A Cowboy in the Kitchen (3 page)

Unnerved and unsure what to do, what to say, Annabel thought about launching into a discussion of how to properly store vegetables, but she could see something was wrong, that she'd crossed a line. For touching him? Maybe she should remind him that
he'd
crossed a line, that he'd touched
her
—ran his hands over her bra, kissed a line down her stomach to the waistband of her jeans. And then dumped her without a damned word the next day.

It doesn't matter
, she reminded herself, a hollow feeling opening in her stomach. It was a long time ago. A lifetime ago for him.
You're his cooking teacher, Annabel. That's it.

“The Dunkins were in for dinner last night,” she said to change the subject—the one in her head anyway.

He stirred the mushrooms, peppers and onions. And didn't respond. Interesting.

Raina and Landon Dunkin, Lucy's maternal grandparents, had left Clementine a huge tip too. Raina, a former Miss Texas contestant, had special ordered a mixed green salad, dressing on the side, with grilled chicken breast and just a bit of Hurley's famed Creole sauce. Landon, a nice enough but reserved man who'd done very well for himself in real estate, had the barbecue crawfish po'boy special, with its side of slaw and sweet potato fries. When Annabel had peered through the little round window on the kitchen door to see how busy the dining room was, she saw the Dunkins lingering over cappuccino, deep in quiet conversation.

“The restaurant sign could use some fresh paint,” West suddenly said, gesturing out the window where the Hurley's Homestyle Kitchen sign, hanging from a post by the white picket fence, clearly needed some sprucing up. Hmm. Guess West wasn't interested in chatting about the Dunkins. Just bored by the small talk? She wasn't sure. “And the walkway needs work. There are a couple of loose stones. It's okay now, but in a few weeks they'll come loose enough that someone could trip and sue you for everything.”

Annabel closed her eyes, a swirl of panic shooting up her spine. There was no money. Gram admitted yesterday that the restaurant was losing money every day. There was little in the account for repairs. With everyone knowing Essie was out of commission, Hurley's just wasn't the same. Clementine had suggested holding a fundraiser; after all, didn't everyone love Hurley's? The place was a community treasure. But Gram had shot down that idea and had called it charity.
You're just as good a cook as I am, better probably
, Gram had said this afternoon as she finished her potato chowder.
There's something special in your cooking. Folks just have to have the chance to know that. Give it time.

“I'll take care of it,” Annabel said to West, then instructed him to turn the heat off the vegetables. “We have some paint in the basement, I think. And I can probably watch a YouTube video on re-whatevering the stones on the path.” She made a mental note to check on the paint and look up “whatevering” stones.

West eyed her, took a sip of his coffee and said, “It'll take me ten minutes to do both myself.
I'll
take care of it.” She watched him transfer the vegetables onto the cheese she'd had him sprinkle on the eggs, then showed him to carefully flip half the omelet over.

She wanted to tell him to forget about it, but she wasn't above accepting help when she really needed it. “I'd appreciate that, West. Thanks.”

“Least I can do,” he said, plating the omelet. He cut it in two, then slid half onto another plate, added another handful of cherries and brought both plates to the table. He was getting pretty good at this. “Really. You have no idea.”

So tell me
, she wanted to shout.

They sat down at the table and he took a couple of bites of the omelet. “This is delicious,” he said. “I really hope I can do this myself when you're not standing beside me. You're a good teacher, Annabel.” He took a long slug of his coffee, finishing it, then got up. “How's tomorrow after the restaurant closes for the lunch lesson? Could you come to the ranch? My daughter will be spending the night at her grandparents' house, so I'll have extra time and I like the idea of learning to cook on-site. But if it's too late, I can come here in the morning.”

Alone with him at his house. At night. She cleared her throat. “Tomorrow after closing will be fine,” she said. “I'll be over by nine-thirty. We close at nine, but I'll need to help clean up.”

He nodded, took his Stetson off the coat hook by the door and left, twenty different thoughts scrambling around Annabel's head. But the one that stood out was about how she'd feel being over at the Montgomery Ranch. For the second time.

* * *

Tuesday afternoon, just an hour after Lucy had come racing off the school bus, waving her “sight words” quiz with
100%
and a smiley face at the top, West rushed Lucy to Doc McTuft's office, cursing himself with what was left of his breath. They'd been in the backyard, Lucy on the low sturdy branch of her favorite climbing tree, calling out words and spelling them, West nailing on the piece of wood for the roof of the new dollhouse he promised to make for her. One minute Lucy had been saying, “Daddy, look how high I am—am,
A
M
!”—and she'd been so high that he called himself an idiot for not watching more closely—and the next, she let out a high-pitched yelp and was on the ground.

Doc McTufts had assured him that Lucy was fine, no broken bones, and that the doc herself had fallen out of plenty of trees as a kid and lived to tell the tale to worried parents all over town. But of course, as they were settling up at the reception desk, who was giving him the stink eye but the Dunkins' next-door neighbor, sitting with pursed lips next to her daughter and grandbaby. As West drove home, Lucy in her car seat in the back with her superhero coloring book, he figured the woman had already called Raina to let her know her poor granddaughter had almost been injured and had left the doc's office with a big bandage over a nasty scrape.

Lucy was all right. That was what mattered. But he would keep a better eye on her when she was climbing.

“Daddy, can we have ice cream for dinner?” Lucy asked.

“How about your second favorite for dinner and ice cream for dessert?” he asked, smiling at her in the rearview mirror.

“French toast with strawberries for the mouth and blueberries for the eyes?”

“Sounds good to me,” he said, feeling pretty confident about his French toast after yesterday's cooking lesson. Plus, hadn't Annabel said that she'd often eaten breakfast for dinner in Dallas when she was feeling low or missed her family? Comfort food. The very reason he ate at Hurley's so often.

He'd lain awake for hours last night, thinking about the cooking lesson. Annabel was so beautiful with that silky dark red hair caught in the ponytail, her pale, porcelainlike skin free of makeup, her long, lush body in low-slung jeans rolled up at the ankles and a loose white button down shirt tucked in. Her uniform, she'd called it. He called it sexy. She was like summertime, like sunshine, and her nearness, the scent of her, the sight of the swell of her breasts against the cotton shirt, the curve of her hip...it had been all he could do not to grab her against the wall and kiss her, memories of their time in the barn hitting him hard, as he'd shaken confectioners' sugar on French toast, slid peppers around in the pan.

And then she'd touched him, her soft hand, her skin electrifying his with the most casual of gestures, moving his hand over on the knife. Her touch had sent a shock through him and brought him back to the barn to forty-five minutes when he thought he'd found his future, when he thought everything made sense.

Until it didn't.

Back then West had been going nowhere fast. Annabel would have joined him there if he'd let something happen between them. After he and Annabel had almost gone too far in the barn, he forced himself to stop for her sake and said he'd better get back to the house. She'd gotten a funny look on her face, and he'd wanted to ask her if she was okay, to get a handle on why she seemed upset, but she seemed in a hurry to get away. From him. Maybe she'd just meant to pay her condolences, nice enough to bring him his favorite chili con carne that he always ordered to go after school, and he'd practically ripped her clothes off.
Jerk
. Maybe she was just being nice and he'd taken things too far, like always.

So then they'd gone back to the house so she could say goodbye to his parents, but his parents were standing outside, his mother crying, his father's arm over her shoulder, and they'd seen West and Annabel come out of the barn. He held back a bit and it was too late to tell Annabel she had a bit of hay in her hair. He saw his mother stare at the hay, then glance at him, disapproval turning her grief-stricken eyes cold. West doing the wrong thing again—fooling around with a girl in the barn while friends and neighbors came to pay their respects. That wasn't how it was, but it was how it had looked to his parents. West was sure of it.

Annabel had told his parents how sorry she was for their loss, glanced at West with such sorrow, then she'd gotten on her bike and raced away. Later that night, after the last of the relatives had left, West had come downstairs for a cold drink when he overheard his mother crying again and his father comforting her. The sound of his mother crying was like a slam in his gut, and West had stood there, frozen, his head hung, wishing he could go in and say the right thing, but he'd known, he'd always known, that he wasn't “living up to their expectations” and he'd be no comfort, that the wrong Montgomery brother was gone. Then he'd heard his mother say Annabel's name and he strained to hear.

Did you see West and Annabel come out of the barn together?
his mother was saying.
She had hay in her hair. Hopefully her grandmother will have the sense to tell Annabel to stay away from West. I hear she has a scholarship to culinary school in Dallas. I'd hate for her to give up her future.

West had gone rigid. He'd waited for his father's response, for some kind of defense, but his dad had said,
She won't give that up to stay in Blue Gulch.

Plenty of girls give up their dreams for handsome boys they're in love with
, his mother had said.
Annabel has her whole life ahead of her, and West will be here, doing what? Odd jobs. New girlfriend every weekend. I love West, but he's...who he is.

Who he is...
His heart in his throat, he'd crept back upstairs, lying awake for a long, long time, tears streaming down his face. He'd lost his brother. His parents thought he was nothing. And now he had to lose Annabel—to save her...from himself. His mother was right. Annabel was a good girl, straight A's, helped out her grandmother by working in the family restaurant every day after school as a cook's assistant and sometimes as a waitress when someone called in sick. And West was the troublemaker in the black leather jacket, calls to his parents from the principal about fights he got into with jerk jocks who thought they could say anything they wanted about anyone. And yeah, since barely graduating, he worked for room and board at a big spread on the outskirts of town, thinking he might want to be a rancher, breed cattle, raise horses. His dad was a mechanic who'd tried his hand at starting a small ranch on their property and hadn't done well, so his father had figured West would fail at that life too. But West wasn't like Garrett, who'd joined the military and planned to become a police officer, a trajectory his parents could be proud of.

Back then he'd lain awake for hours, vowing to avoid Annabel Hurley so that he wouldn't screw up her life. In the barn, she'd taken off her sweater, let him touch her breasts in the lacy white bra, and kissed him deeper and deeper, driving him wild until he'd stopped things, afraid to go too far and take advantage of the situation.

So yeah, she liked him. That had been clear. Liked him enough to give up her scholarship and Dallas? Maybe. So he'd made the decision to avoid her from that moment on, let her go have her great life with a better guy than him.

And when Lorna Dunkin had told him the next day that she knew exactly how to make him forget his grief for a little while, looking him up and down and whispering in his ear, he took her to the flat-topped boulder where he often saw Annabel picking herbs for her grandmother, and he let Lorna help him forget everything—losing his brother, his parents' disappointment in him, his disappointment in himself and giving up Annabel for her own damned good. At some point, he'd heard the crack of a twig and he knew it was her, knew that she saw, and the footsteps running away let him know he'd achieved his goal.

Some damned victory.

Except about six weeks later, Lorna had shown him a white stick that looked like a thermometer with a pink plus sign in a tiny window and said she wanted a big wedding.

Lucy had made everything he'd given up worth it. But those times when he'd be stacking hay or training a horse, he'd think of Annabel's beautiful face, those round dark brown eyes, full of trust, of feeling, and he'd feel like the scum of the earth. He'd hurt her, no doubt. But hadn't she gone off to Dallas to the fancy cooking school? Hadn't he stepped out of her way? He'd heard she had a condo in a swanky apartment building near Reunion Tower. That she was a chef at a Michelin-starred American fusion restaurant, whatever that meant. She probably had a serious boyfriend in a fancy suit.

With Lucy lying on her stomach on the living room rug with her coloring book, Daisy half snoozing nearby, West opened the folder of recipes Annabel had given him. Breakfast was written in red marker on the tab in her neat script. He found the one for French toast, and set to work, cracking eggs, melting butter in the pan, getting out the bread. Soon enough he had four slices of French toast cooking, eyeholes cut out for blueberries and a mouth cut out for strawberry slices for Lucy's portion. Smelled pretty darned good too.