Читать книгу Texas Wedding - Nancy Thompson Robards - Страница 13

Chapter Three

Fluffy clouds like white cotton candy stood out against the brilliant blue sky. What a glorious day to be outside, giving away food. All morning, AJ kept thinking she saw—of all people—that soldier who’d brought her the chocolate. Out of the corner of her eye, she’d catch a glimpse of a tall, broad-shouldered blond guy and immediately her thoughts would skitter to Shane Harrison. Each time it turned out not to be him, a vague sense of disappointment would press down on her.

It was peculiar that she kept thinking she saw him. Usually when that happened, she would end up seeing the person who’d been on her mind.

She didn’t claim to be psychic or think that the false sightings were some sort of precognition; it was just uncanny how often it happened that she thought about someone and later they’d turn up. With the number of false soldier sightings she’d had today, AJ shouldn’t have been surprised when she turned around to set out her ninth tray of samples and found him standing at her tent. Nonetheless her stomach did a triple gainer.

“There you are,” she said.

He narrowed his eyes and cocked his head slightly to the right. “You were expecting me?”

Ugh. “Did I say that out loud?”

“You did.”

She set down the tray on the table and adjusted her latex gloves and smiled at the other people who came up and grabbed the small plates of food she was offering. The festival was so busy and she’d been working at such a brisk clip her thought must have slipped out. Out loud.

Great.

Note to self. Check internal filter. Make sure it is firmly in place.

“Actually, I was speaking in generic terms,” she hedged. Oh, peachy. If she kept this up she’d end up digging herself into a deeper hole. Heat began to creep up her neck. “I knew someone was behind me—lots of people have visited my tent today—and I—I meant to say, ‘There you are.’ You know...as in ‘look what we have here.’ This is for you.”

She nudged the tray toward him. “Have some.” But he continued to squint at her for a few more beats before shifting his gaze to the proffered platter.

“Okay. So, what do we have here?”

“Sliders. Three kinds. I call this one the Tailgater. It’s a beef patty with bacon, cheddar and caramelized onions with barbecue sauce on the side. This one’s the Parisian. It has Brie, ham and sautéed mushrooms. Then there’s the Antipasto. It’s topped with roasted red peppers, spicy salami, provolone and a garlic-basil aioli.”

As he contemplated the platter of mini burgers, it was the first time AJ had the chance to get a good, uninterrupted look at him. She drank him in, his close-cropped sandy hair, the high cheekbones and his straight, slightly too-big nose that balanced his good looks with just the right amount of brawn. He would be too pretty with a nose any smaller—especially given the particular fullness of his lips. Yes, the lips were...sexy.

He looked up and caught her staring.

“May I try one?”

“Of course.”

Her gaze slid down his broad shoulders to his arms, which were tanned to gorgeous end-of-summer bronze perfection. Her focus finally found the tray of sliders.

“In fact, I’d appreciate it if you would try all three and tell me which one you like best,” she said.

“I’d love to,” he said. “I’m somewhat of a burger expert.”

“You are?”

She grabbed a larger paper plate from the supply she’d stashed under the table and used the tongs to dish up three sliders. When he reached for the plate, she noticed his hands were rugged, but the fingernails were short and clean.

Mentally, she checked off the clean hands item on the list of “Man Criteria” she kept in her head. Clean hands told a lot about a guy. Soft, manicured hands would be weird, but clean with short nails were still manly and indicated good grooming. As far as she was concerned, nasty hands were a definite deal-breaker—well, it would be a deal-breaker if she were looking for something more than his opinion on her new recipes.

“Since we’re getting into football season, Celebrations, Inc. is offering catered tailgate picnics. The sliders and crispy onion straws are just some of the items on the menu.”

Realizing the onion straws were missing, she turned to her friends, Sydney and Pepper, who were helping her out today.

Pepper was right behind AJ with a freshly filled tray of burgers. As she placed the burger tray down, she looked appreciatively at Shane, most likely realizing that he was one of the few people in this small Dallas suburb that she didn’t know. She cleared her throat. AJ had known her for so long she didn’t even have to look at her friend to know she wanted an introduction.

“Pepper Merriweather, this is Shane Harrison. He knows Maya. Can you believe it?”

“Really? Enchanté.” Always up for a bit of drama, Pepper extended her hand, not in a handshake, but palm downward and fingers dangling, as if she expected Shane to kiss her hand.

AJ suppressed a smile. Especially when Shane hesitated a moment as if unsure what to do, and finally gave her fingertips a slight squeeze. “Very nice to meet you.”

“You’re obviously not from St. Michel,” Pepper said.

“Pepper!” AJ said. Despite having been through finishing school and having made her debut into polite society, sometimes her friend didn’t realize how off-putting her words could sound.

“What?” she asked, her expression all wide-eyed innocence.

AJ gave her a look.

“What I meant, AJ, was judging by his accent, I gather that he is an American.”

She turned her attention back to Shane, suddenly all smiles and Southern sweetness. “How do you know Maya?”

Shane gave her the short version of how he’d been passing through St. Michel on his way back to the States, and Maya had asked him to bring chocolate to AJ when she learned that he was stationed at Fort Hood.

“AJ, you got chocolates from Maya and you didn’t share them with me?”

“Hey! What kind of burgers are you cooking up?” asked a man who had just walked up to the table.

AJ smiled at Pepper and with an almost imperceptible nod of her head, she silently asked Pepper to tend to the customer, which she did graciously.

“Hey, Syd, how are the onion straws coming along?” AJ asked.

The pretty brunette lifted the metal basket out of the deep fryer. “I have a fresh batch right here,” she said, her British accent upbeat and melodic.

For most of the morning, AJ had been cooking, and Pepper and Sydney had been expediting and greeting the potential customers who stopped by. That’s why AJ felt comfortable giving Shane her full attention now, while Sydney tended to the makeshift kitchen, and Pepper answered questions.

A few seconds later, Sydney gave AJ a who’s-the-hunk? look as she set a basket of onion straws on the table. Again, AJ made introductions and then put a healthy heap of onion straws on Shane’s plate. Sydney uttered a polite, “Very nice to meet you,” and returned to frying the onion straws.

Shane tasted the Tailgater slider first. AJ watched him bite into it. She got enormous pleasure from feeding people. Rapt, she watched Shane as he chewed and swallowed.

“What do you think?” she asked, not even trying to stifle the eagerness in her voice.

He nodded. “It’s delicious, but didn’t you say it had barbecue sauce with it?”

“Oh. Yes, it does.” She glanced at the crowded contents of the table and saw that the barbecue sauce was, indeed, missing.

AJ got the sauce and turned around to find herself staring into the ice-blue eyes of the one person she’d hoped not to see today: her grandmother, Agnes Jane Sherwood. Grandmother’s steely gaze assessed AJ. Judging by the way the matriarch frowned down her aquiline nose, AJ knew her grandmother found her lacking.

No big surprise. She always had. The only thing AJ could do was shake it off.

This was the woman for whom AJ was named—her mother’s feeble attempt to get back into her estranged mother’s good graces after AJ’s mother had eloped with Joey Antonelli. A plumber. A man Agnes had considered so far beneath her daughter that she couldn’t even see that far down the social food chain. When her daughter came back married, Agnes quit speaking to her for years.

Even though her mother and grandmother were on better terms today, Agnes still liked to grouse, “What was I supposed to say? When my friends’ daughters were marrying into families such as the Connecticut Collinses or the Dallas Dashwoods, my daughter has married into the Antonelli Plumbing Antonellis. It was mortifying.”

Apparently, it had been a huge disgrace. One so grave that even after the young bride had saddled her innocent first born with a name like Agnes Jane Sherwood-Antonelli, grandmother hadn’t let AJ’s mother back into her good graces.

It was no help, either, that Agnes Jane Sherwood’s namesake had decided to become a chef. Cooking was a chore the hired help quietly took care of. Not something a Sherwood fretted over and certainly not something they found enjoyable. Grandmother said, “Obviously AJ has inherited her father’s working-class DNA.”

Today, what made matters worse was that Grandmother was the chair of A Taste of Celebration. Obviously, the chair in name only, because she seemed just as surprised to find her granddaughter part of the festival.

“Flipping burgers? Really, Agnes Jane, how could you embarrass me— How could you embarrass yourself like this?”

A sudden hush seemed to settle over the square as the eye of Hurricane Agnes settled under the Celebrations, Inc. tent. As ever, her grandmother’s energy was harsh and commanding, a presence that seemed to vibrate. Or maybe the vibration was simply the sound of blood rushing through AJ’s ears as she stood there mortified, watching Shane watch this embarrassing confrontation.

“Have you been reduced to serving fast food?” Agnes continued.

Pepper came up behind AJ and put a supportive hand on her shoulder. Something in that kind show of I’ve-got-your-back loyalty made AJ snap out of her stupor.

“Grandmother, I am test-marketing options for a football season tailgating menu that my company is going to offer.”

It was her company.

She hadn’t asked the woman for a penny of her millions to get Celebrations, Inc. off the ground. AJ had laid a careful plan, worked hard, scrimped and saved with the intention of gathering enough seed money to open her doors.

The opening had been put on a faster track after AJ’s fiancé died, naming her the beneficiary of his life insurance policy. But not until after the money sat in a savings account for a little over three years. At first, AJ couldn’t fathom spending a penny of it, paralyzed by the thought that Danny was gone and money was all she had left of him. It hadn’t seemed right. It hadn’t seemed fair that he’d had to die, and she was left here to try and go on without him.

For three years, AJ had lived in a daze, going through life’s motions—getting up, working long hours, coming home, sleeping only to get up and do it all over again. Sleep was the only place where she found peace... At night, when her head hit the pillow, she could lose herself in dreams where Danny was alive, her family accepted him and she was happy. As a result, during the waking hours, she shut down, living in her head. This didn’t escape her friends.

That’s when it had hit her. He would never have wanted her to sit idle. She needed to invest that money in making her career dreams come true—something Danny had been so supportive of.

After she’d done that, it was as if Danny were right there with her every step of the way.

So, even if she were “flipping burgers,” she’d rather be doing that, relying on herself and her own creativity to make or break her than living on her grandmother’s terms.

AJ knew it galled her grandmother that she was that solvent. Thanks to Danny, a man Grandmother had deemed beneath her namesake, AJ was free, and her grandmother didn’t have an ounce of control over her.

Her grandmother didn’t dignify the justification of AJ’s burger flipping with a comment. She just stood there with an expression so sour, AJ feared the old woman would suck on her cheeks hard enough to suck herself inside out.

As AJ stifled a smile, she realized she was still holding the bowl of homemade barbecue sauce she’d promised Shane. Why did he have to witness this ugly scene?

She turned away from her grandmother to set the bowl of sauce in front of Shane. As she did, the toe of her hot pink Dr. Martens caught on an exposed tree root. As if in slow motion, she lurched forward, splattering sauce down the front of Shane’s white polo shirt.

* * *

Shane knew the barbecue sauce mishap wasn’t intentional, and he tried to reassure AJ of that. He wouldn’t allow her to have his shirt cleaned, and she didn’t deserve her grandmother making an awkward moment worse by insisting that the Taste of Celebration committee would replace the shirt.

He declined both offers.

However, it soon became clear the woman—who he was tempted to call “the old battle-ax,” but refrained because she was AJ’s grandmother and that would be disrespectful—was a trying piece of work. But soon he realized Agnes Sherwood would not take no for an answer. He decided to give her his address just so she would shut up and go away.

At first he was going to give her the central address at Fort Hood. But then he decided he would give the woman a full-on dose of the working-class stiff he was. “I’m staying at the Celebration Suites, off of the highway. I don’t know the address off the top of my head, but it’s unit 201.”

Agnes sniffed and Shane swore he saw her bristle. “Are you referring to that place one rents by the week?”

Never before had he heard the word place said with such contempt. If he didn’t know better, he’d think he was renting a place in Celebration’s Red Light District—if there was such a place in Perfectville, U.S.A.

“Yes, ma’am that’s where I live. For the moment anyway. I’m sort of...transient.” He looked her square in the eyes and smiled.

He loved messing with people who carried a superiority complex. This woman wore hers like crown jewels. For a split second, he wondered how someone like AJ could be related to Agnes Sherwood. AJ was humble and sweet, someone who wasn’t too proud to serve burgers and onion rings—or to roll up her sleeves and get the work done. Agnes Sherwood, on the other hand, seemed the type who’d never gotten her hands dirty.

After all the things he’d seen in the Middle East and his years in the army, he couldn’t stand it when the idle rich put themselves above others. But it wasn’t his duty to reform her.

“Agnes Jane, write down his information. Apartment number, size and brand of the shirt. I will have something sent by midweek.”

With that, Queen Agnes turned and left.

They were dismissed.

* * *

AJ was thankful for the way Pepper and Sydney jumped in and distracted the customers who were kind enough to focus on the food and not the scene that had just unfolded. This left AJ free to do damage control with Shane.

“I am so sorry,” AJ said to Shane.

After being humiliated by her grandmother and dousing him in barbecue sauce, what else was there to say?

She wished she could blame her grandmother for unnerving her, but really, it was her own clumsy fault. She should have been more careful and watched what she was doing. Or as Grandmother would say, “her comportment had been lacking.” Again.

Shane was only a customer, after all. Not someone who should fluster her.

“Please don’t worry about it,” he said. “No harm. No foul. Now, if I’d been wearing my Dallas Mavericks jersey, that would’ve been another matter all together.”

“Lucky me. It’s not game day.”

“Yeah. Lucky you.”

She felt her hot skin blanch, until he grinned and winked at her. Then her cheeks went all hot again.

“The stain is drying to look like a bad tie-dye job,” she said.

He gazed down at the soiled area. “I haven’t worn a tie-dyed shirt since I was a teenager.”

“Well, there you go. Merry Christmas, a few months early. Here, let me get a pen and some paper and I’ll get your information for my grandmother.”

He tried to wave her off. “Let’s not. Please? Just tell her I left before you could get it.”

“Are you kidding me? You saw how my grandmother is. I’m not going to cross her again. So, wait right there.” Playfully, she pointed at him. “That’s an order.”

She grabbed a pen from her purse and picked up a napkin. She turned back to him, half expecting to see him walking away, but he was still there. He hadn’t left. He hadn’t stomped off in a furious huff—as if normal people actually stomped. Of course not. Only her grandmother did things like that. The fact remained that Shane was standing there, making light of her faux pas. At that moment, something inside of her shifted.

Besides being a very good-looking man, he seemed like a good man. If for no other reason than that, she wanted to get to know him better.

“Here,” she said, handing him the napkin and pen. “Write down your size, the brand of shirt you like—make it something expensive since Grandmother is paying. Also, write down your apartment number and your phone number. I am going to fix you dinner since I put you through all this trouble. I’ll call you and we can figure out what day this week would be good.”

He regarded her for a moment. Then he tore the napkin in half and handed a piece to her.

“I’ll need your number then. If I’m giving you my number, you have to give me yours. Call me old-fashioned, but I think the man should be the one to call and arrange the first date.”

“Date?” AJ sputtered. Did he think she was asking for his number to call and ask him out? She tried to think of a witty retort, something to put them back on level ground, but his words, “Call me old-fashioned,” resonated in her head.

“What? You don’t want to go out with me?” He frowned. “Are you rejecting me? Do you have a prejudice against men who smell like barbecue sauce?”

She loved the mischievous sparkle in his hazel eyes. Those eyes—with their green and brown and amber flecks—were almost hypnotizing.

“I don’t remember you asking me for a date. The last I remember is my offer to cook for you. What? You don’t like my cooking?”

Shane smiled and picked up one of the Tailgater sliders. He took a bite and chewed. AJ couldn’t help herself, her gaze dropped to his lips and for a moment, she lost herself, wondering if they tasted as good as they looked.

But then he swallowed the bite, and her gaze skittered back up to meet his. Their eyes locked.

“If today is any indication of your talents, I’m fairly certain I’ll fall in love with your cooking. But why don’t we start with a first date?”