Sweet Home Carolina (2 page)

“No, I have not.” Amy checked the rolls browning in the
bottom oven. “I can’t afford a therapist. Evan’s job doesn’t supply medical
insurance for ex-wives. Besides, I don’t need a therapist to tell me I’m
stressed out and so angry I could spit.”

“Do what Jo does when she gets mad, throw dishes.” Jo’s
husband and the other co-owner of the Stardust, Flint Clinton, emerged from his
office to sniff the mouthwatering aromas. Taller than Jo, his craggy face more
striking than handsome, Flint examined the roasted chickens. “What is this,
Thanksgiving?”

“Can you fix microwaves, O Great Wise One?” Setting aside
the flask, Jo steered her husband toward the broken appliance and out of Amy’s
line of fire.

Not that Flint was in any danger from her, Amy thought. Jo
was the plate-throwing diva in the family. As appealing as throwing things
sounded, Amy was too practical to waste the energy of throwing crockery she’d
only have to clean up afterward.

Amy had always been the responsible member of their
irresponsible family. The sensible one who’d slaved hard to earn a scholarship
and put herself through school. She’d been rewarded for her efforts by marrying
an ambitious man who worked as hard as she did — and she worked harder still
helping him up the ladder to success. All she’d accomplished was to make Evan
look good to the kind of wealthy socialite he should have married in the first
place.

Jo filled three glasses from her flask and shoved one into
Amy’s hand, hiding it from their customers. “Until Flint persuades the town to
go wet, this will have to do. It’s just lemonade with a little extra,” she said
when Amy hesitated. “Call it an intervention. You need a break. Your pot is
about to boil over.”

Grabbing the pot of peas from the stove, Amy set it to one
side, then sipped Jo’s weird cocktail. She was perfectly aware Joella wasn’t referring
to the peas. She grimaced as the sour punch hit her tongue.

Jo dipped the spoon in the dressing and offered a sample to
Flint, who moaned appreciatively while investigating the insides of the
microwave. “Mom and her quilting friends just took a big order. If they finish
before Christmas, there will be money to spare and carols sung throughout the
hills.”

Christmas. A hollow opened in Amy’s middle that would never
be filled. She took another sip of the spiked lemonade, but she might as well
have thrown alcohol on a fire. How would she pay for Christmas? She didn’t even
know where they’d be living then.

“If we could get the mill back in production by Christmas,
there would be reason for caroling,” Amy declared fervently. A real job would
solve half her problems, anyway.

“Other than the Music Barn, those old mill buildings are
useless if the bankruptcy court decides to sell off the machinery instead of
letting the town buy it,” Flint commented, completing his repairs now that the
coffee was simmering. “We can’t put people to work in empty buildings.”

“And the tourist business is dead after this weekend.” Amy
slid the browned mushrooms from the oven, trying not to think of the stack of
bills on her desk. “There go your biggest-spending customers.”

Flint leaned against the counter, crossing his arms while
brandishing a screwdriver. “We can pay you to stay on, but we may have to go
back to being a coffee shop instead of a restaurant.”

“Only if you want to hand out free soup,” Amy predicted.

Returning his screwdriver to a drawer, Flint grabbed a hot
mushroom. Throwing it from hand to hand, he retreated toward his office. “We’ll
do what we have to do,” he called over his shoulder before he disappeared back
into his world.

“We know you’ve been handing out free meals,” Jo said with a
shrug, taking a bite of a mushroom and humming in pleasure. “It’s okay by us.
Flint’s so tickled with the Music Barn you helped him get that he’d knock heads
for you.”

“And endanger his guitar-playing hand?” Amy joked. Fighting
wasn’t a solution to this problem. Besides, his hand had just recovered from
surgery.

“The Barn brought in tourists all summer,” Jo reminded her.
“The whole town knows you talk sense. The judge ought to just let you have the
mill so you can set people to working again.”

“Oh, that’s
so
going to happen.” Amy whacked a bell pepper. “If I were Queen of the World, I’d
make a lot of changes around here, starting with ordering all men to line up
for common sense tests.”

“If you don’t watch out, you’re going to cut off a finger.
Have another drink.” Jo grabbed the knife and nudged Amy back to the stove with
her hip. “Is this about losing the house?”

Flipping off a burner, Amy lifted the heavy frying pan and
poured the gravy into a waiting gravy boat. “I can’t look for a new house until
I know where I’ll be working.”

“You’re working here,” Jo said firmly. “We can’t replace
you.”

Amy slapped the pan back on the burner, put her hands on her
hips, and glared at her younger — taller — sister. “That’s what I’m trying to
tell you. You cannot pay me on what this restaurant is making.
I’m
facing facts. You and Flint are the
ones with your heads in the clouds.”

As if on cue, the cordless phone Flint had installed by the
counter rang. Amy snatched the receiver before Jo could. “Stardust.”

“Amy, this is Mayor Blodgett.”

Amy took another swig of Jo’s spiked lemonade to calm her
suddenly shaky nerves. “Is there a problem?”

“That depends on how you look at it,” the mayor enunciated
slowly. “Another interested party has asked to look at the mill. As I
understand it, the company is European and cash heavy. It could be just the
investment we’re hoping for.”

“A foreign company won’t want to hire our workers,” Amy
warned the mayor. “The whole point of our buying the mill is to keep Northfork
residents employed.”

“You don’t think they’d bring in illegal immigrants, do
you?” the mayor asked in alarm.

Amy rolled her eyes, handed the receiver to Jo, and opened
the bottom oven to check on the rolls. If she were Queen of the World, men
would be relegated to hard labor. They were obviously not meant to think.
Parallel parking maybe, they could do that. Make them chauffeurs. Hole diggers.
Brick layers. But not politicians responsible for the lives and welfare of
entire communities of women and children.

While Jo chitchatted and applied her charm to the mayor, Amy
removed the rolls and began buttering their tops. She glanced at the clock. She
never wore watches. She was tired of replacing them. But the clock wasn’t
working either, so she checked the mullioned windows to see if the sunlight had
faded. After the first of September, the sun dipped behind the mountain around
five. It should be almost time for the early dinner arrivals.

As she watched, a sexy, dark maroon sports car rolled to a
stop, parking half on and half off the sidewalk in front of the café. The low-slung
front end halted inches from the snout of the concrete purple pig adorning the
café’s corner. The narrow mountain highway had no shoulder room for parking.
The shiny car would end up as a hood ornament on the next semi coming around
the curve too fast.

No one in town owned a car like that. Had ever seen a car
like that. Which meant it was European. After the mayor’s call, Amy had a very,
very bad feeling about that car.

She turned from the window and tossed back the cup of spiked
lemonade, superstitiously deciding if she didn’t look, the car might disappear.

Jo hung up and turned to see what had Amy tossing back
alcohol. “Oh, my. That’s one of the new Porsches,” she said with reverence.

“That will soon be a flattened Porsche,” Amy replied.

The low rumble of another powerful vehicle forced her to
glance out the window again. A shiny black Hummer sporting satellite antennas
drew up behind the sports car. Amy mused, how far would a Porsche travel after
being slammed into by a Hummer propelled by a semi?

Deciding bad news could wait, she checked the various pots
on the stove and missed seeing how the Porsche owner squeezed out of the low
front seat into traffic. Jo’s chuckles as she exchanged observations with the
locals sipping coffee at the counter were sufficient commentary for amusement.

The café’s red door swung open. Amy unconsciously waited for
a biting
What a dump!
from the owner
of a car that cost more than her house.

“Catarina, look!” a smoky baritone with a sexy accent Amy couldn’t
quite place called to someone outside. “Did you see the
brilliant
pig on the corner?”

She couldn’t resist. Just like everyone else, she checked
out the new arrivals.

The speaker was a lean, elegantly dressed gentleman propping
open the door to let in an entourage of characters as out of place as their
vehicles. Given the amount of animal-skin fabrics, feathered collars, and
leather worn by the gentleman’s exotic entourage, they looked like escapees
from a zoo in this land of denim and polyester. But the gentleman holding the
door looked as if he’d been born to wear a top hat and tux.

“Do you think he’s the ringmaster?” Jo murmured in
amusement, echoing Amy’s thought.

At that instant, the object of their fascination whipped off
his designer shades and winked in their direction. Amy almost dropped the
mushrooms. The stranger’s scorching gaze paused on her and triggered her
hormones like neglected hand grenades. She could have sworn he actually
saw
her, except no man who looked like
that ever noticed her when she stood next to Jo.

He could have just walked off the pages of a fashion ad, one
of those where the male models had six-pack abs and deliberately mussed
hairstyles that cost a fortune to achieve. Straight-cut brown hair brushed his
nape and fell Hugh Grant-style across his wide brow. A black ribbed polo shirt
pulled taut over his admirable chest, and the camel sports jacket topping it
was probably Armani and tailored to emphasize his square shoulders.

The likes of Hugh Grant didn’t appear around here without
reason, and after the mayor’s call, she had a sinking feeling that she knew the
reason.

The visitors milled about the nearly empty café, gazing at
the unconventional décor as if hoping a real restaurant would pop out from
under the eccentric tablecloths.

“Are we too early for dinner, my fair lady?” the stranger
asked playfully.

It took Jo’s elbow in her ribs before Amy realized he was
talking to her and not to her beautiful, blond baby sister. Jo was already
peeling off her apron in preparation for acting as hostess. The foreign
gentleman watched Amy expectantly, making her nervous.

“Dinner’s on,” she agreed with assumed nonchalance. “Take
seats anywhere.”

“You are a lifesaver,” he purred in a wickedly sexy voice
that had every woman in the café panting. “We’ve just driven up from the
airport in Charlotte, and there wasn’t a decent eatery in sight.”

“There’s a Cracker Barrel on the interstate,” Jo said with
amusement, gathering napkins and silverware.

“What’s a Cracker Barrel? It sounds
appalling
.” The gentleman sauntered — Amy swore that was the only
word that could describe the way he caught his hand in his pants pocket and
gracefully dodged tables and chairs without looking at them — to the counter.

He smelled even better than he looked. The subtle scents of
musk and pine woods intertwined with the aroma of her cooking, and her mouth
nearly watered as he took one of the seats at the counter, putting his boyishly
tousled hair within reach. Dark eyes watched her with impish laughter. She
poured another swallow of Jo’s lemonade.

Not wishing to see shiny cars smashed into grease slicks,
Amy nodded toward the door. “There’s no parking allowed on the street. The
police don’t tow cars because they’re usually scrap metal before tow trucks can
reach them. There are parking lots coming into and on the way out of town.”

Before the European hunk could respond, a lithe, towering
beauty swayed up to brush her breasts against his shoulder, drape her tousled
mane of tawny-streaked hair down his front, and whisper in his ear.

Amy recognized the Italian accent. Although she couldn’t
translate the words, she maliciously translated body language to
What are we doing in this hole, sweetikins,
let’s go somewhere fabulously expensive and sip champagne and make beautiful
love.

James Bond turned on his stool to wrap an understanding arm
around the lioness. He patted her hip and responded reassuringly in Italian;
then to Amy’s amazement, he gently nudged Blondie away and turned the intensity
of his focus back to her.

Amy’s wariness shield shot into full alert.

“You will pardon my friends? I was so eager to arrive I did
not think of their needs. They deserve a lovely resort, do they not? Can you
recommend such a thing?”

“An hour back down the road in Asheville. Would you like
coffee, tea?” Amy lifted the coffee carafe in an age-old gesture of hospitality
that she couldn’t neglect despite all suspicion.

“Tea, if you would be so kind.” He smiled in delight, and
his eyes crinkled in the corners. He turned and spoke more unfamiliar words to
his audience.

The blonde in the slinky leopard-print skirt sulked, and a
tall man with an Asian cast to his eyes replied in a bored French drawl.

Not knowing whether to provide sweet or unsweetened iced
tea, Amy poured unsweetened and pushed the sugar packets in the gentleman’s
direction, then took another sip of her spiked lemonade.

She began filling cups and glasses to Jo’s hand signals and
sighed in relief when Janey, their teenage waitress, shoved open the door,
followed by the first of the local curiosity seekers. The Porsche was better
than a neon sign. Word spread fast in a town like this, and the visitors were
better than any entertainment they’d had since the last country music show at
the Barn. Well-heeled foreigners didn’t often find the less-traveled paths
through these mountains.