Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Laney was still thinking about last night and this morning, when Chloe came in for dinner service. The whole kitchen was bustling, and she needed to get her head in the game.
They hadn’t assembled the entire gingerbread house this morning, but they had gone over a tutorial on different elements, and she was amazed at all the ideas that he had.
His mind was fascinating. She wanted to work with him. She wanted to study under him. Wanted to understand the way that he looked at sugar and flour and butter and created art.
He had changed some of her ideas, which had been rudimentary by comparison, and now they had an even more ambitious project on their hands, which they would be starting tomorrow if everything with the prototype went well tonight.
She had a section of the kitchen devoted to the gingerbread monstrosity that was in situ, and Chloe kept on looking over at it while she was preparing the veg for dinner.
“That’s what my dad’s working on with you?”
“Yes, it is,” she said.
Chloe got a soft, dreamy look on her face.
“He used to make the most incredible gingerbread houses, both at the hotel he worked at and for our place. A lot of our Christmas decorations were sweets. It was like Candy Land.”
Everything he’d said last night about the way that he liked to use dessert to transport people came back to her now. He used it for his own daughter. Loved it for his own daughter.
And she could see how much it meant to Chloe even now. “I really never thought he was going to do this kind of thing ever again.”
“Really?”
She wondered how bad his accident must have been.
“Yeah, he left all that behind. And I really did think he’d left it forever.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Yeah... I don’t know. It’s just good to see him doing this again. I’m glad.”
“Well, I’m grateful, because I was making a mess of it. Anyway, it’s only Wednesday, but...”
“It’s still going to be a busy night.”
Dinner service was smooth and easy tonight. It would be interesting to see how Chloe did when they were in the throes of a weekend rush, but for now everything was going great.
But Laney was fluttering, waiting for Pike to come in.
And when he did, with the new and improved base for the hotel, her stomach went tight, like a fist was gripping it.
He looked so good in his faded black jeans, black cowboy boots, and tight black t-shirt.
She would never have said that cowboys were her type, but she’d developed a craving ever since meeting him.
She would have said that men were not her type anymore.
Not after the whole debacle with Jonas. It had been so hellish.
She had internally sworn off the entire gender.
But Pike made that difficult.
“How was Chloe’s second day?” he asked, as he set the wood base down on the counter.
“It was great. She’s wonderful. And I don’t need you to intervene with anything just yet. Though, we’ll see how she handles Friday and Saturday.”
“You got a full house?”
“Yes. And a couple fairly complex specials. She might be cursing the word remoulade by the end of the evening.”
“Ah. I don’t miss my sous chef days.”
“You know what? Neither do I. Where did you start working in kitchens?”
“New Mexico,” he said. “I was almost eighteen when I got my first job washing dishes. Then started getting trained as a cook.”
“Oh, you were a line cook? I bet you fucked up some lives.”
“Well, yeah. I did. Got Melinda pregnant with Chloe, as a matter of fact.”
“Oh,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Sorry. I was trying to be funny.”
“It’s kind of funny. Line cooks are never beating the allegations.
But it was when I realized I needed to get my shit together, because I was suddenly a husband and about to be a dad.
Got really serious. Really, really serious.
Then, when I was working as a sous chef at a place in Santa Fe, I got called in to assist with some pastries.
Found my passion. Still worked evenings as a sous chef.
Started selling concoctions that I made in the mornings at a stand.
Coffee and pastries. Took the extra money that I made, and moved everybody to Paris for a little bit to study pastry while I worked in kitchens there. ”
“You worked in kitchens in Paris?”
“Yes, I did. And I got very good at taking abuse and swearing in French.”
“I would never have guessed this about you.”
He smiled and the skin by his eyes crinkled. Damn that man was fine. “Well, I’m a dark horse.”
“So...were you raised on a ranch?”
He shook his head. “No. I wasn’t. My dad worked on a ranch near Santa Fe when I was growing up, though, so I had some exposure to it.
It was always something that I knew I loved.
That was one reason when I was able to take work at the Gold Leaf Hotel in Wyoming, I took it.
With that place opening, and my getting to do what I wanted with it, I not only got to fulfill some career ambitions, I got to buy a ranch. ”
“Oh.”
It had never occurred to her that he might have owned his own ranch. And this was why he had never totally made sense. He wasn’t the kind of person to naturally work on someone else’s land. He was the man in charge. Her body had known that from the beginning.
She liked an alpha. She always had. The trouble was finding somebody that was more alpha than she was. And that was an ever-revolving door of mistakes.
“Chloe said you left it all behind. That sounds kind of ominous.”
He grinned at her. That wicked grin that had snared her the first time she’d seen him. The one that she now knew was more or less a lie. A bright and shiny lure to deflect attention from the real man. “Oh, it is,” he said.
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
“Not at all.”
He started mixing together frosting, and laying out all of the candy and gingerbread tiles and panels they were going to need. Then they started discussing the isomalt sugar, and the construction methods they would use to make the window panes.
She watched in awe as he melted the sugar precisely with his thermometer, and spread thin sheets out onto a tray, and then squared them up by hand.
“We can make molds for the larger one. I won’t mess around with eyeballing.”
“But this looks perfect,” she said.
“Perfect enough for this.”
He was quiet for a moment as he began to assemble the first panel on the house. “What about you, Laney, how did you end up in Mustang River?”
“The same way many people do.”
“And what is that?”
“A bad breakup. Very bad. As in, stole my deposit money for the brick-and-mortar restaurant that I was going to open.”
“Shit. Really?”
“Yes. And I’m an idiot. I knew the guy I was buying the building from, so I sunk a bunch of money into it before the loan was finalized.
So most of my savings got eaten up already.
Then the loan got secured, and I needed my down payment and it was gone.
We had a joint account, and so I was basically told there was nothing I could do about it, and pursuing getting it back wasn’t worth it. ”
“That sounds like bullshit.”
“Yeah, it is. But we weren’t married, and there’s just... I didn’t have anything written down, I just trusted him, because we’d been together for five years.”
“Well, you should have been able to trust him.” He shook his head. “You should be able to trust your partner. I’m divorced, so there’s no claiming that I was a perfect husband or anything like that. But I didn’t leave her with nothing.”
“That’s really nice.”
“When I say I didn’t leave her with nothing, I mean she got our ranch. The house that Chloe grew up in. I just think that was right.”
“Well, he didn’t care about what was right, and...
caring about it would have really hindered his ability to take me for everything I was worth.
He didn’t think about me. After five years together, he didn’t think of me at all, he just thought about his own cold feet and I guess in the end he decided that was all that mattered.
Finding his own comfort. I mean, he had a lot of childhood trauma and —”
“It doesn’t excuse what he did.”
“You don’t know what his trauma is.”
Pike shrugged. “I don’t have to know. Having trauma isn’t an umbrella that shields other people from your consequences. When your bullshit hurts other people you don’t just get to excuse it.”
Her heart squeezed tight. She had been hurt by it.
So badly. “I worked for years for that,” she said softly.
“Food trucks and pop-ups. And I finally had all these people who were interested in investing and... It just disappeared overnight. And that was when I saw an ad online for this place. That they were looking for a chef. I just figured I would take it. It’s different than what I wanted to do, but not that different.
I’m able to be me. And actually a lot of the local food here is similar to what you find in the Bay Area. Probably fresher here, honestly.”
“Yeah, sometimes life just kicks your ass.”
“It does.”
Pike looked at her, and she felt herself lean toward him. She wanted a kiss. Just one.
“I’m an addict, Laney. Just so you know.”