Sweet Home Alaska (5 page)

“I can’t take all the credit,” he said. His voice sounded right behind her, close to her.

She gripped the railing and refused to turn around in case he might see the interest in her eyes. “Why’s that?”

“My cousin, Zak, he encouraged me to add a more ‘Alaskan’ look to the hotel.”

She gathered her business-like will and swung around, keeping her back against the rail. “I saw the photo of his lodge in your office. A beautiful place. I’ve never been that far north. Which is kind of crazy, since I grew up here.”

“Alaska’s a big place. It’s understandable.” His intense scrutiny struck her momentarily speechless.

Thunder pounded in the distance and she jumped.

Trey reached out his arm and came within inches of touching her. “Come inside. We’re going to get wet if we stay out here.”

At that moment, she thought getting wet with Trey was a fantastic idea. Visions of drenched clothes plastered to their bodies, then running inside to tear the fabric from their damp skin, clouded her mind. She tore her stare away from him and stepped inside.

She quickly reached for the quilt and spread it across the floor. She got on her hands and knees and straightened out the wrinkles. She needed to focus on business and quit fantasizing about Trey. He was her client for a few weeks, nothing more. She arched her back, craned her neck, and asked, “How’s this?”

Trey swallowed. She watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down.

His eyes narrowed, then blinked twice. “How’s what?”

“The blanket.” She sat back on her bended knees. “Is this okay for our picnic?”

“The blanket’s fine.” His tone lacked any kind of inflection.

Was he irritated with her? Or was it interest she saw shining in his eyes? She was beginning to hope so. She opened the cooler. “I’ll set everything up.”

She swung around, sat on her bottom and eyed Trey standing at the edge of the quilt.

She shifted her eyes upward. “Why don’t you sit down?”

Trey moved to the opposite corner of the quilt and sat cross-legged.

Lauren busied herself pulling out the food she’d packed. She handed him the bottle opener. “Here, would you uncork the wine bottle please?”

“Sure.” His warm fingers grazed hers as he took the bottle from her hands.

Her pulse threaded beneath her skin in a hungry rhythmic beat. She’d been so busy building her business, working all hours of the day, she hadn’t realized how sex-starved she’d become. With shaking fingers, she opened containers and unwrapped sandwiches.

Trey uncorked the wine bottle and poured the chardonnay into the two wine glasses. “So, about the menu. . .”

She glanced up from dishing a spoonful of potato salad on his plate. “Yes, I have several items for you to consider.”

His eyes widened. “Yeah, I can see that.”

She placed a chicken wrap, antipasto salad, coleslaw, and a bite-sized tuna sandwich on his chilled ceramic plate and placed it in front of him on the quilt.

Trey finished pouring chardonnay into the wine glasses before he noticed his plate full of food. “How much do you plan on feeding me?”

She pulled out a bag of chips from the cooler. “Oh don’t worry, a lot more. I haven’t even told you about my desserts yet.” She winked at him and reached for another container. “Oh no.” She searched the bottom of the cooler.

“What?” He asked as he handed her a glass of wine.

“My salsa. I forgot the salsa.” It was one of her specialties. She took the glass of wine he gave her. But maybe forgetting the salsa would make for an excellent excuse to stop by her place later.

“I think we have plenty to eat for tonight.” He looked down at his plate. “It looks delicious, but that is a lot of food.”

“I assumed you’d want cold and hot dishes at the party. Tonight is just about testing some cold samples. Do you want both?” She handed him a fork.

He took the fork from her and set it on the edge of his plate. “I want a lot of things.” He coughed. “I want a lot of things to eat. At the party.”

“Great. That’s what I’m here for.” She held up her glass. “Should we make a toast?”

“Sure,” he said, holding up his glass as well.

“To a fun and profitable business relationship,” she said and took a sip of wine. She twirled the stem of the glass between her thumb and fingers. “Thank you for giving the awkward, defeated girl a helping hand in her homecoming.”

He eyed her with skepticism. “You are many things, but defeated isn’t one of them. And you’re certainly not awkward. I doubt you’ve gotten a nickname like ‘Crash’ in your past.”

“Crash?” she asked. Memories came flooding back. It started to come together, that day in the lunchroom. “Oh my gosh. I’d completely forgotten about that.”

“Did you now?” he asked sarcastically.

“Yes,” she implored. “I’d completely forgotten. And I’d rather spill a plate full of food in front of my high school classmates, than come back to this town with everyone looking down their noses at me because I failed at making it as an actress in Hollywood.”

“You don’t look like a failure to me,” he said. “The town doesn’t look at you as a failure. I’m sure of it.”

“Nice of you to defend them, but I disagree.” She took a gulp of wine.

“You must have had a job while you were trying to obtain an acting position. How else would you have survived? I’d like to hear what happened.”

He opened the door to make this evening more than just business. She couldn’t deny it felt wonderful to relax and say exactly what she thought, and he was so darn cute, the way he said “obtain an acting position.” The guy needed to loosen up, and she started to think that she was just the person for the job. . . or position, as he would say. In fact, she’d like to show him a lot of
positions
. “Eight years is a lot of cover. This is gonna take more than one bottle of wine.”

Leaning in, he raised an eyebrow. “We have more wine downstairs, if needed.”

“Perfect,” she said, as though telling someone your entire life story was completely normal. Maybe drinking wine on an empty stomach wasn’t such a good idea. “Where do I start?”

“Start at the beginning. What happened after graduation? After you left Alaska?” he asked, and bit into his tuna sandwich.

She enjoyed watching him dig into the food she’d put before him. “I’m going to give you the watered-down short version, okay?”

He finished chewing a spoonful of potato salad. “Sure. Whatever you’re comfortable with.”

“I had big dreams,” she began. “I wanted to be an actress. I had an agent. I figured it would only be a matter of time. Right job, right place, and all that. But the best I could do was a toothpaste commercial. And with my bills piling up, I had to get a steady income, so I ended up taking a job as a make-up artist. I figured if I wasn’t one of the actors, at least I got to work with them.”

Trey refilled her wine glass, then bit into his chicken wrap, all the while listening to her story.

“I eventually started bringing snacks into the break room. You know scones, or muffins, coffee cake, whatever I felt like baking. I did miss home. I missed my grandmother, but I was determined to make it. But baking made me feel not quite so homesick.”

“I bet your coworkers loved that.”

“Oh, they did. I kept getting requests for a dozen cookies or cupcakes. Whatever I brought in, everyone ate. Eventually, I had to start charging people if they wanted me to make something for a special event. Next thing I knew, I was working full-time as a make-up artist and part-time for a catering outfit because somebody told someone else about my baked goods. It’s all about networking in Hollywood. Anyway, I worked for this guy Myles, who owns Delights Catering. He catered for many actors and actresses in their homes when they had dinner parties. I learned so much. I always had the baking end of things down from my grandmother, but there I learned about the catering business and preparing all kinds of dishes. I was really enjoying it.”

“Sounds like it.” He seemed genuinely interested in what she had to say, so she forged on.

“Then Myles told me about this show
The Perfect Taste
on the Food Network. They were having a contest. A cook-off, if you will. But not only did you have to be a good cook, as the grand prize winner you got to be the hostess for this new show. Myles thought I should enter. So I applied.”

“Yeah,” Trey said, between bites of antipasto salad. “Go on. What happened?”

“I was accepted. I wanted this job so bad. It was the perfect combination of acting and cooking—the hostess of my own cooking show! It was a dream. Sometimes you don’t know what your dream is until it’s placed right in front of you—you know,” she said.

“I do know.” Trey nodded.

“I ended up being eliminated in the second round.” She didn’t sit up quite as straight. The defeat still hurt. “When I asked why I wasn’t selected to move on to the next round of the competition, they said ultimately I was too young. That most people who watch the Food Network are older and their customers would relate better to an older hostess, a married hostess with kids. Well, clearly I didn’t fit their mold. It was completely out of my control, but still… I was devastated.”

“I’m sorry.” He sounded like he really meant it, like the words weren’t just an automatic response to her sad story.

“Yeah, me, too. I decided L.A. wasn’t for me, but then my grandma died and I never got to tell her. . . Then, she left me the bakery. It was time to come home. I didn’t make it in Hollywood.” Saying the words hurt more than she’d realized. She almost said what she’d said to no one—that she was sorry. She wanted to tell her grandma how sorry she was more than she ever wanted anything, but her pride had been more important, and now it was too late.

“You’re being way too hard on yourself. Look at all you’ve learned. If you didn’t work for Myles, you wouldn’t have learned everything you did about catering, right?”

“Yes, that’s true. Everything happens for a reason, as they say, but I can’t help but think if I hadn’t been off chasing my silly dreams that I’d be here where I’m supposed to be, and I could have been spending all those years with Grandma. Instead, I was away from her.”

“I don’t think she held it against you. She was happy for you. She always talked about you with pride in her voice,” he said.

“She did?” Lauren asked incredulously.

“Absolutely. She was very proud of you.”

“I feel like I’ve let her down.” She drank more wine and noted how Trey was gobbling up the food she’d made.

“We can’t live our lives doing what others want us to do. We have to do what we want to do for ourselves. How will we ever be happy otherwise?”

“I wanted to host my own cooking show. I really did. I wanted it more than I ever wanted anything in my life.” That wasn’t the entire truth. What she wished more than anything was that her parents were alive. She’d gone back to L.A. not just because her mother was an aspiring actress and she wanted to be like her, but because somewhere in her soul she had thought by going back there, where her parents had lived together, she’d feel closer to them.

“I wish it would have worked out,” Trey said quietly.

“Well, I have this fantastic back-up plan, thanks to Grandma and thanks to you. I’m hoping my catering business can start off with a bang by hosting your party.” She’d confessed too much, but if felt good to put it all out there. “But enough of me, what about you?” she asked.

“Not much to tell.”

“Of course there is. You’ve done well for yourself. A business owner, a hotel owner. . . And you know I must tease you, because even though you are a big important person in the area, you haven’t let the fame get to you. I mean, I did see those little
Star Wars
figurines in your office, after all.”

His smile wasn’t so small this time. She actually saw teeth.

He averted his gaze when she said, “You can’t take the comic-lover out of the boy, no matter how many adult responsibilities you give him.” After a pause, she said, “I confessed all to you, now it’s your turn.” She had finished one glass of wine in the course of her storytelling and Trey had refilled it. She’d been so engrossed, she hadn’t noticed if his glass had been refilled as well, but she did notice he’d eaten everything on his plate.

“I’m looking forward to the new
Star Wars
movie,” he said sheepishly.

Lauren held her glass up in the air. “Okay, here’s the deal. If this grand re-opening is as successful as I think it will be, we need to celebrate by having a
Star Wars
movie marathon night and watch all six episodes.”

A crashing sound echoed down the hotel’s hallway.

Lauren jumped. “Did you hear that?”

“Yes.” Trey stood and gestured an open palm toward Lauren. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

Chapter Seven

Trey marched down the hallway of the Salmon Catcher hotel’s third floor. The sound could have been the thunder, but it sounded like it came from inside the hotel. He’d had a state-of-the-art security system installed, and as far as he knew he and Lauren were completely alone. So what could have made that sound?

He’d never imagined Lauren was so vulnerable, so willing to share what she considered her past failures, but she was full of surprises. And he found it endearing.

He had been determined not to let an old infatuation cloud his judgement, but he couldn’t keep his feelings at bay. And now he wondered if the crush really was something in the past, because it felt real to him now.

And those damned high-heeled shoes of hers were so distracting. He’d always been a leg man, and she wore a skirt and heels like no other woman in this town could, or ever would. He really needed to keep his fantasies to himself Lauren was not the type of woman to be interested in a small-town guy like him.

The doors to all the rooms on the third floor were closed except for one at the end of the hall. Room 313. A ladder was tipped over in the center of the room and the window was open. Rain drizzled in, and Trey quickly darted across the room to close and lock it.

One of the construction workers must have left the window open. Wind gusts from the inclement weather likely blew the ladder over.