Chapter 5

FIVE

HOW LONG DID IT TAKE to discuss what happened this morning?

Cassie paused her pacing in front of the window in Bronwyn’s office and soaked in the extraordinary view. Hideaway’s dining room sported a breathtaking vista as well. It was too bad the kitchen didn’t have a window.

When Bronwyn finally entered the room, she held the door open and waved Cassie toward the conference room. “I’m not supposed to talk to you again until Donovan completes his interviews. But I have to say this.” Bronwyn reached for Cassie’s arm and squeezed it. “It’s none of my business, but I’m pretty sure being alone in a room with Donovan isn’t exactly what you were prepared for today, and I’m sorry.”

Cassie felt her face go up in flames. “I can handle it.”

Bronwyn squeezed once more and released her. “Oh sweetie, I know that. Quinn women are fierce and strong.” She leaned toward her. “But even the strong can fall when someone cuts their legs out from under them.”

So, so true.

Bronwyn stepped back. “You’ve got this. And when you’re done, we still need to talk.”

Cassie walked toward the conference room. Donovan stood by the open door, and after she was inside, he closed it. She took a seat and waited. He stood, his back to the room, his shoulders rising and falling as he took a few deep breaths.

What was that about? “Donovan? Are you okay?”

He turned and gave her a smile. If that smile had been a paint color, it would have been called busted-by-my-ex-girlfriend sheepish. He took his seat and finally met her gaze. “Just needed a second.”

“Why?”

He scooted his seat back from the table, far enough that he could rest his elbows on his knees. He laced his fingers together and spoke to the floor. “I’m not sure I can do this.”

“Do what?”

“Interview you.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not as unbiased as I should be.”

Cassie leaned back in her seat and crossed her arms. “Unless you think I’m responsible, there’s no reason any biases you have against me should make any difference. Welcome to small-town life, Officer Bledsoe. You don’t get to pick and choose who you defend and protect.”

He stood and ran his fingers through his hair. It had grown out some since—

She pulled back from that thought so fast her mind provided her with sound effects for a needle scraping across a record.

He put his hands on the table, and with his height and general disposition, she probably should have been a little concerned about the way he was towering over her. What did it say about her that she’d always liked it when he got riled up? Worse, what did it say that she still liked it?

“Cassie.”

Her name was practically a growl. And why did she have to like that ?

“I’m concerned for your safety.” His hands flexed on the table. “You could have walked in on that burglary. The vandalism could be directed at you. And I’m not sure I can investigate this without letting my personal feelings interfere.”

Cassie kept her arms crossed so he wouldn’t see her hands trembling. “I fail to see how this is an issue. I assume you want all of your constituents to be healthy and happy.”

“You are not the same, and you know it.”

“No, Officer Bledsoe. I’m exactly the same as anyone else. At least as far as you’re concerned. So I suggest you sit that cute little butt of yours down, conduct the interview, and allow me to get on with my day. I’m sure my cousins will be anxious to get to work, and I’m sure you have plenty of other things to do today.”

She took a breath and gave herself a mental high-five. Of course she knew he was referring to their dating history, but playing dumb, or at least refusing to acknowledge that he might have a valid point, made her feel like she had the upper hand.

She tried to focus on that and not on the way she’d be spending the next six months trying to erase that growly “Cassie” from her memory. Or the way his struggle to hold it together made her wish for things that she couldn’t have.

Like Donovan Bledsoe.

A Donovan Bledsoe who currently looked ready to rain down death and destruction on anyone who got in his way.

He sat, turned on his voice recorder, stated their names and the date, and then held his pen against his notepad. “Ms. Quinn, do you have any quarrels with anyone in the kitchen?”

Bronwyn. That rat.

When she regained motor function of her mouth, she gave Donovan a sugary sweet smile. “How would you define quar rel, Officer Bledsoe? Chefs are as temperamental as any other artist. No one expects everyone to get along.”

“No one expects a coworker to destroy the kitchen, either. But given that it’s a very real possibility that one of your coworkers did exactly that, it’s one we have to explore.” Donovan’s tone was even. But there was a muscle jumping in his neck.

What was wrong with her? Shame flooded through her as she thought about her reactions to Donovan in the last ten minutes. He’d been nothing but kind. While she’d been ... awful. She leaned forward and rested her forehead on the table. “Could you turn off the recorder? Just for a minute?”

He didn’t answer, but she heard the recorder move. Presumably he’d turned it off.

She didn’t look up. “Could we start over please? I don’t know what’s wrong with me. You’re concerned, and I appreciate your worry. I apologize for being such a shrew about it.” She sat up but kept her head down. “This is harder than I anticipated it would be. If you could restart the voice recorder, I’ll answer your questions without the attitude.”

“Cass.” This time, there was no growl. There was tenderness. And drat her stupid, idiotic, traitorous, glutton-for-punishment heart, but she liked that too. “You don’t owe me an apology. Your day ran off the rails, and then I took it and threw it over a cliff.”

She didn’t want to laugh. He wasn’t being funny. But her heart still ached. Because Donovan was funny. Kind. Protective. Caring. Compassionate. And for all his macho manliness, he wasn’t afraid of apologizing or of expressing his emotions. He’d been practically perfect in every way.

Right up until the day he wasn’t.

And she still didn’t know why.

But she wasn’t going to find out. Not today. Today, she was going to put on her big-girl panties and deal with the situation. “I’ll accept your apology if you’ll accept mine.”

“Deal.”

She pointed to the recorder. “Let’s do this.”

He gave her a look that said the conversation they were about to have wasn’t the one he wanted to have. But he hit record. “Cassie, could you tell me if there are any issues in the kitchen that I need to be aware of?”

“Bronwyn ratted me out, didn’t she?”

He smirked. “She indicated that she had concerns, and you’d been unwilling to discuss them. She also indicated that while she respected your decision at the time, circumstances being what they are, it would be wise for me to find out what’s going on.”

“You aren’t going to like it.”

“I don’t have to like it. Doesn’t mean I don’t need to know.”

“Fine.” How to put this ... delicately? “The sous-chef, Amos Cartwright.”

“Yes?”

“He, um, well ... he either wants to date me or kill me. Honestly, it could go either way. I’m not quite sure.”

Donovan’s jaw worked. She waved a hand at him and mouthed, “Relax before you break your teeth.” Somehow she didn’t think it would be appropriate for that to be on the recording, but seriously, he was going to need to see Meredith and get a night guard if he did that kind of thing in his sleep.

He unclenched his jaw and indicated that she should continue. “To be clear, I’m not interested. I don’t date my sous-chefs. It’s a firm rule. But even if he wasn’t my sous-chef, I wouldn’t date him. He isn’t my type.”

One eyebrow lifted. He went with a different approach. “Can you describe this chef? What was his name again?”

“His name is Amos Cartwright. He’s from West Virginia. Chef Louis hired him two years ago. He’s an excellent sous-chef. He claims that he doesn’t want Chef Louis’s job. But I think he was caught off guard when Bronwyn brought me in rather than promoting him to the role of head chef while Chef Louis is recuperating.”

“Okay. What does he look like?”

“He’s maybe five ten? Two hundred pounds? Brown hair. Brown eyes. May or may not be emotionally stable.”

AN UNSTABLE CHEF? In a kitchen, night after night, with Cassie? No. Donovan did not like the sound of that.

Cassie had the bubbly, girl-next-door good looks that made people underestimate her. They saw her blond hair and blue eyes and easy laughter and didn’t realize that she was a woman driven to be the best. Mentally, she was a force. But physically? She wasn’t much over five feet tall. A two-hundred-pound man with anger issues could be a big problem.

Cassie ran her hands over the smooth tabletop. “But I don’t see him doing something like this.”

“You said earlier that he either wanted to date you or kill you and you weren’t sure which.”

“Oh, I stand by that.”

Donovan’s blood ran cold at her matter-of-fact statement. “Why, exactly, do you say that?”

“Because one day last week, he told me he wanted to marry me. This was after I made breakfast for supper for the staff after a long night. But then a few days later, he half jokingly, half seriously threatened me with a chef’s knife. So I’m not sure how he feels about me. But I do know that he loves that kitchen more than he loves anything else. He’d never damage it. He might damage me, but not the kitchen.”

How could she say that so flippantly? “He might damage you?”

Cassie shrugged. She shrugged!

Donovan squeezed the arms of the chair where he sat and forced himself not to move. “Cass, could you go back to the way he threatened you with a chef’s knife?”

Cassie glanced at the recorder. Then back at Donovan. “This is one of those things that could get blown way out of proportion. I don’t want him to lose his job over what was probably a joke to him.”

“But it wasn’t to you?”

She shook her head, and when she met his eyes for a fleeting moment, there was something he’d never seen in them. It might have been shame. Or fear. Whatever it was, it was bad.

“Cassie?”

She took a gulp of air, and the words tumbled out so fast he was thankful the recorder would capture everything. “It was late. We were all tired. Everyone gets punchy sometimes, and the diners that night had been ... challenging.”

“Define challenging.”

Cassie stood and paced around the table like a caged animal. “Okay.” She pitched her voice low and leaned toward the recorder. Clearly she wanted her words recorded, but didn’t want to risk anyone overhearing. “It shouldn’t come as a surprise that in order to keep them happy, some of our guests require special handling.”

“You mean because The Haven caters to people who almost never hear the word ‘no’ regardless of what they ask for?”

Cassie smirked. “Something like that.” Her shoulders relaxed a fraction. “We had a guest who complained about everything we served him. The salad dressing had too much salt. The shrimp was too spicy. The dessert”—she paused and held her hands out in a circle the size of a small dinner plate—“was too small.”

“Too small? How do you put up with that?” He would have told the guy to go make his own dessert.

“Your world is black and white. There are laws. People follow them or they break them. If they break them, there are consequences. But my world isn’t like that. Taste is subjective. One person’s spicy is another person’s bland. It doesn’t mean one person is right and the other is wrong. It’s a matter of opinion.”

“People can have a difference of opinion without being jerks.”

“True. And if it had just been about the seasoning of the food, I could have attributed the behavior to someone with a vastly different palate than mine. But when he pitched a hissy fit about the size of his dessert? That’s when I knew there was no pleasing him. We aren’t running a buffet here. This isn’t a cruise ship where people can request three entrées and four desserts. We typically don’t plate the desserts until it’s time to take them to the diners, and we only make what we need. But in this case, someone had miscounted and we had another dessert plated, so I told the server to give him another one, no charge. I didn’t realize that Amos took it upon himself to hand deliver it. When he returned to the kitchen, he was so angry he took a knife, whacked a few onions, a couple of potatoes, and then came toward me with the knife in his hand, point up.”

Donovan had never believed it was possible to feel his blood pressure rise. Until today. He was pretty sure he was approaching stroke levels. Only the obvious proof that Cassie had walked away unscathed from the encounter kept him in his seat.

She carried on, seemingly oblivious to the mental, emotional, and physical distress her story was causing him. “When I asked him what had put a twist in his toque, he told me the guest took two bites of the second dessert before declaring himself too full to eat any more. Then Amos waved the knife around, a bit too close to my jacket for my liking and went off. He ranted about the guests and the kitchen and my handling of the entire situation.”

She paused, her brow furrowed. “I’m not sure how to explain it. Even while he was spewing about everything wrong in our kitchen, it still wasn’t clear if he was angry at me or for me.”

Donovan took a swig of water from the bottle on the table and was pleased to see that his hands weren’t shaking in rage. “Cassie. The knife pointed at your chest probably should have clued you in on that.”

“He didn’t attack me with it.”

“No? Were you afraid?”

She dropped her gaze.

That was all the answer he needed. “Terrorizing someone with a weapon is aggravated assault. No physical harm is required. You could have him arrested for that.”

Her eyes widened. “I don’t want him arrested. He was angry. He’d had a long night. He was tired and frustrated, and that particular guest was loud and drunk and completely out of line.”

“None of that gives him the right to come at you with a knife!” Donovan wasn’t sure when he’d stood up, or when he’d leaned toward her. But Cassie didn’t flinch from his nearly shouted response.

“I know that! But it isn’t my kitchen.” She pressed a hand to her chest. “I’m filling in. I’m in charge of the food, not the staff.”

“I doubt Bronwyn would see it that way.”

Cassie flopped into her chair. “I’ve handled far worse and lived to tell about it.”

This was a thread Donovan desperately wanted to pull. But he knew from past experience that it wouldn’t get him anywhere but annoyed and frustrated. Cassie had a story. But she hadn’t confided in him while they’d been dating. She certainly wouldn’t confide in him now.

“Bottom line—Amos has been a problem from the first day I came in. But like I said, I don’t see him destroying the kitchen.”