On Lavender Lane (44 page)

A bonus was that while she was braising her chicken legs, which, admittedly, smelled insane, he was able to grill the chops. He might not be able to cook, but, hey, what guy hadn’t thrown a burger or steak on a grill?

Her fancy custard with the top she’d turned all crunchy with that blowtorch looked like something that you might find in one of the Frenchman’s chichi restaurants. But Lucas knew he had the crowd on his side when they applauded after he tossed that cognac into his pan and the flames exploded, making him glad he’d decided to leave Scout at Charity’s for the day.

And then it was time.

The judges did not appear to be taking this nearly as lightly as the spectators. Their expressions, as they tasted their way through the courses, remained as sober as…well, judges.

As he’d expected, Maddy’s tortilla soup won the first round for complexity and blending of flavors. But they said all good things about his, and even complimented him on the toasted butter crouton on top with the yogurt, which he figured said a lot for a guy who, although knowing his way around a can opener, had never known a kitchen mandoline existed until Maddy had pulled one out like a gunfighter pulling a Colt revolver out of her holster at high noon.

At first he was worried when the two women judges nearly had an orgasm over Maddy’s damn chicken legs. It was chicken, for Pete’s sake. How could it beat a grilled pork chop?

They praised his ingenuity in the stuffing, said lots of fancy culinary stuff about heat and texture and the marriage of flavors in the filling and the pepper rub. Which wasn’t the kind of marriage he was going for here, but he figured it was all good.

They all agreed that the glaze created by the barbecue sauce during the last fifteen minutes of grilling was pretty. And they praised the dirty rice. Then—hoo-yah!—gave that round to him.

Sax flashed him a thumbs-up. Even Maddy smiled at him and asked for the recipe, proving herself a graceful loser.

They were down to the final round.

This time Lucas’ dish was first. Although they did praise his showmanship, which was, after all, the freaking point, and said the hot bananas over the vanilla ice cream were delicious, the cookbook author worried about the calorie count from all the butter and brown sugar.

It’s dessert,
he wanted to tell her.
A special treat. Not something you eat every damn day.

But he smiled and thanked her for her comments, as both Sofia and Sedona had instructed him to do.

As the crème brûlée in its pretty white dish was set in front of the judges, the yard became unnaturally quiet. It was, Lucas thought, as if every single person there were holding his or her breath.

They were not alone.

He remembered the ceremony when he’d received his SEAL pin. His father had flown down to San Diego, and Lucas had to keep reminding himself, as he’d stood proudly at attention, not to lock his knees or he’d pass out.

That was the last time, until now, that he’d been afraid of
losing consciousness without having had something come crashing down on his helmet, which occasionally had happened in his former line of work.

All three judges cracked the caramelized top and dug in. Then exchanged puzzled glances.

Which, in turn, had all the spectators looking at one another, curious about what was obviously perplexing the judges. The guy from Astoria dug deeper and took another taste of the creamy custard. Then put his head together with the other two while they conferred.

And everyone at Lavender Hill Farm waited.

Finally, the chef from the Sea Mist, who’d seemed the nicest of the trio, asked Maddy, “Did you taste the custard before you flamed the topping?”

“No,” Maddy admitted. “Time was running out, and I’ve made this dish so many times before.…”

“You should have,” the cookbook author, whose face had wrinkled up like a prune at her first taste, chided. If she’d been a guy, Lucas would’ve wanted to punch her for the tone she used with Maddy.

“Definitely,” the chef from Astoria said. “Then you wouldn’t have made that mistake.”

“Mistake?” Maddy appeared surprised by the suggestion.

“Perhaps you’d better take a taste yourself,” the Sea Mist chef suggested. Asking for a fresh spoon, she held the dish out to Maddy, who approached the judges’ table and took a bite. And immediately shook her head. “I can’t believe it.”

“You mistook salt for sugar,” Astoria Guy said.

“Something we’ve all done,” Anne Taylor, the kinder, local chef, soothed.

Damn. He hadn’t wanted to win by default. Not by Maddy making what even he figured was a pretty boneheaded mistake. Especially since she’d told him she’d already done the same thing before.

Suspicion stirred.

He shot her a sharp look, but she only returned an innocent one in return.

The crowd went wild as the cookbook author announced him as the winner. Everyone was shaking his hand and patting him on the back and telling him they knew he could do it.
Yeah, right.
The last he’d heard, the odds had been ninety-eight percent in Maddy’s favor.

But he didn’t care about the judges, whom he did somehow manage to thank. He didn’t care about the betting that had been going on. Or all the people wanting to congratulate him. He thanked Sax, exchanging a guy hug, then moved on to Sofia and Sedona.

Then made his way through the crowd, which parted, to Maddy.

His Maddy.

“Congratulations,” she said.

“I had a lot of help.” More than he’d counted on. He held out a hand. “Now let’s go home.”

“We do have a wedding to plan,” she agreed.

Much, much later, as they lay amid the tangled sheets on the bed—with Scout, whom they’d picked up on the way to the cottage, snoring from the other room—Lucas looked down into that lovely face he’d never been able to put out of his mind and said, “You threw that dessert round. Didn’t you?”

Her answering smile lit up her eyes and her entire face. No one had ever looked at him with such a wealth of love, making him feel like the richest guy on the planet. “If you knew more about the culinary world, you’d know a good chef never gives away all her secrets.”

“You made that mistake on the French tarts,” he reminded her. “And even got fired for it. You’d never screw it up again. So just admit it. You threw the throw-down.”

“Why don’t you ask me again?” She laughed as she lifted her lips to his. “On our fiftieth anniversary?”

Belying the song lyrics about it never raining in California, a dark gray sky was weeping onto the black Suburban’s windshield as Marine Captain J. T. Douchett drove through rain-slicked streets to carry out his mission. A mission he’d been catapulted into a year ago. A mission without weapons, which, given that every Marine was a rifleman, was not one he’d prepared for at Officer Candidates School, the War College, or even during years of combat.

The rain was appropriate, he thought wearily as he pulled into the parking lot of a Denny’s restaurant. As tough as this assignment was, it always seemed a lot worse when a benevolent sun was shining and birds were singing.

The drizzle reminded him of home. Back in Shelter Bay, his father and brother Cole would’ve already gone out on their fishing boat. Maybe his grandfather, who often missed his days at sea, would have gone with them. The small coastal town would be coming to life—shopkeepers down on Harborview Drive would be opening their doors and lowering their bright awnings; beachcombers would be walking at the edge of the surf, gathering shells and agates; locals would be sitting around tables at the Grateful Bread, enjoying French toast and gossip while tourists lined up at the pier to go whale watching.

Memories of his hometown not only comforted him, they reminded him of his family, which drove home the significance
of this mission for which he definitely never, in a million years, would have volunteered.

But the first thing J.T. had learned at OCS was that every Marine was part of a larger picture. And the tradition of “Leave no Marine behind” was a sacred promise that went beyond the battlefield.

He and his passenger, a staff sergeant who, despite years of marching cadences still had the slightly bowed legs of a man who’d grown up riding horses in Abilene, retrieved their garment bags from the backseat. They entered the restaurant, walking past the tables to the men’s room, where they changed from their civilian clothes into high-necked dark blue jackets, dark blue pants with a bloodred stripe down the outside of each leg, and shoes spit-polished to a mirror gloss.

Although he could feel every eye in the place on them, J.T. put on a focused but distant stare and glanced neither left nor right as he walked straight back to the Suburban. Neither man spoke. There was no need. They’d been through this before. And it never got any easier, so why talk about it?

After being waved through Camp Pendleton’s main gate, passing a golf course, a McDonald’s, a Taco Bell, and a veterinarian’s clinic on the way to his destination, it occurred to J.T. how appearances could be deceiving.

The tree-lined streets he drove through, set on hillsides behind a lake shadowed by fog, with their manicured lawns and children’s play park, portrayed a sense of tranquility. It could, he thought as he turned onto Marine Drive, be any one of a million suburban neighborhoods scattered across the country.

What made his destination different from most was that these tile-roofed, beige stucco houses were home to warriors. Another reason he was grateful for the rain. On a sunny day, more people would be outside, and the sight of the black SUV carrying two Marines wearing dress blues would set off alarms that would spread like wildfire.

J.T. leaned forward, trying to read the house numbers through the slanting rain. He could have used the GPS, but found the computerized female voice a distraction in situations like these.

The house was located at the end of a cul-de-sac. A white Ford Escape with a child’s car seat in the back was parked in the driveway. A bumper sticker on the small SUV read
MY HEART BELONGS TO A U.S. MARINE.

Exchanging a look with the sergeant, J.T. pulled on his white cotton gloves and climbed out of the Suburban. The heels of his shiny shoes clicked on the concrete sidewalk.

A pot of red geraniums on the small covered porch added a bright spot to the gray day. A blue star flag, signifying a deployed family member, hung in the side window.

J.T. took a deep breath. He knew the sergeant standing beside him would be saying a prayer. Wishing he still possessed such faith, J.T. found his own peace by envisioning himself back home. The remembered tang of Douglas fir trees and brisk, salt-tinged sea air cleared his head.

Although he’d rather be back in Afghanistan, facing a horde of Taliban than be standing at this front door on this rainy California day, J.T. squared his shoulders and braced himself as he reached out a gloved hand to ring the bell and shatter yet another woman’s heart.

It wasn’t the same. J.T. wondered why he even thought it could be. Shelter Bay hadn’t changed. But
he
had.

Giving up on sleep, he crawled out of the rack at dawn and ran out of town to the coast, boots pounding the empty streets, across the bridge, and along the hard-packed sand at the ocean’s edge. He didn’t run for physical fitness, or to achieve any elusive runner’s high. The truth was, he was out in the morning fog, as he’d been every day since returning
home, trying to wipe out the memories that ran like an unending video loop in his head. Even as he feared they’d always be with him, J.T. continued to run. And run. And run.

Arriving back in town, he passed the blue and white welcome sign, announcing that the sleepy Oregon coastal town he once couldn’t wait to escape was not only the Pacific Northwest’s whale watching capital, but home to Navy Cross recipient Sax Douchett.

Knowing how his former SEAL brother hated that hero tag, J.T. suspected that Sax cringed every time he was forced to drive past the sign.

Another sign he ran past was yet more proof that while
J.T
. may have changed during the dozen-plus years he’d been away, not much else had. The Rotary Club continued to meet on Tuesdays at the Sea Mist restaurant, the historical society on the first Thursday of every month at the museum, and summer concerts were still held on Sunday afternoons at Evergreen Park.

Although the calendar might say summer, a cool, misty rain blowing in from the Pacific had followed him, dampening his hair and brown T-shirt as he ran along Harborview Drive.

Again, everything looked nearly the same as it had when he’d left town in search of adventure. It was high tourist season, and although it was still early and wet, people were out in full force, crowding the sidewalks as they shopped in quaint little galleries and souvenir shops, standing shoulder to shoulder at the seawall taking photos of the sea lions lounging on the docks, and watching with binoculars for the resident whales that made Shelter Bay their home.

A fat orange cat lounged in the window of Tidal Wave Books next to a stack of Gabriel St. James’ new photo book. The former jarhead (not that there was really any such thing as a
former
Marine), was J.T.’s brother Cole’s best friend. While in Shelter Bay for Cole’s wedding—which J.T., who’d been in Afghanistan at the time, had
missed—St. James had fallen in love with a local veterinarian and stayed here.

When he went inside to buy a copy of the book, the friendly store owner chatted away as she rang up the sale. But although he could see her lips moving, J.T. couldn’t hear a word she said over the roaring that was like surf in his ears as another memory flashed through his mind.

When a pregnant wife had asked to spend the night before her husband’s funeral next to the flag-draped casket, J.T. had sneaked her into the funeral home. Not wanting her to have to sleep on the hard tile floor, he’d gone to Walmart for an air mattress, pillow, and sheets. Until he’d stood in the aisle, he’d never realized sheets came in so many damn colors. Since women liked flowers, he’d grabbed the ones with roses, which she’d seemed to appreciate.