One More Taste (24 page)

Maybe she should be.

And there he had it, the answer to his own question. What he needed, more than anything, more than smoked pork or mole or Frito pie, or even peach soup, was her.

He studied her as she perused the menu, feeling like he was seeing her for the first time all over again, marveling at his epiphany.
She's what you need, what you've always needed but could never find.

“What should we get?” she said without looking up.

He had to clear his throat before speaking. “Anything you want.”

She shone her bright green eyes at him. “I like the sound of that.”

So did he. “Tell me, Emily. What are you feeding me next?”

Her expression turned saucy. She gave a toss of her hair as she signaled the waiter. “I guess you'll have to wait and see. But I think you're going to love it.”

“I think I already do.”

 

Chapter Thirteen

For the first time since moving to Briscoe Ranch, Knox didn't sleep a wink. Rather, he'd lain in bed, replaying every moment he'd spent with Emily in his mind. He'd never seen it coming, how deeply he'd grown to feel about her. He'd come a long way from the restlessness and lust that had led to their brief, intense sex in his childhood bedroom.

Oh, the lust was still there, all right, but it had evolved into so much more. When they'd returned to the resort after dinner, it had been torture to walk her to her office, where she'd insisted she needed to go in order to make notes about upcoming menus she was planning, and leave her there—when all he wanted to do was press her to the wall and kiss her. He wanted to gather her up in his arms and cart her off to his bed where they could dissolve into a naked, sweaty mess of passion, then lie in the dark and talk for hours about Hong Kong noodle makers and wines and fishing until the sun rose.

Are you ready to let me feed you like you need to be fed?

Yes, by God, he was.

At dawn, Knox gave up the fruitless pursuit of sleep and dressed in his running clothes and shoes, then stepped outside into the foggy morning. He stood a long time and stared at the lake, considering his next move. Usually, no matter how late he'd gone to bed the night before, or how fitfully he'd slept, he loved the shot of energy being up this early infused him with. The illusion of beginning at the starting line of the day instead of coming in during the middle of the race gave him a better sense of control. But he couldn't get Emily out of his head.

After a brief stretch, he took off jogging down his driveway. As he turned onto the road, he touched the sign indicating that Briscoe Ranch Resort was three miles ahead. The perfect distance for a morning jog. Perhaps putting in a few hours at the office would give him a much-needed reprieve from his wayward thoughts about Emily. And there was plenty of work to be done, especially since the equity firm had approved a plan for repairs that would keep the resort open, before launching into a three-hundred-room expansion and complete remodeling of the main building, and the bids would be coming in any day on revamping the golf course into a competitive one that rivaled the best in the world.

The resort office was as quiet as one might expect on an early Saturday morning and smelling faintly of brewing coffee. Knox snagged the spare suit he kept in his office, then detoured to the employee locker room on the basement level for a shower.

He couldn't help but glance into the catering kitchen as he passed. Emily's domain. On a whim, he ground to a stop. With a look over his shoulder, dogged by the illogical feeling that he was trespassing, he stepped inside.

The kitchen was a sea of spotless, gleaming stainless steel—a blank canvas for Emily's artistry. How late had she stayed the night before, scribbling notes? She'd had to be exhausted when she finally went home. He glanced through the window into her office. In his mind's eye, he could see her at her desk, bent over her computer, typing out ingredient lists and flavor profiles with the passion of a mad genius.

Setting his spare suit on the nearest counter, he took a step closer to her office. The top edge of her sofa came into view. Haylie had told him during their tour of the resort that Emily slept there often. At the time, he'd thought of that as evidence of Emily's ambition. But that was before he'd seen the world-weary look in her eyes the night before, when she'd spoken of the abusive relationship her friend was in. The words she'd chosen and the look on her face made it clear that her knowledge of battered women's mentality was rooted in personal experience.

What if she didn't sleep in her office because of the long hours she worked? Rather, what if she worked those long hours and slept in her office because there was someone at her home from whom she was trying to escape? What if she were asleep on the sofa right now?

Heart racing, he crept closer, torn between a heady desire to discover what she looked like as she slept and the hope that the sofa was empty and his instinct about her home life was wrong.

The breath caught in his throat at the sight of her bare knee poking out from beneath a quilt.
Damn it.

Something definitely wasn't right, and he intended to find out what it was. Yes, Emily deserved privacy. She deserved better than a boss who snooped into her personal life. But she also deserved a good home situation instead of working herself to the bone and bunking in her office night after night. He grabbed his suit from the counter and tiptoed out of the kitchen.

He showered and changed with mechanical indifference, his mind a swirling stew of questions and ideas on how to go about his search for answers.

When he passed the door to the kitchen again, his steps faltered at the sight of her office lights on, the door open. He swallowed hard. Talking to her now would be a mistake. He couldn't take the chance of letting on to her about his concerns, not when he wasn't even sure there was something to be concerned about.

He kept walking and didn't stop until he was in his office with the door closed. Emily's personnel file was easy to find in the company's human resources database. He typed her address into an internet search engine.

The address came up as a business, not a residence. Murph's, a boxing gym in a dead-end town forty-five minutes from the resort. He clicked the street view on the map and stared at the two-story building, a banner splashed over a window advertising that it was open twenty-four hours, seven days a week. The ground floor was dominated by a boxing ring surrounded by free weights and pulley machines, while the floor-to-ceiling windows on the second floor revealed empty fitness classrooms with walls of mirrors.

It didn't make sense.

On a whim, he started a new search, this time for her name. There were several
Emily Fords
in Texas, and it only took a few clicks for him to decide that wading through the Facebook pages and high school photos of random
Emily
s was a poor use of his time. Instead, he navigated to a private investigation database he'd once seen Shayla use to research a potential employee for the firm.

The first mention of an
Emily Ford
with her birthday and social security number happened thirteen years earlier, the year she'd started culinary school when she was eighteen. She'd never owned property, never purchased or leased a car. She had a credit card, with a credit history also beginning at age eighteen, as well as a bank account. Before that, there was no record of her in Texas or otherwise—not even a birth certificate or a high school transcript. It was as though she'd materialized from thin air when she turned eighteen. That's when he noticed that the social security number on record had also belonged to another Emily Ford, one who'd died more than fifty years ago.

After nearly an hour of digging and crosschecking the information he found, he could no longer deny what his findings were telling him. Whoever the woman who fixed his meals each day was, her real name wasn't Emily Ford.

He thought back to their first encounter when he'd cut her down with questions about why she was holding herself back, why she hadn't made a name for herself, if she was such an extraordinary chef. Now it made sense. Whoever she really was, she must have had a good reason to forge all identifying information about herself and disappear into the hills of Texas to toil away anonymously at a resort as a catering chef, careful not to draw too much attention to herself.

It didn't take him long to connect the rest of the dots. He could think of only one reason that a woman would forge her identity as Emily had. Escaping an abuser. No wonder she'd sounded so intimately familiar with the domestic abuse her friend was suffering.

He stood, his instincts urging him to immediate action. He scribbled Emily's address of record onto a sticky note, then stuffed it into his pocket. He strode from the room, summoning a Cab'd driver using the app on his phone as he walked. Of all the days to have left his truck at his house.

Ty stood in the doorway to his office across the hall as though he'd been waiting for Knox to emerge. Ever since they'd clashed after the meeting with the structural engineers and their mentor/ingénue illusion had fallen away, Ty had watched Knox like a hawk, all day, every day. Knox wouldn't be surprised if Ty were rifling through Knox's desk drawers every chance he got. Knox tried to take Ty's overbearingness for what it was, the last, gasping power play of a defeated man. Soon enough, Ty would be gone, and Knox would have free rein of the place.

Ty nodded to Haylie's empty desk. “I've been meaning to talk to you about Haylie. You've got to rein her in. Maybe you haven't noticed, but yesterday was her third late arrival since you hired her, and that's not even mentioning how many days she's taken an extended lunch. I love that girl to death, but I told you she's the type to take advantage of a situation if you let out too much leash.”

Given Ty's imperious ways and the all-consuming distraction that Emily had become, Knox had forgotten all about his often-absent secretary. Though he chafed at Ty comparing his own daughter to a dog on a leash, that didn't mean Ty wasn't right about Knox needing to hold Haylie accountable as he would any other employee. As soon as possible, he'd sit her down and lay out some ground rules. But not today. Not when Emily's possible danger crowded his every thought.

“Where ya headed?”

Knox closed his office door and kept moving. “I'm going to lunch.”

“It's nine in the morning.”

That late already?

“Breakfast, then,” Knox tossed over his shoulder as he pushed out the door to the lobby. His Cab'd app said a driver was still ten minutes away, but maybe the wait would give him time to figure out what to do or say to Emily now that he knew the truth.

 

Chapter Fourteen

Knox pulled his truck in front of Murph's Gym and confirmed what he knew he'd find. That there was no apartment to be seen either behind or above or next to the gym. Even if there had been apartments for rent, there was no way a resort executive lived on this rundown shop-lined street of a lower-income San Antonio suburb. He knew what Emily's salary was.

He leaned against the hood of his truck and feigned casualness as he watched the smattering of men—and one woman—bust their tails in the sparse, no-nonsense gym that had nary a circuit training machine in sight amongst the free weights and pulleys and punching bags. Two men sparred inside the boxing ring. He busied himself watching them while he pondered what an idiot he'd been to cross the line and spy on Emily.

Thankfully, she'd never find out.

The rumble of a bus engine caught his attention and he looked down the street. As the bus pulled away from the curb, Emily came into view, walking in his direction on the sidewalk across the street three blocks down.

He jolted to his feet, cursing, his heart racing. He flung the truck door open and dove in. In all his idiocy, he hadn't considered what he'd do if he saw her. For a man who prided himself on always having his shit together, he sure was spiraling into a reckless fool. Over a woman, of all the pedestrian reasons. Men only fell to pieces over women in fairy tales. Not in real life, and definitely not a man such as Knox. Even in high school and college, with his dangerous combination of immature teenage brain, surging testosterone, and insatiable sexual appetite, he'd chosen his girlfriends and bedmates prudently and had never spiraled out of control. Never.

Except that now, Emily was driving him to the brink of insanity. He'd entertained more foolish thoughts and crossed more ethical and moral lines in the past two weeks than the rest of his life.

He turned the key in the ignition, but all the engine did was click.

He threw his back against the seat and looked to the truck roof, as though Heaven itself were hovering over him like a cloud. “Really, Dad? Because she can't catch me here, okay? Let me start the truck and get out of here.”

Holding his breath, he turned the key again.
Click.

“Damn it, Dad. What do you want from me?”

He looked down the street. Emily was a block closer. Any moment, she'd spot him and then what? What could he say that wouldn't make him seem like a creepy stalker?

Nothing, because that's exactly what you are. Idiot.

So this was what it was like to hit rock bottom. He needed to remember the way this felt so he could never fall into the same well of shame again.

Closing his eyes, he gave the ignition one more try, praying as he turned the key. Nothing. When he opened his eyes again, the meathead who'd been standing behind the front desk at the gym was standing outside his door, now with a pair of dark sunglasses sitting atop a crooked nose that gave the impression he'd spent his fair share of time in the gym's boxing ring. The embroidery on his gray polo shirt read
Murph
.

Tamping his impatience to have to field questions from a stranger when what he really needed to do was get the hell out of there, Knox rolled down the window. “Yes?”