He slammed the door in their faces.
“He can make biscuits!” Heather told Josie, shaking her head. “I’ve never known a boy his age who could cook!”
“Dad couldn’t boil water,” JJ said as he finished cutting out biscuits and putting them on a black iron griddle ready to go into the oven. “It was self-defense.” He grinned at them.
“Well, you’re already a treasure, my darling,” Heather told him and bent to kiss his brown head of hair. “I’ll take the bacon up and then I’ll start scrambling eggs.”
“Can I help?” Josie asked.
“Can you scramble eggs?” Heather asked.
Josie grinned. “I used to fill in as bunkhouse cook when ours was too drunk to do it.”
“Bunkhouse?”
She nodded. “My dad had a ranch up in Wyoming,” she said, letting it sound as if her dad was gone.
“I’ve had my turn cooking for the cowboys, too,” Heather agreed. “Everybody’s a critic.”
“Tell me about it,” Josie replied as she got eggs out of the fridge and assembled spices and butter and salt. “Do you guys like salsa with your eggs, and do you have fresh tomatoes, peppers and onions?”
Heather grinned from ear to ear. “We do, and I have. In the crisper. And you’re from Wyoming?”
“I’m a Texas transplant,” Josie teased, and it was true. She did work out of the San Antonio office as a rule. She’d been loaned to another office in Fort Worth for this particular sting operation. “In San Antonio, if you don’t eat salsa with your eggs, you can get pelted with rotten tomatoes!”
“Truer words were never spoken,” Heather agreed.
Josie was carefully cooking eggs when John walked into the kitchen half-asleep, his shirt hanging open over a hair-roughened, muscular chest. Josie just gaped at him.
He gave her a poisonous glare, and she went right back to her eggs, just in time to keep them from burning.
“What are you doing in the kitchen?” he asked JJ and actually smiled at him as he buttoned his shirt.
“Cooking biscuits,” JJ said. “I can make bread from scratch, too. One of the ladies who used to babysit me taughtme how when I was just little. Well, littler,” he amended, bending to look in the lighted oven to check on the progress of his bread.
“Will wonders never cease,” John murmured. His eyes went to Josie. “Youcan cook?” he asked in mock-astonishment.
“Keep it up and I’ll put nagas in your salsa,” she muttered.
A laugh escaped him before he could stop it. “Where are you going to find a naga pepper?”
“I grow them,” she said, and it was true. She had a container garden on her patio, if she ever got back to it.
“Dad tried to eat a naga pepper once. He threw up,” JJ said.
“John did, too, except he didn’t throw up. He...”
“Aaaahhhh!” John corrected his mother.
“He shot it,” she whispered with glee.
Josie, who’d just taken up perfectly cooked eggs, gaped at him. So did JJ.
“You shot a pepper?” she exclaimed.
John glowered at her. “Something that evil deserves to die.”
“Naga peppers aren’t evil. They’re just made for people with guts.”
