Recipe for Eagle Cove, page 6
“Dog meat? That’s Natalya’s favorite threat. She cornered you, didn’t she?”
Becky could see it on his face.
“I love Natalya to death, but for this I just might have to kill her. Is that the reason you’ve been acting so strangely around me all day?”
“Her points on decent and proper behavior have a valid basis—”
“Counselor, shut up!”
It took him a moment, but he closed his mouth. Then a grin slowly formed. It didn’t start at his lips, it started with those ocean blue eyes.
“The court has ruled. I am not Natalya’s little sister despite my size. And being of sound mind and body, I hereby order you to kiss me.”
“Well,” the grin had reached his lips. “I can’t speak to the mind, but that is some body you have.”
“Stop quibbling.”
And he did.
It wasn’t a scorcher like last night, or maybe that was the buffering of the drugs, but Harry didn’t leave much else to complain about. It was just lip to lip as they both still held their burgers, which made it only the second best kiss ever committed…anywhere, ever.
Her head was spinning long after he leaned back and resumed eating his burger with a cat-and-canary smile.
“Don’t need any drugs as long as I have access to that,” she muttered to herself.
“I have a supply in stock.”
“Good, give me another dose.”
“I’m busy eating.”
She couldn’t wipe the smile from her face as they continued their meal. Okay, she had a blown knee, a knot on her forehead the size of a quahog and a brace most of the way up to her crotch. But she did have a whole lot to smile about at the moment.
Then she looked up at her vats and tanks. The latest fermentations needed checking. And the mash tun and kettle were both empty—waiting for the ton of product stacked right now in the back of her van.
She decided to worry about all that in the morning.
She barely noticed when strong hands tucked a blanket around her.
The kiss on her forehead was a soft caress.
Chapter 4
The cell phone ringing eased Harry awake with all of the grace of an electric chair. His nerves were jangling as he managed to answer it.
By a dim worklight in the brewery, he could see that Becky was still asleep on the couch. And his back could feel every second of sleep he’d managed while slumped in the armchair.
He didn’t want to disturb her and hurried out the door before speaking. It was still dark and a chill bit at his bare arms.
“This had better be good,” not his most gracious greeting. Especially not if it was one of the partners at Parrish, Merryfield, and Roland operating from another time zone. Harry was in the final year of the partner track—the one senior associate that everyone knew was a shoe-in. They rarely tapped more than one a year, but the firm’s director had made it clear he was in, without making promises of course.
“Peggy has a flight this morning and Greg and Jessica left town,” the Judge began without preamble.
“Why didn’t you stop him?”
“I had told him to take the week off and I have never been one to go back on my word, despite my ill-spoken sentiment yesterday morning.”
“And you’re calling me because…” Please tell him he was wrong.
“Your assistance this morning would be appreciated. Am I correct in assuming that you’re in town?” His father was careful not to ask where he actually might be as he hadn’t come home last night. “Passed out drunk on Cal’s couch” had been too likely a response to that question in his younger days. There was no point lying about anything in a small town, especially not in the Judge’s house.
“Yes,” he was in town though he wished he could have said no.
“Fine. We open in twenty-eight minutes.”
And Harry was holding a disconnected phone. “I never agreed to help, you arrogant jerk!”
Shouting at a cell phone in the middle of the night. Really useful; but it was more than he’d ever managed or would manage to his father’s face. Twenty-eight minutes. Okay, it wasn’t the middle of the night. It was five thirty-two in the morning. Because, if the Judge was anything, he was punctual.
There wasn’t time to get home, shower, and change. Eagle Cove wasn’t big, but LBB Way wasn’t exactly a raceway and Becky’s was on the far end of town.
He tiptoed back into the barn-turned-brewery.
Upstairs he discovered that a section of the hayloft had been walled off. It was a single space that was both cozy and rustic. Windows to one side opened onto darkness, and to the other they revealed the unfinished section of the hayloft, still partly stocked with large bales of sweet grass.
Becky had wrestled a king size bed up the stairs—it was covered with a quilt made from all the colors of the sea. It started dark in one corner and went through a storm-tossed transition of intricate piecework before finally emerging in the lighter tones. A good kitchen made of salvaged materials dominated the other end of the room: a large cast iron sink, refinished planking thick enough to park a tractor on, and odd-sized cupboards that looked more appropriate for animal tack than human food.
In a corner stood a toilet and clawfoot tub. What was it that women had against showers? The clawfoot had a curtain on circular rod, but the spray nozzle was a handheld on a steel flex-hose coiled about the faucets.
All open plan. Becky either never entertained up here or she had no modesty around her partners. He very much liked the image of a naked Becky cooking in the kitchen in easy view from the bed. He didn’t like the image of Becky here with another man. Possessiveness wasn’t really his thing, but he didn’t like it anyway.
Something was missing and it took him a moment to figure out what. The loft apartment had no living room. No desk. Becky might sleep, cook, and bathe up here, but she lived downstairs close by her brewery.
He shed his clothes, trying to ignore the intimate sensations of being naked in her bedroom, and washed himself quickly. Just like the plumbing in the brewery downstairs, it was perfect—hot and plentiful.
There was nothing else to change into other than yesterday’s clothes. They felt clammy and grimy. They were still stained with grease and ketchup from yesterday’s diner disaster.
“And today is looking so much better.” Maybe instead of dry cleaning he’d just have them burned. He found a toothbrush still in its packaging and used that.
He left a note and things she’d need where Becky couldn’t help but see it and kissed her lightly on the forehead. Unshowered, injured, and hurting, she was about the cutest thing he’d ever seen all tucked under her blanket with little more than her hair showing.
He resisted, just as he had last night, his urge to do so much more. Natalya had been right to trust him, even if she didn’t. But he could at least wish he was a little less honorable.
Becky woke to the start of her van’s engine. It was dark except for the nightlight she kept on in the brewery—she’d banged her shin more than once when some overpressure alarm had gone off in the early days or a timer had run out. Now her living room was never truly dark.
It was so quiet that she could hear the gear shift lever dropping into place and the parking brake clunk off.
Someone was taking her van.
She heaved the blanket aside, swung her legs off the couch—
And landed in a heap on the floor between the couch and the coffee table on which she banged her elbow.
Her knee. A leg brace. And as she lay on the floor, a slow cascade of pills rolled off the edge of the table and began piling up inches from her nose.
Pain meds.
She’d blown out her knee, which used that moment of awareness to start hurting like mad.
But that still didn’t explain her van.
She sat up as well as she could to stem the flow of pills. The concrete was cold through her thin skirt. Valeria’s skirt.
A quick sniff of the air told her that the brewery was okay. No scent of overcooked mash or a fermenting tank having outgassed yeasty air through an overpressure valve. No scent of warm copper from a working kettle either. In fact, the kettle was cold because…all of the product that was in the back of her van was currently crunching down the gravel drive and off into the distance.
As she gathered pills, she spotted the note.
Gone to help Judge with breakfast.
Rest easy. Take meds with food.
I’ll bring back lunch.
H.D.S.
H.D.S.? Oh, Harold Davis Slater. Or was it Harold David? She didn’t even know.
He’d left a container of yogurt, a banana, and an energy bar on the table for her which was awfully sweet. The last time a man had made a meal for her had been her father making waffles the morning before climbing into the RV and heading north. It wasn’t much of a meal, but Becky wasn’t going to tell Harry how many bonus points it had earned him.
She opened the yogurt, but there was no spoon. And her crutches were…she scanned around…leaning by the door a good dozen steps away.
“Missed that one, didn’t you, Harry?”
Becky leveraged her cold behind back onto the warm sofa. From there she achieved her feet and immediately wished she hadn’t. The brace didn’t compensate nearly enough for putting weight on her bad leg. Raising it so that she could hop across the room wasn’t much better; she more ran into the rough barn wall than reached it.
She added splinters to her list of woes. Harry was rapidly losing those bonus points. With her crutches she made it to the bathroom, fetched a spoon and a juice in the kitchenette, and hobbled back to the couch. Breakfast and taking her meds lasted about two minutes.
She checked her phone, rather she tried to. It wasn’t anywhere to be found. She could almost picture it…on the dash of the van. No! The big clock above the brewery’s control panel read six a.m. Harry would be back in about five hours. What in the world was she supposed to think about for five hours?
Certainly not Harry Slater.
Her other option was staring her in the face. She could think about all of that gleaming hardware standing there doing nothing.
She’d be better off thinking about Harry.
Harry decided that he’d be better off dead.
He had the coffee maker figured out, so that part of it was okay. And to replace the soiled Hugo Boss the Judge had found him an Eagle Cove t-shirt with more of Ma’s art on it. He only wore t-shirts when he played racquetball and it left him feeling strangely exposed. Ma’s art made him feel like a walking billboard for opportunistic exploitation. Didn’t the man respect anything about his wife’s legacy? Every local would recognize it and know that her son was wearing…
Least of his problems.
It took him a while to understand that the Judge had very specific rules of the kitchen, which really shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it was.
He offered omelets five different ways that weren’t written down on the menu; thankfully the locals knew them and Harry soon had those down. Pancakes came in two different-sized stacks. And oatmeal apparently only ever existed in one, single form: with sliced dried apricots and diced apples. Everything came with a side of farm sausage and hash browns—neither was optional. Marshmallows in hot chocolate were also considered a punishable crime for anyone tall enough to rest their elbows on the table without a high chair.
Harry ignored him on the last point because the other option was whipped cream from a can. When he found the stash of several bags of tiny marshmallows hidden in the server’s station he decided that just maybe Greg was an okay little brother, even if he did marry Jessica Baxter and then skip town just because it was his honeymoon.
The problem was that the Judge’s omelets were absolutely incredible and everyone in town knew it.
That meant the tables filled rapidly and stayed that way. Every time he looked out the big front windows, he saw another person walking toward their end of town along Beach Way. It was like a zombie apocalypse or something; they just kept coming.
Because they stayed mostly full, there were seventeen wrong tables that he could deliver an order to, using the process of elimination. His average hit rate of the correct table was awful. He finally started marking the tickets with quadrants of the room: north, east, south, west.
“Greg has the tables numbered,” the Judge kept offering him service tips across the pass-through window. This time it was accompanied by three omelets and a tall stack that went to one of the five tables of four people each in the west corner by the door, but he had no idea which one. Or did it go to the two sets of two. If the Judge offered more variety, it would be easier…but he didn’t…so it wasn’t.
“How are they numbered?” He had already proven that a tray was a bad idea in his hands, so he grabbed the first two plates, then cursed. It was about the hundredth time this morning that he’d forgotten to use hot pads. The Judge served his plates very well warmed. His father’s hands might have calluses of iron, but Harry’s didn’t.
“No idea,” the Judge actually looked chagrined. “He just makes it work.”
“Thanks for the helpful tip.” He grabbed the two plates again using hot pads and went in search of their owners.
Becky spent the morning going quietly insane.
Thoughts of Harry distracted a woman only so long when she had nothing more than a pair of nice kisses and a slow dance to base them on. Her reading material was upstairs, as was her laptop. She eyed the climb several times, but her antics of the morning were still having repercussions. There was a demon poking at the inside of her knee with a sharp knife, and every time she stood up the room gave a nasty spin that sent her plummeting back to the cushions.
If she was her old self, dressed in jeans, she’d just scoot up the stairs on her bottom. However, ruining Valeria’s beautiful skirt was not an option and the inevitable splinters that would jab through the thin material and into her behind didn’t sound like much fun either. The tasting room didn’t have hours today, so she didn’t need to worry about that.
If she had her stupid phone, she could call Peggy for help. But her phone was…where? Oh, parked down at The Puffin Diner. Maybe if she wrote a note to herself she’d remember that for more than fifteen minutes.
Harry’s score had slipped below par and was rapidly sliding down the cliff and being washed out to sea.
For lack of anything else to do, she managed to fetch her recipe books. They were her prized possessions and she kept them locked in a small fire safe she purchased for just that purpose. So far there were four thick, leather-bound journals in the series. She had to make three trips to get back to the couch. Why four books hadn’t taken two or four painful, weaving trips rather than three was something she couldn’t figure out at the moment.
Each one had been horridly expensive, especially in the beginning. Custom hand-tooled leather outside and handmade paper within. Barry did such beautiful work and she’d forked over the cash for each one because she wanted her business to be a real and serious business. No fooling around, no cutting corners. One hundred percent the best the whole way. She brushed her fingers over the hand tooling, “5B” with roman numeral volume numbers worked into the soft leather. She loved holding the journals. These were her children, for now. At least until she found the right man.
There was a laugh. If Harry Slater was anything, he wasn’t the right man. Worldly, handsome, living the high life in New Orleans with his Mercedes-Benz roadster. She could see him back in Eagle Cove as easily as Jessica. Except Jessica had come back, surprising everyone including herself.
Becky turned to the journals, knowing Harry was never coming back to stay.
Integrating the Asian pear was going to require a new approach. The texture would behave like an apple, but the flavoring profile was so much more subtle than anything she’d used before that she hardly knew where to begin. She was halfway to her feet to fetch one so that she’d have the flavor on her tongue as she thought about it, when she remembered that the produce was with her cell phone. In the van parked a mile away. She plummeted back down into the couch and her knee screamed. She sat very still until the pain eased back down to merely intolerable.
She went back to Volume I.
The first journal covered the pre-beer years, but she flipped through it anyway for nostalgia. Pop had started her off at the age of eight brewing a demijohn of root beer. The five-gallon glass vessel had exploded and nearly killed one of the barn cats. That’s how she’d learned about pressure relief valves.
She paged through the learning years. By twelve she made more spending money than most of her friends’ allowances selling off her root beer, twenty-five cents a bottle and a nickel back when you returned the glass. Cider and ginger ale had come next. She’d taken over a whole bay of the farm’s equipment shed by the time she was sixteen. The second journal contained the years of research on the brewing process. Eventually, there were sketches of the basic system design that she hadn’t had a chance to build it until she was twenty.
Pop was frugal and Mom was good with money and they’d trained her well. She never borrowed, never used credit. Becky took no action until she had the cash in hand.
Instead of giving her the money they’d set aside for her college, they gave her the farm in exchange for a ten percent share of profits. They’d taken her college fund and their savings and moved to Alaska. So far all they’d received for their faith in her had been ten percent of the fee she collected for the pasture she rented out for hay; a hundred percent of the brewing money went back into the business. For now.
The second journal ended with the results of her first batch, a simple pilsner. No special flavoring, just a clean, single-fermentation brew.
As she studied the third and fourth journals, she couldn’t seem to get comfortable. No matter what she did, her brace was awkward and uncomfortable and her knee throbbed. Every time she thought she had an idea about how to make the Asian pear come to life, a new twinge sent it slipping away.
