Chapter One

“Carly! Order up!”

“You made sure to leave off the mustard and lettuce?” I asked Tiny, the ginormous cook at Max’s Tavern, smiling to soften my question. “The customer made it very clear he’d be taking it out of our tips if we get it wrong.”

Tiny placed his hand on the service counter and leveled his gaze with mine. “I can read a ticket.”

“I guess it’s not you I’m necessarily worried about.” I gave a slight nod to the woman struggling to flip a burger on the grill. Tiny had hired the new cook a few days after Bitty, who’d worked under his supervision for years, was shot and killed just outside of the tavern. She’d sold information about me to a man who’d intended to murder me, and he’d immediately turned around and double-crossed her. Despite the steep price she’d paid, Tiny and the rest of the staff saw her action as a bitter betrayal. Once you were accepted at Max’s, you were family. And family never turned on each other.

After my own father’s betrayal, I knew that was nothing but a sweet lie.

Tiny rolled his eyes. “Sugar didn’t have a thing to do with this order.”

Sugar was the nickname he’d given her, and we’d all taken to using it even though I was fairly certain that her real name was Phyllis.

Tiny plopped another plate on the counter. “But she had her hands all over this one. You can give it to Jerry.”

Jerry was a regular at the tavern, and he lived on a very fixed income. I’d learned on my first night that the staff always tried to feed him something extra on the sly, a habit I’d quickly embraced. We’d give him something he hadn’t ordered and claim it had been a kitchen screwup. But there had been dozens of actual screwups a day since Sugar had started, and Jerry had gained a good five pounds.

“I already gave him a lunch.”

“Well, see if he wants this one too.”

Sighing, I picked up both plates. “Jerry might actually put some meat on his bones if we keep this up.”

Tiny shot a glare at the woman behind the grill. If Max, the owner of the place, didn’t fire her soon, I suspected Tiny would take matters into his own hands and do it himself. Rumor had it that Max had hired her as a favor to someone, but no one seemed to know whom. If Max wasn’t careful, he just might lose the best fry cook this side of the Smoky Mountains.

I carried the plates to the dining room. We’d reached the end of the lunch rush, thank goodness, and the space was starting to empty out.

Jerry sat at the bar, and I gave him his food first, cringing as I slid the plate in front of him. “Jerry—”

“How many mistakes can that woman make?” Jerry asked in a whisper.

I made a face. “Apparently a lot of them.”

“Why doesn’t Tiny fire her?” he asked, using his fork to turn over the tortilla-wrapped object on his plate.

“You mean Max?”

He shot me an irritated look. “Everyone knows Tiny runs the kitchen and Ruth runs the dining room. Max just sits behind the bar and looks good.”

I smothered a laugh—I’d never heard Jerry say something so blunt—and Max, who had been standing behind the draft handles, popped his head up. “Somebody say something about me?”

Max Drummond was one fine-looking man and he knew it. Thick blond hair, hazel eyes, and an infectious laugh. He was the good-time guy behind the bar and, rumor had it, between the sheets. Although I hadn’t seen him with a single woman since I’d shown up in town at the beginning of November, he was supposedly something of a ladies’ man. Ruth liked to bring up all his past indiscretions and rub his nose in them, something he tolerated with good humor. He was only twenty-nine and had plenty of time before he had to worry about settling down…unless he went through the entire under-forty female demographic in the Smoky Mountain town of Drum, Tennessee, before he reached that stage. But my intuition told me that the smooth-talking charmer would still get his pick of girlfriends past.

But now he’d turned his attention to Jerry. “You talkin’ about me?”

Three weeks ago, Jerry would have likely hung his head and shied away. But he had recently taken a stand against a man who’d bullied him, and doing so had brought back some of his confidence. He put his fork down and stared Max in the eye. “Phyllis is terrible in the kitchen. You need to fire her.”

Max and I both stared at him with dropped jaws. “What?” we asked simultaneously.

“Hey,” my cranky customer asked from across the room. “Am I gonna get my food here?”

Great. Mr. Fancy Pants had noticed me dawdling with Jerry while holding his plate of food. Given my short interaction with him, I should have known to serve him first. Within thirty seconds of walking in, he’d grabbed my arm and pulled me away from a table of customers. In a condescending tone, he’d asked about the VIP dining area, as if we might have a secret back room to separate rich people from the riffraff. With a chuckle, I’d told him this was as good as it got. He’d taken a table in the middle and asked for a fresh cloth to wipe down the table and chairs as if the place were dirty instead of very well-worn. I’d obliged, but his attitude had made me spitting mad.

Truth was, I dreaded waiting on him. His expensive dress shirt and pants, silk tie, and Italian leather loafers all screamed that he wasn’t from around here, and he wore a perpetual smirk that reinforced that he thought he was too good for our tavern. He reminded me of the people who’d populated my past.

I set his plate in front of him, stretching my smile as wide as possible and forcing a cheery tone. “Here you go, sir. A cheeseburger with no mustard or lettuce, with a side of fries.”

His dyed black hair was slicked back, and his face was clean-shaven. There was a hint of crow’s feet around his eyes, but something about his forehead suggested he was a frequent Botox customer.

“They’re cold,” he said, staring up at me with narrowed eyes.

I tried not to shudder.

“You didn’t even try them yet,” I said in a forced teasing tone, pretending to be oblivious to his insults.

He didn’t take his hard gaze from mine, and I realized we were in one of those staring contests my third-grade students had loved to challenge one another to back when I lived another life—the first one who blinked lost.

I knew I should just take his plate back to the kitchen and get a fresh order of fries—“The customer is always right” was the first rule of waiting tables—but I also knew they were still hot enough to burn his tongue. Mr. Fancy Pants got off on scaring people with his thousand-dollar clothes and arrogant attitude. He liked to see people run off with their tails tucked between their legs, but Charlene Moore didn’t have a tail to tuck, and I was all out of patience with rich people trying to intimidate and destroy me.

I let my smile fall. “Those fries are just fine. You don’t scare me with your condescension. What are you gonna do? Walk out without paying? I’ll just give your meal to someone who’ll appreciate it.”

I should have kept my mouth shut, but he reminded me of my oil baron father and the assholes in his entourage. I might not be strong enough to face Randall Blakely, but I could definitely stand up to this prick.