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Ryker found himself repeating the nickname in his head. Beamer. How appropriate for this woman who seemed to be a grinning ball of sunshine and light. Belatedly, he noticed it was his turn to do the reply thing. Clearing his throat, he looked at the plastic bag.
“Thanks for tossing my stuff in your cart. What do I owe you?”
“Zilch. It was the least I could do when your quick thinking saved my niece. And if it had been an active shooter in there, we’d have been in good hands. Are you in the military?”
He nodded, shifting uncomfortably. “I was.”
“Let me guess—Marines?” she asked, and when he nodded again, her face brightened as if she’d won a prize. “I knew it—you were fast on your feet and fearless. Well, thank you for your service. Is that how you lost part of your leg?”
Wow. She went there.
Her bright smile hadn’t lost any wattage as she awaited his response. Typically, people would studiously avoid looking at his leg, or else they’d stare at it. They rarely asked any questions.
He blinked and moved his head up and down. Damn it—what was wrong with him? He felt as tongue-tied and reclusive as his horror-writing older brother, Drake, had been before he’d met Kate and she’d dragged him into society. Clearly, Ryker needed to get out more.
Yet the woman appeared undaunted by his conversational ineptitude. Her easy expression never shifted as she slid her hand into her jeans pocket underneath the white chef’s coat like she had all day to wait for more than a nod to her question.
“Yeah. In Afghanistan.” The sting of the word was still there, but as promised, seven years of PE therapy had dulled the barb to a scratch versus a stab. Yet something must’ve shown on his face, as she was quick to reply.
“I wasn’t trying to pry. My dad was born with a leg-length discrepancy and a big port-wine stain on his face, and the thing he hates most are people staring and pussyfooting around it. Nobody likes to be pussyfooted around, right?”
The p-word, twice, falling from the lips of this gorgeous woman made the edges of his mouth quirk up. “True,” he said. “Pussyfooters are the worst.”
She nodded once, as if he’d passed a test. “Well, I appreciated what you did in there and wanted to pay it forward somehow. I’ve been really blessed to have met some kind people in town who’ve helped me adjust to being a single…whatever I am. Mom-like creature, I suppose. But I use the term loosely.” Her eyes darted to the yellow BMW, and her expression lost some of its luster. “Truth is, I feel like a failure. Every day is a crisis—the disharmony is exhausting, my self-care is nonexistent, and I’ve given up finding a work-life balance. Who knew caring for small humans was so hard?”
He knew from the gutted tone of her voice that she needed something. Empathy, or, more likely, she just wanted to be heard. Seen. Validated. Ryker knew the feeling. But coming up with a response was like turning the key in the ignition of a car left sitting in a dusty garage too long. His vocal cords were seized up with disuse, and he wondered if they might squeal from rust as he cobbled together a few sentences.
“Yeah. This is my first whole weekend with little Lisi, and I’ve been on high alert the entire time. Hard to believe a kid this tiny could fill a diaper so full that it ran up her back and into her hair.” He shook his head with the memory of getting crap out of baby Elise’s fine, red-brown curls. When he stopped speaking, the woman’s bright, inquisitive eyes and expectant expression wrung more words from him. “It took a half bottle of baby shampoo to get the mess out—it was like washing a greased seal. I thought it was tough playing football in the rain, but bathing a wet baby is next-level difficult. Just as I had her clean and wrapped in a towel…she pooped again, and now the whole bottle’s empty and I’m sure when I hand her back to her mother on Sunday, there’s going to be some rapid-fire questions.”
“Oh, I can top that.” The woman’s lips curved in a wry smile, her eyes glinting with something like competitive mischief. “Last week, Cecily set off the emergency flare she’d dug out of the roadside kit I kept under the seat and nearly blew us all up. We piled out right in the middle of Main Street. The inside of my car looking like the Fourth of July and everyone around us just started taking pictures and making judgments. I had no idea parenting was so hard—did you? I mean, someone should write a damn manual.”
Ryker had been marveling at how he and his brothers had never managed to set off a flare inside the car—they’d likely done everything else to drive Mom crazy after Dad died—when the rest of her words made it through his rarely used conversational filters.
She thought he was Elise’s dad. He rushed to explain.
“I’m not—”
Suddenly, the horn sounded from the nearby BMW. Both girls were still messing around in the rear window, so it must be the oldest girl beeping for her aunt.
“I’ve got to run, or they’ll find a way to destroy my car.” The woman grinned. The smile brightened her whole face, crinkling the skin next to her eyes.
In his head, Ryker tried to classify her eye color as blue or gray, while at the same time, he berated himself. Why hadn’t he asked her out when he had the chance, before he’d acted like a kook?
Suddenly, he realized she was still talking. He struggled to catch up with her words.
“…the baby shampoo, but honestly, as far as the canned soup goes, take my advice and save that crap for a blizzard. Next time, soup’s on me. We caregivers have to stick together to survive these tiny humans. Agreed?”
Dumbly, he nodded. Then he noticed he was standing at loose attention, his posture rigid and his hands at his thighs, thumbs pointing straight down where the seam of his trousers would be, if he were in his dress blues. Her voice had a crisp, no-nonsense, “this woman is in charge and means business” cadence that his Marine-trained brain reacted to by standing at the ready to receive orders. He made a concerted effort to relax his shoulders and take the business card she’d thrust at his chest.
Bryce Weatherford, Sous Chef
PattyCakes and Coffee Café
Wellsville, NY
He blinked, details of past conversations with his family sifted through the teeth-like gears of his mind. This was the woman his mom had hired a few months ago to take over the kitchen and expand the menu. The same new employee she’d been trying to not-so-subtly suggest would be a nice person for Ryker to “get to know” if he would only stop by the bakery—one more woman in the seemingly never-ending stream of them his family was always thrusting in his path, as if he were incapable of finding his own dates.
“Don’t let the title fool you,” Bryce said, misinterpreting his pause. “Patty gives all her employees business cards with fancy titles, because she says words matter. Although I’ve told her whipping up sandwiches and soups hardly qualifies as a sous chef, Patty insists. Since she had these cards printed, I didn’t want to seem ungrateful—she’s been good to me and the girls—so I occasionally give them out as a promo-type thing.”
