“Absolutely.”

  When he’d made five crepes, Nate took the pan off the heat and reached for the jam. I took a quick sniff as he screwed off the top. Flowers. Just like always. He spread a couple of teaspoons of jam around the crepe, then started to flip the side across.

  “Wait,” I said and turned to the refrigerator. I had a small carton of Corona’s crème fraiche left, also a demitasse spoon. I dipped a quick squiggle of crème fraiche across the top of the rose petal jam.

  “Terrific.” Nate extended the folded crepe toward me. “Here. Have a bite. Tell me what you think.”

  I took a quick bite and closed my eyes. It was…amazing. Sweet and tart and warm and cool and everything you want in a light dessert. And there was the added bonus of Nate’s hand holding the crepe, brushing my lips as I bit. “Oh, gosh,” I murmured.

  Nate took a bite of the same crepe, then closed his eyes, too. “Yes. Oh, yes.”

  And just like that, it happened. I heard the ping in my mind that I’d been waiting for, almost like a chime being played. The combination of sublime taste and Nate had pushed me over the edge. And I knew. Being with Nate was absolutely, positively what I needed to do.

  I blew out a long breath and looked up at him.

  He was watching me, too. After a moment, he extended his hand to me.

  I took it.

  He leaned in. So did I. And then things got interesting.

  Chapter 20

  Breakfast was great. Better than great, actually. Of course Nate had stayed over. I’d thought he might choose to return to his place, but I was really glad he hadn’t.

  We had the rest of the crepes, this time with honey and yogurt because we didn’t want to use up the rose petal jam before the contest. Nate said he’d take it with him and keep it well hidden where Coco wouldn’t find it.

  I suppose I should say something about the night before. Without going into details, I can say I had definitely turned a corner. Among other things.

  Nate kept touching me while we cooked and ate. Little touches, like brushing my hair away from my face or running his hand down my arm when I passed him the honey. It was like he couldn’t get enough of touching. And neither could I.

  We’d gotten up early because Nate had to go to work eventually. But the café did a midday brunch rather than breakfast on Sunday, so he didn’t have to get there until nine or so. That was just as well since I didn’t think I could bear to let him go too early.

  We were both still at the I’m pretty sure this has never happened to me before stage.

  Uncle Mike showed up at my door around eight, bringing Herman for his breakfast. That could have been awkward except Uncle Mike had always been really eager for me to get back into the social scene. Clearly I was heading there with a vengeance.

  His eyes widened slightly when he saw Nate at the breakfast table in his unbuttoned shirt and bare feet. Herman padded over to sniff at him, then turned to me, questioning. He wasn’t used to seeing strange men first thing in the morning, but then neither was I.

  “I’ll get your breakfast in a minute,” I said, trying to sound perfectly normal. It wasn’t a normal situation, and we all knew it. But I didn’t see any point in making it more abnormal than we had to. “Have you had any breakfast, Uncle Mike?”

  Uncle Mike shrugged. “Cereal and toast.” He looked longingly at the crepes we were eating. “Got any more of those?”

  “Sure. By the stove. Help yourself. Nate made them.”

  “Oh.” He gave Nate a neutral look. Nate gave him a smile, and Uncle Mike smiled back. Okay, first crisis averted.

  After that we all ate crepes in companionable silence. Apparently Nate had passed some kind of test with Uncle Mike, although I wasn’t sure what it had consisted of.

  Nate left a few minutes later, after we’d made a date for that night after the café got done serving brunch. They were closed Monday, which opened up a lot of interesting possibilities.

  Uncle Mike sat at my kitchen table, chewing crepes as Nate closed the door behind him. “Umm…” he began a moment later.

  “You don’t have to say anything. I know you’re concerned, but everything is okay. You don’t need to worry.”

  “I wasn’t going to.” He gave me a small smile. “Did he make you dinner?”

  “It was terrific. He made the crepes for dessert. We used the rose petal jam, and I gave him the last two jars.”

  “Well, that’s okay then.” Uncle Mike got up and carried his plate to the sink where he washed it carefully. “Thanks for breakfast.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Come on, Herman.” He patted his leg, and Herman lumbered to his feet.

  “You’re taking him to the main house?”

  “You won’t want him around tonight.” He gave me a quick nod and ambled out the door, followed by our mutual dog.

  I took a while to finish my coffee, ruminating about life and sex and families. Having Uncle Mike’s approval wasn’t a necessary requirement for my boyfriends, but it didn’t hurt.

  I decided I should probably make dinner for Nate tonight, which might mean going into town to hit City Market. At the moment, though, I enjoyed the fact that I was feeling a lot closer to “normal” again than I had for a couple of years. I’d never wanted my Denver experience to define my life, and maybe this was the final step to making sure it didn’t.

  Susa called me while I was cutting up apricots. “Well?”

  I considered saying Well, what? But that would just be annoying. “It was fine. Very nice.”

  That was putting it mildly, but I didn’t feel like getting into specifics right then.

  “Fine?” Susa exploded. “It was fine? Nice? Good grief!”

  “It was good, Sus. Really good. I’m happy.”

  There was a pause on Susa’s end. Then she sighed. “Hallelujah, then. Remind me to give Nate Robicheaux a big hug the next time I see him.”

  “Nope. I won’t be doing that. But you can pat him on the shoulder.”

  Susa chuckled. “Good enough. I don’t blame you. What else is new?”

  “What else?” I paused, guiltily. I hadn’t bothered to write up my conversation with Spencer or the one with Fowler, which probably needed to be added to our records.

  “You didn’t write stuff up, did you?” Susa sounded more resigned than annoyed.

  “No, but I will. I had a conversation with Spencer Carroll. He mostly talked about what Brett was like in the kitchen. No good, according to Spence. The other cooks all hated him.”

  “What a surprise.”

  “Oh, he also had a little more to say about the thing at the high school. Apparently Brett got bounced from the mentorship program.” I settled into my chair with another cup of coffee.

  “How the hell can you get bounced from the mentorship program? I’ve been trying to get out of it for a year, but Dolores won’t let me go.”

  “Who’s Dolores?”

  “Dolores Cantu. The principal. She’s the one who recruited me as a mentor. Believe me, once you’re in, you never get out. Or anyway, that’s what I thought.”

  I took another sip of my coffee. “I didn’t know you were in that program. Did you run into Brett?”

  “That isn’t the way the program works. You meet with the kid you’re mentoring a couple of times a month at the school. You have a project you work on together. I met my student in the school computer lab because that’s where we were working. I have no idea where Holmes was.”

  “Probably in the school kitchen. Or the home ec room. Do they still teach home ec?”

  “No idea. It wasn’t one of my interests.”

  It actually hadn’t been one of mine either, but I seemed to remember there was a room with several stoves and sinks. “Could I go with you to talk to the principal?”

  “I guess so. You realize she’ll probably ask you to join the program.”

  Somehow I doubted that, given my current reputation. “I doubt there’d be any student interested in jam-making as a profession.”

  “It would probably be someone interested in professional cooking or small business management, but who knows? I guess this means I’ll have to call Dolores, which means I’ll have to have a mentor meeting sometime this week. I’ll let you know when she can talk to us. Meanwhile, write up your notes.”

  “I will. I promise.”

  It was only after we’d hung up that I realized I hadn’t told Susa about Fowler. Just as well. There was nothing she could have done about it. Except maybe avoid him in case he’d heard she was asking questions, too.

  I got the apricots on to boil, then I grabbed my phone to check my contacts. One of my roommates in Denver, Lauren, had worked at Solo for a while until she’d quit to take a better job at another restaurant. I hadn’t talked to her much since I’d left, but we’d been friendly. I figured if I wanted the lowdown on Brett, Lauren would be a good place to start, assuming the two of them had overlapped at Solo.

  She picked up after a couple of rings. “Yeah. Who’s this?”

  I checked the time a little guiltily. If Lauren had worked the Saturday night dinner shift, she might have wanted to sleep late on Sunday. “Hey, Lauren. It’s Roxy Constantine.”

  There was a brief pause on the other end. “Wow, Roxy. Long time. How ya doin’?”

  Fortunately, she sounded more friendly than annoyed. “I’m fine. Got a jam and jelly business going here in Shavano called Luscious Delights.”

  “No shit? That’s great. You selling anywhere in Denver?”

  I had a momentary pinch of guilt—I really needed to expand my distribution, just like I’d discussed with Uncle Mike when I thought I might be on Sweet Thing. “Not yet. Right now I’m just selling here in town and in a couple of shops in Salida.”

  “I’ll keep an eye out for it. What else is new?”

  We spent a few minutes talking about mutual friends and the food business before I got down to my real reason for calling. “I wanted to ask you—when you worked at Solo, did you know a guy named Brett Holmes?”

  “Oh, the asshole? Yeah, I knew him. They hired him on just before I left.”

  “Was he head chef?” Not that it made any difference as to why Brett had been killed, but I was curious to know if he’d been telling the truth about that.

  “No way—he was on the line. Just like the rest of us. Of course he ended up at Shorty’s Italian, and they might have been dumb enough to put him in charge some of the time. Why? Is he up there where you are now?”

  I paused, trying to figure out the right way to say it. But there wasn’t any right way. “He was head chef at a restaurant up here, High Country, but he was killed last week. Someone murdered him at the restaurant where he was working.”

  “Holy crap,” Lauren murmured. “He was an asshole, but I didn’t want anything like that to happen to him.”

  “No,” I agreed. “Even assholes deserve to live. But there are some people up here who seem to think I was involved in his death. Not the cops, but other people. There’s some gossip around town. And I’m worried it may affect my business.”

  “Yeah, I can see how that might put a crimp in your sales. So you’re trying to find any other people who might have wanted to kill him?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, there’s always the guy who owns Solo, Harry Moritz.”

  “His former boss? Why would he want to kill Brett?” I settled a little deeper into my chair.

  “A couple of reasons. We can both agree, Brett wasn’t the brightest bulb on the tree, right?”

  “Right.”

  “He also had a pretty inflated idea of his own attractiveness. He was always coming on to all the women in the kitchen, including me, believe it or not. I told him I was a lesbian, but that didn’t stop him. He kept saying I just needed to be with a ‘real man.’ ”

  I could almost hear the quotation marks in Lauren’s voice. “That’s genuinely creepy.”

  “Agreed. But that was the kind of guy he was.” She blew out a long breath. “Anyway, he was convinced he was God’s gift to women—all women, regardless of age.”

  “Uh oh,” I murmured.

  “Uh oh is right. He made a play for Moritz’s seventeen-year-old daughter who worked in the front of the house. I never heard how far the whole thing actually went, but it was far enough that Moritz fired him. One of the guys I knew in the kitchen told me the daughter said she’d been raped, but I don’t know that for a fact. I did hear Moritz actually beat Brett up pretty good and told him to get out of Denver. After he left Solo, Brett apparently talked some trash about Moritz’s daughter, about how she’d come on to him and then lied to make him look bad. That pretty much finished him as far as Denver’s concerned—Harry Moritz is a popular guy. I guess Shorty’s got rid of him, too. My guess is that’s when he started looking for something out of town. But that all happened after I left. So maybe he actually got a genuine offer based on his skills. Such as they were.”

  “Hah.” I considered the implications of all this. Another person who absolutely hated Brett Holmes, with very good reason. Actually, more than one, assuming the daughter wasn’t too traumatized to fight. Of course Moritz was in Denver, but Denver was only a couple of hours away. “What happened to the seventeen-year-old?”

  “No idea. Like I said, that all happened after I left. But she wouldn’t have had an easy time, what with rumors flying around about her character.”

  Something I knew only too well myself. “And Solo is still going?”

  “Still going strong last I heard. Losing Brett didn’t leave a dent.”

  That didn’t necessarily mean that Harry Moritz didn’t have time to come up to Shavano and clobber Brett, but maybe it was less likely. “Okay, thanks, Lauren.”

  “Keep in touch, okay? Denver always needs good women chefs.”

  “I’ll do that. Come up to Shavano and have some mountain food sometime.”

  “I might. I just might.”

  I could hear the smile in her voice, and I was smiling myself when I hung up. I should have done a better job of keeping in contact with my Denver friends. Maybe it was time I did a little fence mending.

  I sat down at my computer then and typed up all my notes for Susa. And, of course, as I did, I started to see connections. Which was probably why Susa wanted us both to do it in the first place. So much of Brett’s life seemed to revolve around his relationships with women, which were uniformly lousy.

  Did that mean a woman had killed him? Maybe. Women certainly had lots of reasons to resent him. But the fact that he’d been killed in his kitchen might indicate a professional connection.

  His fellow cooks disliked him enough to dump a skillet full of mushrooms on his foot, which risked injuring him seriously at the very least. I didn’t think Brett’s obnoxious nature was enough to murder him for. But kitchens were high stress environments. Who knew what Brett could have done to piss someone off? Maybe that someone had stuck around after work to call him on it, and Brett had said or done something even worse. I could easily see one of the cooks being so furious that he’d hit him with whatever was handy, most likely a pan or a heavy implement.

  If that’s what had happened, it was an accident with lethal consequences. And whoever had done it would be horrorstricken but also eager to cover it up. Spencer Carroll hadn’t seemed that temperamental, but I didn’t know the other people in the kitchen. And even Spence might have his temperamental moments. Brett tended to bring out the worst in people.

  I wondered if Nate knew any of the other people in the High Country kitchen. I couldn’t think of any way I could meet them myself without diving into the off-duty cook scene, which I didn’t want to do. I was happier staying out of bars like the one where we’d met Spence.

  On the other hand, I could try to find Carrie, the waitress who’d had a relationship with Brett. Maybe Spence knew her last name, and if he did, I could check around and see if she was still working in Shavano. Good servers were always needed around Shavano, and she might well have found a job with another restaurant in the area. Preferably one where the head chef wasn’t a jerk.

  Now, however, I needed to think about dinner. I checked the freezer and found some stew. I had a bottle of red wine that would work. I wished I had some of the exquisite greens and tomatoes Nate had gotten from Aram Pergosian, but I didn’t have time to go to his farm stand. Instead I found a half bag of Uncle Mike’s arugula and some sliced strawberries I could sprinkle over it with a vinaigrette. None of it would be particularly gourmet, but it would mean Nate didn’t have to cook. And for someone who’d spent two or three hours frying eggs, that had to be a major relief.

  Nate arrived around five, carrying a paper sack. “I should have asked you what you wanted for dinner. We had some leftover pie, so I brought that. And I can do eggs. Trust me, when it comes to eggs, I’m in the groove.” He paused to inhale. “Something smells delicious.”

  “It’s stew I had in the freezer. And I made an exceedingly minor salad.”

  He grinned at me. “Exceedingly minor is fine. Stew and salad with pie for dessert. Works for me.”

  I grinned back. “Me, too.” I pulled the wine out of the rack and handed it to him. “You open this, and I’ll get the stew out of the oven.”

  “Deal.” He grinned again, a lot more sultry this time.

  And right then and there I decided to forget about Brett Holmes for the rest of the evening. There were more interesting things to think about.

  Chapter 21

  I succeeded in pushing Brett out of my mind for the rest of the evening, but I couldn’t keep him away much longer than that. Susa called me the next morning while Nate was in the shower and I was getting eggs and ham for breakfast. I didn’t know if we’d have Uncle Mike and Herman to feed, too, but there was enough for everybody.

  “I talked to Dolores,” Susa said. “She can meet us this afternoon after school, around four. And of course she wants to talk to you about joining the mentorship program.”