TAKE A CHANCE (Chance Colorado Series) (13 page)

Logan returned his friend’s grin, shaking his head. No doubt. Likely would save a lot of wear and tear on the friendship, too.

“Okay then.” Tanner smacked his hand on the door frame. “I’ll be out running if you need me.”

Logan dried off his hands, staring out the window toward the center of town.

When had he gotten so bad at this male/female interaction stuff?

The thought made him snort. When had he ever been good at it? He’d had little enough experience. First there’d been Shayla for five years, and after that fiasco, he’d sworn off relationships completely.

Maybe it was time to consider taking another chance on women. Another chance on life. Or at the very least, one small step forward.

Standing alone in the silent firehouse, the ticking of the big clock on the wall his only company, Logan found himself with a sudden hankering for coffee.

Maybe it was time he let Allie buy him that cup after all.

Not a date, he reassured himself as he headed outside, twirling his keys around his finger. Just coffee. Now that he’d talked to Tanner and learned he wasn’t interested, there was no rush to think about anything as serious as a date.

His nerve almost faltered when he pulled into a parking spot in the lot next to the Hand, but he forced himself to turn off the motor and get out.

For cripes’ sake, what was wrong with him? He had no hesitation about running into a burning building or facing down a raging forest fire, so how could the thought of having coffee with one blushing, curly-haired blonde rattle him so?

It couldn’t. He wouldn’t allow it to.

“Hey, Logan. How’s it going?” Desi greeted him with a smile as he stepped into the coffee shop. “Want your usual coffee to go?”

“No. I… um… I came to see Allie. Is she here?” He fumbled his way through the question, wishing his face didn’t feel so hot.

“She’s not. Sorry. She’s up at the resort this afternoon and, if all’s gone well, by now she’s having herself a visit with that hunk of a chef they’ve hired themselves.”

Allie had gone up to the resort to spend the afternoon with some guy?

“Oh. I didn’t realize they’d hired a new chef.”

“I guess he’s new. I saw him for the first time at the dedication and, trust me, I’m pretty sure I would have noticed him if he’d been around before.” Desi grinned and held her hands up in front of her, her wiggling fingers setting the chains she wore, draped from her fingers to her wrist, jingling like little bells. “He is what I would describe as one total looker.”

“Afternoon, Logan,” Dulcie called out as she entered from the kitchen. “Can I get your usual started for you?”

“No… yes,” he amended quickly. No reason to hang out here now.

Dulcie had his coffee in the cup by the time he reached the counter and pulled out his money.

“Anything to eat with that?” she asked.

“No, just the coffee, thanks.” The butterflies in his stomach wouldn’t do well with food raining down on them.

“I’ll let Allie know you stopped by,” Desi said as he opened the door to leave. “Any message in particular?”

“No message,” he answered.

He’d be delivering his message in person. Spending so much time fretting over whether Tanner was interested in Allie, he’d completely neglected to consider any other men in town. But his eyes were open now.

The next time he saw Allie, he was going to collect on that coffee she’d offered. In fact, it just might be time to consider asking her out.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into, Dulcie. I’m the only person I know who can screw up boiling water.”

Allie’s hands shook as she dropped the apron over her head and tied the strings around her middle. Her cousin might think she was kidding, but this was no joke. She really couldn’t cook anything that didn’t come frozen out of a box and go directly into a microwave.

“You’ll do just fine,” Dulcie assured her. “But you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

Allie had offered to do whatever she could to help out at the Hand until her first order of books arrived and she could get down to business. She’d just never dreamed that the help her cousin would want would be in the kitchen.

“No, I’ll do whatever you need me to. I really don’t mind. I’m just warning you.”

Dulcie laughed, grasping Allie’s hand to pull her over to a long table. “We’ll keep it simple. No following recipes or anything like that. I need onions sliced for the soup I’m doing for today’s lunch special. It’s a horrible task, but if you seriously want to help, this is what I need done most. You’ll see. We’ll make a cook out of you before you know it!”

It was Allie’s turn to grin. She highly doubted her cousin’s claim, but she was willing to give it a go. “Even a kitchen klutz like me should be able to do something as simple as slicing stuff.”

Dulcie demonstrated exactly what she needed Allie to do before pulling off her plastic gloves and heading back to the front of the shop. “I’ll leave the door ajar. If you need me for anything, just yell. And don’t forget the gloves.”

Allie nodded and pulled a pair of gloves from the big box above the work area. Once she’d slid them on her hands, she picked up the big knife and made her first cut.

Not bad. This wasn’t so hard. All you needed was a sharp knife and some good concentration.

Another cut and her eyes began to sting from the fumes.

And maybe a gas mask. But no problem. It was going really well and the pile of slices had already doubled in size. All her slices were so neat and uniform, if she didn’t know she’d done them herself, she’d swear someone else had been working at this spot.

Maybe she wasn’t a lost cause as a cook after all. She certainly felt like she belonged here now that she’d donned her new apron and completed her official uniform—black T-shirt with a sparkly clip-on bow tie, white apron with a big black hand and
The Hand of Chance Coffee Emporium
emblazoned on it in fancy black letters. It was as if she’d found her niche in Chance.

She continued working, the background of voices a steady hum outside the open door, her pride in her accomplishment growing as the minutes passed.

“Afternoon, Tanner. The usual for you, Logan?” Dulcie’s perky greeting floated in from the other room.

Logan was out there, just on the other side of the door. Had he come back to see her? Desi had told her that he’d been in asking for her yesterday afternoon.

Her stomach did a nervous little flip and she fought the desire to check her hair. But, since brushing down the flyaways with hands covered in onion goo would hardly be an improvement, she’d just keep working. If he were here to see her, someone would come get her.

Surely they would. Wouldn’t they?

She leaned forward, continuing with her work, straining for any sight of him through the small crack of open space where Dulcie had left the door ajar. If she could finish the pile of onions quickly enough, it would only make sense for her to go out there to ask Dulcie what she should do next. If she hurried, she might even get out there before Logan left.

Not that she wanted to see him if he didn’t want to see her. But he had asked about her yesterday.

Maybe if she worked a little faster…

A sting shot across her finger, as if a wasp had attacked, and she jerked her attention down to her workspace.

The loose plastic covering her pointer finger was slowly filling with some dark red liquid and it took her shocked brain a moment to understand that the liquid was blood. Her blood.

How bad could it be? After that initial sting, it didn’t hurt at all. That had to be a good sign. Likely it was no worse than a paper cut, and she’d had plenty of those.

“Dulcie?” she called out, her voice sounding detached and robotic to her own ears.

“Just a sec, hon,” her cousin called back.

Blood welled up against the slice in the plastic and dripped onto the cutting board in a dime-sized splash. Paper cuts didn’t bleed like this.

“Dulcie!” Was that a ring of panic in her voice?

Allie gripped her other hand around the injury and squeezed, while blood spilled out between the fingers she’d closed around the wounded digit.

“I’ll be right—” Dulcie began.

“Now!” Allie yelled, no longer wondering whether she was panicking as the feeling returned to her injured finger. Pain surged with each pounding beat of her heart and the blood continued to drip.

If she could only hold it tightly enough, maybe she could force it to stop. Until then, she just needed to keep it together. She wasn’t a kid anymore. She’d outgrown those old fears.

Hadn’t she?

Dulcie stepped through the door, her hands filled with plates and a cup. “What’s so urgent that I can’t even…” Her words died off as her eyes fixed on Allie. “Oh, criminy. What have you done?”

“I lost my focus, I guess.”

Dulcie hurried over, dropping the dishes onto the edge of the counter to grab for Allie’s hand. “Let me see it. Holy crap, you’re bleeding like a stuck pig. Did you slice all the way through?”

Allie was only vaguely aware of a clattering crash of china as the plates toppled onto the floor. It was all she could do to keep her grasp locked around her injured finger even as Dulcie tried to pry open her grip.

“No,” she murmured, her eyes fixed on the blood pooling in her hand.

Tighter. She had to grip it tighter to make it stop. Or was it that she needed to find a pressure point? She was sure she’d read something about tending wounds in the past, but the knowledge eluded her now.

Matt would know. This was the sort of thing he dealt with all the time as an emergency medical tech. Though how he could stand all the blood was beyond her. The sight, the smell, everything about it made her brain want to shut down. This sort of thing was exactly why she worked with books, where the worst injury she was likely to see was a paper cut.

She’d never seen a paper cut that bled like this.

“You have to let go, Allie,” her cousin encouraged.

But she couldn’t let go. The fear from so long ago, the panic she’d always experienced at the sight of blood, crawled up from somewhere deep inside, wrapping its sharp claws around her lungs and squeezing.

* * *

Logan might have consoled himself that it was only his imagination that Allie’s voice sounded strained, if not for the crash of breaking dishes when Dulcie disappeared through the door to the kitchen.

He was off his seat and vaulting over the counter before he even had time to think about what he was doing.

Tanner followed so closely behind that he bumped into him when Logan came to a stop after he burst into the kitchen.

Dulcie hovered over Allie, pulling at her cousin’s blood-covered hand.

“Perfect example of why we need that med tech on staff,” Tanner muttered.

Logan hurried to Allie and gently nudged Dulcie aside as he took Allie’s hand from the other woman.

“Open your hand, Allie,” he encouraged. “I can’t fix it if I can’t see it.”

“I can’t,” she murmured, her gaze fixed on the injury.

“You can,” he assured her. “Just relax and let me take over. I’ve got this.”

Her reaction concerned him as much as the pasty-white color of her face. He’d seen this sort of behavior a few times before, in fire victims. She seemed to be suffering an acute stress reaction. He needed to get a good look at her hand to see just how bad the wound really was.

“There’s a guy in the dining room who’s staying out at the fishing lodge,” Dulcie said from her spot at the sink. “I think Desi said he told her he was a doctor of some sort.”

“I’ll get him and the med kit from my pickup,” Tanner offered, already running for the door.

Logan led Allie over to the sink, trying to break through the shell that she seemed to be locked inside.

“Look at me. Eyes right here.” He pointed to his eyes as he lifted her chin until her gaze met his. “Now, take a big breath for me and let it out slowly. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“It’s okay,” she repeated, her voice shaky and unsure.

He turned on a small stream of cold water and pulled her hands toward it, almost getting there before she tensed again, clamping her hold on the wound tighter than ever.

“Your friend said someone back here was hurt?”

“Yes!” As the stranger who’d been sitting in the corner headed toward them, relief washed over Logan, leaving in its wake an empty hole in the pit of his stomach.

He stepped aside to allow the doctor to take his spot next to Allie.

“What happened?” the doctor asked.

“She apparently cut herself,” Dulcie answered. “Not sure how bad, but you should know she has this thing about blood. Has ever since we were little kids. It totally freaks her out.”

“Blood-injury phobia,” he murmured. “This isn’t exactly my field of expertise.” He turned a reassuring smile in Allie’s direction.