Shattered (21 page)

Although Kirby had been given directions, she’d been afraid she’d get lost in the big house, but it turned out that all she needed to do was follow the amazing scents wafting up the stairs.

Sabrina was standing at a huge commercial stove, stirring something in a pot that looked large enough to cook for an army, while a stunning African-American woman wearing black leggings, calf-high boots, a bright color-blocked sweater, and sporting a very visible baby bump kneaded dough on a marble countertop.

“So,” Swannsea’s owner greeted her with a smile. “Did you get settled in?”

“I did, thanks. And the room’s beautiful.”

“If there’s anything you need, just let me know.”

“I think you’ve pretty much covered everything.”

That was a decided understatement. The woven sea grass basket in the adjoining bathroom held more luxury goodies—including a white origami washcloth—than what Kirby imagined could be found in a five-star Wingate Palace hotel. There was also an automatic coffeemaker featuring a fabulous selection of Swann teas, along with a variety of single servings of coffee.

And if all that wasn’t enough, her hostess had included a carafe of springwater, a box of Swiss chocolate, and a stack of paperback novels and glossy magazines on a skirted table.

“Zach and I want you to be comfortable,” she said with that smile Kirby suspected must have worked wonders calming down unhappy travelers.

“Well, you’ve certainly succeeded there. Shane said you managed a hotel in Italy?”

“I did. Well, for about an hour. Then a suicide bomber blew up the hotel, and that pretty much cut short my career in international hotel management.” She put down the spoon to begin grating a block of rich, dark chocolate. “After the rescue crew dug me out of the rubble—miraculously, without any lasting injuries—I came back here to recuperate, went into business with my best friend, and fell back in love with Zach.”

She smiled toward the woman. “This is my best friend and partner in crime and all things culinary, Titania Spencer.”

As warm as Sabrina’s smile was, the other woman’s was so dazzling Kirby felt she should be wearing the shades she’d left upstairs in her purse. “Forgive me for not shaking your hand.” Titania held up both two dough-covered hands. “But it’s lovely to meet you.”

“You, too,” Kirby said. “Wow, it really smells fabulous in here.”

“That’s Titania’s doing,” Sabrina said. “She’s the culinary genius; I’m just allowed to stir and do dishes.”

The idea of the superrich tea heiress doing kitchen scut work was more than a little surprising.

“Are you hungry?” Sabrina asked.

Actually, since she’d been too nervous to eat this morning before the hearing, the only things she’d had to eat were those M&M’s from the drugstore. The rest of the day had been so stressful, she hadn’t realized she was starving.

Until now.

“I wouldn’t want to put you out,” she felt obliged to say.

“Nonsense; you’re a guest,” Sabrina countered. “And what kind of hostess would I be if I failed to live up to our legendary Southern hospitality?”

“Besides,” Titania said with another of those blinding grins. “You’re just in time to be our guinea pig.”

“We’re trying out new recipes,” Sabrina explained. “Everything we make includes one of our teas as an ingredient, and we’d love an impartial opinion.”

It was Kirby’s turn to grin. “That’s the best offer I’ve had all day.” She sat down at the long plank table.

Thirty minutes later, she’d decided that if she hadn’t died and gone to heaven, this surely had to be the next best thing.

The chicken breasts glazed with a sauce made of Swann orange spice tea, apricot and pineapple preserves, and a touch of red pepper flakes and soy sauce to give it bite was not only delicious, it was so tender it was falling off the bones.

The sesame seed oil added the perfect zing to the Earl Grey vinaigrette on the salad, and the fluffy rice, seasoned with Swann herbal green tea, could not have been more perfect.

“Wow,” she said. “If the military could only hire you two as MRE contracts, not only would their recruiting problems disappear, but reenlistment numbers would go through the roof.”

“Nate, he’s my husband and a former Marine, swears the same thing,” Titania said.

“Zach, too,” Sabrina echoed as she topped off their wineglasses with a crisp Chardonnay while Titania stuck to iced sweet tea. “But then again, guys who’d actually eat the Four Fingers of Death and live to tell about it are not exactly going to be invited to judge Top Chef.”

Just the memory of those gross mystery-meat things claiming to be hot dogs was enough to make Kirby groan. “Those things definitely lived up to MRE’s ‘Three Lies for the Price of One’ reputation,” she said. “It’s not a meal, it’s not ready—”

“And you can’t eat it,” both women joined in.

They all laughed.

“We were fortunate in the Green Zone to have a lot more options than the guys in the forward positions,” Kirby said. “But I did do some rotation forward, and WMR buys a lot of surplus MREs, so I’ve suffered my share.”

It had always amazed Kirby that the military could pinpoint targets with smart bombs, deploy thousands of troops to a flash point within days, and the Night Stalker creed promised they’d arrive on target plus or minus thirty seconds, but they still hadn’t figured out how to feed troops at the pointy tip of the spear.

The easy womanly companionship had Kirby thinking of Rachel again. Of the personal conversation they’d shared before Kirby had left for the States. Which, in turn, kicked up the worry factor times ten.

“She’s going to be all right,” Sabrina assured her, demonstrating the empathy Kirby figured was even more important than freebies in the bathroom if you were running a hotel. Even more so a smaller, more intimate inn such as the one she seemed to be planning here at Swannsea.

“Zach and Quinn are the best at what they do. And Zach’s always claimed that there’s not a better pilot in the military than Shane.”

“So he always told me,” Kirby agreed, which earned another laugh.

“He’s also the most positive person I’ve ever met,” Sabrina added. “A lot of people would be understandably bitter after what he’s been through. Others might get depressed. But although I didn’t know him until he came to town, Quinn, who visited him several times while he was in rehab, insists that he only let himself stay down a couple weeks. Then threw himself into regaining his life.”

Kirby knew that the words were meant to reassure. But instead she found them depressing. If she’d only refused to leave and stuck around Landstuhl for a few weeks, would he have been willing to pick up their relationship?

Deciding there was no point in dwelling on the past, she turned to a more pleasant topic.

“When’s your baby due?” she asked Titania.

“In May.” The woman beamed, looking a lot like all those romanticized paintings on Italian cathedral ceilings of the Madonna. A very sexy Madonna. She unconsciously smoothed her hands over her belly.

“Being a genius at planning, you’ll note that she cleverly scheduled the birth before the full heat of the summer,” Sabrina said.

“Scheduled, hah,” Titania scoffed. “It was all Nate’s fault. He was the one who suggested we stay in Maui those extra days. If it’s a girl, I think we should name her Mai. For the mai tais that were responsible,” she explained at Kirby’s puzzled look.

Her laugh was like silver bells. She was, hands down, the most stunning woman Kirby had ever seen who wasn’t on a movie screen or in a music video.

“So you don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl?”

“No. We decided we want to be old-fashioned and be surprised.”

“That’s nice.”

Kirby had occasionally given thought to having children. But the impracticality of her gypsy life in the military, then with WMR, had always precluded her becoming a mother.

There was always the problem of not having met anyone that she’d actually want to have children with. Or at least who wanted to father those hypothetical children—Shane coming to mind as he so often did.

“Do you have family here?”

“My mother died when I was born,” Titania said.

“I’m sorry.”

The boatneck sweater slid down over a caramel-hued shoulder as the other woman shrugged. “I’ve thought on occasion that was easier than having lost her later. Because I didn’t have any memories, so it wasn’t exactly as if I knew what I was missing.”

Her doe-brown eyes took on a distant, somewhat sad look. Which she quickly shook off. “Besides, Nate’s mother, who’s now my mother-in-law, pretty much raised me while my father was working here at Swannsea for Sabrina’s grandmother.”

The two women exchanged a look Kirby couldn’t quite decode.

“So you’ve known your husband all of your life?”

“They took baths together,” Sabrina offered.

“We were babies,” Titania countered. “No more than toddlers.”

“That’s nice, though,” Kirby said. “To have that history together.”

Once again, it had her thinking about Shane. How they’d jumped into bed without knowing anything about each other. And how they hadn’t known that much more when he’d dumped her months later.

It was her turn to shake off an unhappy feeling. “So,” she said, with exaggerated brightness, “what about your father? He must be excited to be a grandfather. Is this his first?”

“And only,” Titania said. She and Sabrina did that unreadable trading-look thing again. “He’s been ill with Alzheimer’s and used to confuse me with my mother a lot, so I was afraid he wasn’t going to understand what’s happening. But his doctor put him on new medication, which has him much more aware and less likely to suffer the hallucinations that used to seem real to him.”

Another look.

There was definitely something going on here.

“Including a really difficult time when he wasn’t sure I was even his daughter. Which is a long way of saying, that yes, Dad’s over the moon at the idea of a new baby to continue the Davis family line. As are Nate and I.”

The beaming smile was back, giving Kirby the idea that whatever family problems she and her father might have had—and with that tragic disease, they must be considerable—they appeared to be, at least for now, somewhat smoothed out.

“I think, since we’ve had a long day and worked really, really hard, we deserve a treat,” Sabrina said, standing up and effectively putting an end to that line of conversation. “How would you like dessert?” she asked Kirby. “Titania’s Swannsea chocolate mint brownies are absolutely to die for.”

“Oh, my God,” Kirby moaned, after taking a bite of the minty fudge dessert. “You were’t exaggerating.”

“I never do.” Sabrina’s smile was warm and lit up her lake blue eyes. “I like you,” she said.

“Well, that would be mutual. Even if you hadn’t given me the best meal I’ve had in months. Make that years.”

“Titania, Cait—that’s Quinn’s fiancée—and I have been working on a project.”

“Well, if you ever decide to take Swannsea Tearoom public, I want first dibs at the stock,” Kirby said.

“Actually, it’s not about food,” Titania said.

“It’s Shane,” Sabrina said.

A second sinfully decadent brownie was on the way to Kirby’s mouth when she paused. “Shane?”

My Shane? she thought, but did not ask.

“We’ve been trying to fix him up with a woman.”

“Oh?” Her casual tone took a herculean effort, given that she doubted there was anything these two couldn’t succeed in doing if they put their minds to it.

“But so far it’s been a bust,” Titania said.

“A total disaster,” Sabrina added. “Of course, part of our problem is that he hasn’t been at all cooperative.”

Titania snagged another brownie from the plate in the middle of the table. “I’m eating for two,” she announced. “And that’s a decided understatement. I swear, I’ve never met a man I couldn’t bend to my way of thinking.”

Kirby had not a single doubt of that.

“But I’ve figured out why,” Sabrina said.

“Oh?” Kirby asked.

“We’ve been using the wrong bait,” Titania said.

Kirby was beginning to feel as if she were being tag-teamed by experts.

“It’s obvious he’s hot for you,” Sabrina said. “I swear, I can’t remember the last time I saw a man look at a woman the way he was looking at you.”

“Like he wanted to start eating your toes and work his way up, is how Sabrina described it, to me,” Titania said.

“I was afraid he was going to melt into a little puddle of need right there on the marble floor of the foyer,” Sabrina said.

“That was before I’d told him I’d given up sex,” Kirby found herself admitting.

Damn. It had to have been the wine that had her sharing that. She wasn’t used to alcohol.

Neither woman looked any more convinced than Shane had appeared.

“And how’s that going for you?” Sabrina asked after a pause.

“Fine.”

She could tell neither of them believed her. And why should they? When she didn’t believe it herself.