A Family for Reno (Cobbler Cove #8)

Chapter 1

Buns ’N’ Roses smelled like rosemary that morning, which Grace had not been expecting.

She’d come in at four-thirty to put up the bread.

The starter was happy. The butter was tempered.

The four loaves of cardamom brioche she was twisting for the McAllister wedding rehearsal were braided and rising in their pans by the time the rest of the world was waking up.

It should have been the only thing she smelled.

Cardamom and proofing yeast and the faint cinnamon-sugar smell of the breakfast scones she’d put in at five.

But there was also rosemary. Not even faint. A bright clean herbal smell coming from somewhere nearby, the way rosemary smelled when someone had just bruised it between their fingers.

She stood in the middle of the kitchen with her hands flour-white to the elbows and tried to remember the last time she’d had rosemary on the premises. She made a savory boule with rosemary and roasted garlic in the fall. It was April. There hadn’t been rosemary in the kitchen in five months.

She washed her hands and went to work making buttermilk biscuits. The dough timer dinged at five-twenty-six. She took the loaves out, set them on the cooling rack, started the next thing.

She kept thinking about the rosemary. And she kept smelling it.

Finally, she got down on the floor, achy knees and all from twelve years of standing on tile, but she got down and looked under the prep counter.

Three sprigs of fresh rosemary were tucked neatly behind one of its legs as if someone had intentionally put them there.

“Huh,” Grace said to herself.

She grabbed them and stood up. Looked at them in her hand.

She walked over to the door of the kitchen and opened it and looked into the front of the shop, which was dark and quiet and smelled the way it should at five-fifteen on a Tuesday morning, which was to say like bread.

She came back to the kitchen.

Looked at the rosemary.

She set it on the counter.

Okay, that was weird. Where on earth had neatly trimmed, fresh rosemary come from?

The only thing she could think of was a rodent carried it in.

Except her building was solid brick and she had it carefully inspected every quarter for cracks, holes, and any sign of rodent activity.

She kept out little live-trap boxes in her storeroom and under all the prep tables, and she checked them faithfully.

She’d never once had a mouse in her establishment.

Confused, she took the first batch of scones out of the oven, because they were done, and she forgot trying to solve the rosemary mystery as she went on with her morning baking.

By seven the shop was open. By seven-fifteen, her friend, Charlotte, was at the counter with a coffee and a cardamom scone and a list of complaints about brides who thought the whole world revolved around them that she was eager to share with Grace.

Given that Charlotte designed and sewed custom wedding gowns, she would know.

By seven-thirty Tucker had come in for the standing order of donuts he took to the fire station every Tuesday, paid in cash, tipped extravagantly, and left without a word, the way he had been doing for the past several months. By seven forty-five there was a small line.

Grace ran the front. Mary, her assistant, had called in sick this morning, which meant Grace was in her flour-dusted apron and the pale lavender blouse she’d pulled on at four that morning, taking orders herself.

She didn’t mind working the counter. She got to see and chat a bit with her friends and neighbors. It was one of the parts of the job nobody had told her about when she’d opened the doors four summers ago and been certain she was going to lose the place inside a year.

The line moved. The pastry case emptied. Mrs. Hennessey ordered the wrong kind of muffin, registered the error, declined to correct it, and left clutching the wrong muffin like she’d won the lottery. Grace gave the right kind to her grandson at the door. The grandson winked.

Grace went back to the counter and took care of the last customer in line. There would be another rush around 8:30 as the folks who went to work at nine came in for coffee and a quick bite to eat.

She ate a scone in between serving customers and pulled out two blueberry muffins now, keeping one for herself and plating the other one for Charlotte, who’d been sitting at one of the tiny bistro tables doing some paperwork before her craft store down the street opened.

“You’re quiet today,” Charlotte said from her chair across the room.

“Am I?” Grace asked. “Guess I’ve been busy working.”

“You’re working and you’re quiet,” Charlotte declared.

Grace wiped down the espresso machine, refilling the hopping with beans in preparation for round two of the morning crowd. “I found some rosemary in the kitchen this morning.”

“Isn’t that where it should be found?” Charlotte asked, frowning faintly.

“There hasn’t been rosemary in the kitchen since November. It was fresh, too. Three sprigs on the floor under my prep counter.”

Charlotte set down the muffin. Her hair was up in a bun she’d done in the rear-view mirror of her car, which Grace knew because she’d seen Charlotte do it through the front window.

“How fresh was it?”

“Just-picked. It was bright green. The leaves were soft, and the stem where it had been cut was still moist.”

Charlotte’s expression became thoughtful. “Anything else weird happen in here recently?”

“This morning? No.”

“How about in the last week?”

Grace thought about it. There had been a strange email last week, from someone who said they’d found a fly in a hot chocolate they ordered to go from her store. The person was considering reporting it to the health department.

The email address had been random letters with a number on the end. No name. Grace had answered it politely and apologized. Offered to give the person a free hot chocolate the next time they came in if they would identify themselves to her so she’d know who to gift the free drink to.

Later that day, though, she’d still been chewing on how a fly got into a drink without her or Mary noticing it.

She ended up looking at the date the complainer cited in the email and going back through her store receipts for that day.

She’d sold exactly fourteen hot chocolates, and she knew every single customer who’d bought one.

She also knew most of their email addresses, and it only took a few minutes on her laptop to find email addresses for the rest. None of them used a randomized, anonymous email handle.

She’d received no response to her email, and the accuser never did identify himself or herself to claim their free drink.

She told Charlotte about it, now.

“Sounds like somebody was bored and just trying to get a rise out of you,” Charlotte said.

“Maybe.” Grace shrugged. She was generally calm and unflappable, and she was pretty sure everyone in Cobbler Cove thought the same of her. None of them would bother trying to get a rise out of her, would they?

She got very few customers who weren’t locals, and she knew almost every one of her customers by face and name. Had a stranger come through the day of the alleged fly incident? She didn’t remember one coming in.

Charlotte interrupted her train of thought with, “Let me know if any more weirdness happens.”

“I will.”

“And Grace, if somebody plants something bigger in your kitchen — bugs, expired food, mouse droppings, call Sheriff Wheeler. Take pictures. Don’t touch it.”

Grace stared. “You think someone’s going to plant bugs or poop in my kitchen?”

“I think someone put that rosemary in your bakery, which is weird. And I think it would be even weirder if that’s the only thing they do. I’m just telling you how to react when something else happens. That’s all.”

“Charlotte, this isn’t one of your true crime shows. Eat your muffin.”

By ten the rush was over. Mary was feeling better and showed up at ten-thirty. Grace put her to work prepping sandwiches for the lunch customers.

Grace had taken off her apron and was sitting on the stool behind the counter writing out the order list for next week’s deliveries. The shop was quiet until the little bell mounted over the front door rang, announcing a customer.

She looked up.

Did a double take.

The man was tall. Athletic. Had brown hair so dark it almost looked black. His complexion had the dark tan that came from spending a lot of time outdoors and wouldn’t fade in a hurry.

He was handsome. Really handsome. As in hard to take her eyes off of him handsome. He wore a black t-shirt and charcoal gray jeans, and the dark colors made his tanned forearms look darker still.

He had . . . presence. A quiet confidence about him that invited her closer, drew her in. She supposed other women would call it sex appeal. Females must fall over like bowling pins in his wake. Good thing she was immune to men in general.

She’d only dated, loved, and married one man in her entire life. After he died, she had no desire to do any of it again. She’d found and lost her one great love and that part of her life was over.

As the customer headed across the front room toward her, she noticed a high-tech leg brace, made of molded black plastic with a shiny metal joint at each side of the knee, encasing his jean-clad left leg from mid-thigh to mid-calf.

He walked with a small limp he was clearly working hard to make look like a normal gait, but he didn’t quite manage it. She found it oddly endearing that this perfect specimen of cowboy manhood had one flaw, at least.

She knew who he was. She’d met him briefly last Thanksgiving at the big dinner Jenna Foster had thrown at her ranch.

Jenna had invited all her female friends plus all the cowboys who’d shown up at her ranch for a few months to help Jenna’s soon-to-be husband Sully rescue the ranch from foreclosure. This man had been one of those cowboys.