Eighteen
Chapter One
“Only twelve thousand biscuits left to bake,” Cindy Lefler said cheerfully as she popped a baking sheet into the industrial oven at the Miracle Café. Though she loved the smell of fresh-baked biscuits, she had grown weary of the actual baking. One time, she’d tried to figure out how many biscuits she’d baked in her twenty-eight years. It had numbered well into the millions.
“I wish you’d stop counting them down,” grumbled Tonya Dewhurst, who was folding silverware into paper napkins. She was the café’s newest waitress, but Cindy had grown to depend on her very quickly. “You’re the only one who’s happy you’re leaving.”
“I’ll come back to visit.”
“You’ll be too busy being Mrs. Dex Shalimar, lady of leisure,” Tonya said dreamily. “You sure know how to pick husbands.” Then she straightened. “Oh, gosh. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
Cindy patted Tonya’s shoulder. “It’s okay, I know what you mean.”
She still felt a pang over losing Jim, which was only natural, she told herself. The disagreement between her husband’s truck and a freight train had happened only a year ago. But she had picked a good one when she’d married him. And she’d gotten just plain lucky finding Dex.
“It’s almost six,” Cindy said. “Would you unlock the front door and turn on the Open sign, please?” A couple of the other waitresses, Iris and Kate, had arrived and were going through their morning routines. Iris had worked at the café for more than twenty years, Kate almost as long.
Tonya smiled. “Sure. Um, Cindy, do you have a buyer for the café yet?”
“Dex says he has some serious nibbles.”
“I just hope the new owner will let me bring Micton to work with me.”
Cindy cringed every time she heard that name. Tonya had thought it was so cute naming her baby with a combination of hers and her husband’s names—Mick and Tonya. Micton. Yikes! It was the type of backwoods logic that made Cindy want to leave Cottonwood.
Customers were actually waiting in line when Tonya opened the door—farmers and ranchers, mostly, in jeans and overalls, Stetsons and gimme hats, here to get a hearty breakfast and exchange gossip. Cindy went to work on the Daily Specials chalkboard, suspended high above the cash register.
“’Morning, Ms. Cindy.”
She very nearly fell off her stepladder. Still, she managed to call out a very pleasant, “’Morning, Luke.” The handsome sheriff’s deputy always unnerved her. He showed up at 6:10 a.m., like clockwork, five days a week, and ordered the same thing—one biscuit with honey and black coffee. But every single time she saw him sitting there at the counter, that knowing grin on his face, she felt a flutter of surprise.
Kate rushed over from clearing a table to pour Luke his coffee and take his order. The woman was in her sixties. at least, but Cindy could swear Kate blushed as she served Luke. He just had that effect on women, herself included. Even now, when she was engaged—hell, even when she’d been married to a man she’d loved fiercely—just looking at Luke made her pulse quicken and her face warm.
She refused to blame herself. It was just hormones. The man was sexier than the devil himself, with that curly chestnut hair and those eyes, green and dark as a cool, mossy pond. In high school, he’d worn his hair long and unruly, sometimes past his shoulders, as part of his go-to-hell image. He’d made girls drool back then when he was still a skinny teenager. He’d inspired Cindy to do a lot more than drool. Now, with that uniform and the wide shoulders to fill it out and the hair cut shorter in a futile attempt to tame it, he was even more mouthwatering.
“So, how are the wedding plans coming along?” Luke asked Cindy. A bystander might assume the question was borne of polite curiosity, but Cindy knew better. Luke Rheems had despised Dexter Shalimar on sight, and he never missed an opportunity to subtly remind Cindy that he thought she was a fool for marrying Dex.
“There aren’t many plans for me to make,” Cindy said breezily. “Dex is handling all the arrangements. We’re flying to Lake Tahoe, getting married in a little chapel in the mountains and then Dex is going to teach me to ski.” It was the sort of vacation she’d always dreamed of. She and Jim had visited Lake Tahoe before, of course. She’d gasped at the breathtaking scenery, the opulent homes, the flashy casinos. But there’d been no money for skiing or gambling, and they’d slept either in their truck or at a cheap motel.
This time, her honeymoon would be four-star hotels, fancy meals, private skiing lessons.
“Dex handles a lot for you, doesn’t he? The sale of your restaurant and your house, your wedding, your honeymoon. He’s chosen where you’ll live—”
“Dex is in real estate,” Cindy broke in, climbing down from the stepladder. She couldn’t spell and argue with Luke at the same time. “Why shouldn’t he handle my real-estate transactions? It’s what he’s good at. As for our home, yes, he did pick it out and furnish it. But I’m no good at decorating—he hired an expert to do that. Anyway, I’ve seen it and it’s perfect. A no-fuss penthouse with all maintenance taken care of.”
“And no backyard. Where will Adam play?”
She lowered her voice, getting truly irritated. “Don’t you start laying that guilt trip on me. My son is going to have a fabulous childhood. Dex has business all over the globe, so we’ll all travel the world together. Adam will meet and play with children of all cultures. He’ll frolic in alpine meadows and on Jamaican beaches. He’ll sample fresh foods from Italy and Indonesia. You act like he’ll be deprived simply because he doesn’t have a postage stamp of grass to call his own.”
“I happen to believe a child does need a few blades of grass to call his own.”
“And when you have a child of your own, you can raise him in a little backyard like a rabbit in his hutch. With the same view, seeing the same people, eating the same foods day in and day out.” She knew she should stop there, but he’d hit her hot button. “And he’ll grow up to be just as closed-minded and provincial as everybody else in this town, afraid of anything that’s strange or foreign or the slightest bit different.”
Luke arched one eyebrow at her, surprised by her outburst. “Is that how you see your Cottonwood neighbors? A bunch of ignorant, closed-minded xenophobes?”
Cindy was embarrassed to admit she didn’t know what xenophobe meant. But that was part of her point—and part of why she wanted something different for Adam. Sure, she’d traveled the country, but she’d never been to college. She wasn’t well read. She didn’t know anything about stylish clothes or entertaining or even how to fix her hair, which was currently pulled back in a loose ponytail. Dex had never criticized, but if she was going to be the wife of a high-society millionaire, she was going to have to work on her shortcomings.
To mask her ignorance, she changed the subject. “You’re just raining on my parade because you’re jealous.”
“Jealous? Oh, yeah, right. Of Dex? He’s a pencil-neck weenie.”
“Now you are obviously desperate, resorting to name-calling. By the way, I never heard the results of your big investigation into Dex’s background. You
