Getting Lucky (The Portland Pioneers Book 2) (6 page)

“A belt?” she asked skeptically. “Are you certain?”

He gave a little huff of annoyance—either at her, or the part he was unsuccessfully tugging at. She wasn’t sure.

“Still hovering,” he finally grunted. “And yes, I’m sure. Or would you like to get Cal on the phone to verify?” The last bit came out quite testily, and Maggie was very nearly delighted. He was so much more fun when he dropped the charming heartbreaker routine.

“Oh, no. I’m sure you’ve got it under control,” Maggie said airily. “I’ll just be over helping Rosa with the orders.”

But when Maggie ventured over to where Rosa was efficiently and quickly making a Denver omelet in one pan and a pancake in the other, there wasn’t really anything for her to do. Rosa had everything under control, which was pretty much par for the course.

Rosa was a genius in the kitchen, a wonder of efficiency and speed that even left Maggie bewildered occasionally. A single mom with a handful of a son, Rosa had come to Maggie looking for a job right before the Café opened. When Maggie had witnessed firsthand Rosa’s kitchen skills, she’d had to ask the obvious question. Why hadn’t Rosa tried to get a job at The Cliffs, the big restaurant on the hill? Lucas, the owner, was always looking for prime kitchen help and he also paid better, because the restaurant served dinner.

The answer had been a surprisingly simple one: Miguel, who was Rosa’s teenage son.

“I like to be home when he is,” Rosa had said simply, drying her hands on the towel hanging from the waistband of her apron. “He can so easily get into trouble.”

Maggie hadn’t needed to be lectured about the trouble a fifteen year old in Sand Point could get up to. She’d witnessed Tabitha raising hell firsthand, and had simply nodded.

Rosa made it possible for Maggie to not work twelve hours a day, every single day of the week. Affording her pay had been a little tricky at first, and Maggie appreciated more than Cal probably knew all those extra twenty dollar bills he’d liked to hide away in her purse when he thought she wasn’t looking, but in the end, it had been the right decision. Maggie knew that three years into the Café’s existence, she wouldn’t have still been open if it wasn’t for Rosa. Handling it all herself would have burned Maggie out long before now.

“No word from Cal?” Rosa asked as she flipped the pancake while barely batting an eye and poked at the omelet with the spatula in her other hand. “I know we managed breakfast okay, but without the grill. . .”

Maggie had come to the same conclusion as Rosa. Which was why she’d allowed Mr. I’m Too Sexy to poke around her kitchen.

“I’ve got it covered,” Maggie announced more confidently than she felt. While Noah might be certain the belt was the issue, he also played baseball for a living
.
How much could he really know about professional restaurant equipment? Even Cal had had to do major research when he’d designed and installed her kitchen at the Café, and Cal was an architect and had been working in his dad’s construction business since he was old enough to swing a hammer.

“Calvin isn’t coming?” Rosa asked again, more pointedly this time and Maggie couldn’t help but flush at her evasion being discovered.

“I haven’t heard from him,” she had to finally admit.

Maggie’s admission was enough to trump even the Denver omelet. Rosa turned from the temporary burners and pinned her with a sharp look. “You’ve had the strangest look on your face every time his name’s mentioned today. And now he’s not here. Tell me what happened.”

Glancing at the order tickets, Maggie pulled out a few pieces of thick sourdough bread and dipped them into the egg batter sitting on the counter. Letting the bread soak, she pulled out a new skillet and sliding next to Rosa like she’d never left, Maggie ladled in a scoop of clarified butter and heard it sizzle as it hit the pan.

Even though half her attention was clearly on the French toast she was cooking, Maggie had way too much additional brainpower left and she agonized over whether she should say anything to Rosa. She was a great employee and a good friend, but Cal was her
best
friend. They’d been through their whole lives together, practically. The years she’d been in San Francisco and he’d been studying architecture on the east coast were the only time they’d really spent apart.

“Nothing, really. I guess he must be busy.” Maggie knew she was a terrible liar and hoped that Rosa was preoccupied enough with finishing off her Denver omelet to realize it.

Maggie flipped her French toast, but didn’t miss the inquisitive glance Rosa shot her.

“That boy is never too busy for you,” Rosa said so matter-of-factly that Maggie’s stomach clenched at the thought this might no longer be true.

“He’s been really busy at the Sanderson job. I heard him say last night they’re about to lay some tile. Maybe he turned off his phone to concentrate.”

Rosa was not a stupid lady. Cal hadn’t really gotten his hands dirty in years. He had employees for that. “Maybe,” she murmured softly as she scooped softened honey butter onto her pile of pancakes and slid it under the heat lamp.

Returning her attention back to her French toast, Maggie grabbed a plate from the stack and let the pieces slide from the pan in a jumble of crisp, caramel edges and soft, buttery insides. She tapped the powdered sugar shaker, leaving only hints of the brown buttery crust behind, then turned to the fruit station, expertly wielding a small knife to dissect a fat strawberry and then fan out the slices onto the plate.

She’d just set the plate of French toast on the heated pass through when she heard his voice.

Wiping her hands on her apron and stupidly, self-consciously raising a hand to smooth the short blonde ponytail she’d put so little thought into this morning, Maggie headed into the dining room. Sure enough, Cal had clearly just walked through the door, greeting the various townspeople he knew with smiles and a handshake or two. Then his eyes reached hers and he flushed. “Maggie,” he said, and the apologetic tone in his voice only went a little bit to cooling her sudden burst of temper.

“Calvin,” she replied a lot more evenly than he deserved.

“I just got your messages. My phone crashed, I guess.” He shrugged like it was a minor inconvenience, when she’d been sweating and stressing all morning about the repair and then about losing his friendship.

This wasn’t the time or the place to let him know just where he could shove his stupid excuse, but she shot him a look that he’d definitely know how to interpret.

“How’s the fan?” Cal had the nerve to ask.

“It’s working,” a voice from behind her said, and she glanced back and very nearly gaped at Noah Fox, who was just coming out of the back, wiping grease-speckled hands on an old dish towel. “I had to reset the belt, but it appears to be fine now.”

Maggie turned to Cal, very curious to see what his reaction to this stranger fixing the
fan was. She expected shock. Maybe awe. She didn’t expect anger that evaporated almost as instantly as it appeared. Maggie was definitely planning on telling him what a jerk he was being, embroidered with lots of extra flourishes, when they were finally alone.

“Sounds like you saved the day,” Cal said, and she was further annoyed by the snide edge in his voice.

She
was supposed to be the one annoyed with Noah Fox.

Noah just shrugged. “I’ve got a knack for tinkering with things.”

“Sounds like a lot more than a knack,” Cal drawled, leaning back against the edge of a booth and crossing his arms over his chest. Maggie rolled her eyes at all this ridiculous alpha male posturing.

“Cal,” she snapped, “unless you want breakfast, no need for you to stay. And you,” she glanced pointedly at Noah, “get a free meal.”

Noah’s grin was brighter than the sun at the height of summer. “That sounds great. I’m starved.”

“Well sit down, and I’ll bring you something. How do you like your eggs?”

He slid into an empty booth and flashed her another smile. “Scrambled.”

Noah was still trying to reconcile the pissed-off, sharp-tongued Maggie from earlier with the soft, smiling woman who’d just offered to feed him, when the older, dark-haired waitress with “Janice” on her name tag dropped off a full plate of heavenly-smelling food.

A heaping mound of fluffy eggs sat next to crisp bacon and a pile of sausages, their skins crispy and crackling. Pancakes rounded out the plate, butter melting from their heat. A basic breakfast, maybe, but he’d eaten in a lot of crappy diners and had plenty of early morning room service deliveries in his years as a baseball player. Very rarely had a breakfast ever enticed him with just the aroma wafting from the plate.

“Coffee?” Janice asked with a hard-edged smile that told him she’d been serving for more years than this place had probably been open. He nodded and she set a mug down and filled it efficiently with not a single spilled drop.

He’d basically skipped dinner the night before in favor of the dark room and a handful of the pills that had sent him into a dreamless sleep. But he’d woken up this morning with no headache and hadn’t even had to squint in bright light of the tiny hotel bathroom.

All good progress. After he finally got the information he needed out of Maggie, he’d head down to San Francisco anyway and pay Dr. Singh a visit. Potentially this improvement meant his symptoms were finally disappearing. Maybe he could finally get cleared to participate in actual baseball activities.

Fear momentarily soured his stomach, as it always did, and he had to swallow hard to force it to pass. Picking up the mug, he took a large gulp of coffee and prayed it would do the trick. Then he picked up his fork and dug into the eggs.

He’d been hungry, but even hunger didn’t do justice to Maggie’s cooking. The eggs practically melted on his tongue. Picking up a piece of bacon, he took a bite off the crispy end and savored the perfect balance of salty pork fat and the faintest hint of maple and brown sugar. The sausages were a revelation of spices, subtle in one mouthful, aggressive with another. Noah savored them one bite at a time, practically hoarding them until he’d popped the last chunk into his mouth.

The pancakes? They were so sublime, he practically cried into his coffee as he ate them. He shouldn’t have been surprised, after everything else he’d eaten, that Maggie had put a subtle spin on them too, mixing the butter with rich honey and letting this heavenly mixture melt and seep into every air pocket and bubble. When he’d finally taken the last bite, he eyed the plate and wondered if anyone would find it weird if he licked it clean.

He was just reaching for it when Maggie slid into the booth opposite him. Glancing around, he realized the Café had mostly cleared out, and only a few stragglers like himself remained, basking in the feeling of being full of a wonderful breakfast.

With a smile and not a frown, she lost that pinched, anxious look in her face and he was reminded again how pretty she really was. Maybe not an attention-grabbing knockout like her older sister, but beautiful in her own quiet way—sunny blond hair cut in a long choppy bob and eyes so light a blue he was reminded of the water off the coast of Cozumel. In his mind, he dressed her up, painted her lips red, gave her a smoky eye and it wasn’t a stretch to believe she might turn heads the same way her sister did.

But that clearly wasn’t where Maggie’s desire and skill truly lay. Having just tasted her cooking for the first time, it was difficult to believe she could have picked any vocation better suited to her talents.

“How was your breakfast?” she asked, with another of those hesitant smiles, as if she was no longer sure what to make of him. And that made sense, he supposed, because he didn’t know what to make of himself anymore.

He also liked that she was honestly curious about his opinion; she wasn’t going to just rest on her obviously-considerable laurels. If he’d told her the sausages could have used more fennel seed, or the eggs more salt, or the pancakes were far too heavy, she would have just nodded seriously, taking mental notes behind those crazy-light eyes of hers that never seemed to miss a beat.

“It was really great. I don’t know when I’ve had better.”

Her answering smiled dumped his whole world upside-down. She wasn’t just quietly pretty; she was stunning. It took the pleased happiness of that smile to transform her face and light up the features he’d believed somewhat ordinary only a moment ago. Suddenly, he couldn’t turn back the clock and find her as passably attractive as he had only a few minutes earlier—even if he might be a hell of a lot more comfortable with it.

“We weren’t on our best game today,” she admitted wryly, and Noah had to wrap his mind around the possibility that her food got better, “but I think we righted the ship. Though I couldn’t have done it without your help.”

Janice swung by his table and with only a quick glance, refilled his coffee mug and set another in front of Maggie, filling it too. She lifted her mug to her lips and sipped with a grateful smile in her waitress’ direction.

“You take your coffee black, too,” he stated in surprise.

“You only have to cover up the taste of bad coffee,” Maggie said with a tiny shudder. It was unspoken that she wouldn’t ever serve anything substandard in her Café, and after that breakfast, Noah believed her.