Chapter Three
“What is the matter with you?” Flannery demanded exactly two weeks later, glaring at Kitty across her worktable in the kitchen of the restaurant. “You’ve been more ornery than usual lately, and that’s saying something.”
“I’m not more ornery,” Kitty retorted, though it was possible that the way she slammed her oven door behind her when she said it was a pretty good indication that she was not telling the truth. Entirely. “What I am is busy. Maybe you’ve noticed the tourists started early this year.”
“I have noticed,” her sister shot right back. “And I’ve also noticed that every time you walk out of this kitchen to deliver the food, you’re this close to scaring them all off.”
She snapped her fingers in the air, theatrically.
“Did you come back here to critique my personality?” Kitty asked her, pivoting back to the worktable between them. “Or is there some business reason, related to the restaurant we run, that you might have come back here to—”
“Oh my god,” her younger sister said, also dramatically.
“I’m not going to argue with you about your obvious hideous mood, the one you’ve clearly been in for at least the past week.
Maybe two. But I did want to remind you that not only are we starting up the Farm & Craft Market this Saturday, we’re also catering the big Carey wedding this Friday. ”
“I know our schedule, Flannery.” Kitty was exasperated. “What I don’t know is why you want to talk about it in the middle of the dinner service.”
Flannery had her red hair pulled back into two braids.
And there was that flush on her cheeks that meant her temper was kicking in.
“I wanted to talk to you about it over the weekend, which is when we normally talk about schedules, but you were storming around like you wanted to murder us all with your hands. I was afraid you’d start trying to bite us if we talked about calendars. ”
Kitty had never wanted to throw something at her sister as much as she did just then. She wanted to throw the nearest pan and tell Flannery nine hundred more times that she wasn’t upset about anything. Not anything at all.
But not only was that untrue, it wouldn’t convince her sister anyway.
Kitty took a deep breath instead of throwing things.
She told herself that she hadn’t been counting the days since she’d propositioned Finn Patrick, but of course she was.
Last Wednesday had been particularly hard because there he’d been, like every Wednesday, sitting at a table out in the main dining room with his siblings and half siblings, and he hadn’t glanced toward the kitchen even once.
She knew that because she’d pretty much been staring at him the entire time. To the point she almost burned a few orders.
This was even more bothersome than the usual Finn Patrick offenses.
And it was a very strange feeling to be this hung up on waiting for some man to answer her offer.
Kitty didn’t know what to do about it. She wasn’t used to feeling things like this.
Or really at all. Because she’d had her fill of big emotions and demanding feelings already in this life and she’d left that behind in North Carolina.
She certainly had no intention of letting her means-to-an-end potential fake husband change that.
So even though it was a lot harder than it should have been, she made herself smile at Flannery. This had the immediate effect of making her sister’s eyes narrow in suspicion, but Kitty ignored that. She pushed on.
“I’m not in a particularly terrible mood,” she told Flannery, careful to keep her voice calm. Something that also took more work than it should have. “I’m trying to sort out the summer menu and none of my ideas are working out the way I want them to. That’s all.”
This was true in the sense that she was putting together the menu. What was in no way true was that she was having any trouble with her concoctions, because this kitchen was her happy place. It was where she put flavors together and made magic.
“Your ideas always work out,” Flannery said at once, and it wasn’t even loyalty talking. It was just the truth. “That’s why the entire town likes to eat here every night of the week.”
“I appreciate the vote of confidence.” Kitty did appreciate it, but she also knew that she couldn’t maintain any pretense that she’d somehow lost her touch in the kitchen.
She already regretted that she’d lied about it.
Another strike against Finn Patrick, to her mind.
So she moved on swiftly. “Crowded Table is opening this weekend. Have you met the owners yet?”
“I’ve seen them,” Flannery replied. “Looks like they’ve had their hands full getting ready to open.”
“I thought I might go over tomorrow,” Kitty said, and turned her attention to the orders awaiting her attention. “Introduce myself, maybe get a peek at their menu.”
Kitty and Tennessee Lisle—the only other restaurant cooks in Cowboy Point—had the distinct impression that this new farm-to-table place was going to offer an elevated dining experience, which suited them both fine. But Kitty still wanted to see for herself.
“Do we even know where they’re living?” Flannery asked. “Indy is sure she heard that one of them has a connection to the old Maynard place, but I don’t know if that’s just a rumor.”
The old Maynard place had been a farm, at one point.
But farming was hard in these mountains and the story that Kitty had heard was a very familiar story in rural areas like this.
One generation worked the farm. The next generation thought that looked like a terrible life, and moved somewhere else where they didn’t have to live according to the weather, or tend the earth through all its seasons and moods.
She wondered how many similar places there were, dotted here and there in the mountains around Cowboy Point.
She’d been here for years now and she still hadn’t explored each and every one of the dirt roads that led up into the hills.
There were all kinds of places tucked away back there.
“I intend to find out everything there is to know about them,” she told her sister, and thought she actually even sounded like her normal self again, which was a relief. “For all kinds of reasons, but I love the idea that there will be more women-owned businesses in Cowboy Point.”
That made Flannery smile. “Damn right. Got to break that cowboy code.”
Once Flannery swept back out into the main dining room, Kitty didn’t jump back into her work, even though she could hear that the restaurant was filling up.
Thinking about cowboy codes made her think about Finn Patrick and that cowboy hat of his.
She had thought about him, and that cowboy hat, entirely too much over the last two weeks.
It did not please her to discover that Finn Patrick was bothersome even when he was making himself scarce.
Thinking about Finn had her thinking about the wedding they were throwing on the patio of Mountain Mama later this week, if the weather cooperated.
Because Finn was living in the apartment that the bride, Dr. Ramona Taylor, had been living in since she’d moved back to Cowboy Point a few years back.
It sat up above her grandfather’s old house that Ramona had made into a medical clinic.
Now Ramona was marrying one of the Carey brothers.
They ran the biggest, longest-running ranch in Cowboy Point and had been marrying themselves off in rapid succession over the past couple of years.
Knox Carey was the last to take the plunge.
He and Ramona had adopted the baby that had been left on Knox’s doorstep on Christmas Eve, and that had been the end of the on and off relationship the two of them had been in for some time.
Like all the rest of his brothers and their wives, Knox and Ramona seemed head over heels for each other now.
And the baby had not been Knox’s, it turned out, though the town had speculated otherwise for some time. Kitty supposed some folks always would, no matter what evidence was presented to them.
But somehow, in her head, the fact that Knox Carey—who everyone thought would never stay in Cowboy Point—had settled down with a baby to raise and a fiancée to boot, all seemed to conspire to make her even more agitated about the fact that it had been two weeks and still no word from Finn about her proposition.
Kitty was not handling it well. But Flannery had reminded her that she needed to keep it together, so that was what she did throughout the rest of the dinner service.
If she was waiting for Finn to appear, looking around the restaurant far more often—and more closely—than she usually did, well. She had to think that was an improvement on daydreaming about throwing things.
It was not until she was back at the house later that night, climbing into her bed on the top floor beneath the eaves, that she realized he really, truly wasn’t going to show up.
The amount of disappointment she felt about that was entirely too extreme.
It actually kept her awake until she could hear the birds singing in the new morning.
She didn’t see Finn until Wednesday, in fact, when he sauntered into the restaurant like he didn’t have a care in the world to meet the rest of his family for their weekly dinner.
He was early. And Kitty felt a kind of electric shock go through her when he turned his head and looked straight at her. As if he knew she was there, peering out the window that let the customers see back into the kitchen.
She wanted to jump away, and maybe even hide, but she didn’t.
She wanted to look away, but she didn’t do that either.
Instead, she stared back at him and felt the strangest sensation prickle all through her when his mouth slowly curved.
It was that same kind of low trembling that she had felt before, only now she felt it everywhere.
And it was worse, somehow.
Kitty decided to interpret it as outrage.