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Chapter Two
Clarissa Cooper could only stare as she stood just outside the shoppe. “This can’t be happening,” she said, but she’d know that gait, those boots, and that pair of broad shoulders anywhere.
Just because she hadn’t seen Spencer Rust face-to-face in a while didn’t mean her memory had been wiped clean. The real question was: What in the name of everything buttery was he doing here?
“This has disaster written all over it.” Just like that time she’d tried to make black licorice, cream, and sugar to play nicely together. Clarissa could usually get any flavor to marry well with the ice cream base she’d perfected at her family’s dairy farm, but that concoction had been her one great failure.
At least in the kitchen.
She’d failed plenty of other times, in plenty of other ways. She had a half-finished business degree, a culinary certificate she hadn’t used yet, and four long gashes on her heart to prove it, almost like the claws of a tiger had taken a swipe at her for not mixing catnip into a creamy ice cream base.
Spencer Rust had almost been the cause of one of those gashes, and she wasn’t going to let him have another chance to derail her future.
Her father had opened the barn door across the parking lot from the Cooper & Company Shoppe, which Clarissa had been running for the past eight years. He’d already gone inside, and Spencer brushed his hands down his torso as he hurried after him.
“Almost like he’d seen Satan himself,” Clarissa muttered, already disgusted with the man. Deep down, she knew that feeling extended to herself, because her heartbeat had gone haywire when she’d seen him exit the barn from inside the shoppe.
She wasn’t even sure how she’d come to be standing outside.
Spencer went into the barn, and at that moment, Clarissa’s heart started beating normally again. Stupid thing didn’t realize it was supposed to do that all the time, and that it couldn’t stall or freak out at the sight of every tall, dark, and delicious cowboy.
She turned away from the barn and went back inside. She brushed her hand along the window to fix the curtains she’d practically ripped down when she’d recognized Spencer and continued over to the wall to retrieve the clipboard just inside the kitchen door. The store was closing in ten minutes, and she needed to do the inventory. Then she’d know what cheeses to make in the morning, and which products she needed to put on sale before they expired.
Cooper & Co didn’t use any antibiotics or hormones, and that meant their completely organic milk and milk products couldn’t sit in coolers forever. Pick-ups had to be made within the hour of her pulling the product from the refrigeration unit in the milk parlor. Almost everything she sold in the shoppe had a shelf-life of less than four days.
Yes, she was proud of her family’s operation. They’d worked hard to build the dairy farm, and her great-granddaddy had settled here in Sweet Water Falls over a century ago. She’d filed for historic status for Cooper & Co a few months ago, but she hadn’t heard if the state had approved it or not.
If they did, the farm would get a nice plaque to put on their sign out on the highway. She supposed Daddy could put the plaque anywhere he wanted, and she hoped the Texas Agriculture Board would get their act together before October. Daddy’s birthday was at the beginning of that month, and she wanted to give him the plaque and the certificate as a gift.
He’d worked around the farm since he was old enough to walk. All Coopers did, even her older sister, Cherry, and even her.
She and Cherry had both left to go to college, as had Lee, her oldest brother. Her other two brothers hadn’t, though, and she could see why not. They knew how to run the farm without certificates and math classes.
Clarissa sometimes felt like that about her culinary education. Some of her cooking ability had come as innate ability. Her palette could detect the subtlest of flavors. She loved creating recipes, and she’d started a document on her computer with all of her best ice creams, cakes, cookies, and brownies. She didn’t dare call it a cookbook, though somewhere in the back of the part of her mind that still dreamed, shewaswriting a dessert cookbook.
Surprisingly, she didn’t want to own a bakery or sweet shop. She had two really good friends in town who did that, and she saw how much they worked.
You’ll work that much if you get the job at Overlook, she told herself. Excitement zinged through her at the thought of even stepping foot in the four-star restaurant in San Antonio as a professional chef. Her best friend from culinary school had landed a job there a few years ago, and Leslie had contacted Clarissa a couple of months back, saying that an opening might be coming up in the kitchen there.
Clarissa had thought she’d been happy in her family’s small cheese kitchen here. She did get to mix up herby cheese spreads and make varieties of ice cream no one else got to experiment as freely with.
And shehadbeen happy. She liked being near her family, though her brothers were some of the grouchiest men on the planet. It didn’t help that Mama kept after the three of them constantly to find someone to marry and start having babies with.
Lee, the oldest had been married before. He had a son he saw all the time, and who came to live on the farm constantly, as his ex-wife lived only a short twenty-minute drive away, and they shared custody of Ford.
Mama didn’t keep her lectures about settling down and raising a family to just the boys either. Cherry and Clarissa heard it plenty, that was for sure. Even though her mother was sick and barely left the house anymore, Clarissa knew exactly how she felt on a variety of topics.
Her stomach flipped at the thought of leaving Sweet Water Falls. She’d only done so to learn new skills and get an education, and she couldn’t imagine moving to San Antonio permanently.
Cherry had done it a decade ago, and while the two girls bookended the family, with Cherry the oldest and Clarissa the youngest, Clarissa did love her sister fiercely.
Guess who’s on the farm today?she typed out and sent to her sister. When she and Spencer had broken up nine years ago, she’d promptly left town. She and Cherry had still talked about him for months, though, because hehadput one of those gashes on her heart.
“Not analmost-gash,” she told herself, and it felt like the wound was starting to reopen, and she’d only seen him. What would it be like if she had to speak to him?
Who?Cherry asked.
Spencer Rust.
