Hungry Heart: Konigsburg, Texas, Book 8 (39 page)

“If you want to discuss something, let’s do it sitting down.” She sank into one of the lawn chairs, sighing. “I don’t think I’ve been this tired in years. But it’s good tired, you know?”

He nodded.
Good tired
about summed it up. “I’m thinking of investing some money in the King’s business. Assuming he’ll let me. I haven’t talked to him yet.”

Andy’s forehead furrowed. “You mean to get him back on his feet?”

He shrugged. “Yeah. That and start planning for a place here in town. I figure eventually he’ll have a restaurant of his own. I want a piece of it.”

Her mouth edged into a grin. “You want to cook barbecue?”

He shook his head. “I’ll leave that to him. Although I might want to keep an eye on some of the recipes—pork and
cabrito
, say. But the town could use a barbecue place. Right now they’ve got nothing. I figure the King’s a natural.”

“How much do you want to invest?”

He shrugged again. “Say ten or fifteen thousand. I figure it’s not going to cost much to get him up and running again. My cousin Danny can check his plumbing at that kitchen, and he’ll know an electrician who can make sure the wiring is ready. I’ll get the family out there next weekend for cleanup. Shouldn’t take more than a day or so to get it done. But he can’t go on cooking out there long-term, not if it means being flooded out every time the river rises.”

“Hence the barbecue place.”

He nodded. “Plus he needs to move up. We do, that is.”

Andy shrugged. “It sounds like a good idea to me. Is that all you wanted to know?”

“Yeah, after all it’s your money too.” He paused, watching her face. “It will be anyway.”

Her cheeks flushed for a moment, then she smiled again. “We need to start figuring all of that out, don’t we?”

“What’s to figure out? Get a license, pick a day, get it done. I talked to Horace. If we let him know the date, he’ll clear his schedule. I figure my mama can’t object to us being married by the mayor even if it does mean she can’t make it the wedding of the year.” He narrowed his eyes. “So how soon can we do this?”

Andy blinked at him. Then she threw back her head and laughed. “You’re the greatest organizer I ever met. I love that about you.”

His heart gave a mighty thump. He drew a deep breath into his suddenly tight lungs. “How soon, Andy?”

“A couple of weeks,” she said, smiling. “After we clean up the King’s place. I figure he can cook us a couple of briskets for the reception.”

Chico nodded slowly. “And some chicken. Maybe we could use the event center at the Rose. I’ll call LeBlanc. We’ll work something out.”

Andy shook her head, still smiling. “I’m sure you will. Now let’s take those beans home. I’ll make you some dinner.”

His heart seemed to contract as he looked at her. His wife. His barbecue joint. Well, partly his anyway. Had he actually been bored once? It didn’t look like that was going to be a problem again any time soon.

“Yeah,” he said, extending his hand to pull her to her feet then wrapping his arm around her shoulders. “Let’s do that.”

About the Author

Meg Benjamin is an award-winning author of contemporary romance for Samhain Publishing. Her books have won an EPIC Award for Contemporary Romance, the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award, the New England Romance Writers Beanpot Award, and the Holt Medallion, among other honors. Meg lives in Colorado. Her website is
www.MegBenjamin.com
and her blog is
http://megbenj1.wordpress.com/
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Look for these titles by Meg Benjamin

Now Available:

Konigsburg, Texas

Venus in Blue Jeans

Wedding Bell Blues

Be My Baby

Long Time Gone

Brand New Me

Don’t Forget Me

Fearless Love

Promise Harbor Wedding

Bolted

Sweet music doesn’t come without a few sour notes.

Fearless Love

© 2012 Meg Benjamin

Konigsburg, Texas, Book 7

MG Carmody never figured her musical dreams would crash against the reality of Nashville. Now the only thing she has going for her is her late grandfather’s chicken farm, which comes with molting hens that won’t lay, one irascible rooster, and a huge mortgage held by a ruthless opponent—her Great Aunt Nedda.

With fewer eggs to sell, MG needs extra money, fast. Even if it means carving out time for a job as a prep cook at The Rose—and resisting her attraction to its sexy head chef.

Joe LeBlanc has problems of his own. He’s got a kitchen full of temperamental cooks—one of whom is a sneak thief—a demanding cooking competition to prepare for, and an attraction to MG that could easily boil over into something tasty. If he could figure out the cause of the shy beauty’s lack of self-confidence.      

In Joe’s arms, MG’s heart begins to find its voice. But between kitchen thieves, performance anxiety, saucy saboteurs, greedy relatives, and one very pissed-off rooster, the chances of them ever making sweet music are looking slimmer by the day.

Warning: Contains hot kitchen sex, cool Americana music, foodie hysteria, and a whole lot of fowl play.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Fearless Love:

Joe swore he could feel her stiffening from three feet away. He’d known a lot of people who didn’t like talking about their backgrounds, and at least some of them were screwed up beyond all redemption. MG Carmody gave no evidence of being any more or less neurotic than the next person. Of course, the next person at the moment happened to be him, and he wasn’t exactly a model of mental health himself.

Which made her great reluctance to talk about herself particularly intriguing. “Did I say something wrong?”

She blew out a breath. “No. It’s just not very interesting. I came down here because my grandpa got sick and needed someone to take care of him.”

“Where were you before that?”

“Tennessee.”

“Doing what?”

Long pause. “Writing.”

Writing.
Well that covered a lot of ground. “Writing about what?”

“Oh, you know. Love, death, the usual. There’s my driveway.” She picked up her pace slightly.

Joe matched it. “So you wrote fiction? Novels? Or maybe journalism. I guess you could say that deals with love and death too.”

“No. I just… I wrote, you know? So where were you before you came to Konigsburg?” She sounded a little desperate.

“Oh here and there,” he said easily. “I was in New York, then New Orleans for a while. Then I moved to Texas, worked in Austin and Dallas, got the job with Resorts Consolidated.” He felt a little guilty all of a sudden. There were parts of his life he didn’t like talking about either. Who was he to expect her to give him all the details? “Did you grow up around here?”

She seemed to relax slightly. “No, my mom lived in New Mexico, outside Albuquerque. I grew up there, but I came here to visit every summer. I helped my grandpa with his chickens.”

“Do your parents still live there?”

“My mom does. My dad took off when I was little. I don’t know where he is now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well, I never really knew him. My mom took her maiden name back, and I did too—I’m a Carmody more than anything else. My mom’s a tough broad. She brought me up on her own. I never felt like we were missing much.”

“I’m sorry about that too.” He slowed down slightly, hoping she would too.

She stopped, looking back at him. “So where are you from?”

He let himself grin. The yard light near the chicken house made it easier to see her face at least. “Aw, darlin’, can’t you tell?” he drawled, letting his accent deepen. “Baton Rouge.”

She grinned back. “I guess it is sort of obvious, now that you mention it. Did you grow up there?”

“Yes, ma’am. Lived there until I went off to learn how to cook. Only it turned out my mama’d already showed me how to do most of that.”

“Big family?”

He shrugged. “Big enough. I’ve got five brothers and sisters and a shitload of cousins. All of us lived in the same neighborhood.”

“So what did you learn in culinary school?” She turned back toward the front porch, but at least she was walking more slowly now.

“How to cook for a restaurant, which is sort of different from how to cook. Also how to survive in a restaurant, which is more important.” He almost hadn’t done that, of course, but he’d managed to pull it together in the end.

She turned to face him at the foot of her front steps. “Do you like it here?”

He paused. He wasn’t sure anyone had ever asked him that before. “Yeah. Overall, I like it a lot. How about you?”

“I haven’t been here long enough to have an opinion.” She paused. “Except that’s not exactly true because I lived here at Grandpa’s every summer for seven or eight years.”

“Not the same, though, is it,” he said slowly.

“No, it’s not exactly.” She sat down on her top step, staring up at him. “But in a weird way, it is. I mean, my grandpa was sort of an old style farmer. He’d go to town maybe once a week, if that, just to go to the HEB supermarket. He never went to a restaurant or a movie. He didn’t drink. He had a television set from the Stone Age. I think he even felt bad about buying food at HEB. He thought he should be able to grow everything he needed himself.”

“What about your grandma?”

She shook her head. “She died a few years ago. Cancer.”

“No other relatives around?”

She shrugged. “Well, there’s Grandpa’s sister, my Great-Aunt Nedda. She’s into real estate. But she and Grandpa weren’t close. We hardly ever saw her.”

He sat down beside her on the step. “So why are things not that different?”

She sighed. “Because I still don’t go into town that often. Hell, I don’t even take the time to put gas in my car. Between the chickens and the Rose, I’m a real drone.”

He leaned back, resting his elbows on the step behind him. “Chef’s hours are a bitch. It’s a wonder any of us have any home life at all.”

“You don’t get out either?” She raised a faintly disbelieving eyebrow.

“I don’t get out as much as I used to, but I make it into town occasionally.” Actually living in the country had been a safety measure for him. It wasn’t as easy to wander out to another restaurant or bar for a drink or five to let the adrenaline wear off. “We got Sunday and Monday off, you know.”

She nodded slowly. “I know. I’m looking forward to it.”

He watched her for another moment, her face pale in the moonlight. She seemed to be deliberately looking away from him. He turned and looked up at the star-filled sky. “Ever been to the Faro Tavern in town?”

She shook her head, still not looking at him. “As I recall, that was one of the places my grandpa wouldn’t even walk by. He didn’t exactly call it a den of iniquity, but I think that’s because
iniquity
wasn’t part of his vocabulary.”

“It’s changed a lot since then.” He turned to watch her again. “New management a while ago. Guy named Tom Ames. His wife runs a first-class coffee place next door.”

Her lips edged up into a faint smile. “That is a change. The old Faro wouldn’t have had any coffee on the premises.”

“Want to go there for dinner Sunday night?”

She licked her lips, still not looking at him. “Would that cause any…problems in the kitchen? I mean, I don’t want Darcy…or anybody…to think…” Her voice died away. He had a feeling if they’d been in daylight her face would have been bright pink.

Joe knew he shouldn’t grin, but he couldn’t help it. “Darlin’, nobody in the kitchen will care. Hell, nobody in the kitchen will even know, unless you tell them. I’m sure as hell not going to bring it up. And I’ve never seen any of them in the Faro.” Now that he thought about it, he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen any of them in town period. He found himself wondering just where Leo and Jorge were doing their drinking these days.

She raised an eyebrow, turning toward him for the first time. “Because it’s not supposed to be mentioned?”

“Because I don’t talk about my private life in the kitchen. I’m not one of those chefs who takes everybody out drinking after we finish service so he can talk about his exploits.”

Once upon a time, of course, he’d done just that. Once upon a time he’d actually been famous for doing just that. But then the drinking had morphed into other things, cocaine chiefly. And it had started screwing with his life in major ways. And then it had started screwing with his cooking.