d said he owed her one, but it was unlikely he would ever see her again to make good on the promise.

  It was probably better that way.

  Chapter Three

  MELODY PULLED AWAY from the curb, blowing out her breath and shoving down unreasonable disappointment. She’d known the guy for all of four hours. Knew nothing about him but his name, his occupation, and the fact he liked to fix up old cars in his spare time. And yet she was wishing that she’d offered her number. Or asked for his. She was a modern woman, after all. There was no reason to hide her interest in him.

  Scratch that. She had plenty of good reasons. Five to be exact.

  Brandon. Sebastian. Luc. Leo. Micah.

  Especially Micah.

  All guys she’d been powerfully attracted to at first sight. All guys who had been intelligent, charming, accomplished. By all outward indicators, decent as well.

  But little by little, whether it took one month or one year, she’d realized that outward appearances were deceiving and been left with nothing but a broken heart and a sense of shame over her own naiveté.

  No more. She had plenty of things to worry about, first among them how to get off this dead-end path she was on. If there was one good thing about Justin’s appearance tonight, it was that she’d been forced to articulate what bothered her about her life. How far from her own dreams she’d drifted. Justin had made it seem simple to make a plan and follow it. So why couldn’t it be?

  She found street parking outside her tiny white-brick apartment complex in Sun Valley, an area that was worlds away and not just a handful of miles from the tony Capitol Hill neighborhood in which she worked. That was another thing that would be depressing, if she allowed herself to think about it for too long. Her best friends had made something of their lives by the thirty-year mark: Rachel was an award-winning chef who owned a nice condo conversion in Cheesman Park, while Ana was a big-time publicist with a beautiful high-rise condo in Lower Downtown. It wasn’t that Melody was irresponsible or profligate with her money—quite the opposite. It was just that her line of work didn’t tend to pay especially well, and she didn’t hang around most places long enough to get a promotion and a raise. These days she was pretty happy to afford rent, food, and health insurance. Which meant living in a not-quite-nice building in a not-quite-nice neighborhood.

  She bypassed the snow-covered shopping cart that had been abandoned at the curb and trudged toward the building’s front entrance. Her key stuck in the cold lock, and she had to wiggle it to get it to turn—naturally the owners wouldn’t have sprung for keycard locks, not in a building of this age. She climbed the stairs through the dingy hallway to an apartment on the second floor, its door peeling and warped, where she went through the same key-jiggling routine she’d done with the front door.

  The interior, fortunately, was nowhere near as depressing as the common areas. Melody had resigned herself to not getting back her security deposit and covered the plaster walls in a soothing shade of gray to contrast with the white molding. Much of the art-deco plasterwork remained, damaged and patched inexpertly, giving the apartment an air of graceful decay, like the lovely old building in which she’d lived in Paris for a short while. There wasn’t much that could be done with the 1950s kitchen, but she’d decorated the rest of the living area in whimsical printed fabrics and vintage furnishings she’d thrifted or refinished. It was a beautiful cocoon, one that blotted out the loud neighbors and wailing sirens that surrounded her.

  She dropped her keys on a tiny demilune table near the doorway and hung her coat on the antique doorknobs that acted as hooks. A big glass of water, a quick shower, and then she could collapse into bed beneath her pin-tucked cotton duvet cover. And if she happened to be thinking about a certain handsome pilot despite her best efforts to the contrary, there was no one here to tell on her.

  * * *

  An obnoxious trill penetrated Melody’s dreams, peeling back the layers of unconsciousness until she could pry one eye open to squint at her cell phone. The big white numbers on the screen said 2:05. She swiped a finger across the screen, but instead of silencing the alarm, she only managed to swipe the phone off her nightstand with a cringe-inducing thud.

  She fumbled back the covers with clumsy limbs and crawled under the bed, where she finally got the blasted thing to shut off. That was the drawback of shift work. She might get six or seven hours of sleep a day, but it wasn’t good sleep, and she often woke in a state of confusion. She pushed the phone onto the table where it belonged, climbed into bed again, and dragged the duvet over her head.

  No. It was Saturday. That meant that she couldn’t go back to sleep. She had a dessert to make for the Saturday Night Supper Club.

  Technically, it wasn’t an official meeting; those only happened on the first and third Saturdays of the month when Rachel hosted the invitee-only dinner party at her house. For the actual supper clubs, the guests were nominated by previous attendees and selected by Rachel and her boyfriend, Alex. They pretended like the selection was random, but in reality, Rachel and Alex spent a great deal of time putting together the right mix of guests to ensure that conversation would flow and everyone would get along. Guests were expected only to contribute the cost of their meal, which could range from ten dollars to fifty depending on the extravagance of the menu, but it was a small price to pay. In the eight months since it had begun, it had quickly become the hottest and most sought-after dining invitation in the Denver metro area.

  Most of that had to do with Rachel’s incredible cooking, but Melody could say without arrogance that her desserts were always one of the night’s highlights.

  Because tonight was a girls’ night—only she, Rachel, and Ana were attending—she could get away with something simple, but of course she wouldn’t. She had a reputation to uphold, after all. Melody rubbed her eyes until they burned, levered herself out of bed with another yawn, and stumbled to the kitchen.

  Her programmable coffeemaker was almost finished, the last drips making concentric ripples across the surface of the dark brew. She grabbed a mug from the cabinet, poured herself a cup, and added milk and sugar. She’d go through this entire pot by the time she left for Rachel’s, but right now she took the opportunity to sip the first cup and let it transform her groggy state into something resembling alertness.

  She was practically a Folgers commercial.

  In the meantime, she could decide what to make. She selected one of her favorite cookbooks from the rack on the kitchen wall and took it to the dining room table, flipping through the pages for inspiration. She rarely baked from them—she had her own recipes for most things—but there was something about the beautifully photographed, glossy images that sparked her imagination.

  She brushed a finger across a photo of a strawberry pie. The glistening strawberries and swirls of cream topping began an instant craving for summer, but fresh strawberries were
months away from their peak. She could still do a napoleon, though.

  With either inspiration or caffeine flowing through her veins—hard to tell which—Melody began pulling ingredients out of the cabinet. She didn’t store them in the quaint little jars one would expect from the vintage style of her apartment, but rather big commercial Cambros, plastic buckets that could hold twenty pounds of flour and sugar at a time. When it came to serious baking, cute didn’t quite cut it.

  A proper laminated dough would take hours, folding the layers of dough and butter multiple times, interspersed with frequent rests in the refrigerator. She had neither the time nor the energy to pull off something so exacting for a casual meal. Rough puff would have to do.

  This method worked on the same principle as traditional pâte feuilletée, cutting cold butter into the flour, rolling the dough out until it was streaked with butter, then folding it several times envelope style. As the water in the butter evaporated, it caused air pockets that rose the pastry while the fat kept it tender. The shortcut meant it wouldn’t have as many layers, but it was close enough that some of the chefs she’d worked with didn’t even bother with the real thing.

  When the dough was folded, she wrapped it in plastic, popped it in the refrigerator to chill, and began to work on the filling. There wasn’t enough time for a proper pastry cream—it had to be boiled together on the stove like a custard and then chilled before using—so she’d do a whipped cream filling with strawberry jam.

  Melody lost herself in the work, her grogginess melting away as she put together a quick jam, whipped heavy cream, and baked the pastry between two sheet pans to keep it flat. When the components were finished and cooled, she cut the sheet of pastry into even rectangles and layered each with whipped cream and jam. She scooped the rest of the whipped cream into a pastry bag with a star tip and piped perfect little plumes on the upper layer. At the last minute, she pulled out a bar of bittersweet chocolate and sliced curls onto the top with a vegetable peeler. Beautiful. The girls would love it. As would her followers.