My office in back of The Spoke had oversized leather couches and a distressed oak coffee table that came in handy at our biweekly team leader meetings. The butter yellow orchid I’d had the misfortune of winning at the last school carnival and fundraiser shivered on the corner of a desk I rarely used next to a stack of purchase orders. One more thing I needed to do. Behind Saffron (because of course Lacey had named the damn thing the moment she saw it, ensuring I couldn’t kill it), a wall of windows faced out over Main Street. Directly towards Blair’s. Lowering my head, I pulled out my phone.
Me: I was a douche. Let’s talk beef ribs. I’m thinking a year’s supply.
Me: Plus that bleu cheese macaroni you loved last month.
Me: bacon-emoji
Me: I’m sorry.
BabyGotBake: Awkward is not a good color on us. Sorry I didn’t answer before. I needed time to think. Can you come over later?
Me: When?
BabyGotBake: Tonight. And I still want my mac & bleu.
Stripping down, I cranked the water in the shower over to death wish and stepped under the spray, reaching for the shampoo—
—and got a palmful of vanilla-coconut bodywash.
Here’s the thing about a good prank. You had to find that line. Aim too low and there was no impact, like that time Lacey left a box of her coconut macaroons, which she and everyone else in Lindley County knew I had a not-so-secret weakness for, up at the hostess station in a Blair’s box with a big silver bow. As if I couldn’t smell she’d laced them with enough ground-up ghost peppers to take out half my staff.
Course, she wound up winning that round because what was I supposed to do, admit in front of the handful of humans working that night that I had freaky werewolf spidey-senses and could smell she’d tried to poison me? You think ghost peppers are bad, try them with a nose a hundred times more sensitive than a human’s.
But filling my Old Spice bottle with her bodywash so I had to go around the rest of the day marked as her bitch?
Freaking. Epic.
Lathering up, I started scrubbing. Images from two nights earlier in the bakery forced their way into my head. I leaned back under the spray and shook out my hair, remembering the way her teeth had dug into my lip, that kiss, the first one we’d shared in almost ten years utterly shredding me inside.
This doesn’t have to mean anything.
Yeah. Except no way was I going to be her second choice lay. I’d run naked and barefoot through two miles of prickly pear before serving as Emo’s relief pitcher. We could just go back to pretending our middle of the night hookup hadn’t happened. Fine by me.
Except now I had freaking wood.
I braced an arm against the shower wall. It was crazy, the idea of a do-over. I’d dated other women over the years, even liked one or two of them. Nothing ever stuck. When you couldn’t get your head out of the past and away from the one girl who could kick your ass at pool and tell you honestly your cobb salad was about as original as the one they were selling at the chain restaurant down the street (which, ouch—and she was so right), moving on was about like trying to drive off with your tow-strap hitched to the side of a barn.
I let my head fall back, hand shuttling faster. For one dark, forbidden moment, I allowed myself to picture Lacey Blair spread out over my bed, naked and flushed with need, her skin caressed by my high-thread-count sheets as I kissed my way down to the juncture of her thighs. I released a tight growl, remembering how her fingers had twisted into my hair as she sucked at my tongue, pulling until it hurt, until pleasure and pain were so deliciously knotted I could barely breathe for the aching bolts of heat pulsing through my dick. Raw, unfiltered moonlight had streamed in from an open window out on the street, calling my feral side to the surface and heightening every sensation to a roar. I was amped up, wild from the moon’s power burning in my blood, and so aroused I could hardly breathe for the need to be inside her.
And when Lacey leaned back, pulling me over her on the countertop, baring her throat to me in a gesture of utter submission, I thought I would burst from my skin. She was trembling with arousal, breath coming in rapid pants, and it had taken every ounce of my control to cage the monster inside me, the beast that needed to bite her, mark her, fuck her right then and there—
The door to the bathroom flew open. Cursing, I covered myself.
“What the hell, Dallas.”
Smacking off the water, I reached for a towel. Clouds of steam billowed between us. “We gotta stop meeting like this, sweetheart.”
“Like I haven’t seen it all on every pack hunt.”
I brushed past her, going for my clothes. “Nice to know you’ve been taking notes.”
Twin spots of color appeared on her cheeks. With a growl, she slapped a paper bag against the center of my chest. It was pretty much your standard waxed pastry bag number. Wheat-brown with cocoa-colored writing.
Blair’s, you’ll love the size of our éclairs.
Turns out if you did a quick internet search, there were one or two shots of the world’s favorite cream-filled pastry you probably didn’t want to pass around in church.
“It’s on, Caldwell.”
“Guess that means you didn’t find the regular bags in the cupboard behind the sink—”
“Oh, I found them,” she called, heading for the door. “Your note was so conveniently tucked beneath the tenth bag.”
“If you didn’t read them, chances are no one else did either.”
“You should probably have someone taste your food.”
I bit back a grin. “Can we talk?”
“Tonight. Brody has me out on patrol.”
Half an hour later I pushed my way through the kitchen to the sound of pots clanging. My team was hard at work getting ready for us to open for the lunch crowd by eleven, the prep guys whipping up the sides we made fresh every day. You couldn’t have Texas-style barbeque without fluffy potato salad with celery and dill, beans slow cooked in brown sugar and applewood smoked bacon, and coleslaw made with green cabbage, carrots and our homemade mayonnaise that people raved about in their online reviews.
Since I liked keeping things original, we also changed out our menu daily with a variety of special-order sides. Think beer-battered okra, baked macaroni made with bleu cheese and bacon crumbles, and August’s favorite, green bean casserole with fried onions and water chestnuts to give it a little extra crunch.
I went to this fancy barbeque joint once up in Fort Worth. Leather Chairs. Fancy custom wood counters. The works. These guys even had their logo stamped onto every plate. And, oh yeah. One small detail. The food sucked. At The Rusty Spoke, we had bench-style seating out on the patio with fans swirling overhead, or your choice of a booth or a table if you wanted to eat inside, but in the tradition of the best state barbeque pits, your order was served up hot and fresh on butcher paper that you carried over to your table in a crate. Every cent you paid went into slow-smoked meat, sides my team and I made every day by hand, fresh desserts, and our signature sauce. I learned how to cook from my mom. And guess what? None of it depended on the plate.
Back when I was a kid, she and I used to get up early every Saturday morning to make breakfast together. While I mixed pancake batter, she’d dice the onions, peppers and tomatoes. Eventually the rest of my brothers would shuffle in, sleepy and in pajamas, lured by the smell of pancakes topped with fresh strawberries and bananas, crisp applewood bacon, and migas with eggs, fried tortilla strips, and cheese. But somehow even when the kitchen grew chaotic and you could barely hear over River and August bickering, those mornings always felt like they belonged to just the two of us. Some people spent half their life figuring out what it was they wanted to do. I’d always known I was meant to be in a kitchen, my hands smelling of cilantro, cinnamon and dill, a thousand flavors at my fingertips the same way an artist might wield a brush. There was no better feeling in the world than seeing someone appreciate a meal you made with your own two hands.