“Almost there.” I stirred the mixture of flour and butter, watching the color turn darker. It’d been a long day—one where I almost fell into the weeds during the dinner rush—but I’d held everything together. I’d been at full staff tonight—two cooks in the kitchen, three waitresses on the floor—a first for me. The extra bodies had helped, and the men had obviously been satisfied with their meals. The plates had come back with hardly a scrap on them. And complaints? Not a one. Already, the diners seemed to be adjusting to the smaller dinner menu, though I’d promised them I’d have more options on the weekend. My plan for how to succeed with such a strange rush of diners every weekday might just work.

I stretched, my arm shaking as I stirred, trying to keep the thick mixture from burning. My back hurt from standing all day, and I couldn’t stop thinking of my bed as the long hours wore down on me. But some soups needed to set up overnight, to give the flavors a chance to meld and deepen. I made a lot of soups after the dinner rush ended. Tomorrow, I’d serve gumbo as my lunch special. It was a favorite in town, and I knew I’d be too busy in the morning handing out to-go containers for the guys on their way into work to get it started in time for the melding. My gumbo absolutely needed to be made the night before.

As the roux turned a dark cardboard color, my mind wandered away from food. The color I wanted was darker, deeper. A fuller caramel sort of brown. Almost rich mahogany. Like some parts of Gage’s hair. Not the darkness of it—that would mean a burned roux and having to start over on the whole process. No. I wanted the color of his highlights. That lighter, richer shade that women paid for and he probably came by naturally.

The color my roux finally turned just as my thoughts turned to wondering if his hair was that color all over.

“Not where your mind needs to go tonight,” I singsonged, refocusing on the food. I added the mirepoix—bastardized with the addition of green pepper because gumbo required that flavor profile—and stirred. And stirred some more. And some more. Once the onions, carrots, and green pepper were fully coated and cooking down, I added way more garlic than I’d been taught—I couldn’t help myself. It added such a spicy sort of sweetness to the dish. The kitchen smelled amazing already, and it would be even better tomorrow when I put the bread I’d started this morning in the oven. Gumbo and crusty, homemade bread? A perfect meal to satisfy even the hungriest logger in town. Even Gage. No special lunch for him—he loved my gumbo and bread.

As I continued making the gumbo, as the muscle memory kicked in and I lost myself in the repetitiveness of the movements, my mind settled and calmed. No stress, no fear, and none of the monsters that chased me through my dreams. I found peace when I cooked. Food was easy. Food was balanced and fun and warmed your soul. There were no negative feelings in my kitchen, just the confidence born from years at a stove.

But thinking of confidence only reminded me of the times when I didn’t feel the same way. Like with Gage anywhere near me? The exact opposite of confidence. I’d never been so nervous around another human being, and yet, I’d missed him tonight. He hadn’t come in for dinner. Hadn’t made me jump or scream. No matter how many times I’d looked up, expecting him to be standing silently off to the side, he hadn’t been looming in the corner. I’d even missed his dog being in my kitchen.

“Quit thinking about Gage,” I said, trying to wrangle control of my thoughts. I poured chicken stock into the pot and turned the burner down to simmer, finally ready to step away and let the heat do its job. I couldn’t leave, though. There was always so much to do.

Next week, I’d be making crispy pan chicken with roasted vegetables, which meant I needed to make sure both my cast iron skillets were well seasoned and ready to use. I pulled them from the shelf where they lived, inspecting each for any sign of the seasoning layer flaking. One pan passed inspection, the other…

“Time to season you again, old girl.”

I set the pan on a burner and turned the gas all the way up. Seasoning in the oven was better, but mine had been cool for hours. It’d take too long to warm it back up to the point I needed, so stovetop it was. As the pan heated, I grabbed the flaxseed oil and a potholder. It wouldn’t save my hand from the pan once it reached the heat level I needed it to be at, but it’d protect me as I worked the oil over the dark surface.

Dark. Like Gage’s eyes.

“You’ll burn your hand off if you don’t pay attention,” I whispered to myself. “And you should really get a radio so you stop talking to yourself.”

Yeah. Thank goodness I was alone in the building.

I poured the oil into the pan, swirled it around to coat the bottom evenly, then put the pan back on the burner and let the heat do its job. The soup would cook for about an hour, and the pan would be ready to remove from the heat at about the same time. That left me at least sixty minutes of time to fill. As much as I dreaded the thought of tiring myself out more, I headed to the gym.

Well, okay—Justice didn’t have a gym. What we did have was another storefront connected to mine by a set of double doors in the dining room and a hallway running along the back of the building. When my place had been a diner, the other space had been the smoking section. I hadn’t wanted or needed the full space for my restaurant, so the room sat empty. At least, for a few weeks. Someone—probably one of the guys from the mill—had brought in exercise equipment recently, and a lot of people used the space to work out. Me included.

I changed out of my kitchen gear and into yoga pants and a tank top. My hair was already piled high on my head, and any makeup I might have put on had been melted off in the heat of a busy kitchen. Didn’t matter, though—this late at night, the only person I usually saw was Camden, and he definitely didn’t care what I looked like. He didn’t care about much of anything anymore, it seemed. That worked out fine for me and my messy, no-makeup appearance. I needed sleep and some sun, but I wouldn’t get that tonight. Instead, I’d get my nemesis.

The elliptical machine.

The only piece of equipment I used, and the only torture I put myself through. I wasn’t stupid—being a chef meant eating, tasting, trying, sampling…whatever word you could use to describe adding calories to your diet one bite at a time, it worked. My body had always been a bit on the softer side—something my mother had made sure to point out at every turn—which meant working out was a must. Calories in, calories out, my mother had chanted when I’d been a child. As much as I may have wanted to forget those lessons, I couldn’t. So I worked out.

And I hated every damn second of it.

I heard the sounds of someone lifting weights as I made my way through the back hallway. Most likely Camden, so I tucked in my earbuds. No sense trying to talk to him when he’d just grunt or ignore me. But when I turned the corner, when I actually made it into the workout space, I nearly dropped my phone. It wasn’t Camden lifting weights—it was Gage. Shirtless, tattooed all over, wearing dark gray sweat pants that should not have looked so utterly sexy…Gage. Lifting weights. Shirtless.

Did I mention he had no shirt on?

God, that picture of him with his tattoos on full display would be burned into my brain for the rest of my life. Colors swirled from his wrists up his arms, filling in the planes of his chest as well. They even looped onto his neck, words and shadows and shapes drawing my eyes to the corded muscles there. And when he lifted the bar? When his arms extended and his muscles seemed to make the ink on his skin dance? I nearly moaned.

He looked like the cover model for some modern, edgy romance featuring a man who’d do anything for his girl. The hero to some perfectly coifed heroine who would get to touch and lick and enjoy every inch of that man for the rest of her life while being completely poised and perfect. Me? I was a hot mess. Literally. Kitchens got hot, and I sweated all day. This was so not fair.

I nearly ran away, nearly busted my butt back to the kitchen to hide and think about all that multicolored skin as I washed my face with the hand soap in the bathroom and tried to figure out a way to make myself look…well, less of a mess. Rex sold me out, though. The dog hurried over before I could escape, wagging his tail and catching Gage’s attention. The hero of someone else’s story pushed the bar back up into the holder, then sat up, looking all kinds of delicious as he turned my way.

Whoever that someone else was, his future heroine? I hated her with every fiber of my being.

I also had no chill left. “Oh. Hey. Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt, but it’s usually only Camden in here at night, and he doesn’t pay any attention to anything anymore, so I don’t think he minds that I come work out. Not that I work out like—” I waved a hand at him “—that. I just use the devil machine over there. Though, I usually do this in the morning before I start working because by the end of the night, I’m already super tired and sweaty and don’t need to add to that. I know it’s not my normal schedule. Maybe I should just—”

“It’s late,” Gage said, watching me. Resting his elbows on his thick, thick thighs and leaning forward. Abs, abs, and more abs…that was all I could see. Gage Shepherd was the biggest distraction in my world.

I had to swallow hard before I could speak again. “That’s what I was saying.”

“No, you were telling me when you usually come in here.” He stood, rising to his feet like some sort of superhero. Like Aquaman in that movie trailer that made all the girls scream. Made them all wet, too. And when he grabbed a towel? When he wiped that lucky, lucky terry cloth down the muscles of his chest and neck? I might have died just a little.

He made words so hard.

“I…yeah. That.”

The slow smile that spread across his face might as well have been a stroke of his finger across my clit for how much it made me shiver. “What are you doing here so late?”

I wanted to answer in a sentence, I really did, but the man had his hands on his waistband and was tugging the elastic away from his skin to mop up the sweat dripping down his—fuck, how could I be expected to count—eight-pack abs? Eight. And he had that V. Every woman knows that V—the muscles that dipped down along a guy’s hip bones and made us go stupid. He had that V, and it accomplished its job with me just fine. I had no words…save one.

“Gumbo.”

He nodded, moving around the weight bench to the side with the arm support thing. Technical term.

“You like it to set up overnight.”

“That’s right. And I usually work out in the mornings, but I was running late today, so I figured I could hop on the elliptical while the gumbo simmered. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

The intense look he sent my way practically melted me. “You didn’t interrupt anything. Go ahead.”

I wanted to move, I really did, but he kept those dark eyes on me as he raised a water bottle to his mouth. As his bicep flexed and he licked his lips. As he chugged that cool liquid down.

Jesus, I was about to come from watching a man take a drink of water.

“I’ll just…” I pointed toward the elliptical and shoved my earbud back in. I needed an escape, a reason to stop staring, and making my muscles hurt on that blasted machine was about as good of an excuse as any.

But I hadn’t thought of the logistics of getting on the elliptical, or the positioning of all the equipment. I had to turn my back on Gage, had to climb up onto the foot pedals of a machine taller than I was. Whoever designed this demon had obviously not intended it for people as short as me. I also had to use my legs to make the pedals move to get the beast turned on. That took strength and coordination, of which I had very little. I did it, though—of course, I nearly fell forward when the machine kicked on and the pedals moved more freely.

Smooth, Katie. Real smooth.

But hey, I had two slices of bread to work off. And a piece of cobbler. And…a few other things I’d sampled. I needed this workout, so I set the display to see my strides per minute, upped the resistance to a respectable level four, and got to it.

Two minutes in, and I knew even the burn of going backward without hands wouldn’t work to clear my head, though. All I could think about was Gage. Was he lifting again? Was he looking at me, staring at my ass as I worked out? Was my ass good enough to attract his attention? Did I want it to be? I’d look at his ass, for sure, especially tonight. What was it with men in sweat pants? Something about the casualness of it, maybe. Or the way they couldn’t hide much underneath. Were they the leggings of the male wardrobe? Comfy and casual, but deep down, men knew they hugged their ass and hips just right. Or the yoga pants of his clothing choices—totally appropriate for working out, but he ended up wearing them more often simply because they were comfy. I could almost see a future with Gage—me in my yoga pants, him in his sweat pants. I’d make him a nice bowl of soup with some good bread, and we’d end up on the couch doing horribly naughty things under the yoga pants and sweats.

Things I needed to stop thinking about before I fell off the cursed machine.

Dating was not on my radar. I had a business to build and a life to start all over again after leaving Denver behind in such a rush. All with no support system—my mother had passed away a few years back, and the only other relative I had was her brother, who I had absolutely no interest in talking to ever again. I had the Kennards and the men they employed backing me up because I was from Justice—that was all. I couldn’t risk my place with them.

And Gage…he likely wasn’t interested in me like that anyway. How could he be? I word-vomited all over him every time I saw him. And he was always so cool, so controlled. Calm. I was anything but. Pretty much always had been.

I was either too much or not enough for a man like Gage Shepherd.

I pushed a little harder, focusing on the burn building in my thighs and trying hard to psychically will the calories I’d ingested to burn away. Calories in, calories out.

Ugh. Thanks, Mom.

For all her faults and all her craziness, I missed her. She’d been an aerobicizing junkie back in the days of Suzanne Somers commercials and Thighmasters. Always working out, always watching what she ate. Constantly fighting those ten pounds she was convinced were somehow holding her back from everything good in life. I’d watched her try every fad diet and health program out there. And I’d hated it.

I’d hated the boxed dinners and freezer meals purchased from some diet company promising a better life if you only ate their stuff.

I’d hated the fake food flavorings added to things because the real stuff would add to the calorie count.

I’d hated the tracking and weighing and constant need to trim off just a little more.

I’d hated thinking that eating all that crap had caused her colon cancer, and that was why I’d become a chef, why I’d taken so many courses on nutrition and dietary needs. I’d developed the opinion that food should be food—not chemicals pretending to be food. If I plated something, I wanted to be able to tell the diner exactly what was in it and why, without either of us needing a chemical engineering degree.

And even though I couldn’t take care of my mom anymore, I could still cook. I could take care of the little town where I’d grown up, the only place I felt safe anymore. I could feed the people I cared about real food without obsessing over every single calorie in a dish.

My mother would have hated seeing the amount of butter in my restaurant, but I didn’t care. Butter was natural and real. And good. Butter was always good.

I was thinking about grabbing some of the leftover bread from the day—what I’d been planning to make bread pudding with—and slathering it with butter as a post-workout snack when the machine beeped at me. Calories spent goal achieved—workout over. Thank the stars.

I hopped off the demon I’d officially tamed and grabbed my towel, wiping the sweat from the back of my neck as I took a drink of my water. Definitely bread and butter. And maybe some cheese. Cheese was good too, though it deserved wine. If I waited until I got home, I could have all of it…and some fruit to cut the heaviness of the bread and butter. Grapes and apples, maybe. A boring night alone had never sounded so good.

But as I turned around, I found Gage sitting on the weight bench, eating a store-bought granola bar out of a shiny package. My words came unbidden, something left over from thinking about my mom and her diets. About the sickness that took her away from me.

“I can make you something way better than that.”

Eyebrows up, Gage glanced down at the bar in his hand and slowly lowered it. Shit. I hadn’t meant to food-shame him.

“I just mean, that’s fake food. They combine all of these chemicals to imitate the flavor and texture of food, but it’s not really food, you know? But you can make them with real food. Or I can. Nuts and nut butters for protein, oats to fill you up, dates for sweetness. They’d be much better for you. Not that you’re not doing fine on your own. I mean, you look fine. Not fine like fine but like…healthy. You look healthy.” Did I just tell him he wasn’t fine? Because that was the biggest goddamned lie of my life. My internal groan would have shattered a window or two, it was so loud. Time to retreat. “I should go check on my gumbo.”

“I hate these things.”

I stopped, frozen halfway through a step to walk out the door. “What?”

“These bars. They’re Bishop’s. I hate them.”

“Then why are you eating one?”

He shrugged, one ink-covered, massive shoulder rising and lowering in a smooth sort of arc. “Knew I needed to work out and didn’t have anything else to bring with me.”

Well, now I felt like a jerk. He probably didn’t have time to cook, what with working and guarding the town. Which was probably what he was doing in the gym so late—guarding me, the only person dumb enough to work past sunset when the town had already been attacked by the Soul Suckers. My opinion of myself needed clarification—I was not just a jerk, but a huge jerk.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“Katie?”

“Yeah?”

“You ever make some of those bars you talked about, I’d love to try them.”

Flutters. I felt them all over at the tone in his voice and the way he looked at me when he said that. “Really?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Great.” I clapped my hands together, my grin unstoppable. “I’ll make some. Not tonight because I’ve got gumbo going and I’ve already kept you here late enough, plus I need to get up early to try a new bread recipe. Not sure it’s going to work out. It requires kneading, and I hate kneading bread.”

Gage rose to his feet, moving closer. Stealing all the oxygen from the air around us. “How do you make bread without kneading it?”

He…expected me to think when he stood close enough to touch? “Time. It works magic. You give the dough enough time, and the yeast will do the job for you.”

Oh god. He was so close, and he smelled so good. Like everything tasty all thrown together into the most perfect combination known to man. Like something I wanted in my mouth.

Speaking of mouths, his was only a few inches from mine as he said, “What if you’re tired of waiting?”

Why are we waiting?

“I mean…there are faster ways,” I said, trying hard to concentrate on bread. “I have an industrial mixer, so I can mix anything. The machine does most of the work, but then I have to take the dough and let it rest, punch it down, all that stuff. Eventually, I have to knead at least a little bit, but given enough time, the yeast really handles—”

“Katie.”

I couldn’t breathe, he was so close. Looking at me. Devouring me with his eyes. “Yeah?”

He stepped even closer, and my heart dive-bombed into my stomach. “I love how excited you get about food.”

And then his lips were on mine, and all thoughts about food or the restaurant or anything other than the warmth of his lips, the slickness of his tongue, and the feel of his beard against my face flew right out the window.