Never Too Hot (Hot Shots: Men of Fire #3)(11)
Author: Bella Andre

“Why?” Isabel asked, feeling very protective of her friend. “What did he do? Did he try something?”

Ginger blushed. “Oh God, no. Of course not. It’s just that…”

“What? You can tell me.” And then Isabel would head back into the restaurant and kill him.

The last thing she was prepared for was Ginger saying, “Oh Isabel, there’s just something about him. Not just that he’s big and strong and gorgeous, but it’s like there’s this weird connection between us. Like we’re supposed to be…”

Isabel tried to think how she would have normally responded if she didn’t know the MacKenzies. Probably would have encouraged Ginger to break her year of celibacy with the guy.

Fortunately, Ginger was already laughing at herself. “Listen to me. You’d think I was fifteen again with a crush on the quarterback. Talking about how the stars are aligning to bring us together. Could we both forget I said any of that?”

But the thing was, Isabel remembered what good-looking kids the MacKenzie boys were. There was a reason for Ginger’s bright eyes and flushed skin. MacKenzie men were a force to be reckoned with. As a teenager, Isabel had half wondered if their father did indeed hold the strings to the stars.

“Hey, your family has lived next door to the MacKenzies for a long time. Is there something I should know about them? Some sort of warning you should be giving me about him?”

Isabel shook her head no, but she put too much force in it and ended up feeling dizzy. “Well, Helen and George are great. But you already know that from dealing with them over the phone.”

She should stop there, shut her mouth. But somehow, she couldn’t.

“I knew Connor’s father, Andrew. We dated for a while. A very long time ago.”

Seeing the interest on Ginger’s face, Isabel moved to quickly stamp it out. “We were just kids. Like Josh and the girl he went to the movies with. I haven’t thought about him in years. I probably wouldn’t even recognize him if he walked into the diner.”

Too late she realized it sounded like she was trying way too hard to convince Ginger about just how no-big-deal it was. A clear case of “she who doth protest too much.”

Fortunately, Ginger was too wrapped up in her own problems to pay much attention. “Guess I’d better get back out there before the customers start a mutiny.”

Isabel said “Sure” in an easy voice. But when she went back into the kitchen and picked up her knife, her hands were shaking.

This was usually the time of day she liked best, when the dinner crush had erupted in organized chaos; but it was hard to focus on her job, impossible to stop her brain from rewinding, from retracing the steps that had brought her here. To this diner on the lake.

Ten years had passed since the day she’d bought the run-down building on Blue Mountain Lake’s small main street.

At that time, the town had barely been more than a grocery store, a post office, a liquor store, and a gas station.

Lately, though, she’d step outside to mail a letter and surprise would catch her at just how far the small town had come.

A bustling cafй that often housed live music occupied an old white post-and-beam house on the corner. Anderson’s Market, a grocery store that had been around since her grandparents had built their cabin on the lake, had done major upgrades in the past couple of years, going so far as to stock organic fruits and vegetables all year long, rather than just July and August to appease the summer folks. And the Inn now had huge plantings of bright flowers all along the fence that bordered the street.

Only the knitting store was showing signs of wear and tear. Isabel remembered learning to knit on the comfortable couches in the middle of the store one summer when Josh was still an infant — mostly for the help of extra hands to take her baby, less because she had any affinity whatsoever for yarn.

After her divorce, the only thing that had made sense was to leave the city and settle in Blue Mountain Lake permanently. Her heart had always been there, waiting September through May for June fifteenth to roll around again. By the time she and Brian split, she’d been a full-time mom for five years, but everything changed once she took off her wedding ring. It wasn’t okay to let her ex support them anymore.

Josh had made it through his childhood and early teens relatively unscathed, in large part, she believed, because Blue Mountain Lake was a world apart from the fast-moving city she’d grown up in. It helped a great deal that cell phones hadn’t made their way into town until recently. Because of the thick forests throughout the Adirondacks — and a blanket unwillingness to rent out land for cell towers on the part of the locals — cell reception had been little to none in most parts of town.

Over the years, as cell phones had become increasingly popular, Isabel often had to swallow a laugh at summer visitors standing in the middle of a canoe on the lake waving their cell phones in the air trying desperately to stay connected to their fast-paced lives back home.

Wasn’t that the whole point of coming to Blue Mountain Lake? To get away from everything they needed to get away from?

It was what she’d done.

Her first day back in town she’d seen the FOR SALE sign on the old diner and the lightbulb had gone on. Cooking had always been her passion, the best way to settle her nerves at the end of a long, irritating day.

Fortunately, living full-time in the lakefront cabin had given her the freedom to use her savings to lease and fix up the old diner. And in the end, having to figure out how to cook, day in and day out, for paying customers, learning how to hire other cooks and waitstaff and be a good boss to them, was the perfect way to get over her divorce. To get past it.

Long hours behind the stove or hunched over her computer in the office going over payroll helped her turn down the volume on the things she and Brian had said to each other at the end, the horrible accusations he’d made.

“Did you ever really love me, Isabel?” he’d asked. “Was there ever enough room in your heart for both me andhim?”

Dampness crept between her br**sts, across her forehead. The Big M was creeping up on her. More and more often she found herself tangled up in sweaty sheets in the middle of the night. She didn’t mind at all the thought of not having a period anymore. That had never been her best week of the month.

What got to her was the sense that she wasn’t going to be a real woman anymore. That forty-eight would turn to fifty in the blink of an eye and she’d be nothing more than a dried-up old woman. That her best years would be far behind her.

As she moved through the kitchen and into the blissfully cool walk-in refrigerator to check the stock, she knew it wasn’t fair to paint the past as bad. As a kid, she’d spent many happy rainy afternoons at the original diner’s counter, sipping milkshakes and malts, giggling with her friends over the cute boys. Thirty-five years later, the picture hadn’t changed much. Every summer, girls on the verge of becoming full-blown women came in through her doors in cutoff shorts and flip-flops and giggled with their friends over the boys they’d seen that day on the beach.