But he treated me like an outsider in my own kitchen. The kitchen I grew up watching my dad cook in. It doesn’t matter that I can’t cook a single thing in there, everything about that place is my pastandmy future, yet he saw me like I was from a different world to his own.
It’ll be sweet when he realizes I’m his boss.
For some reason I can’t explain, it feels like I’d be the one with egg on my face if he found out I’m not just the manager though.
Rory watches me closely for long enough to accept that this is important to me, and not to bicker over it anymore.
“Fine,” she concedes. “I won’t say a thing. I’m still not sure how you’re going to keep a secret from anyone in this town, you know how the gossip goes.”
I do know how the gossip goes. But while it’s common knowledge I’m involved in reviving the diner, turning it into a fresh café, very few realize that the grant—the weight of possible failure—is under my name. Rory, our stepfather, and Rory’s husband, Wyatt, might be just about the only ones in town who know. And those three are all pretty good at keeping secrets of their own.
Besides, this isn’t the only secret I’m keeping these days anyway. What’s one more?
Family dinnertwo nights later is a rather awkward affair.
First of all, it’s the first one since Wyatt and Weston made up. They’d gotten in a big fight before Rory and Wyatt left for the city last week, Wyatt has this weird thing where his brother is concerned.
He found out his little brother had been hooking up with the new girl in town, a tiny cutie of an angel that I just adore. Wyatt was the last one who didn’t realize they were banging harder than a trailer’s screen door in a tornado, and he had a damn meltdown when he caught them in the act. Or right after it. I didn’t get enough details.
Rory iced Wyatt out until he finally talked things out with his brother and made good there. So tonight, Weston is bringing adate to family dinner for the first time—probably not just in our new tradition, but I’m guessing in his life.
It might be cute, but they’re almost sickening to my people (the perpetually single), the way Amelia’s on his lap at the end of the table, his hands all over her. I’m also a little worried about what might be going onunderher, because she keeps squirming in his lap, and I can practically hear theboingof his boner from here.
“Here” is the far end of the table, where I can be exposed to their nauseating joy as little as possible.
So I focus on the conversation with my sister, who is daring to bring up the elephant in the room, as her husband and our stepfather continue setting up the meal, in and out of the Grady cottage to the table in the backyard where the rest of us are sitting.
“I hear there’s fresh meat in town,” she says, catlike smile still on her face.
The memory of my first encounter with Wilder swarms to the surface, where I’ve struggled so hard to keep it from going since that afternoon, and emotion overtakes me once again. Irritation and frustration wrapped up in one horny little package, that’s me.
“Youhearthat, do you?” I seethe at her, shooting daggers at her with my eyes that don’t have as much heat as they would’ve a couple years back, but I’ll still throw down with her over this if she pushes me. My issues are always brimming right under the surface when it comes to her anyway. Sometimes I think one wrong word and she’ll set me off in a way that can’t be undone.
“Could that be becauseyougot him here? And stuck him on me? And now I have to work with the most infuriating man-child on the planet because you gave me no other choice?”
Rory sips her wine, taking her time to respond, and when she does, only one line jumps out at me of what she says. “I got you a talented chef, straight from New York.”
When I skimmed his résumé, the job he’s held for the past seven years wasn’t exactly what I’d been led to believe.
“You got me a sandwich maker from a bodega!” I shout.
The man should be working in a sub shop, making corny jokes about footlongs, not the head chef of the café I’m opening to carry on the family legacy.
“That’s one of his qualifications, yes.”
“Wait,” Weston’s voice butts in. Laidback, easygoing, he’s the nice brother of the two. Golden blonde hair, golden tanned skin, he looks like a surfer fell into the mountain town, not sprouted from the ground here, just like his grumpier older brother did.
“Thesandwich maker? Fromthebodega?” he asks.
I was so caught up in my battle against him, I didn’t even connect the dots. I scream a laugh, the pieces clicking together in my mind as I point an accusing finger at my sister.
“Wilder isthatman! How did I not put this together sooner?”
My mind races, scouring the tidbits she gave me about him in the past. It came out one girls’ night, early on after rekindling our relationship as sisters.
New York wasn’t all bad,she’d said.Might not have the sun rising behind the mountains, but therewasthis mountain of a man who made my sandwiches at the bodega who looked like he could break a back or two.
Jealousy, hot and vicious, like I haven’t felt with her since she first came back, comes rearing up my throat like acid when I remember the next thing I said.You ever let him break your back?
