“Hell no!” Roan said. “It was all about Reede. We all loved seeing you pour that beer over him. Everybody in town’s wanted to do that, or worse, but then, we all worried what he’d do to us at our next flu shot. We’re all cowards.”
“He nearly ran over me,” Sophie said, but his sympathy had softened her resolve. Maybe she could just look at the shop.
“That’s what I heard.” Roan put his hand behind her back, not touching her, but guiding her back down the sidewalk. “Didn’t he crush something of yours?”
“My cell phone.”
“That’s expensive!” Roan unlocked the door to the sandwich shop and waited for Sophie to step inside.
“It was a throwaway.” She was looking around the store. It was rather simple, with a tall glass cabinet to the left, a stainless counter behind it, tables and chairs to the right and in the back. It was all small and neat and looked to be in good condition.
“Reede should buy this place for you,” Roan said.
“I don’t want anything from him,” she said. “Nothing at all.”
“Yeah?” Roan asked, his eyes alight. He was a good-looking man, with whiskers and thick hair that had a reddish tint. He was looking at her in a way that she’d seen all her adult life—but she wasn’t interested. He understood her look. “Okay,” Roan said, “that can wait. What do you think of the place?”
Sophie looked at the chalkboard over the counter. It listed six flavors of smoothies and tuna salad sandwiches. “I don’t know anything about the restaurant business, and the only cooking I’ve done is for my family.”
“So make some family meals,” Roan said as he leaned back against the sides of the glass counter. “Look, Sophie—if I may call you that—from what I gather, you’re kind of at loose ends right now. No job, your friends are in faraway places, and didn’t I hear that your sister is in some college somewhere?”
Sophie crossed her arms over her chest. She wasn’t about to tell this man more about herself than the gossips already knew.
“All right, so maybe you are the center of interest in this town right now, and I don’t blame you at all for being a little miffed.”
“Is that what you call it?” she asked. “How about a flaming inferno of rage?”
Roan couldn’t conceal a little smile. Damn! but she was pretty. And he really liked her temper. If there was anything he couldn’t stand it was a bland female. “And you’re right to feel that way. I wouldn’t blame you if you left town and never looked back.”
“That’s my thought too,” Sophie said and turned toward the door, but then the old cell phone Kim had lent her vibrated. There was something about a buzzing phone that compelled one to look. So few people had her number that she wanted to know who was contacting her.
She took the phone out of her bag. It was a text message from Reede.
SORRY I RAN OUT. SIX-CAR PILEUP. BE HOME WHEN I CAN. DID YOU GET A HOUSE FOR US? I MISS YOU. REEDE
She knew he was teasing about living together, but for a moment Sophie closed her eyes. If she didn’t know what she did, that text would have made her very happy. Get “us” a house? He missed her? Even the thought that he was detained because he was saving lives appealed to her.
But not now. She turned the phone off.
“Reede?” Roan asked.
Sophie gave a curt nod.
“Poor guy doesn’t know he’s dead meat.” Roan said it with so much glee that Sophie came close to smiling.
Again she looked around the small restaurant. Sun was coming in through the windows and showing the dust motes in the air. The glass on the display cabinet was dirty and the wooden floor needed a good scrubbing. Reede’s text made her realize that she’d be seeing him every day. “I think this was a mistake,” she said and walked to the door.
“Christmas!” Roan said loudly.
She looked back at him. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Everybody around here, all the way to DC, thinks Edilean is the cutest little town they’ve ever seen. All of us who live here hate being called ‘quaint,’ but we’ve learned to make money from it. Seventy-five percent of our business is from Thanksgiving to Christmas. And all those shoppers get hungry. Make some soup, some fancy sandwiches, charge big city prices, and by the middle of January you’ll have enough money to bankroll your trip out of here.”
Sophie still had her hand on the doorknob. “I couldn’t do this alone.”
“So we can get you some help.”
“Who is ‘we’?”
“The people of Edilean. Al told me he plans to make them feel so guilty that they’ll buy three meals a day from you.”
Sophie’s hand tightened on the knob.
“Okay, two meals, and you choose which ones you want to cook. If it were me, I’d make the menu simple and change it every day. That way you won’t get bored. Tell people they have to take what they get. For Thanksgiving you could do—”
“Food in cartons,” she said softly. “They could order it all beforehand.” She’d seen a butcher shop that did that, and she’d envied people who could afford it. Having to cook a turkey and a dozen side dishes wasn’t easy, so it was nice to be able to supplement.
“Did you see the stove?” Roan asked as he went behind the counter. “It’s a Wolf. Red knobs. Nice, huh?”
Sophie took her hand off the door and stepped toward the counter to peer through the glass. “I’ve never used a commercial stove before.”
“It has eight burners. The last tenant wanted it and I bought it for her. Cost me a fortune.”
“And how did she pay you?” Sophie asked, one eyebrow raised.
Roan gave a laugh. “You got me on that one. Yes, she asked me for an eight-burner Wolf while we were in bed together. I thought she was referring to me, but it turned out she meant a cooking stove.”
The tiniest smile crossed Sophie’s lips.
“That’s better. Don’t you think you could stand to do this for two and a half months? Just until after the New Year?”
Sophie went to the end of the counter and looked behind it. There was the huge stove with its cast iron burners, double ovens beneath, stainless steel shelves above. More stainless covered the countertops. The wall had open shelving.
Could she do it? she wondered and tried to envision the little shop full of people. Mothers with overexcited children, carrying half a dozen shopping bags. Locals rushing in at the last minute. Fellow shopkeepers wanting sandwiches to go.
Turning, she looked back at Roan.
“Want to see the upstairs?”
Silently, Sophie nodded, then followed Roan to the back of the shop. As she walked, Sophie couldn’t help looking around the place. There were some booths in the back and there were lighter places on the walls where pictures had hung. If there were a lot of tourists coming through Edilean, especially ones “all the way from DC,” as Roan had said, maybe Sophie could display some of her work. She used to be rather good at reliefs, so why not hang some on the walls?
If she served breakfast and lunch, no dinner, she’d have the evenings to herself. With no man in her life—and she vowed that there wouldn’t be—she’d have time to create things. What a wonderful word, she thought as she went up the stairs, and couldn’t help saying it aloud. “Create.”
“Did you say something?” Roan asked.
“No, nothing.” She opened the door at the top of the stairs and saw the apartment. It was small, as long and as skinny as the store below, but there were windows all along the front, and it had tall ceilings. Facing the street was a living room, the middle held a kitchen, and in the back was a bedroom and bath. There were a lot of boxes that seemed to be full of the last tenant’s personal goods and she’d have to remove them, but the apartment could be liveable.
She looked at Roan. “I don’t own any furniture, I’d need help in the store, and I don’t have any money to pay for anything. I can’t even afford to buy a bag of onions.”
“What if I—?”
/>
“No.” For the first time since seeing Reede’s face, she was sure about something.
“But I—”
“No,” she said again and stared up at him.
Roan gave a sigh. “Reede’s ruined everything for all of us, hasn’t he?”
“If by that you mean men in general, yes. I . . . ” She broke off, not sure of what she wanted or needed. It was all too soon, and there were too many confusing thoughts in her head.
All she knew for sure was that it had all been too fast. She’d gone from Carter to Reede in a matter of days. Back in her small Texas hometown she’d seen Carter as her savior. For years, people there had made snide remarks about how Sophie had gone away to a fancy college in the east to learn how to paint pictures. “I learned that in the first grade,” some redneck she’d grown up with said, and everyone had laughed. But Sophie had returned to town because her little sister needed help and she’d stayed there. To her, what she’d done was noble. She’d felt that she was protecting her sister, but the townspeople liked to point out that her uppity college degree didn’t help her in her waitressing, or in answering the phone at the insurance agency.
And then along came Carter. That summer had been wonderful. It was great to be picked up in Carter’s sexy little Jag. While it was true that they didn’t go out to public places often, everyone knew she and Carter Treeborne were a couple.
After about their third date, Sophie began to see changes in the people around her. The teasings were less; the men stopped flirting with her. There were no more comments about how well her uniform fit. Instead, people made a point of saying “good morning” to her.
Was this what she really liked about Carter? Not him as a man but that he was part of the Treeborne family? When Carter had told her it was over, was she angry at losing him or of no longer getting the respect the Treeborne name gave her?
As for that matter, had she latched on to Reede for him or because she’d envisioned throwing a doctor in Carter’s face? “See?” she’d say to him. “I am equal to you. I am marriage material.”
“You okay?” Roan asked when they were again downstairs.
“Just thinking is all. Do you really believe I can make some money with this place? The rent alone—”
“Is free for four months, and I’ll take care of the employee salaries for three months.”
“You can’t—”
Roan’s face went from calm to almost angry in seconds. “You know something? You need to get the chip off your shoulder. Everybody needs help at some point in his or her life, and I’m offering it. If it will make that pride of yours feel better, you can pay me back next year, but for right now you need to learn the word ‘yes.’ ”
Sophie’s first thought was to storm out and drive away, leave Edilean forever, but then she realized that he was right. “I know,” she said. “I’m—” She took a breath and put her shoulders back. It wasn’t easy to ask for anything. “I’m broke and I don’t have a job and I do need help. Do you have any idea where I should begin?”
Roan gave a little smile out of the corner of his mouth. “So who lied to you the most? Lied flat out to your face?”
“Other than you?”
Roan’s smile broadened. “Free rent and paying salaries are my penance. So who else in this town owes you?”
Sophie’s lips tightened. “Those three women who work for Reede. When I think of how I spent an entire day scrubbing his apartment and all along they were concealing his identity . . . I’d like to give them a piece of my mind.”
“I have a better idea. Let’s shower them with guilt.” Roan took his mobile phone out of his pocket and pushed a few buttons. “Betsy?” he said. “I’m over at Daisy’s.” He paused. “Yeah, I’ve found a tenant and she plans to open it right away, so I want you and the other two girls to come over here and scrub the place down.”
Sophie could hear Betsy’s voice raised in anger.
“Since when do you think we’ve become cleaning women for you, Roan McTern? Just because Dr. Reede is out of town doesn’t mean we don’t have anything to do and we are professional women, not—”
“Sophie is going to run it, and she knows everything,” Roan said into the phone.
Betsy took a moment before speaking. “How much is everything?”
“Lies, concealments, the town being in on it. Every last dirty detail.”
When Betsy spoke, her voice was meek, apologetic. “We’ll need to get supplies.”
“Make it fast,” Roan said and clicked off the phone. He looked at Sophie. “What else do you need?”
“I don’t know,” Sophie began, then smiled. “This is like being given wishes.”
“Does that make me your fairy godmother?” Roan asked, eyes narrowed.
“If the shoe fits, Cinderella,” Sophie couldn’t help saying.
At that insult, Roan turned on his heel and started for the front door.
“I’m sorry!” Sophie said and went after him and put her hands on his arm. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I—” One look at Roan’s eyes as they sparkled in delight and she knew he’d been teasing her, and she couldn’t help laughing. “I need everything! All of it, from furniture to curtains to pots and pans to a sign painter for the windows.”
“What are you going to name the place? Sophie’s Revenge?”
“How about No Doctors Allowed?”
Roan put his hand over his heart. “I love that name. At least then I might have a chance.”
She stepped back from him and put her hands up in defense. “No. No more men. At least not for a while.”
“How long?” Roan asked seriously.
“Until . . . ” She looked around the little shop. “Until all the walls are covered with my work.”
Roan looked at her for a moment. “That’s right, you’re an artist too, aren’t you?”
“I was. I wanted to be.”
“I’ve always wanted to be a writer,” he said. “Problem is that I can’t write.”
“I doubt if that’s true,” Sophie said. “Surely you can—”
He was shaking his head at her.
“What?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever met a person with a softer heart than you have. You bring out every protective instinct in me and make me feel like some knight of old. Maybe I should show up on a black horse and—” He broke off at the memory, and Sophie’s narrowed eyes. “Sorry.”
He wouldn’t say it, but he now knew what had made Reede agree to wear that ridiculous costume Sara had made for him. When Sophie looked up with her big blue eyes, Roan felt like grabbing a sword and a shield and fighting off any man who came near her.
Too bad, he thought, it wasn’t the Middle Ages. If it were, he could challenge his cousin to a joust, with Sophie being the prize. Since Roan was bigger than Reede, he’d surely win.
Alas, it was the twenty-first century and all he had was a cell phone. “Didn’t Sara make that red and black costume for you?”
“The one that didn’t fit?”
Roan wanted to say that he thought it fit exceptionally well, since most of Sophie’s luscious figure was spilling out over the top, but he didn’t dare. “Sara knows lots of women who can sew. We’ll have curtains for you in twenty-four hours.”
“Furniture?”
“From the attics of Edilean. Sara’s mother can handle that. She’s the town’s mayor.”
“What do I cook with?”
“You and I will go to a restaurant supply store and fill my pickup.”
“I can’t—”
Roan held up his finger for her to stop talking.
“But you can’t—”
“At!”
Sophie gave a sigh. “Thank you.”
“That’s all I want to hear. That and the sound of a cash register ringing.”
“Speaking of which . . . ”
“We’ll get one of those too.” Roan started punching buttons on his cell phone. “Let me talk to Sara’s mom, Elli
e, and she’ll get everything started. You better open the door.”
Sophie turned to see Betsy and Heather outside, buckets and mops in their hands.
“Alice is getting supplies and bringing her husband’s shop vac,” Betsy said as soon as she was inside. “Sophie, we didn’t mean you any harm.”
“It’s just that Dr. Reede can be such a jerk that we’ll do anything to give us some peace,” Heather said. “And when we met you and you are so very pretty, we hoped that—”
“That’s enough,” Roan said. “I’m taking Iphigenia here out to do some shopping. When we get back I want this place to be sparkling. There’ll be furniture here this afternoon. See that it gets placed correctly.”
Sophie was trying to hide her smile over his Iphigenia remark. In Greek mythology she was a young woman who had been placed on an altar to be sacrificed to help others. Whether or not this was carried out differed from one storyteller to the next.
“Ready?” Roan asked Sophie, and she nodded.
Later, when he and Sophie stopped for a late lunch, Roan slipped away to call Reede to tell him that Sophie had found out who he was.
“Who told her?” Reede asked.
That it was hours later and no one from Edilean had told Reede, Roan took to mean that they were too chicken. “She went to your apartment and saw you sprawled on the couch. I don’t know why she didn’t drop something else on that ugly mug of yours. She—” Roan broke off because Reede wasn’t making his usual protests. “You okay?”
“No,” Reede said. “How angry is she?”
“More depressed than angry, but I’m working on her.”
“She probably thinks I’m like Treeborne.” Reede was standing in the hospital corridor, his white jacket rumpled. There were dark circles under his eyes from lack of sleep, from the trauma of his patients, and from Sophie not answering any of his six text messages, three e-mails, or four phone calls.
“Treeborne?” Roan said. “Like the foods?”
“You didn’t hear me say that name. Got it?” Reede said. “Just tell me about Sophie. I was afraid she’d leave town when she found out. That’s why I tried to get her to rent a house.”
“The old Gains place? Al tore up that lease, although I heard that his wife made him pay a deposit plus the first and last month’s rent. But don’t worry about Sophie. We’re taking care of her.”