Beauty and the Black Sheep. Jessica BirdЧитать онлайн книгу.
also including his meat and dairy requirements.
“I assumed we wouldn’t have more than ten people a night for the next seven days so I’ve kept it light. And just so you know, I’m going to redo your menu. It’s old and boring.”
She nodded and looked up, narrowing her stare. “I spoke with Henri just now.”
Nate smiled. “How is the old buzzard?”
“He told me you were…very good.”
“Precisely why I gave you his name. Figured if you heard it from him you wouldn’t worry about me so much. And by the way, I don’t have a criminal record and the only time I was in a police car was when I was in college and went skinny-dipping in the Charles River by mistake. My father had a lot to say about that one but I wasn’t formally charged. Oh—but I do have about thirty outstanding parking tickets in New York City.”
Frankie frowned in an attempt to keep a smile off her face. “Let me ask you something.”
“Shoot.”
“Why would someone with your background and training want to work here?”
He shrugged. “I need the money. And it’s just for the summer.”
“But why don’t you find somewhere like La Nuit to work? Down in the city. You could be making a lot more.”
Frankie closed her mouth, thinking she should shut up. Was she actually trying to talk him into going somewhere else? Because he was right—she did need him.
Nate considered her for a long moment, as if debating how up-front to be. “A buddy and I are going to buy our own restaurant. We’ve been looking for the last four months in New York, Boston, D.C. and Montreal, but the right opportunity hasn’t come along.” He grinned. “Or maybe it’s more like we haven’t found a place we can afford yet. I’ve been living off my savings and we need that money for a down payment to secure a small business loan. Right about the time my car broke down, I’d decided to find summer work and then resume the hunt in the fall. Your place is as good as any.”
Frankie looked down, absurdly hurt. To her, White Caps wasn’t just any place. It was home, it was family, it was…everything. But to a stranger, of course, it would just be a bunch of walls and a roof.
“I guess that makes sense.”
“Besides, how can I resist the opportunity to work for someone like you?”
She glanced up. “Like me?”
His gaze drifted from her eyes to her lips. Her breath stopped.
He was looking at her as if he wanted to kiss her, she thought. He truly was.
Time slowed, then halted altogether. She looked away from him, unable to stand the tension.
“Hey, sweetheart,” he said softly.
She braced herself and met his eyes again, thinking that the casual endearment really shouldn’t please her.
“Smile for me and don’t hide it this time.”
She flushed. “Maybe later.”
Nate’s lips lifted slightly, as if he enjoyed her show of spirit. “I’m willing to wait.”
And then he went back out to the kitchen.
Frankie put her head in her hands, propping the weight up by her elbows. She was not the kind of woman who fell for romance. She really wasn’t. But, in a matter of moments, he could completely disarm her with that charm of his. Somehow, even if it was a ruse, just some throwaway words to him, his husky voice had the power to short out her brain and turn on her body’s boiler system.
This was not good.
In the middle of all the chaos, being attracted to her new cook—chef—was a complication she didn’t need.
The phone rang and she picked it up with relief, ready to be distracted. It was, unfortunately, someone canceling their reservation for the following weekend. When she hung up, she looked through the window. Out on the lawn, which needed to be mowed again, there were a pair of chipmunks racing around.
An old memory drifted through her mind. She saw Joy and Alex and her much younger self in the midst of an Easter egg hunt. Joy had found only one egg, but that was because she’d been looking for the bright pink one in particular and had stopped once she got it. Alex had found three, but then lost interest and climbed up a tree to see how high he could go. Frankie had scampered around, retrieved all the other eggs and divvied them up between the baskets equally. Finding them had been easy enough to do. She’d helped her mother hide them.
That was so long ago, she thought. Back when their parents had seemed like fixed objects in the sky, a surefire, two-pronged orientation system to the world. That feeling of safety, however illusory, had been so powerful.
God, she missed them.
When the chipmunks got bored with playing keep-away and disappeared into the lilac hedges, she let the past go.
Measuring the lawn, and envisioning hours of pushing the ancient manual mower, she looked back down at the desk. Next to Nate’s list was the letter from the bank—the one that reminded her she’d been behind on the mortgage payments for six months in a row. Her banker, Mike Roy, had written on the bottom of the form letter: Let’s talk soon—we’ll work something out.
She was lucky she had Mike to deal with. He’d been head of the local bank for almost five years and had always been fair. Maybe a little more than fair. She’d gotten behind in years past, especially at the end of the long dry spell caused by winter. The summer season provided her with the opportunity to get caught up and she’d always managed to get things under control again. At least until last summer. For the first time, she’d gone into the winter still behind, which meant she had an even bigger hole to dig out of this season.
She worried that selling the place might be inevitable. She’d been rejecting the idea out of hand for years, but it looked as if the unthinkable might become the unavoidable.
With a nauseous swell, Frankie imagined packing up her family’s home. Her family’s heritage. She pictured herself transferring the title to the house and the land to someone else. Walking away, forever.
No.
The protest didn’t come from her head. It came from her heart. And the strength of it flooded through her body, making her hands shake.
There had to be a way to make it work. There just had to be. She refused to sell the only thing left of her parents, of her family. She had worked hard all of her adult life to keep White Caps. She wasn’t going to stop now just because the stakes seemed more stacked than ever against her.
She thought of Nate. A fine French chef. Maybe he could, as he put it, get some asses back in those chairs. And she could run some specials on the Lincoln room in the newspapers around the area. There was always Labor Day to look forward to. They already had three rooms booked and usually they had a full house. And hadn’t she read in the paper the other day that tourism was on the upswing after a couple of hard years?
The tide was going to turn in their favor and it would be a damn shame to quit just before things got better. She only had to have a little faith.
Frankie checked her watch and picked up her purse. She needed to go into town to make a deposit before the bank closed at noon and there were a few odds and ends she had to pick up. As soon as she got back, she was going to take care of the lawn. It always seemed as if the moment she finished pushing that arthritic mower around, she had to start on the acres of grass all over again. She’d asked George to do it once but it had looked like a shag carpet when he was finished. It was easier to do the job by herself than try and talk him through the process a second time.
She passed through the kitchen, where Nate was working over the stove, and called upstairs. “Joy, I’m heading into town, you need anything?”
“Can Grand-Em and I come?”