Getting Lucky (The Portland Pioneers Book 2) (5 page)

She slipped away from the burner, and Rosa took over without missing a single beat, confident and sure after working with Maggie for the last three years.
Thank god for Rosa
. Closing herself in the little nook of an office she kept at the Café, Maggie pulled her phone out of her jeans pocket and dialed Cal yet again. Common sense said she could probably call for a repair from any of the many commercial kitchen suppliers in San Francisco, but they’d never be able to get out here and make the repair today. Plus, Maggie thought with a wince, she wasn’t entirely certain her month’s budget could handle that kind of high-priced repair.

The phone rang and rang, and Maggie swore under her breath. Where the hell was he?

It was unlike Cal to go off the grid like this, and of course, he’d had to do it on the
one
morning she needed him more than ever. Maggie felt her blood boil in frustration. She was contemplating calling a company she knew in San Francisco, damn the expense, when she heard a knock on the office door and looked up to see Hannah’s distinctive blonde hair through the window.

Maggie opened the door to a Hannah who was suddenly bubbling with excitement.

“Oh good, Maggie, I found you.” Hannah paused, nearly breathless with
something
and because of how the last twenty four hours had gone, Maggie began to brace herself for yet another unpleasant surprise. Hannah was a sweet girl but she also had the common sense of a gnat. If she was excited about something, it wasn’t necessarily because it was something
good
.

“He’s here,” she finished. “
Here,
at the
Café
.” Even though she’d graduated from high school last year, Hannah hadn’t quite outgrown the teen queen dramatics, and they were in full force now.

“Who’s here?” Maggie asked, desperately hoping that it was Cal, come on his white horse to save the day. It wouldn’t be like Cal to not call her back and let her know he was on his way, but then they’d left things weird last night. He’d almost made a pass at her and she hadn’t really stopped him. That might be enough for him to give her space.

“Noah Fox,” Hannah breathed out in unsteady awe. “You know, the baseball player. The
hot
baseball player.”

Noah Fox’s existence came to Maggie in degrees, and as she remembered that conversation she’d had with him the night before, she realized she’d let Cal completely distract her. She’d never googled Noah, and she’d never emailed Tabitha. Whoops.

“Oh. Him,” Maggie said, but the nonchalantness of her response didn’t seem to deflate Hannah in the least.

“You know he’s here for you,” Hannah said reproachfully.

Maggie rolled her eyes.

“He told me last night,” Hannah continued. “I’m completely jealous. He is so insanely hot
,
Mags.”

It was hard to deny that Hannah’s words were the truth. After all, hadn’t Maggie herself done a double-take when Noah Fox had walked through her front door? His smile had rendered her practically speechless. Maggie didn’t like to think what Noah Fox could have done to an unexperienced, naive girl like Hannah who’d barely ever left Sand Point.

“Tell him I’m a little busy and I’ll call him later,” Maggie instructed before pulling a Yellow Pages from one of the built-in shelves above the desk. “I’ve got to fix this exhaust fan before the natives get even more restless.”

The incredulous look on Hannah’s face told the whole story. She couldn’t believe Maggie hadn’t instantly started primping in the tiny mirror hanging on the back of the door, and then gone to snap Noah Fox up. But Maggie had more important fish to fry than the hard-on Noah had for her sister, and Hannah couldn’t possibly understand until she grew up and maybe grew some common sense.

“But he’s here for you,” Hannah repeated. “He said so. For the whole week. He even had a key made for you.”

Maggie glanced up from her search with a faint sense of alarm. “A key?”

“For his hotel room,” Hannah clarified, and then Maggie realized where Hannah had met Noah the night before. He’d checked into the Sand Point Hotel, where Hannah worked at the front desk.

And while checking in, he must have insinuated that Maggie and he. . .
oh
, Maggie thought,
that rat bastard.

She snapped the Yellow Pages closed with a decisive thump. “Oh really? Well, as it happens, it looks like I have a free moment right now.” She dropped the heavy book on the desk and followed Hannah back to the dining room.

Noah Fox was practically holding a press conference in
her
Café. Apparently word had spread overnight that a famous baseball player had arrived in Sand Point and this was apparently the most exciting thing anyone had experienced in years, because the awed expressions on everyone’s faces was just plain sickening.

Unsurprisingly, he was eating up the attention, smiling and laughing like he was just like them, but he wasn’t,
Maggie inwardly raged. She stomped right up to his stupid, hot self and poked him hard in the arm. She resolutely ignored how firm and muscley his biceps felt.

“I hear you’d like to talk to me,” she said when he turned to her.

“Oh, Maggie. Just the woman I wanted to see,” he said with so much transparent delight she wanted to smack it right off that ridiculously handsome face. No man should look that good, she thought rebelliously, it was unfair to the rest of the mortal world.

“My office,” she spit out, and walked off, weaving between the tables and slack-jawed customers, not even bothering to glance behind to see if he’d followed her.

He was in Tabitha’s thrall, and Maggie was apparently the only way he could find her; of course he’d follow.

They reached the office and she gestured him inside and shut the door behind her. It was only at that moment, looking up at him, thinking,
god, he’s so tall
, that she realized she’d made a slight miscalculation.

The office was so small, there was barely room for her desk and a single chair, with the built-in shelves towering over her desk, but Noah was definitely not a small guy. He filled the open space so completely, Maggie pressed her back to the door and still felt nearly overwhelmed by his over-sized presence.

Shit.

But she couldn’t back down now by opening the door and moving this meeting to another location. That would be tantamount to admitting he got to her and he really didn’t. She wasn’t as weak-willed and superficial as the rest of Sand Point—or her sister—was.

“You have time to talk to Tabitha last night?” Noah asked with nearly as much transparent eagerness as Hannah had displayed earlier.

Maggie shook her head sharply. She really didn’t want to go into why she’d been so distracted either. Even though this Noah Fox presented himself as everyone’s super genial friend, he was still a complete stranger.

“Oh,” Noah replied, ducking his head down low, a faint flush of embarrassment on his cheeks, and for the second time, she saw the depth of the darkness in his eyes. And didn’t it intrigue her more this time than it did before? Maggie cut off that thinking hard and sharp. She was not
going to forget what Hannah had said before she’d been forced to interrupt her search for a repair.

“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing,” Maggie said more than a little testily. “Or what you’re saying.”

His disarming smile was practically a master class in innocent charm. When he folded those muscled arms against his firm chest, she had to remind herself yet again that he was a huge jerk.

“I don’t appreciate you going around talking about me that way,” Maggie repeated. “We’re not involved. You’re here to find Tabitha.”

His white teeth flashed against that tan skin again. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Maggie’s temper roiled. This was probably how he lived his whole stupid, privileged life—going around doing whatever the hell he wanted, and blasting women with that goddamn smile when his trail got too messy and he had to clean up a bit. “Buddy,” she bit off, “you do not
want to fuck around with me today. It’s been a spectacularly awful twenty four hours, and I really can’t take your bullshit right now. So cut the crap and stop making people think
I’m
why you’re here.”

“What’s happened? I hope it wasn’t me that made things tough on you.” He had the nerve to look genuinely concerned.

Maggie grimaced. “Hardly. You’re not so high on my priority list that you showing up in my town ruins my life. If we want to start with this morning, my exhaust fan wouldn’t turn on and Cal, who could normally fix it in a heartbeat, won’t answer his phone because he’s probably mad at me. And now I’m going to have to spend money I don’t have on a repair.”

She hated the sympathy in his stupid face. “I could take a look at it for you,” he offered and it was such a nice thought she actually stopped herself from rolling her eyes again. She could be difficult sometimes, but she prided herself on not being an ungrateful bitch.

“That’s really not necessary. You wouldn’t know what to look for.”

Noah shoved his hands in his pockets and Maggie resolutely ignored the way the muscles and tendons of his arms flexed at the movement. “I’m actually pretty handy with stuff like that,” he said softly and so unassumingly she never would have guessed he was the same show-off who’d dealt out smiles and genial handshakes in the dining room only five minutes ago.

It was proof of just how close Maggie was to the end of her rope that she considered the idea. It wasn’t like he could do much
harm
, right? He’d really only be marking time until Cal decided to stop pouting.

“Sure, why not,” she finally said, leaving out her silent assumption that he couldn’t break it worse than it was already broken.

“And, for the record,” he said genially, “I never told Hannah anything. She made her own assumptions.”

Maggie suddenly remembered she was supposed to be furious with him. The ability to disarm women was probably another one of the many tricks he had up his sleeve. “Hannah isn’t prone to vast exaggeration,” Maggie insisted, “
some
exaggeration, yes, but not making up stories out of thin air.”

In the approximately fifteen minutes they’d spent in each other’s company, she’d never seen him look uncomfortable, but he did now. “I might have hinted a
little
,” he allowed. “But she was so. . .determined to flirt. And I don’t do that.”

“Anymore,” Maggie added helpfully.

He shot her a look like she was crazy, and it was a testament to how bizarre the last day had been that Maggie actually preferred that
look to the panty-melting smile he usually employed.

“I mean,” she added, “that you don’t do that
anymore
.”

He was beginning to look downright disgruntled and Maggie was secretly—or maybe not so secretly—thrilled at this. He was cute mad. Maybe even cuter than when he was trying to be so hot all the time. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he practically grunted.

“You said you don’t do that. But look at you.” She gestured absently in his general direction but she’d forgotten how cramped the office was, and her fingers brushed the soft fabric of his t-shirt and the firm stomach muscles beneath it. Snatching back her hand, she glanced up at him, ready to apologize for nearly groping him, but the sudden heat in his eyes caught her off-guard.

Maggie knew she should reach behind her, open the door and stop this conversation right now. She didn’t, though, and the only reason she could figure was it had been so long since a guy looked at her with that soft, almost reluctant attraction, even though she knew
he was only looking because she faintly resembled her elder sister. She’d needed something all day to cleanse her palate of Cal’s ridiculous flirting, and Noah seemed made-to-order.

“Look at me?” he asked. “What about you? Are you so ugly that nobody could ever imagine you flirting?”

Maggie knew
she wasn’t ugly. She also wasn’t her sister. “Hardly.”

“Hardly,” he chuckled, “Not quite how I’d put it, but I guess that works.”

She really didn’t want to know what he thought of her. Only that he had, even for the briefest of moments. She didn’t have Tabitha’s gigantic ego over her looks, but that didn’t necessarily mean that Maggie was ego-free—instead, Maggie’s pride generally centered around what came out of her kitchen.

That thought was just enough to jolt her out of whatever danger zone she was currently flirting with. She reached behind her and wrenched the door open. “I’ll show you were the fan is,” she said with as much professionalism as she could muster. “It’s just over here, over the grill. I could dig out the ladder . . .”

“But I won’t need it,” he interrupted smoothly, sending her yet another flirtatious grin as he followed her into the main kitchen area where they’d stood just last night.

Had it been only last night? Maggie found it hard to believe that less than twenty-four hours had passed since that conversation; it felt like an eternity.

“It would be nice to be tall and not need the ladder,” she said as he carefully jerked off the panel covering the bowels of the fan, and started poking and prodding at parts she couldn’t see. Half a dozen times she wanted to tell him to
be careful
,
for god’s sake
, but each time she bit back the remark. She was determined not to let a bad night’s sleep and Cal’s mysterious absence turn her into a raving bitch.

Finally, he looked down at her, a vaguely amused expression on his face. “You know, you don’t have to stand guard over me. I won’t break it worse than it’s already broken.”

His comment was so close to her own internal thoughts not five minutes before, Maggie flushed guiltily. “Are you sure?” she asked.

He shot her another one of those
crazy girl
looks. “I’m pretty damn sure you’ve got about ten thousand better places to be. Besides, you can’t help me fix it by hovering.”

“Right,” Maggie said, but still didn’t move. “Have you figured out what’s wrong?”

“I’ve got a pretty good idea, actually. I think the belt just came off the track. Once I can get it back on, we should be back in business.” He glanced down at her and smiled. “I’m sure you’ll be pretty relieved.”