Idiot, he told himself, even as he held out an empty plate to Jud. “Help yourself. It’s breakfast.”
Holly smiled.
“From Café Nirvana,” Riley added. “It’s a special treat.”
Jud looked at Holly with a good amount of suspicion, but with Riley holding out an empty plate, and all the steam and good scents rising from the food, he didn’t have a prayer in resisting. When the plate was heaped high, Jud dug in with his fork and…choked.
“Yuck!”
“Yuck?” Riley looked at Holly. “I thought you said it was good.”
“It is good!” she claimed, but she bit her lower lip uncertainly.
Riley whipped around to Jud, who was dumping the food in the trash.
“Those eggs are fake!” he yelled.
“They’re low cholesterol,” Holly whispered.
“And that sausage!” Jud spit into the trash can. “It wasn’t sausage at all!”
“It’s turkey meat.” Holly winced at the loud, heavy thud they made as they hit the bottom of the can. “It’s much healthier.”
“It’s disgusting,” Jud said. “Don’t tell me all your meals are going to be this bad.”
“I’m thinking of trying other lean dishes, yes. Like meat loaf from low-fat ground turkey.”
Riley groaned.
“What’s that mean?” she demanded, whirling to him.
“Sounds…lean.”
“Exactly!”
“Oh, man.” Riley shook his head, grateful he’d already eaten. “You’re going to go give us all that newfangled California junk, aren’t you?”
“Your cholesterol will thank you. I’ve got some salads planned-”
“Gee,” Riley muttered. “Sounds appetizing.”
“I think so.”
Jud pulled at his sagging pants. “I want the fat, woman!” He glared at Riley as if this were all his fault, then walked out.
The silence was deafening.
Holly straightened her shoulders, lifted her chin.
Riley sighed, rubbed his hands over his face, then looked at her. “Well, that went well. You were exceptionally charming and sweet.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m easier to get along with when people agree with me.” But she looked out the window at the empty parking lot in front of Café Nirvana and chewed on her very red, very shiny and perfectly made-up bottom lip.
A lip he suddenly, irrationally, had the most shocking urge to suck into his mouth.
Where was a cow emergency when he needed one?
4
SLEEP ELUDED Holly that night. No surprise really. She’d set a new record, even for herself. Alienating an entire town in less than forty-eight hours.
She lay wide-awake in the small bedroom of her tiny apartment above the café. The Mendozas had cleared out quickly for their move to Montana, and yes, the thought came with a tad of bitterness.
Okay, more than a tad.
At least they’d left the furniture. The floors were hardwood and bare except for a few southwestern throw rugs. The walls were bare, too, but for such a small place there were a lot of windows.
The better to let the heat in.
Actually, it wasn’t that bad, if you didn’t count the extremely fat, rude Harry, who’d insisted on coming up with her.
He lay snoring in the kitchen sink.
But other than him, the place was clean and all hers, which made it…almost cozy. Her place in Los Angeles had been rented from a business acquaintance, and so had her place before that. She’d never really had a place of her own, but looking around the very small but oddly homey apartment now, she thought maybe if she could pick her own, it wouldn’t be so different than this.
Except for the cat.
It would be nice to be able to call a place her own, but she couldn’t do that until she figured out where she wanted to be for the rest of her life.
And where she wanted to be was back in a big city, any big city, where she could lose herself in her work, normal work. Where she could be around people like her.
Only the truth was, she’d never been around people like her.
She could tell herself it was the pace of the big city she missed. The movie theaters, the shops…Thai food.
But that was a lie, too.
She didn’t miss those things; she didn’t miss any of it. She just wanted to belong somewhere. Anywhere.
Damn, now she was right back to where she started, wallowing in self-pity.
She couldn’t help it. Everything was wrong. She’d been assured by her parents this would be a short interlude, that the restaurant would sell quickly. That she would be fully staffed. That her duties would be purely managerial.
None of that had happened, which should have made it easy for her to back out. After all, her parents hadn’t kept their part of the bargain, why should she?
But the new and improved Holly wanted to keep her bargains. She wanted to come through.
She wanted her accomplishments acknowledged.
And to do that, she had to succeed.
At any cost. Which meant if she had to continue to cook and clean and serve until she got it right, if she had to force people back into that café and eat her food so that a prospective buyer would be impressed, that’s what she would do. And tough beans to the local population who didn’t want to cooperate.
Finally, this decided, sleep claimed her.
She dreamed about cooking, and how she’d almost, almost, enjoyed herself today while teaching herself to make breakfast from a cookbook. She dreamed about Jud admitting he’d been wrong about her food being inedible. She dreamed about an obnoxious cat.
And she dreamed about one grinning, sexy sheriff.
BY THE NEXT MORNING, Holly was ready to dole out lots of tushie kissing and smiles that she didn’t especially feel.
The biggest problem, of course, was what to serve for breakfast? The café was low on supplies and she hadn’t yet had a chance to get any paperwork going, so she hadn’t ordered anything.
She’d have to go get what she needed herself. Determined, she got in her Jeep, unable to help noticing Riley’s truck was already in front of the sheriff’s station.
So he worked hard, so what? It was no reason to feel a little…melty on the inside. She worked hard, too, dammit, and pushing him from her mind, she drove to the one and only grocery store in town.
She loaded five big containers of instant oatmeal-not low fat-into her cart, and at the last minute added several baskets of blueberries for color. See? She was thinking like a restaurateur already.
At the checkout, she was thoroughly inspected by a midtwenties buxom redhead with the biggest hair Holly had ever seen. Though it was barely seven in the morning, the woman was cracking a big wad of green bubble gum. Checking out Holly’s cream-colored skirt and matching box jacket, she sniffed. “Going to be a scorcher today, you know. You’ll be sweatin’ in those fancy clothes.”
Those “fancy” clothes were light and cool, and very chic. Holly knew she looked good; looking good was important to her. It gave her a semblance of being in control. “I’m fine, thank you.”
“This it?” Her tone was a one on a friendly scale to ten. “This is what you’re going to offer at the café for breakfast?”
“Look-” Holly peered at the woman’s name tag “Isadora-”
“Dora.”
“Dora, then. Could you just check me out here? I’m in a bit of a hurry.”
“Why?” She bagged the oatmeal, sniffing disdainfully at the blueberries, as if even she knew that nothing, nothing at all, could decorate instant oatmeal. “You don’t have any customers waiting.”
“How do you know?”
“My momma’s sister’s boyfriend’s third cousin is the sheriff’s receptionist. She can see you through the windows, all by yourself inside the café. Your arrival, and the clearing out of the café, has been the biggest gossip to hit town since Jimmy Dalton got caught in the bowling alley trying to cheat Lester Arnold.”