Читать книгу Dangerous Disguise - Marie Ferrarella, Marie Ferrarella - Страница 10

“I hear the new guy’s pretty resourceful.”

Maren had barely touched the doorknob before she heard the deep voice. She grinned as she entered the office she shared with her favorite person in the whole world.

As she opened the door Joe Collins turned to face her. It was the accountant’s first visit to the office in two days. Things never seemed quite right without him. In his later fifties, Joe still gave the impression of being larger than life. His very presence filled up a room for her, the way it had from the very beginning when he had been her entire world.

She owed him everything.

Maren paused to kiss his cheek before tossing her purse onto her desk and stripping off her jacket. “Nobody told me you were coming in today.”

“I sneaked in like the wind,” he said, winking.

After hanging up her jacket, she pulled her chair away from the desk and sat down. Slowly she felt the tension leach from her body, the way it always did whenever Papa Joe was around. He made her feel that everything was going to be all right, as long as he was close by.

“The wind, huh?” She raised one amused eyebrow. “Then how did you hear about the new guy?”

“Wind with ears?”

His big, booming laugh wrapped itself around her, just as his arms had all those years ago when he had taken her home from the hospital. From the hospital and into his heart and life. He’d saved her from a system that could have very easily stripped her soul if she’d been placed with the wrong people. Or put her in one foster home after another.

She never tired of hearing the story, even though it had gone through many phases over the years. When she’d first asked the man she always thought of as her father why she didn’t have a mother when all the other girls in her kindergarten class had one, he’d told her that she was secretly a princess.

As she listened with wide eyes, he’d gone on to tell her that her mother had been a queen in a distant land. A queen who had saved her from a big, bad ogre, but she’d gotten mortally wounded in doing so. He was the knight who had come by, found her and slain the ogre. Maren remembered always applauding when he came to this part. The dying queen entrusted her infant daughter to him, making the knight pledge to guard her always.

Periodically, as she grew older and brought her questions to him, Papa Joe would revise the story, trimming away the fairy tale and replacing it with a little more of the truth. Then came the time when she’d turned thirteen. After he had swallowed his embarrassment and gone with her to purchase her very first bra, because she’d pressed so hard, he’d told her the complete truth.

Taking a shortcut through a dimly lit alley to his apartment one rainy night, he’d happened across a teenage prostitute named Glory just after she’d given birth. Her pulse was reedy and she’d lost a great deal of blood. He’d known she was dying. Without hesitation, he’d hailed a cab and taken both mother and child to the hospital. He’d left the complaining cabdriver with a huge tip.

But it had been too late for Glory. She’d lost too much blood and had died within the hour. Because there’d been some misunderstanding at the hospital, the attending physician and emergency room nurse had both thought that he was the newborn’s father. Something had stopped him from setting the record straight. Alone, with no family of his own, he’d impulsively gone along with the error.

“You wrapped your perfect little hand around my finger and I was just a goner,” he told her time and again. That part of the story never changed.

For three days, he’d come back to see the baby. On the fourth day, she’d been discharged into his care. He’d paid the medical bills out of his own pocket, making arrangements with the cashier to make monthly payments. And then he’d taken his new daughter home with him.

Papa Joe had also paid for her mother’s funeral. For three months after that, he’d tried to locate Glory’s family. Even hired a private investigator to look into the matter, all to no avail. After three months, he’d stopped holding his breath and finally given up. The baby he’d saved from suffering the same fate as her mother was his.

He’d called her Maren after his mother and given her the last name of “Minnesota” because that was the state they’d been living in when he’d found her. He’d given her her own last name so that she could always feel independent, even though he’d promised to always be there for her if she needed him.

She’d grown up adoring him.

For a second Maren leaned back in her chair, not realizing until this moment just how tired she actually was. But there was no time to kick back. The unexpected run to the E.R. had put her at least three hours behind in her work. There were phone calls to return and orders to place if the restaurant was to keep on running.

She addressed the question Papa Joe had first posed. “The new guy’s cool under fire.”

Saving the figures he’d just input, he studied his adopted daughter’s face as he asked, “Speaking of which, I hear he put out a grease fire yesterday. What was that all about?”

She’d looked into the fire mishap as thoroughly as she could and had drawn a conclusion she didn’t intend to repeat to either restaurant owner, Shepherd or Rineholdt. Although it was the former who was most likely to show up. To her knowledge, Rineholdt had never put in an appearance, either here or at the other branch of the restaurant. He was the epitome of a silent partner, which was fine with her. Over the years she’d come to think of the restaurant as hers to run. Hers to make thrive. She thought of it as a living entity.

“That was just Max being careless.” He had been the one who’d left the oil standing next to Rachel’s elbow.

Joe frowned. Maren had too soft a heart despite the tough-as-nails image she attempted to project. “You’re going to have to have a talk with that man.”

“Already done,” she responded crisply. The man had been warned and had promised to be more careful in the future.

Going into the desktop, she pulled up the software program she needed.

Both she and Joe knew that the head chef hated being taken to task about anything. But the man knew better than to throw a fit or to threaten to leave Rainbow’s End. He was too afraid that he might be called on his threat and subsequently replaced. Maren had made it known that although she was easygoing, she suffered no prima donnas at the restaurant. That was how Max had gotten promoted in the first place. The head chef before him had decided not to show up in protest over a raise he’d felt hadn’t adequately reflected his talents. A severance package had been her answer to his attempt at blackmail.

“Okay.” Joe nodded. “That explains yesterday, what happened this morning?”

“April got carried away with the chopping knife. Severed her index finger.” Maren closed her eyes for a second without realizing it. Just talking about it sent a shiver down her spine.

“Ouch.” Joe pretended to shake in response. “She okay?”

Maren nodded. It was accompanied by a half-muffled sigh. “According to the doctor who treated her, we got her to the hospital just in time. He says that she should be good as new. Thanks to ‘the new guy.’” She smiled as she used the term. “He took over. Wrapped up April’s wound, barked at me to put the finger in a bag packed with ice and we took off.”

“Where was Max all this time?”

“Over in a corner, turning white as a sheet and looking as if he was going to throw up his breakfast.”

Joe’s expression indicated that he would have expected nothing more from the head chef. “Good thing you hired this guy. Looks like he’s going to come in handy for more reasons than one.”