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Summer shuddered. “I’d rather give up my culinary career than have to deal with Brock Michaels on a daily basis,” she said flatly. “And in case you didn’t notice yesterday, it’s clear he feels the same way about me. The two of us working together would be an absolute disaster.”
Grandma Abigail frowned. The overhead fluorescent light glittered on the fine beads of perspiration that suddenly appeared on her face.
Summer’s gut clenched in warning.Something’s wrong.
“Sweetheart, I’mbeggingyou—” Grandma Abigail’s breath rasped in her throat as she took a shuddering gasp of air. An instant later, her eyes rolled back. She slumped backwards against the booth’s burgundy vinyl seat, her mouth half-open.
“Oh shit!” Summer gasped.This can’t be happening—not so soon after Grandpa Frank!
She lifted her head and looked around frantically. No one in the diner had noticed anything wrong yet. She caught the server’s eye—at least the girl wasn’t busy with her phone today.
“Terri!” she shouted. “Call 911! Now!”
Chapter Six – Brock
“Young man, are you hung over?” Marlene demanded as she lowered a basket of French fries into the deep fryer.
“No. Why?” Brock looked up from his skillet, where he was sautéing a mixture of mushrooms, onions, and garlic for a burger topping.
“Because you look like you’ve been rode hard and put away wet, and you’re grumpy as hell,” she shot back.
“I’m just tired,” he admitted. “Didn’t get a whole lot of sleep last night. And before you ask—” he raised his hand to forestall her next question, “—not because I was out having a good time. I was trying to sort out the mess that Kenny left.”
Her red-painted mouth turned down unhappily. “Kenny was a good guy,” she countered, her tone defensive. “He was just doing his best, you know.”
With an effort, Brock bit back his vitriolic assessment of Kenny’s “best” and just shook his head. He didn’t want to discuss the sorry state of the diner’s finances with her, not when he knew she’d tell the whole town about it by tomorrow.
“How’s that burger coming along?” he asked instead, turning his attention back to the skillet. He’d cooked the excess moisture from the mushrooms, and the onions were browning up nicely.
“It’s coming,” Marlene snapped. “Just another thirty seconds.”
Brock’s head ached and his eyes felt gritty, as if he’d been out in a dust storm.
He had worked late into the night reviewing the past month’s worth of receipts to see which menu items were the most popular, and then costing them out, as Ms. Fancy Pants Chef had suggested.
To his horror, he discovered that most of the dishes he was serving cost at least half of what he was selling them for.
When he added in his monthly overhead—wages, insurance, utilities, etc.—the resulting numbers forced him to confront reality.
Summer had been one hundred percent right about the reason that The Yummy Cowboy Diner was still running in the red despite a crowded dining room every breakfast and lunch service.Dammit.
Right now, no matter how hard he worked, he was losing money on each dish he cooked.
Worst of all, it was his own damned fault for listening to Kenny’s bad advice instead of sitting down and doing the math himself.
After his mother’s death, it had been easier for Brock to retreat to the kitchen and use the hard work of cooking to hold the raw pain of loss at bay. Kenny had kept the diner’s books and done the payroll for as long as Brock could remember.
At the time, there hadn’t been a compelling reason to change a system that seemed to be working. The pricing might have worked for Kenny, and the restaurant, back in the day, but with rising prices due to inflation, it was well past time to make some adjustments if Brock wanted to make ends meet.
After he went to bed last night, his seething anger at himself for letting things get this bad kept him awake for a long time.
When he finally fell asleep, he dreamed he was frantically hunting for a missing ingredient in his walk-in cooler while a blizzard of tickets swirled through the kitchen and Marlene shouted that she was quitting.
Then Summer appeared, wearing a white chef’s coat, her arms crossed and her sweet mouth curled in scorn.
“You messed up bad, Brock. Everyone knows you’re a loser,” she purred. “So, why don’t you let me take over the diner?”
Then, she pressed her soft curves against him and wound her long, sun-kissed golden legs around his hips. Her nails stabbed him in the back, sinking deep into his flesh like knives.
