Savage in a Stetson (Crossroads #4) - Em Petrova Page 0,17
didn’t have a thing to fret over.
“You’re here early!” Carolee had a way of bringing sunshine to any moment of the day as she bustled into the kitchen for her shift.
Jada looked up from mixing her pork rub with a smile. “I thought I’d get a head start on the pork for tomorrow.”
Carolee moved to wash her hands and after that started preparing chicken breasts for the Saturday afternoon rush. They worked in companionable silence, and she was super relieved the woman didn’t mention her competition, because she didn’t want to blurt anything about sleeping with him.
She sliced a look toward the small kitchen window that overlooked the side lot where employees parked. From here, she could only see part of Savage’s Barbecue sign and luckily, no sign of gorgeous, muscled—hung—former rodeo stars.
“What was that, hun?” Carolee drawled.
“I didn’t say anything?” But she must have made a noise.
“Oh thought you did. Did you happen to turn the fryers on? They take a while to warm up.”
“I’ll do that.” She dropped what she was doing and wiped her hands on a kitchen towel before crossing the room to the fryers. She flipped a switch and nothing happened.
She peered down at the grease, watching to see if it moved around the fryer as it began to heat. Two full minutes later, nothing happened.
“I don’t think there’s power.”
Carolee’s brows shot up. “I thought you were just working by the sunlight until closer to opening time.”
“That’s true, but now I’m wondering if we don’t have power.” She strode to the wall of light switches and flipped them on. All of them. Not a single one lit up.
She groaned. “This can’t be happening.”
Carolee abandoned her workstation to join her at the power box. “We must have blown a breaker or something. Let’s have a look.”
After both of them tested the switches in the electric box, Carolee put a call in to her hubby for help. But Jada had another way to find out if they had power.
She walked outside and looked toward Savage’s. No lights were on there either, but as she stood there, he pulled into the parking lot in his truck. He parked, jumped out and circled to the bed of his truck.
Shielding her eyes with a hand, she tried to make out what he was unloading. Then she saw the familiar black bulky shape of a barbecue grill. And another. Actually, after a close inspection, she counted six of the babies!
She fisted her hands and took off at a run-walk across the road. As her boots crunched on his fresh gravel parking lot, he looked up. His expression remained blank, but she saw his eyes dip over her body.
“I’m not wearing cutoff shorts today, so you can quit lookin’. In fact, I burned those ones as soon as I took them off last night.”
He returned his attention to the sixth completely assembled grill he lifted off his tailgate.
“What are you doin’ with all these grills?” She set a hand on her hip.
He tracked the movement, and she dropped her hand, not wanting to give him any more invitations with her body even if her mind gave off a totally different vibe.
“No power at my place.”
“Mine either.”
He nodded. “I know. I called the electric company. Apparently, they’re working on the matter, but it might be as late as tomorrow morning.”
“What!” She whirled to look at her restaurant, sitting in darkness. She spun to face Dom again. “Tomorrow morning?”
“Yep. That’s why I invested in some grills.”
Her mind raced. No power meant no food, and that resulted in empty cash drawers. Her monthly payment to Mortimer Brown required that she needed to earn a set amount per day for him as well as overhead. So far, she was already sinking.
She couldn’t let Dom win the day’s customers simply because he had food to sell.
She whipped around and without another word to the infuriating man, she set off for her own restaurant. She opened the door and called out to Carolee that she was making a run to the hardware store and then jumped into her truck.
Three minutes down the road, she entered the Crossroads hardware store. She didn’t see any display models of barbecues, but maybe they had them in the back.
“Hi, I’m looking for a grill,” she told the man at the counter, who’d happened to graduate a few years before her.
He gave a lamentable shake of his head. “Sorry—I just sold the last one.”
“Last one?” she echoed.
“Actually, sold them all to the same