A Forever Christmas(30)

“Huh.” Miss Joan blew out a breath, exasperated. “You’re going to live to be over a hundred, Eduardo, and we all know it, so stop trying to paint yourself as some kind of a victim. You go through with this, and you’ll go stir-crazy before your first month of ‘retirement’ is up,” she predicted. Miss Joan leveled her gaze at Angel, then nodded toward the swinging doors that led to the kitchen. “Go in and get yourself an apron and show me what you’ve got, girl. And don’t let that old man scare you,” she added, raising her voice so that Eduardo heard. “He’s all bark and no bite.”

“Ha! You should talk,” Eduardo retorted. “You yap enough to give a man a headache forever!”

Gabe looked from the narrow space above the counter, where all the orders were placed once they were filled, to Miss Joan. He lowered his voice and said, “You’re really going to miss that old man, aren’t you?”

Miss Joan shook her head, not in denial but in sad anticipation of what was to come in a far too close future if Eduardo actually did retire.

“More than words can say,” she whispered back. “But don’t let him know,” she warned, slanting a look over her shoulder toward the kitchen.

Gabe grinned. “I’ve got a feeling that he already knows, Miss Joan.”

But Miss Joan wasn’t all that convinced. “If he thought that, he’d say it, believe me. Hell, he’d crow it. Not one to stay silent, that one.”

Still, it didn’t change the situation. Unless something happened, Eduardo was leaving right after Christmas. She dreaded the thought. She and Eduardo had struck up a rhythm of friendly antagonism and it always made the eighteen-hour day go by faster.

“Now, you be nice to this little girl,” Miss Joan instructed, raising her voice so that the cook could hear her. “Don’t be scaring her off. With you deserting me, I’m going to be needing someone to do the cooking. She can probably cook rings around you without even half trying,” she predicted.

“She had better do much more than that if she is to survive here with you, old woman.”

For a moment, as the swinging doors closed behind her, Angel thought of turning right around and vacating the relatively small, utilitarian kitchen. But something held her fast and wouldn’t allow her to flee.

Was that “something” a basic part of her real makeup, or…

Or what? a voice in her head asked.

She had no answer for that, any more than she had an answer for any of the other dozen and a half questions that had assaulted her this past day and a half.

Eduardo’s dark brown eyes looked her up and down slowly, his shaggy graying eyebrows drawing together little by little.

“So,” he finally said, “you are here to take my place?”

“No, sir,” Angel replied quietly and respectfully. “I’m just here to see if I can help out.”

A small, almost nonexistent smile settled on Eduardo’s thin lips and he nodded his approval at her choice of words.

“All right, then, come and help,” he instructed. “You will find an apron in there,” he added, nodding toward the small closet where towels, aprons and a host of other kitchen-oriented things coexisted in a jumbled heap.

Angel went to help herself to an apron. There was no denying that there were colliding butterflies in her stomach, but all the same, she did have a good feeling about this.

“Don’t look so worried,” Miss Joan chided Gabe as he watched the kitchen’s swinging doors close behind Angel. “She’ll be just fine. Eduardo hasn’t required a human sacrifice since his third wife had the good sense to leave him.”

“I heard that, old woman!” Eduardo called out. “And it is I who left her, not she who left me,” the cook corrected.

“Whatever helps you get through the night,” Miss Joan allowed with a dismissive shrug. “She left him,” the older woman whispered to Gabe just before she accompanied him to the diner’s exit. “Eduardo makes a lot of noise, but your little friend’s going to be just fine,” she reassured the new deputy.

Gabe started to issue a disclaimer that Angel wasn’t “his little friend,” but the truth of it was, he was stuck for an alternate label to apply to the woman he’d rescued yesterday. If Angel wasn’t his “little friend”—and she was petite—how did he refer to her? As his project? As his work in progress? Or maybe just a lost woman?