A Cowboy in the Kitchen Read online

  She felt for the little girl who’d lost her mother. Annabel knew what that was like.

  “Normally I wouldn’t take this,” she said, tucking the check in the back pocket of her jeans. “But things have been slow around here for the past few months since Gram got sick and didn’t tell anyone. We could use the money.”

  He nodded and turned to leave.

  “You don’t mind that you’re not getting Gram as your cooking teacher?” she asked. Have you thought about me once in all these years? Why did you call a halt to...things that night?

  She knew why—thought she did anyway. Because it had dawned on him that he was getting hot and heavy with Geekabel. She’d just happened to be in the right place at the right time. He’d been grief-stricken over his brother’s death and out of his mind; she’d been there with whatever comfort he’d needed. Then he must have opened his eyes and seen a too-skinny, frizzy-haired girl he’d never even noticed before, realized he’d been about to make love to Geekabel, sent her home and taken up with sexy, stacked Lorna Dunkin, with her platinum blond hair and 32-D chest and high heels. Annabel doubted that West even remembered her at all.

  He turned back and held her gaze so intensely she had to look away. “I still think about that chili con carne you made me the day my brother died. I’ve never forgotten how good it was or how it actually managed to distract me for a minute from my grief. And you were how old, barely eighteen?”

  So he did remember. An image pushed into her mind, of finding him sitting atop that big rock near the field where her gram had always sent her to collect chickweed and henbit, his arms wrapped around his knees, his head down, his back shaking. West Montgomery, sobbing, his older brother, an army soldier, killed in Afghanistan.

  He shifted, straightening his Stetson and digging his hands in pocket. “Anyway.”

  “Anyway,” she said, unable to stop the memory of the way he’d held her seven years ago in the barn where he’d hidden out during most of the sympathy visits to his parents’ house. He’d eaten the chili and they’d talked some, and she’d known he wanted to say thank you but couldn’t speak, wanted comfort but couldn’t ask for it, so he’d just hugged her tightly and held on for a full minute, Annabel gripping his shoulders. He’d kissed her then, her knees actually buckling from the surprise, the sensation, the dream, and he’d picked her up and laid her down on the blanket in the straw.

  She shook herself out of the memory and thought back to what he said, about her chili distracting him from his grief. Was that why he wanted to learn to cook? To help with his loss of his late wife? He didn’t look sad. If anything, he looked...worried. He hadn’t said he wanted to learn to cook. He said he needed to. There was a story there, she’d bet on it.

  He pulled a tissue from the pocket of his leather jacket and leaned over, dabbing it at her cheek. “Batter,” he said. “See you tomorrow at six.”

  Annabel watched him head back up the path and get into his silver pickup. What the heck had she just agreed to?

  * * *

  At five-thirty on Monday, West took a bite of the homemade chicken tenders he’d cooked for his daughter and shook his head. What the blast was he doing wrong? He’d followed the recipe he found online. Put chicken in beaten egg, coat with flour, then fry in oil in a pan. What was so hard? Why didn’t it taste like the chicken he had last week at Hurley’s? It didn’t even come close to the chicken dinners Lorna had served, which, granted, were nuggets from a big bag in the freezer. He’d relied on frozen, takeout and hot dogs too often. No more. But proof that he needed a cooking teacher was on the plate in front of him. And his daughter.

  He looked over at six-year-old Lucy sitting across from him at the dining room table in their ranch house, his heart clenching as always at how much he loved her, how beautiful she was, her dark ringlets bouncing on her narrow shoulders with every poke of her fork at the green beans she wasn’t eating. She’d had four bites. According to Lucy’s pediatrician at her last checkup, that was perfectly normal for a six-year-old. She’d eaten two bites of the baked potato, which wasn’t quite soft enough, even though he’d followed an online recipe to the letter—wrap in foil and bake for fifty minutes at 425 degrees—and then added some extra butter to make up for it. She’d eaten two bites of chicken. And she’d taken one sniff of a green bean and snuck it under the table to an always-hungry Daisy, their beagle.

  “One more bite of chicken?” he said to Lucy.

  She smiled, the dimple that matched his popping out in her left cheek, her big, round hazel-green eyes, just like her mother’s, darting to her lap. “Okay, Daddy.”

  He watched her pick up a piece of the chicken with her fingers and surreptitiously slide her hand under the table where he knew Daisy was waiting. “Lucy Montgomery,” he chastised, but couldn’t help the smile.

  Hell, he didn’t want to eat his tough, bland dinner either. He scooped up Lucy from the table and held her tight, her arms around his neck the best feeling in the world. “You be a good girl for Miss Letty. She’s going to watch you while I’m at a cooking class.”

  Annabel Hurley came to mind, tall and curvy, with that porcelain skin and long, silky auburn hair. He could still remember wrapping his hands in that hair, the cocoa-butter scent of it, the feel of her soft skin. The sight of her shyly taking off her sweater in the barn loft, the lacy white bra driving him mad with desire for her. If he could go back in time seven years ago, he’d have handled that night differently, wouldn’t have let things have gone that far, no matter how badly he’d wanted things to have gone much, much further. But not with Annabel Hurley. Then again, if he could go back, there’d be no Lucy. That wasn’t anything he wanted to imagine.

  “Will you learn to cook ice cream?” Lucy asked, slipping Daisy another bite of chicken. Lucy’s favorite thing on earth—besides a tree to climb—was a hot-fudge sundae.

  “I will,” he said, a chill snaking up his spine as he remembered his last conversation with Raina Dunkin, Lucy’s grandmother—and Lorna’s mother.

  No young child should be having a hot fudge sundae at eleven o’clock in the morning! Raina had screeched at him in her high-pitched Texas drawl two days ago. She’d barged in for “an impromptu visit to check on my grandchild,” in her trademark silk pantsuit and heels, and didn’t even say hello to Lucy before asking Lucy to hand over the bowl of ice cream and then dumping it in the sink.

  Furious, West had told Lucy as calmly as he could to go play in her room while he talked to Nana. The moment the girl left the room, Raina had stabbed her manicured finger at him and said, You listen to me, West. You’d better start taking proper care of your daughter or Landon and I will have no choice but to petition for custody. We’ve given you plenty of time to adjust to being a single father. But it’s constant hot dogs and candy. And now it’s ice cream before lunch, which I have no doubt will be a fast-food burger. And her hair. God, West. Brush the girl’s hair. Put it in a ponytail. And throw out those damn raggedy green pants already!

  How he’d held his temper was beyond him. First of all, it’s Saturday, he’d snapped. She can have messy hair if she wants and wear her favorite pants. Second of all, I’m doing the best I can, he’d added, anger—and shame—burning in his gut.

  Your best isn’t good enough, now, is it? she said. And if you’d watch her more closely, she wouldn’t have scrapes and marks all over her legs like some wild boy.

  West loved to watch his daughter race around the yard and the playground structure after Daisy, following the beagle down the slide. Yeah, Lucy landed badly sometimes, and there were scrapes and cuts and bruises. When they played hide-and-seek, he always knew he’d find her hiding in the crab apple tree, so high up that sometimes it scared him. But Lucy was happy and loved and cared for. He had the love part of fatherhood down pat; it was the rest he wasn’t great at. He mangled meals and resorted to fast food or Hurley’s too many times
. And he had trouble with the knots in Lucy’s hair, so he let the shoulder-length ringlets do their own thing, resulting in weird tufts that his sitter would fix if she could. Miss Letty was a great sitter, kind and patient, and lived just five minutes down the road at the next ranch, but she’d said she’d never been much of a cook and West had to leave meals for her to heat up for Lucy.

  My disappointment of a daughter couldn’t even beat an egg, Raina had continued, but at least she had Lucy looking presentable in public. Get your act together, Weston Montgomery, or I will see you in court. She’d turned and stalked to the front door.

  So much for his temper. Don’t you ever refer to Lucy’s mother as a disappointment again, he’d said through gritted teeth at Raina’s back, his anger reaching the boiling point.

  His and Lorna’s marriage hadn’t been good, and Lorna had told him she was leaving permanently—and leaving Lucy behind—just a day before the car accident that had taken her life. But preserving a good memory of Lorna for his daughter was important to West, and no one, especially not Raina’s mother, who had a history of slinging cruelty, would disparage his child’s mother.

  Raina had rolled her eyes and stormed out and West had needed to do something physical to get his anger out, so he’d taken Lucy over to Miss Letty’s for an hour and then ridden fence along his vast property, mending and hammering his frustration out.

  West vs. Parents. Story of his life. Lorna’s wealthy, powerful parents had never liked him. Not only had his family been from the wrong side of the tracks in Blue Gulch, but he was the Montgomery family’s black sheep. He and his own parents had never gotten along well; they’d lost their golden boy and had been left with the troublemaker when West was nineteen. Back then, West could imagine his father wishing it had been West who’d been killed overseas in Afghanistan, and his mother responding: As if West had it in him to fight for his country in the first place.

  They’d never said that, but they might as well have. And before he could even try to show them who he was, they’d hightailed it out of Blue Gulch to start fresh in Austin, where Garrett had always wanted to live; a way to honor him, West figured. And to get away from West and his pregnant girlfriend and the gossip in town. But just a few months in, a fire had broken out from faulty wiring, and West had buried his parents, everything in him numb. Lorna and the Dunkins hadn’t had much patience for him and his grief, which had turned him even more inward.

  His relationship with the Dunkins hadn’t improved much over the years either; he’d gotten their “little girl” pregnant and stolen her dreams, they’d said, then trapped her on a ranch in a life she never wanted ten miles from town, where they lived in a huge Colonial.

  He couldn’t lose Lucy—and not to the Dunkins. He’d do whatever he had to keep her. Which meant learning to cook. He’d tried hiring a housekeeper after Lorna’s death, but one woman had harshly scolded Lucy for leaving her toys out in the playroom and made elaborate meals that West had told her neither he nor Lucy wanted to eat, such as beef bourguignon. The next housekeeper forgot Lucy was allergic to soy and made her some inedible vegetable-fruit smoothie with soy milk, which landed Lucy in the emergency room with severe stomach pains and a strained visit from the Dunkins about his carelessness.

  He would learn to cook.

  Taking a class from a Hurley would kill two birds too. Everyone in town, including the Dunkins, liked Gram Hurley, respected her, which was saying something. Essie Hurley had never been wealthy, but she was wise and had been something of a grandmother to most everyone in Blue Gulch in some way or another. Essie had once saved Raina Dunkin from public embarrassment; Lorna had told West all about it when they first got married. Raina would likely back off from threatening to sue for custody once they found out Essie’s granddaughter, with her fancy Dallas culinary school background, was giving him cooking lessons. If they didn’t, well, West had taken over his parents’ small cattle ranch and had turned it into a very prosperous operation; he had the money to hire a good lawyer, but the toll it would take on West, the distraction from work and from Lucy, would just about kill him.

  He’d learn to cook. He’d figure out how to get the knots out of Lucy’s hair, even if the detangler the clerk in Walgreens told him about was no match for the thick curls.

  What he wouldn’t do was let himself fall for Annabel—again. He was done with romance, done with relationships, done with disappointing people. And besides, things with Annabel just cut too deep in too many ways. Where she was concerned, there was too much he wanted to forget.

  Anyway, after the way he’d treated Annabel seven years ago, he was surprised she hadn’t hit him over the head with that wooden spoon she’d been gripping yesterday.

  West heard Miss Letty’s car arrive and took Lucy out to meet her, the fresh April air a relief from the smell of rubbery chicken.

  Lucy bounded over to her sitter, a tall woman in her early fifties with a long gray braid, jeans and sneakers for Lucy’s outdoor play, and a warm smile. “Miss Letty, come play house with Daisy. I’m the mother and Daisy is the daughter and you’ll be the grandmother.” Lucy turned to Daisy, who eyed her skeptically. “Okay, Daisy, I said only one treat after lunch.”

  Miss Letty smiled and followed after Lucy, who pulled her by the hand. “You go ahead,” Letty said to West.

  He hugged and kissed Lucy goodbye, told Letty he’d pay her extra if she’d clean up the dinner dishes, which got him a wink and a sure thing, and then got in his pickup. Time to learn how not to screw up fried eggs.

  Chapter Two

  Yesterday, when Gram was reminding Annabel of how the restaurant worked, Essie Hurley had made clear that Mondays were a real day off—no prep, no cleaning, no ordering supplies. In fact, family who lived in the Victorian were only allowed in the kitchen on Mondays to cook simple meals for themselves. So at five-thirty, Annabel was surprised to come down the back stairs into the kitchen and find her younger sister, Clementine, kneeling in front of the sink and meticulously cleaning the little red rooster cabinet knobs. Twenty-four-year-old Clementine wore gray yoga pants and a long pale pink T-shirt, her feet in orange flip-flops and her long dark hair in a high ponytail.

  “Clem?” Annabel said, watching her sister dip a rag into a small bucket of cleaning solution and go over the rooster’s tiny tail.

  Clementine turned around and shot Annabel a tight smile. “I forgot to clean these last night,” she said, moving on to the next cabinet knob. “Aren’t they cute? Georgia sent them from Houston a few months ago.” She smiled again and returned to work, scrubbing at the rooster’s crown.

  Something was wrong. Annabel had been gone for seven years, and she and Clementine had never been as close as Annabel had hoped, even when they’d lived under one roof, but she knew when Clementine was holding back. Maybe Clem was angry at her for staying away so long. For leaving the restaurant and Gram on her shoulders all these years. It was hard to tell with Clem. Clem was a “fine, everything’s fine” kind of person, the sort who’d tell you “no worries!” with a bright smile and then go off alone to cry over something dreadful that had just happened to her, like when her birth mother had stood her up for their twice-a-year reunions, only to text an hour later to say something had come up. Annabel’s parents had adopted Clementine when she was eight from a bad foster-care situation, and though Clem’s birth mother was cagey and distant, Clementine had worked hard, often fruitlessly, to keep up some kind of relationship with the woman.

  If Clem was cleaning cabinet pulls—and on a Monday—something had happened.

  “Is everything okay with you?” Annabel asked.

  “I’m fine. Just worried about Gram.” She glanced back at Annabel. “I’m fine, really.”

  Annabel wished her sister would open to her. But Annabel knew she couldn’t rush things. This morning she and Clementine had taken Gram to an appointment at the county hospital; th
ree hours later, after testing and poking, they were sent home, Gram told to rest as much as possible until the test results came in. Clementine had been quiet on the ride to the hospital, quiet there, quiet on the way back.

  Now she glanced at the big yellow clock on the wall above the stove. “I promised Mae Tucker I’d babysit the triplets tonight. See you around midnight.” With that, Clementine bolted up, dumped out the bucket and stored it away, then dashed up the back stairs.

  It’ll take time to rebuild your relationship with Clem, Gram had said during lunch earlier. Don’t give up on her.

  Annabel wouldn’t. Ever. She’d never give up on family.

  And she’d never give up on Hurley’s Homestyle Kitchen either. Since the restaurant wasn’t doing well, it was up to Annabel to keep the kitchen going. Folks counted on Hurley’s to be open Tuesday through Sundays for lunch and dinner, and Annabel didn’t want to let her Gram down.

  West Montgomery wants to learn how to cook, does he? Gram had said that afternoon, taking a nibble of the potato chowder Annabel had made her. Teach him everything I taught you, Essie had added. The tips and secrets. The things you can’t learn by a recipe alone. I know he hurt you, Annabel. But I’ve seen him around town with that little girl of his and it would melt the heart of Constance Brichard. Constance Brichard was the grumpiest person in town, an elderly widow who was always threatening to sic her mean little Chihuahua on kids for making too much noise at the bus stop across the street from her house.

  Which made things worse for Annabel. If West could get Constance Brichard to crack a smile, what would he do to her?

  Annabel put on her favorite yellow apron and glanced at the clock—ten minutes till West walked through the door, daughter-sized handprint apron on.

  She pulled the list she’d made from her jeans pocket. Breakfasts: cheese omelet, scrambled eggs, quiche Lorraine, French toast. Bacon. Biscuits with apple butter. Tonight’s cooking lesson would be about breakfast. Annabel was about to open the walk-in refrigerator for the eggs and milk and butter, then realized if West was paying her a thousand dollars to learn how to make an omelet and biscuits, he could probably use a tutorial about the ingredients themselves, what to buy, how to store them.