He shrugged. “I’ve been cooking since I was a kid. You start to get a sense for what flavors go together.”
“Did your mom teach you?”
Brady barely held back a snort. If you called showing a five year old how to turn on a microwave and throw in a frozen dinner—assuming she and his dad hadn’t spent all the grocery money on booze and pills—teaching him how to cook.
“Mom wasn’t much of a cook,” he said, pausing to taste the soup before adding another dash of salt. “So I had to learn to fend for myself. Especially when I started playing football and realized I couldn’t play if I was eating nothing but crap.”
Molly gave a little laugh. “You’d think, growing up with a mom who ran a restaurant, I’d be better at this.”
“You’re doing great,” he protested. “That roasted chicken with artichokes you made yesterday was fantastic.”
She shot him a wry look. “Only because it was your recipe. Once, before you got back, I tried to improvise on your hot smoked salmon and it was a total disaster.” She dumped the garlic into a metal mixing bowl. “But I have to say,” she added as she carefully measured out a half cup of olive oil before pouring it into the bowl, “I enjoy it a lot more than I thought I would when you first left. I like the order of it, I think. It’s kind of like math.”
“Math?” he shot a questioning look over his shoulder.
“Yeah, you have to have the right proportions of everything, and if you follow the steps of a recipe exactly, you know it will turn out right. Like an equation. Everything nice and orderly and turning out the way it’s supposed to.”
He shook his head and smiled. “Nerd.”
“I’ll never deny it.”
“I think I get what you’re saying though—the orderliness, the control.” God knew he’d had little of either growing up.
“Especially when I’ve realized so many things are out of my control,” she said, and he knew by the glum note in her voice she was thinking about Josh.
Determined to wipe any traces of that asshole from her mind, he sidled up behind her on the way to get a loaf of bread. He rocked his hips into the soft curve of her ass and braced his hands against the prep table. “You want control? You can tie me up any time.”
“Pervert,” she whispered, but she couldn't hide the pink stain that crept up her cheeks and the way her breath hitched in her throat.
They worked in companionable silence for the next hour or so, and once again Brady let his thoughts drift, imagining their future, the two of them working side by side during the day and leaving at night to retreat to their house across the river.
“Now you taste,” Molly said, interrupting his musings as she offered up a bite of steak she’d grilled. “Okay?”
He opened his mouth and took the bite, closing his lips over the tips of her fingers as he did so. “Awesome,” he said, grinning as he was rewarded with yet another blush.
“You’re lucky Mom didn’t see that,” she said, casting a furtive look at Adele, who was busy squeezing lemons for salad dressing.
“Believe me, if she weren’t here I’d bend you over that table and violate all kinds of health codes.”
She couldn’t stifle a giggle as she gave him a playful slap. The warmth in her eyes set off an answering glow in his chest, got him thinking that maybe his fantasy future wasn’t too far off after all.
The kitchen door swung open. He scowled as Molly jumped and scurried away, guilty as a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar.
“Brady?”
He turned that scowl on Janelle, who picked up shifts here at the restaurant when she wasn’t managing the mini mart at the gas and grocery Damon owned. When she flinched, he tried to relax his face into a more neutral expression. “What is it?”
“There’s someone out here who says he needs to see you.”
The frown crept back as he walked toward the dining room.
The frown deepened when he saw the person in question. Tall, with a thin, rangy build that would fill out in time. A mop of thick, black hair. A full mouth with a stubborn tilt and silvery gray eyes that stared sullenly out from under arched black eyebrows.
Brady cursed. No, this was no annoying salesman trying to hawk his wares. It was infinitely worse. It was the past he was trying to escape invading his present, in the form of his sixteen-year-old nephew, Jordan.
Molly, who had followed him out of the kitchen let out a gasp. “Oh, my God, is that your son?”
Brady leveled her with a glare. “He’s my nephew.”
“Sorry,” she said, and for once the flustered blush didn’t bring him any pleasure. “Just, the resemblance—”
“He’s my sister’s kid,” he said curtly. His shoulders bunched with anger that she actually thought he was the kind of guy who would have a kid and not mention him for over a year. But that was a discussion for later.
Right now he had bigger issues to deal with, like six feet of sullen teenage boy and what the fuck he was doing here in Big Timber.
“We’ll talk in the office,” he said to Jordan. Then to Molly, “I assume you and Adele can handle lunch?” He tilted his chin towards the front, where the first customers were trickling in.
“Of course,” Molly said. “Take as much time as you need.” He could feel her stare boring into his back, feel the questions bubbling up in that big brain of hers.
He led Jordan to the office and shut the door behind them before turning on him. “How the hell did you get here?”
A shrug. “I hitchhiked.”
“You hitchhiked all the way from Bonner’s Ferry?” He felt his blood pressure soar a few hundred points at the thought of his nephew taking such a risk. Sure, he was big for his age and Brady had taught him some rudimentary self-defense moves to deal with the fights other kids would inevitably pick with him. But knowing how to duck a punch or get his opponent into a sleeper hold wouldn't help if it was some psycho with a knife.
“No,” Jordan said like Brady was the idiot. “I took the bus to Livingston. I hitchhiked from there.”
Like that answer was any more reassuring. Brady wiped his palm across his forehead. “Do you know what kind of lowlifes ride the bus?”
Another shrug. “It wasn’t that bad. I only had one guy offer me oxy in exchange for sucking his cock. I told him I only sucked dick for cash,” he said with a smirk.
“So not funny,” Brady growled. “Why didn’t you call first?”
“Because I knew you’d tell me not to come.”
Brady felt his chest pinch with guilt as he caught the briefest crack in his nephew’s hard veneer. Almost imperceptible, only there if you knew to look for it. But for the briefest second Brady saw not the tough talking teenager, but the vulnerable little boy who needed help, but knew better than to bother asking for it.
“Come here,” Brady held out his arms and pulled his nephew close for a hard, backslapping hug. “I’m glad you made it safe. Now tell me why you decided to show up unannounced when just last week you told me things had settled down.”
“Mom left right after I talked to you,” he said and slumped down into the black plastic chair opposite the small wooden desk.
Brady let out a low curse and leaned against the edge of the desk. His sister Connie was a world class fuck up, and this wasn’t the first time she’d disappeared for several days in a row. At least now Jordan was a teenager and could get himself to school and feed himself. “Didn’t you get the money I wired to Erin?” He’d sent several hundred dollars to his cousin in Sandpoint to give to Jordan so he could buy groceries and pay the utility bills. “There should have been plenty to cover you for a while.”
“Mom took it,” Jordan said, his fists clenched against the metal armrests.
“She broke into the safe?” Before Brady left to come back to Big Timber, he’d bought Jordan a small safe to keep under his bed since Connie had taken to stealing the money Jordan earned working as a dishwasher at Erin’s restaurant to feed her addiction to prescription pain killers.
Jordan mumbled something Brady couldn’t quite hear. “What?”
“I sorta forgot to put it in the safe. I left it in my backpack. She took it while I was asleep.”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“You sounded so pissed last time. I didn’t want to bother you.”
Another sucker punch of guilt. “I’m sorry for that.” That and a hundred other things, like the fact that he hadn’t been around nearly as much as he should have. That though he loved his nephew fiercely, Brady had chosen to avoid Bonner’s Ferry like the plague, unwilling to sacrifice his own happiness to be there like Jordan needed.
“What about Erin? Does she know about this?”
The grey eyes drifted sheepishly to the floor. “I don’t think Erin likes me much right now.”
“And why’s that?”
Jordan was silent for several seconds, squirming under Brady’s hard stare. “Because I kinda told a customer to fuck off last week.”
Brady let out a sigh.
“She was a total bitch, kept sending her food back and talking about how bad the service was.”
“That’s no excuse.”
“She also said that it was no wonder a trashy Flannery would own such a trashy restaurant.”
Brady’s fists clenched instinctively as he acknowledged that he probably wouldn’t have behaved much better in similar circumstances. Lord knew he’d gotten in plenty of trouble at Jordan’s age trying to defend his family's nonexistent honor. “Unlike most of our relatives, Erin can take care of herself.”
“I know, but I don’t like to hear anyone talking bad about her.”
“I’m sure she appreciates you defending her honor.”
“Yeah, appreciates it so much she fired me.”
“I’m sure once she cools down she’ll hire you back.”
Jordan silently picked at his thumbnail.
Brady looked at his watch. “You can stay with me tonight, and we’ll head out first thing in the morning.”
Jordan sat straight up. “No way. I’m not going back.”
“Of course you are—you have to go to school.”
“I can go to school here. Why can’t I just stay with you?”
Because I can’t convince the woman that I love that I’m any kind of catch if I’m bunking up with my juvenile delinquent of a nephew,
he thought, and then felt shitty for thinking it. It wasn’t Jordan’s fault he was born into a family of drug addicts and criminals and didn’t have anyone else to turn to. “It’s not the best timing—”
“I can’t stay at the house, ok? It’s not just that Mom’s gone—there’s some weird shit happening. Some people have been coming around, looking for her. I don’t know what she did, but the other day I came home and the house was completely turned over.”
Based on the last time he’d seen the run down two bedroom rancher Connie shared with Jordan and whatever loser she was sleeping with at the moment, Brady didn’t know he’d be able to tell the difference. But the genuine fear he heard in his nephew’s voice made him hold his tongue. “Did you call the cops?”
Jordan leveled him with an “are you shitting me?” look. Distrusting law enforcement was bred into their DNA. With good cause, considering it was mostly the McManuses and Flannerys causing the police to be called than the other way around.
“Okay. You can stay with me until we can get a hold of your mom, and figure things out from there.”
Jordan’s relief was almost palpable as he slumped back against the chair. “Thanks Unc. I won’t cause any trouble. You’ll barely even know I’m here.”
###
After she assured him that she and Adele could cover lunch service, Molly watched a grim faced Brady lead his nephew out to his truck. Though it was clear based on the pat he gave Jordan on the back as he loaded his bag into the truck that he had affection for the boy, Brady was obviously not happy about the surprise visit.
Curiosity burned in her gut. She’d known Brady for nearly a year, and in that time he’d offered up no information about his family—even that he had one—until he’d had to leave earlier that summer to deal with them.
And now his nephew, showing up unannounced—it had to have something to do with that phone call she’d interrupted earlier this week. The one he didn’t want to talk about with her.
“How’s Jordan?” she asked the next morning when Brady came in. Of course she hadn’t gone over to his house last night, instead spending her night tossing and turning in her too empty bed.
“He’s fine,” he answered curtly. With his dark circles under his eyes and deep lines bracketing his mouth, Brady didn’t look like he’d slept any better than she had.
“You looked pretty upset when you left yesterday. Is he in some kind of trouble?”
“Nothing I can’t handle,” he said and turned away, signaling the subject was closed.
Molly swallowed back her disappointment. “Good, because the producer of
Simply Delicious
called yesterday to let us know they’re coming to shoot in two weeks.”
“That should give us plenty of time to get ready,” Brady said, some of the tension easing from his face at the change of subject. He lifted a box of butternut squash from under the counter, removed one and started peeling it.
Molly grabbed one and did the same. “First they’ll film some establishing shots, where they’ll interview customers and stuff like that. I hope we have customers,” she said, frowning. Though they usually had a decent lunch crowd, at this time of year they were never packed.
“Are you kidding?” Brady said as he sliced his peeled squash neatly in half and reached for a spoon to scoop out the seeds. “All we have to do is let people know what day they’re filming and the whole town will show up.”
“You’re probably right.” Though there had been plenty of film crews in and out of town and in the surrounding area over the years, the citizens of Big Timber lined up in droves to be extras and never missed a chance to get caught on camera.
“After that we’ll have the cooking segment, where we teach Reggie a recipe. Or I should say you teach Reggie a recipe.”
“I’m not going on camera without my favorite sous chef,” Brady said and gave her playful bump with his hip. “And you know your mom is going to want to get in the mix.”
“Of course she is,” she rolled her eyes. “And knowing her she’ll say something completely inappropriate.”
“She’ll do fine. You both will.”