Spooning Leads to Forking (Hot in the Kitchen Book 2) Read online

  “Looking for anything special?” She caught the bemused smirk that played at his lips a second before said lips captured his straw. He drank dark green juice from the same clear cup every day. Whatever he put in there was working. Dev was the picture of vitality—tall and lean and built like a cyclist, or a swimmer or a player of any endurance sport. A healthy tan proved he found time to be outdoors.

  His beard was lustrous and dark—in her fantasies she had touched it and it was impossibly soft. It matched silky hair that was shaven on the sides and grown in on the top and tousled just right. Spiked up at the roots somehow with ends that fell into form without looking stiff, it managed to achieve a frightening shine. But his eyes—God, his eyes—they were the real stars of her fantasies; not dull green like his juice—bright and vibrant like aspen leaves. Even his skin seemed to glow.

  “Any chance my order is in?” Shea asked, knowing full well today was Monday.

  “Sorry. You’re a day early,” he said.

  “Oh.” She pouted a little, then appeared to recover from feigned disappointment.

  Dev leaned his hip against the counter and his lips eased into a slow smile. The rumble of his voice gave her a shiver. “Guess you’ll just have to come back tomorrow.”

  With that, she gave another little smile and continued inside, taking her time as she thought of items she really might need. It was a well-thought-out store, with plenty of fresh staples in the produce section and aisles full of dry goods fit for a health nut or a gourmand.

  Shea made her leisurely way up and down the aisles.

  Coffee. Honey. Probiotics. Dried currants and slivered almonds for tomorrow’s salad. A bottle of that Malbec I like...

  The simple foods she limited herself to were the extent of what she was willing to cook herself. Shea hadn’t done any real cooking in a long time.

  It didn’t hold a candle to what she’d grown accustomed to in New York. But she did like a good, hearty salad—the kind that had nuts and fruit and meat and dairy protein. They weren’t haute cuisine, but they sustained her. Prepared foods and hearty salads were what she’d been living on for weeks.

  “Hey—do you have any sumac?” she asked, circling back to the front after picking up the other items and searching for the herb herself. She’d become convinced that a little bit of the tangy spice would be the perfect addition to the aioli they served with the calamari at The Big Spoon. It was one of only three restaurants in Sapling. Delilah’s served sweet and savory pastries and Gator’s Sports Bar had pub food and wings. The Big Spoon served breakfast, lunch and dinner and had the largest menu of them all.

  “Sumac is edible?” Dev looked up from shuffling his papers, seeming a touch surprised.

  She frowned. “What else would it be?”

  “Poisonous,” Dev picked up his green juice cup again. “Worse than poison ivy, but not as bad as poison oak. Poison sumac’ll give you a rash all over.”

  “Huh,” Shea tutted, wondering whether she’d ever come across it hiking the trails near Kendrick’s house. “Well, people use it for cooking, too. Its berries are a deep red. I’ve never seen it in the wild, but the color of the ground spice is actually kind of beautiful.”

  Then Dev did that thing he did whenever they got to talking: he got quiet for a minute, but never broke their gaze. In moments like that, he had a way of looking at her that made her feel like he was right in her space.

  “Sounds like you want it?” his lips settled into a half-smile. The full smile, she’d noticed, was for genuine amusement. The half-smile seemed to mean something else. It held a different sort of softness too intimate to name.

  “If you can get it…” Her voice held shyness and hope and all the other complex tones she’d forgotten her voice could make. The thrill of possibility was a heady thing.

  “How much do you need?” he wanted to know.

  “I guess a single jar is fine.”

  The warmth in his eyes lingered even as the set of his lips changed. “I can get you sumac.”

  What else can you get me?

  Shea looked forward to the day when she would feel at ease flirting out loud instead of only inside her mind. Acknowledging attraction to other men still felt weird. Nodding her thanks, she walked off before he could notice or read into her blush of embarrassment—more accurately, a flush of lust.

  He probably isn’t even interested, the rational part of her brain pointed out—the part that knew she hadn’t read into a tiny flirtation like this since she was a teenager. These small gestures likely meant nothing to him. It was his job to smile at her. The Freshery must have attracted all sorts of flirters, with Dev looking the way he did. Hell, he might even have been laughing at her beneath it all, with all of her strange requests and thinly veiled loitering.

  Not just that—she felt mildly creepy for stalking him at work, maybe even un-feminist for objectifying his fine behind so hard. If her life weren’t this messy, she might throw out speculation and make an actual move. But her life was this messy. And he was the coincidentally hot grocer. And at the end of the day, a girl had to eat.

  3

  The Critic

  Dev

  Dev liked to be nice to the city folk—not just because he’d kind of turned into one himself—because not everyone in Sapling was. He could only half-blame people for the way they felt. All the wealthy people who had bought up the Hamren houses on Elk Mountain—second homes they barely used—made for strange local economics and a complicated relationship between tourists and locals.

  He’d been back in Sapling for just over a year, though he’d traveled freely between California and Colorado in the six months before that. Delilah had worked on him those months, convincing him that Sapling was where his Midas touch for business was needed. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t torn about being back.

  These were his people. He loved them. With the town struggling like it was, this was where he needed to be. His neighbors had helped him become who he was. People invited him to their barbecues, told him their gossip, called him when they needed help fixing a fence or felling a tree and trusted him to help the town.

  Still, some part of him had one foot out of this place. He loved his forests and his mountains. But he also loved the things beyond. When he was in the city, he missed Sapling in all of its simplicity. When he was in Sapling, he missed the vivaciousness of the city. Maybe that was why he was so drawn to Shea.

  There’s something different about her.

  Dev pontificated for minutes after she left, trying again to pinpoint exactly what it might be. Her fashion sense was a clue. Bright toenail polish that always matched her eyeglass frames and changed with every visit was yet another quirk. That morning, both had been a dark electric blue to match a flattering color gradient she’d somehow gotten to fade onto the tips of her rich curls. She’d carried a gray bedazzled tote that read, Alright, patriarchy. You’ve had your turn.

  But Dev was fairly certain the “something special” feeling he got about Shea went far beyond her appearance, though reflecting upon her visit in any way made him recall how amazing her ass had looked in those white jeans. He knew she stayed in one of the big, glass Hamren houses. Only, most people who owned up there never came except in the winter. Shea had arrived in July.

  Word had it she was there to write some sort of novel, but she didn’t own the house itself. It belonged to some tech guy from Silicon Valley who’d sold his company for eight figures. From the clothes, to the house, to the privilege of retreating to the mountains to write, all of it smacked of big money. Only, Shea didn’t have the other telltale signs.

  For one, she didn’t pay for everything with a Centurion card. She didn’t make inane remarks about how everything in Sapling was “charming” or “quaint.” She made a ton of special requests but was never demanding. She wasn’t glued to her phone, which Dev himself had been accused of in the early days of his return. She didn’t give off that hard-nosed city vibe. Something about her was soft.<
br />
  “Hey, Dev,” came Hank Bowen’s unmistakable voice, scratchy from cigarettes and course with age. He owned the Ashbrook Motel. He’d owned it so long, Dev had distinct memories of being seventeen years old and taking his prom date there.

  “Can I help you find something?”

  The way Dev said it to Hank was a lot different from the way he’d said it to Shea. Hank wasn’t the oldest man in town, but he was the most curmudgeonly. Dev squared his shoulders and crossed his arms—a fitting posture, considering that Hank’s favorite thing to do was roll up, talk shit, and drop bombs.

  “Palisade peaches.” Hank made no effort to not sound put out, even though he was the one doing the asking. “I assume you’ve got ‘em but where do you keep ‘em? Doris needs six pounds to make her pies.”

  It was the tenth request for Palisade peaches Dev had gotten in two weeks. People asking for things he hadn’t seen extra demand for in months was how he found out. Systematically, Big Mart was doing what it had always been bound to do.

  “Imagine that…” Dev smiled now, too, only his was smug. “Your friendly neighborhood Big Mart has scaled back yet again.”

  That was how the big chain retailers operated: they lured customers away from mom-and-pop stores with low prices until they edged them out. Then, once they had everyone good and dependent, they raised prices and shifted inventory to the items most profitable for them. Most times, that meant cutting out local favorites.

  Hank had been one of the hecklers—one of the ones to call Dev crazy for opening The Freshery not three months after Big Mart’s hammer had put the final nail in his predecessor’s coffin. But the Big Marts of the world left the communities they moved into with more processed foods and less fresh produce. Sapling didn’t need to be more of a food desert than it already was.

  “The drive to the Big Mart is still worth it, even with what I spend on gas,” Hank shot back. “There’s still more money left in my pocket than if I’d bought from you. Not everyone around here is San Francisco rich.”

  Hank said it with venom, as if making a living in San Francisco were the embodiment of evil. Dev had never lived in San Francisco proper. He’d lived in Berkeley and Oakland—the former for school and the latter because it was his favorite place in the Bay. But he couldn’t deny the “rich” part—or at least how it looked.

  Dev was an investor, which sounded to people from here like he was made of money. But he was a community investor, which wasn’t so glamorous as that. What money he’d made in the private sector, he’d put to work helping underserved communities thrive. They were riskier investments with return profiles that weren’t nearly as sexy as what you’d see with VC or any other vertical within the project finance world. But there was no convincing people like Hank.

  “For real, Hank…can you just not give me shit today? You know I didn’t open the store to get rich. There’s people in town who can’t make the drive, let alone in the winter. Big Mart is twenty-five miles away.”

  “All right, all right…” Hank waved his hand in front of his face in a way clearly meant to brush Dev off. “Just point me toward my Palisades.”

  He was grateful that Hank relented. Dev was hard enough on himself that he didn’t need anyone else piling on. He had more to worry about than the Big Mart. He’d been in Sapling months longer than expected. Curve ball after curve ball had complicated his economic revival master plan. With every new hit, his vision drifted farther away. He wasn’t even sure anymore that coming back had done much good to solve Sapling’s problems, let alone saved the town from further decline.

  “Mornin’, sugar.” Forty years in Sapling and Evie Boudreaux’s voice still carried the lilt of the bayou. The woman hadn’t set foot in Mississippi since she’d left at seventeen. Dev didn’t think twice before abandoning his post for his top girl. A few long strides and he had his surrogate mother ensconced in his arms.

  Evie gave the very best hugs. Never mind that he was six-foot-two and she was five-foot-six. Her hugs made him feel like the best kind of little boy: impenetrably safe and infinitely loved. His spirits lifted instantly whenever she came in.

  “Mornin’, Evie,” he returned as he pulled back from their embrace, reluctant as ever to let go.

  “My shift starts in twenty minutes,” she started in. “But I made you these last night. I know you’re all healthy now, but you’re still growin’.” She looked past him long enough to cast a gimlet eye on his cup of green juice before fixing him with a pointed look. “And you could stand to eat some real food.”

  Dev took the proffered cookie tin and cracked open the lid, not bothering to hide his excitement. Evie was an amazing baker—had taught Delilah everything she knew—and might have owned a bakery herself if this hadn’t been the kind of town where most folks defaulted to working in the mills.

  “Toffee chocolate chip…” Dev spoke the words as quickly as he identified the confection by smell, all the better to free up his nostrils for another deep inhale. At thirty-four, he sure as hell wasn’t a growing boy anymore. This was a point he wouldn’t argue with Evie, not only because he would lose; he would gladly break from his juice to accept his favorite cookies.

  “When are you gonna quit your job and let me spoil you?” Dev asked for about the tenth time. It had always been his dream to take care of Pete and Evie. They hadn’t been wealthy people when they’d taken in him and Delilah as kids. Evie still wasn’t well-off, even with the life insurance she’d gotten after Pete’s heart attack—even though Dev had done for her now and then.

  There had never been two better people. When Dev’s own mother had passed, they’d stepped up to foster him and Delilah. If not for Pete and Evie, Dev and Delilah would’ve been separated.

  “You know I like working,” Evie proclaimed matter-of-factly before mumbling under her breath. “Don’t know what I’d do all day at home.”

  That was something none of them had ever really prepared for: Evie without Pete.

  “Come work with me at the store and you’ll see me every day...” he baited.

  “You’d prob’ly try to get me to drink that green juice.” She looked genuinely disgusted for a second. “And you know what I’m gonna say—you give me some grandkids to look after, and we’ll talk about me quitting my job.”

  Just then, Hank came puttering back up. The sound caused Evie to turn. Dev didn’t miss the narrowing of her eyes a second before she looked away, though Hank hadn’t noticed Evie yet. Apart from her mama bear tendencies to feed Dev, her instinct to protect him was strong.

  “Anyone still giving you trouble about the store?” she asked too-loudly.

  “Nothing I can’t handle,” Dev returned.

  “Don’t believe a word they say, sugar. You’re doing right by all of us. Anyone who’s got something to say about it, you send ‘em to me.”

  4

  The Cash

  Shea

  Shea liked a bathtub deep enough for the water to rise above her shoulders, for the fragrant blanket of steaming warmth to kiss her chin. Her habit of a leisurely morning soak was a years-long ritual dating back to her beginnings in New York.

  Like her bathroom in Manhattan, this one had a sound system. Unlike the one in Manhattan, it had no TV. Not that she’d ever watched it. Taking a “relaxing” bath while yelling at the news and reading the paper had been Keenan’s thing.

  Shea normally preferred something soothing, like Tibetan singing bowls. Six weeks in Sapling and she’d begun to embrace the silence. Like everything else in the house, the master bath was glass-walled, its view looking out at the aspens. It was late enough in the morning that strong sunlight had begun to filter in. If she could get hold of the remote, she could lower the sunshade with one button and crack the sliding door with another, letting in a bit of the midmorning breeze.

  Her hand was halfway to reaching said remote, which sat upon a well-placed stool right next to the tub. A loud chime came out of nowhere, startling her so badly she sat up straight. It crea
ted a mini tsunami that sent water sloshing out both sides of the tub.

  “Oh my gosh,” she whispered, as if emoting as quietly as possible would allow the space to retain some modicum of peace. She put on her glasses so that she could see. A skyrocketing heartbeat ruined all tranquil relaxation. A single thought amped up its volume each time she repeated it in her head—a thought that found her hands shaking, but her body moving up and out of the tub, too naked and vulnerable, somehow, to stay inside.

  Someone found me. They know about the money.

  But the money was rightfully hers. Any sane judge would see it that way, eventually. The gray area was who it belonged to right now. Keenan had kept money she had earned out of her reach, on purpose, for years. He had their financial managers—his people, of course—tucked safely in his own deep pocket, using them as gatekeepers to keep her in line.

  The account she’d snuck money out of had been from a business she had nothing to do with but technically owned. Keenan was always routing money through businesses with odd management structures for “tax purposes.” So she’d taken a lump sum out of the blue, outside of their accountant’s knowledge and without paying taxes on the withdrawal. The next day, she’d skipped town and had her attorney inform Keenan’s that she wanted a divorce. The problem was what she’d had to resort to, just to start over, could be constituted as embezzlement.

  Toweling off hastily as she stepped on heated floors, Shea padded into the closet, scanning for clothes that could be pulled on quickly. When the doorbell rang again, she decided on pajamas and a robe. She also decided she was under no obligation to open the door to anyone. Unless it was Girl Scouts selling cookies, it would be better to pretend she wasn’t home.