steel bowl. With the last batch of pancake batter gone, she needed to mix another.
She couldn’t believe how totally flustered she felt. She was twenty-nine years old. Not sixteen. In the eleven years since she’d left Maple Mountain for culinary school, she’d worked her way from a line chef in Boston to master pastry chef in four-star restaurants in San Diego and Scottsdale. She had managed to survive the artistic temperaments of male executive chefs who considered themselves God’s gift to man, woman and culinary creativity, and placed in the top three of every dessert competition she’d entered in the last five years. Until two minutes ago—three minutes were she to count from the moment she’d heard Sam’s name—her biggest concern had been the terrible timing of her mom’s need for her to come home.
She had just been offered the position of executive pastry chef where she worked at the Regis-Carlton resort in Scottsdale. She had also been offered the same position with a high-end new restaurant by Doug Westland, one of the most respected and innovative restaurateurs on the West Coast, along with the opportunity to become his business—and bed—partner. She had huge issues with the latter part of that arrangement. But that wasn’t the problem at the moment. Or the point. The point was that she was highly organized, disciplined, creative in her own right and that she was not easily unsettled. Normally.
Scooping a cup of the flour, baking powder and salt she’d premeasured earlier, she folded it into the eggs and buttermilk, gently so as not to make the batter heavy. She felt decidedly unsettled now.
That circumstance no doubt explained why she didn’t feel at all slighted to know that Sam apparently hadn’t even noticed her existence the summer he’d occupied her nearly every waking thought. Realizing he barely remembered her was actually a relief. A huge one. So was the thought that nothing about his manner indicated that he’d discovered her daring and imaginative writings, much less read them. To the best of her knowledge, she was the only Kelsey in Maple Mountain. With her name on the diary’s cover, it seemed that had he found it, she would have at least rated a raised eyebrow when her mom mentioned her name.
She spread two rashers of bacon on the griddle, cracked four eggs beside them. He probably needed the huge breakfast to fuel all that muscle, she supposed, only to deliberately change the direction of her thoughts. Thinking about the admittedly magnificent body that had inspired the current reason for her anxiety wasn’t getting her anywhere. Since it seemed he hadn’t found the diary, she needed to get to it before he did. She just needed to figure out how.
She was praying for inspiration when she set the three plates of food that could have comfortably fed two in the window for her mom to serve. With a smile for Amos when he gave her a surreptitious wink to let her know she’d done well, she turned to make the omelets the tourists had ordered.
Sam noticed that wink. Digging into his own meal, he might have mentioned how good his breakfast was, too, had she given him any hint that she was at all interested in anything he had to say. Instead he took another bite of heaven on a fork and frowned at himself while the two old guys next to him suggested he stop by for a game of checkers on the porch of the general store, providing he had time later that afternoon, of course.
Sam liked the two old guys. There were times when he couldn’t get a word out of either of them other than a thoughtful and considered “Yup” or “Nope.” Then, there were days when they seemed more than willing to share whatever they knew, especially if they figured they could help a person out. It seemed, too, that once they got going, they could reminisce forever about what they considered the good old days—which was pretty much any year before 1955. According to both men, not much of anything was made the way it had been before then, and neither had much use for anything that hadn’t existed by the middle of the past century.
He wasn’t much for games, except maybe the occasional hand of poker. Still, he told them he’d be glad to join them later, since he was looking for as many ways as possible to fill in his time there, and went back to his meal. He wasn’t doing anything but biding his time in Maple Mountain. Any diversion was welcome.
He still didn’t think the time off the force was necessary. He had adamantly argued the need for the leave of absence his department psychologist had insisted he take three weeks ago. He would argue it now, if given the chance. Yet, as he frowned into his coffee, he would concede that the shrink may have had one small point.
He’d suspected himself that he had lost the edge on his social skills in polite society. He just hadn’t been prepared to truly admit that loss until now. He hadn’t been able to get so much as a smile out of the attractive blonde he could see coming and going from the long window above the service counter, much less get any sort of conversation started with her.
He only vaguely remembered the delicate-looking woman Dora had mentioned a couple of days ago. Since he’d eaten only occasionally at the diner all those years ago, he knew he hadn’t seen Kelsey often. But the more he thought about her now, the more he remembered that there had been a cute, long-legged blonde he’d looked for when he had come in. He also recalled that she’d been jail bait.
She definitely hadn’t possessed the presence or style she’d acquired since then, either.
She had her mother’s pale wheat-colored hair, only hers was woven with shades of champagne and platinum and caught in a low ponytail with a black clip at her nape. The rest was covered with a short, white pleated chef’s hat that ended below her brow line and revealed the white pearl studs in her ears. Her lovely eyes were as dark as the rich coffee in his mug, her features delicate, her skin flawless and she had a mouth that made his water just thinking about how soft it might be.
Wearing the high-necked white chef’s jacket he figured she’d brought with her, since he’d never seen Dora wear anything more sophisticated than the hairnet and white bib apron she wore now, Kelsey Schaeffer looked polished, professional. She also seemed as familiar with the patrons she fed as she did the kitchen she moved through with such ease.
He just couldn’t figure out why she would smile and talk with everyone else, but barely converse with him. Drawing out people was his strong suit. Among a certain, corrupt and incorrigible element, anyway. And cons and criminals were usually an even tougher sell.
Deciding it wasn’t worth worrying about, he polished off his breakfast, had Dora bag two giant blueberry muffins from the case for later and headed for his truck and the trailer he was temporarily calling home. He had more on his mind than his apparently forgotten ability to flirt with a respectable woman. The department shrink had said he’d grown out of touch with normalcy, whatever that was supposed to mean, and that if he didn’t get back in touch with it, he could eventually lose his sense of perspective and his usefulness to the department.
The department was his home, and as much his family as those he was related to by blood. Failing it would be like failing himself. He would do what he needed to do to keep that from happening. He wouldn’t like it, but he’d do it.
It had been three weeks since he’d come off a case that had kept him undercover for over a year. The need to stay under had even caused him to miss his brother-in-law’s funeral after a road-rage incident left his sister a widow and his young nephews without a dad. He had been ordered to take three months to decompress by doing normal things. He was to reacquaint himself with his family, find creative outlets, wind down. Helping his sister by refurbishing the dilapidated old house so she could raise her sons in the country seemed as good a way as any to him to keep from going stir-crazy while he accomplished that goal. Then, after he put in his time, he could get back to the work that had become his way of life.
There was just one problem. Having spent ten years working his way down the humanity scale from neighborhood beat cop to vice detective to spending the past fourteen months living in the underbelly of New York with
