breathed a sigh of relief as she pushed open the swinging door that led back to the kitchen. So, Logan Miller hadn’t shown yet. Maybe that explained why things were going so well. Everything was moving along as she’d planned—even though they were one server short. Her assistant hadn’t complained about it, but of course Talia knew they were.
She’d been watching for the man she’d had the run-in with earlier, and he hadn’t shown up. It was just as well. If he’d been there—
‘Oof! Sorry, Talia, I didn’t see you there.’
The saucier had stepped down hard on her foot. Talia smiled determinedly. ‘My fault,’ she said, taking a step back. ‘I’ll just—’ She whirled around as a pot clattered to the tile floor. ‘Sorry,’ she said quickly. ‘I didn’t mean…’
The head chef looked at her. ‘Sounds like there’s a pretty good party going on out there. Why don’t you go have a drink or something?’
Talia laughed and shook her head. ‘Not me. I’m just the hired help—they don’t want me crashing their party.’
He sighed. ‘Listen, boss, I’m trying to do this diplomatically but the truth is, you’re in the way. We’d all be grateful if you’d skedaddle. We’ll yell if we run into trouble.’
She nodded. It was a nice thing to say, but trouble was highly unlikely. The staff were efficient and well trained, and they didn’t need her underfoot. Her job was planning and co-ordinating; the chef was right, she really was in the way right now.
Talia smiled, snatched a cracker from a tray as it went by, and walked to the door. ‘Call if you need me,’ she said, and she stepped out into the dusk.
She felt as if she’d walked into another world. The noise of the kitchen vanished, replaced instantly by the silence of the soft September evening. A breeze carried up from the sand, fragrant with the rich scents of the Pacific, mingling with the clean tang of pine drifting down from the rounded hills that rose behind the inn. Talia stood still for a moment, face lifted to the sky, and then she began walking slowly along the gravel path that wound uphill, through the pines to the grove of redwoods towering beyond them.
It was hard going, thanks to the pitch of the land and the height of her grey suede heels, but she decided to make the best of it. For starters, the air smelled too sweet and fresh to go back inside. For another—for another, she was just as glad to put off the time she’d have to check things again. For all she knew, the man she’d met this afternoon might have changed his mind and shown up to work, and she didn’t really want to face him again. It was silly, but that was the way she felt.
And then there was Logan Miller. She knew what to expect there—his letters, and now the attitude of his employees, had prepared her for the worst. Still, she’d done the job he’d asked of her, and so far she seemed to have done it well. Miller would have to be satisfied, which meant that her boss would be, too. Her promotion would be rock-solid.
In a couple of years, if all went as planned, she’d have enough money saved and enough experience under her belt to start a small catering firm of her own. It was something she’d thought about and planned for a very long time. And then she’d have everything she wanted: she wouldn’t need anyone or anything any more.
If she owed her mother’s memory anything, she sometimes thought, it was that her very irresponsibility had been a kind of legacy.
‘You are the most determined young woman, Talia,’ John Diamond had once said, and he’d laughed. ‘Did you learn that at Cornell?’
No, she’d thought, I learned it when Grams told me the circumstances of my birth. But she hadn’t said that, of course, she’d simply smiled and said she’d learned all kinds of things at university.
The path had grown steep. Talia stopped, drew in a deep breath, and looked over her shoulder. The inn was barely visible, half-hidden by the pine trees. She should really go back, she thought. The cocktail hour would be over soon, and dinner would be starting. You could never tell what might happen then. Once, she’d seen someone take a bite of something, gasp, and fall to the floor in an allergic attack. Only quick thinking on the part of one of the servers had saved the woman’s life.
She thought again of the man in the kitchen. Where was he tonight? Not that she cared, one way or the other. It was just that he’d looked as if he could have used the few dollars he’d have earned this evening. Well, that wasn’t really accurate. There’d been something about him, an aura she just couldn’t nail down that had seemed to overwhelm everything else. He’d looked like a beach bum, yes, but there’d been more to him than that.
She clucked her tongue in annoyance. What was the matter with her? She was tired, that was it, and why wouldn’t she be? She’d flown in early this morning and she hadn’t stopped since. This walk had revived her a bit, she had to admit that. All right, she’d go in a little further, just into the redwood grove ahead, although it did look awfully dark and gloomy and…
She heard the footfalls behind her just as she reached the first stand of giant trees. Footfalls? No, not that. Something was pounding hard along the gravel path behind her. And it was breathing hard. In the silence of the evening, the sound of air being drawn in an out of its lungs was raspingly loud.
Her heart constricted. Talia had grown up in a small city back East, and had spent the last few years in San Francisco. The closest she’d come to country living was the four years she’d spent at Cornell University in New York State, and although the campus was in a beautiful outdoors setting it hardly qualified as wilderness.
Images of bears, cougars, or something even worse jostled each other for attention in her mind. She stood rooted to the gravel path, trying to decide whether it was wiser to turn and face what was coming or to head further into the artificial night of the redwood forest. Face it, she thought. But, just as she turned, the creature that was pursuing her ran her down.
It came at her quickly, a dark blur that rounded the bend and entered the trees with a speed that sent it crashing into her. Talia felt the jarring slap of muscle against flesh, caught the sharp tang of salt and something muskier, and then she went down in a tumble of limbs and grey flannel.
‘For God’s sake, woman, what the hell were you doing?’
The thing that had run her over had a voice. Relief flooded through her as she realised that it was a man—a very sweaty, irritable one, from the feel and sound of him—and then she felt her own anger rising.
Talia pushed at his chest as he lay above her. ‘Will you get off me?’ she demanded. ‘Dammit, where do you think you are?’
The man caught her wrists as she flailed at him. ‘That’s it,’ he said, ‘add insult to injury. It isn’t enough you were playing statues in the middle of the path—’
‘This is a walking path, not a running path. Why weren’t you watching where you were going?’
The torrent of words halted as she stared into the face poised above hers. It was dark in the redwood grove; the man’s face was striped with shadow. But there was no mistaking the thatch of sun-streaked hair that fell across his forehead or the darkly blazing eyes set above those high cheekbones.
Talia’s heartbeat stumbled. The man straddling her was the surfer-cum-waiter she’d met in the kitchen earlier.
He seemed to recognise her at the same moment. A smile curved across his mouth, then vanished.
