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He looked like a lifeguard. A Swiss Alps skirescue guy. He just needed the dog.
She felt small in comparison, dark and mean, dressed in black because it didn’t require her to think to coordinate.
“Alice?” he said, breaking in to her ugly comparisons. He ducked his head to look into her eyes and smiled. “What do you think? Recognize it?”
She realized, belatedly, that the kitchen wasn’t a coincidence. She’d told him a million times what a kitchen should look like according to her. She’d sketched the floor plan on the bare skin of his back over and over again.
“It’s amazing,” she said, her joy in finding her dream brought to life turning to cold resentment. Of course he would take this for himself, too. “You know that.”
“I practically have the floor plan tattooed on my back.” He grinned and the reminder of their intimacies, casually uttered out loud, chilled her to the bone. “When the time came to design the kitchen, I just remembered everything you taught me.”
It was a compliment, probably a sincere one, but she didn’t want compliments.
This is not mine, she told herself, ripping the dream from her clenched fists. I am hired help. I am a bit player. She had no business coveting the butcher’s block, imagining years of early mornings in this kitchen, planning menus.
There is nothing I want, she reminded herself. There is nothing I need.
She forced cold distance into her head and her heart and when she looked at the beautiful kitchen, the chandelier of pots and pans, she just saw things. Inanimate objects that had no relationship to her, that cost her nothing and only represented a way to get out of debt and move on with her life.
They were tools. That’s all. Gabe, this kitchen, the whole inn, they were a means to an end.
“I think we better get to work if you want to open in a month,” she said, cold as ice.
“But did you see the view?” Gabe pointed to the window. “Come on, we can have coffee and take a walk around the grounds. We have a capacity of one hundred guests between the cottages and the lodge, which we’re hoping—”
“No.” She shook her head. “I just want to work, Gabe. That’s all.”
For a moment she thought he might ask her what was wrong. Instead, true to form, he nodded in that definitive way that always indicated he was biting his tongue. “Okay. Come on into the office and we’ll talk—”
“Get your hands off me!” someone yelled, and both Gabe and Alice whirled to the doorway leading to the dining room. They stood like deer in headlights while the swinging door banged open and Max and a teenage boy plowed into the kitchen. “Didn’t you hear what I said!” The kid, practically drowning in oversize black clothes, yelled.
“Yep. And I’m not touching you.”
“Good, don’t start.”
Alice nearly stepped back, as though the kid were a rabid dog.
“Here he is,” Max said and from the corner of her eye she saw Gabe’s mouth fall open.
“You’re kidding me,” he said.
“Nope.” Max shook his head. “This is Cameron.”
“Cut that out, man,” Cameron said, jerking himself away from Max. “The name is Chaz.”
“Chaz makes you sound like an idiot,” Max said. “Your name is Cameron.”
“Hi, Max,” Alice said, pleased to see her former brother-in-law. The best things about Gabe were his brother and father, both as emotionally retarded as Gabe, but at least they didn’t try to pretend otherwise.
“Hey, Alice,” Max said with a quick grin. “Good to see you.”
“Good to see you, too.” She meant it. “How you keeping?”
“Starving,” he said. “We’ve been living on toast and freeze-dried noodles around here.”
Alice shuddered and Max’s grin stretched into a smile. He looked thin, painfully so, and wounded in some dark way, as if all the intensity that had illuminated him was banked, burning out.
“What the hell am I doing here, man?” Cameron, or whatever his name was, asked. “This is an afterschool program.”
“Not when you’ve got a day off school. Then it’s an all-day program.” Max answered.
“This your love-child you never told us about?” Alice asked Max, falling into their old give-and-take.
“This dude ain’t my father,” Cameron answered for him.
“Gabe didn’t tell you?” Max asked, his dark eyebrows hitting his hairline, and Alice suddenly felt a serious lack of information.
“Tell me what?” She crossed her arms over her chest, just in case Gabe misinterpreted her tone as happy.
It took a moment, but Gabe finally issued a response. He looked at her, put on his game face and said, “He’s your staff.”
“Bullshit!” the kid yelled.
Alice laughed. “I’m with him.”
Gabe winced and remained silent, which could mean only one thing. Alice’s mouth fell open. “You’re kidding.”
He shook his head.
“You’re kidding.” She turned to Max, who only shrugged.
She finally focused on the kid, whose eyes met hers briefly. “I got nothing to kid about,” he said, looking as unhappy as she felt.
She shook her head. “I can work alone until I get proper staff.”
“Okay,” Max said, opening the swing door behind him. “Let’s go back to stacking that wood.”
“This is bullshit!” The kid hollered as Max led him into the dining room.
Gabe’s silence worried her, actually set small stones atwirl in her stomach. “What aren’t you telling me, Gabe?”
“There’s no money for staff unless you take a pay cut,” he said point-blank. “Not until the next check comes in from the Crimpsons.”
“When will that be?” She asked, disbelieving.
“Two weeks.”
“Even if that kid was Cordon Bleu trained, I couldn’t pull together the menu for this wedding with one staff member!”
“I know.” He rubbed his forehead. “We open in a month and I’ve already got some reservations and am running an Internet spring promotion, so I should get more. I can make this work. We can use the money—”
She laughed, listening to him rob from Peter to pay Paul.
“You think this is funny?” he asked, his blue eyes dangerously clouded over.
“A little, yeah.”
“Great. Wonderful attitude from my chef.”
“You hired a chef, Gabe. Not a cheerleader. If you’re screwing up—”
Her comment must have lit his dormant temper because he bristled. “I’m not screwing up. You’re the one doing two months’ work for the price of what I had earmarked for a yearly chef’s salary.”
She shrugged. “You should have gotten a beginner chef.”
“No, you should have been reasonable.”
“Ah, I thought I recognized that voice.”
Patrick Mitchell’s loud voice boomed through the kitchen, stalling their argument as he stepped in from the outside. His red flannel shirt matched his ruddy cheeks and it was as if the sun had come out from behind clouds. Indomitably cheerful, that was Patrick, and she was inordinately glad to see him.
“There’s only one person Gabe actually fights with,” Patrick said and held out his thick burly arms. Alice allowed herself to be hugged, the sensation odd but pleasant enough since it didn’t last too long.
When was the last time someone touched me? she wondered. Even casually. That awkward embarrassing kiss from Charlie months ago, when she’d been so lonely and sad and drunk that she’d let him touch her.
She didn’t know when she lost the capacity for casual touch, when any sort of physical affection, no matter how benign, made her ache.
“How is my favorite former daughter-in-law?” Patrick asked, his blue eyes twinkling.
Some of the tension from locking horns with Gabe fell away and she smiled, even patted Patrick’s grizzled cheek.
“Don’t tell me he’s got you working here, too?” she asked.
“Slave labor.” Patrick shook his head, always one for teasing. “At least now we’ll have decent chow.”
“Don’t be too sure, Dad,” Gabe said, leaning against the doorjamb of his office. “She may have decided she doesn’t like the terms.”
“Always trying to make it my fault, aren’t you, Gabe.”
“If the shoe—”
“Wonderful!” Patrick rubbed his hands together. “If you don’t mind, Max and I are just going to pull up some chairs and watch you two duke it out for the next few months. That way no work will get done.” His eyes flicked from her to Gabe, who, chagrined by his father’s reverse chastisement, looked down at his shoes.
“I told Max this was going to be trouble,” Patrick said and she could feel his direct gaze on her face.
She’d only been here minutes and already things were going wrong.
“I can make it work,” Gabe said, resolute. “It won’t be a problem.”
“For you,” she said.
“You, either,” Gabe insisted, his tone hard, his smile sharp. “I will make it work.”
She nodded, wondering why she felt so small. So dark and ill-tempered. He was the one who had lied, who had told her he had staff. She shouldn’t feel bad because she was making him hold up his end of the bargain.
“You always do,” she said. He did. He could make gold out of hay without making it look hard.
“Ah, that’s how children should play,” Patrick said. “Nice.”
“Don’t you have some work to do, Dad?” Gabe asked.
“I’m going to hook up your fancy dishwasher,” he said, pointing to the far corner of the room where a dishwasher sat, with its tube and wire guts spread out across the floor.
He winked at Alice and vanished behind the equipment.
“Let’s get to work,” she said and pushed past Gabe into his minuscule office. “I’ve got some ideas for menus.”
GABE HAD PREPARED himself for the worst. He was fortified by too much caffeine, and ready to do battle with Alice over kitchen operations. But, surprisingly, there was no battle. It didn’t take long for them to ease into their old routine. They were rusty at first, but the one thing they’d always shared—well, two things—was that they were both perfectionists. Fortunately they both had the same idea of what perfect was.
“All right—” Alice looked down at her notebook “—breakfast buffets at the beginning. You have some kind of waitstaff, or do you expect me to do that?” She glanced at him from beneath her lashes and her eyes, black as night, twinkled just a little more than they had before, and he sighed.
“I’ve got staff.”
“Juvenile delinquents?” She was having too much fun with this at his expense. “Cameron going to be your front-of-house staff? He’ll be a real hit with guests.”
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