Prodigal Prince Charming

Surrounding them all was the neighborhood, with its tree-lined streets, tidy houses, cracked sidewalks and bicycles lying on neat lawns.

All Madison noticed after she paid her driver was the white van parked near the corner mailbox.

A young man in a blue mechanic’s uniform met her as she stepped from the cab. After confirming that she was Madison O’Malley, he handed her the van’s keys, told her there were ice chests and ice inside it, and left in a beige SUV that had been waiting nearby to give him a lift back to wherever it was he’d come from.

As she stared at the keys in her hand, it took her a moment to realize she could stop worrying about how she was going to make her lunch stops. Cord had actually done what he’d said he’d do. And with time to spare.

Madison had even more time to spare a few hours later. And spare time wasn’t something she usually had.

She usually finished her lunch route by 12:40 and returned to the pub near 4:00 p.m. With her normal routine seriously shot, she found herself back an hour early because she had no truck to gas up and clean, no leftovers to drop off at the seniors’ center and no idea how she was going to salvage her business.

As she pulled up behind the silver Lamborghini parked at the curb, she also had no idea why the fates had seen fit to throw Cord Kendrick into her path.

Three animated preteen boys hung around the racy car in front of her. Only one seemed able to tear his glance from all that horsepower when she walked over to see what they were up to. Sean Bower’s focus, however, had already turned back to the wide black tires when he spoke.

“Isn’t this way cool, Madison? It must go a hundred miles an hour!”

“Way cool, Sean,” she replied, unable to help smiling at the wide-eyed awe behind his little glasses. The Ridge was a Ford-and-Chevy sort of neighborhood. A car that probably cost more than any of their homes necessarily drew attention. Particularly the attention of the juvenile male variety. Personally, she still thought the thing looked as if something heavy had sat on it. “And I’m sure it does.” She ducked her head to see Sean’s face. “You might want to back up so you don’t get drool on that fender.”

Backing up herself, she glanced toward the ten-year-old Balducci twins. She’d never been able to tell them apart. It didn’t help that they both always wore blue navy SEAL baseball caps. “You boys all keep your hands off the car. Okay?”

The one on the right, Joey, she thought, put his hands behind his back. “We didn’t touch anything.”

“Yes, you did, Jason,” his brother insisted, proving that she’d gotten them wrong again. “You breathed on the rearview mirror and made your nose print on it.”

“Did not!”

“Did, too!”

“Boys?” Madison called, stopping with her hand on the pub door’s ancient brass handle. “Wipe the print off. Okay, Jason? And keep your hands to yourself.”

She didn’t wait to see if the boys would comply. Had Cord’s car been parked a couple of miles farther south, she would have reason to be concerned about the safety of his hubcaps. The kids from this neighborhood, though, rarely caused real trouble. When everyone knew who you were, knew where you lived, who your parents were or who your teacher was, it took considerable creativity to stray too far from the straight and narrow.

When she walked through the door, the sounds of the boys’ animated voices gave way to the voice of a sports announcer coming from the wall-mounted television above the bar. Rumor had it that, except for the TV, the neon beer signs and a new mirror behind the bar, Mike’s Pub hadn’t changed much since the first Michael Patrick Shannahan had opened it a hundred years ago. Four generations and four Michael Patricks later, lace curtains still hung over the front windows, dark wood booths still lined the walls, a dozen scarred wooden bar stools still lined the long, brass-railed bar, and pints of beer still flowed from the taps along with the bartender’s sympathy for whatever injustice or woe a patron had suffered that day.

Her eyes were still adjusting to the dimmer light when the men sitting at the bar ahead of her turned to see who’d joined them. Usually when she arrived home, the place was packed with dock workers who worked the seven-thirty to three shift and stopped for a cold beer and conversation on their way home. Since she was a little early, only Ernie Jackson and Tom Farrell were there.

“Hi, Madison.” The craggy-faced Ernie gave her a toothless smile. “Finish up early today?”

“How’s it going, Ernie?” she asked automatically.

“Can’t complain,” he said, and turned back to the beer he’d probably been nursing since noon.

Tom, newly retired from the docks, lifted his coffee mug to her. Madison suspected he was there escaping Mrs. Farrell. According to Grandma Nona, Tom’s wife of forty-three years had drawn up a “honey-do” list a mile long and had harped on him since his first day off to get started on it.

From behind the bar, Mike caught her eye and tipped his head toward a booth near the front door. With his deep auburn hair, green eyes and infectious smile Michael Patrick V was Irish to the core. His smile was missing, though. All she saw in the big man’s freckled features was curiosity.

“You have someone waiting for you,” he said.

She already knew that. “Thanks,” she murmured, and glanced behind her.

Had she not seen Cord’s car, she would have taken the outside staircase to her upstairs apartment as she usually did and, alone and in private, faced the panic clawing at her stomach. Given that she had an audience, she staved off that panic as best she could and walked over to the large and faintly cautious-looking man rising from the booth next to the last.

The way Cord stood at her approach spoke of manners that were more automatic than practiced.

It was a fair indication of how upset she was that something that might have impressed her barely registered. She was too busy thinking that Cord Kendrick looked as out of place in the working-class establishment as his car did out on the street—and wishing she had never laid eyes on his too-handsome face. She structured her entire life around the work that kept her running sixteen hours a day, six days a week. The thought of any part of that structure collapsing had her stomach in knots.

Assuming he wanted the van back, she held out the keys. “Thank you. Very much.”

Rather than taking the keys, he asked, “Did the van work out?”

“It got me where I needed to go.”

“Then, keep it until a new truck can be delivered. That’s what I want to talk to you about,” he said, motioning for her to sit down. “I have no idea what it is you’ll want, so we need to arrange for you to order it yourself.”

Preferring the isolation of the high-backed booth to being the day’s entertainment for the guys at the bar, she slid onto the green Naugahyde bench seat. Cord slid in across from her, his long legs bumping hers.

“Sorry,” he murmured.

As if hoping to coax a smile from her, he smiled himself. It was sort of a half smile really, an expression that held a hint of contrition and male appeal that would have had the hearts of most women melting.

In no frame of mind to be charmed, definitely in no mood to smile, she simply watched him push aside the beer he’d ordered and hadn’t touched.

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Tell me where you want to order the truck from.” Leaning forward, he clasped his hands on the dark and scarred wood, his voice low enough that the men gave up trying to listen and turned their attention back to ESPN. “I’ll get a letter of credit to the dealer. I also need to settle up with you for the food you lost this morning and your lost profits for the day. They took your truck to a salvage yard a few miles from here. I told the owner of the yard not to do anything to it until he heard from you. I don’t know what you had in there that might be of personal value to you, so you might want to check it out. All I was able to get were these.”

He pulled her sunglasses from the inside pocket of his beautifully styled leather jacket, along with his checkbook. The pen he also withdrew looked suspiciously like real gold.

“Thank you,” she murmured, taking the glasses. Considering how flat the cab of her truck had been, it amazed her that they were still intact. He amazed her a little, too. A few hours ago she hadn’t been inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt about much of anything. She had to admit now, that the man seemed to be doing whatever he could.

“I appreciate what you’re trying to do,” she said, voice calm, insides knotted. “And I appreciate the use of the van. But I’m going to lose more than just today’s profits. There are state laws regulating businesses like mine. I can’t meet the refrigeration and sanitation requirements with the van, and I’m not going to risk having my food preparation license pulled. All I’ll be able to sell now is baked goods, fruit and soda,” she told him. “I can’t even sell coffee because I don’t have enough thermoses, and I wouldn’t have any way of filling them on the road. That’s only a third of my business.”

“Coffee is?”

“Baked goods and sodas.”

His broad shoulders lifted in a dismissing shrug. “Then, I’ll pay you the other two-thirds for every day you’re without the right kind of truck.”

He clearly didn’t see a problem. He also seemed to think that all he had to do was open his checkbook and her little crisis would be solved.

Wondering if life was always that easy for him, and suspecting it must be, considering who he was, she forced patience upon her growing unease. “This isn’t just about money. Money isn’t going to feed my customers or get me my work back,” she explained, needing him to understand that dollars couldn’t begin to replace the structure of her carefully ordered life. “I get up at three o’clock in the morning to do my baking and make sandwiches. At eight-twenty I load my truck and leave for my first stop. I finish my breakfast-and-break run, come back for lunch restock and finish the lunch run by twelve-forty. After that, I gas up my truck, drop off leftovers at the seniors’ center, stop at the produce market and come back here so I can clean up the truck, refill the dispensers and get my dry ingredients mixed up for the next morning’s baking.

“All I’m going to be able to do now is a breakfast-and-break run,” she continued, only now allowing herself to consider what tomorrow would bring. With all she’d had to deal with that day, she had managed to avoid that prospect so far. With her sense of anxiety growing, she truly wished she could avoid it now. “That means I won’t have to bake nearly as many cookies and I won’t make sandwiches at all. And I won’t have my lunch run to make, or my truck to take care of when I get back, so that means I won’t have nearly as much to do when I get back in the afternoon.”

She shook her head, wondering how many hours that left unfilled. Not wanting to know, self-recrimination lowered her voice to a mutter. “If I hadn’t wanted the money for that stupid chafing dish, everything would be fine.”

Cord watched the pretty, sable-haired woman across the booth from him rub her forehead. Her short, neat nails were unpolished, her slender fingers ringless, her dark and shining hair pulled back and clipped casually at her nape. Her lush mouth was unadorned, free of the shiny sticky gloss worn by so many of the women he knew. There was a freshness about Madison O’Malley that wasn’t terribly familiar to him, a lack of studied polish that spoke of interests beyond the hours he knew some women—his own mother and sisters included—spent being manicured, pedicured, highlighted, waxed, masked and massaged. On the other hand, it didn’t sound as if she had time for such fussing. From what he’d just heard of her schedule, she barely had time to sleep.

That she also now seemed as upset with herself as she was with him wasn’t lost on him, either.

Overlooking the fact that anyone else would be grateful for the break, and hoping to cash in on the blame she seemed to be feeling toward herself, he focused on the chafing dish she’d just mentioned. He had no idea how it figured into what had happened, but he’d buy a gross of them for her if it would help fix this little mess.

“This chafing dish,” he said, ducking his head to see her eyes. “Is it something you need for your business?”

“It’s one of a lot of things.” Absently pulling a napkin from the holder, she lifted her head. “I’m trying to expand my catering business, but I don’t have the equipment and serving pieces I need for parties. If I’d had a couple of good double chafers I wouldn’t have had to turn down Suzie Donnatelli’s wedding last week. Not that she asked,” she admitted, sounding as if she were talking more to herself than to him as she rolled the napkin’s edges, “but I know she would have if I’d told her I could do it.

“That’s why I took the coffee and muffins to the trailer,” she hurried on, her racing thoughts leaving him in the conversational dust. “It wasn’t worth being off schedule for twenty dollars worth of coffee and food, but a fifty-dollar tip would make a serious contribution to my equipment fund. As it was, the tip you gave me would almost buy the blasted thing, but it wound up costing me my truck.”

For a moment Cord said nothing. He just sat there wanting very much to keep her away from her last thought.

“Okay,” he said, buying himself a few seconds while he weighed the new information she’d more or less given him. If he read this woman correctly, she was actually more upset about having time on her hands than she was her loss of income. She also had something more she wanted to do, but hadn’t been able to because she hadn’t had the extra income to do it with.

“If I get you equipment and catering jobs, would that help?”

Madison opened her mouth, blinked and closed it again.

“I can buy you whatever you need,” he said, thinking that anything he had to pay would be a bargain compared to what it would cost him if he couldn’t make her happy enough to stay away from insurance companies and lawyers. “And I know lots of people who entertain. You can work on that end of your business until your new truck gets here.”

His expression mirrored hers when her eyebrows pinched.

“What?” he asked, needing to stay up with her, if not one step ahead.

“It’s not just the equipment I lack. Not exactly,” she confessed, sounding as if one set of concerns had just given way to another. “It’s the experience. I’ve done a few small parties,” she explained. “I’ve just never done anything of any size that wasn’t just hors d’oeuvres.” Suddenly looking a little self-conscious, she dropped her voice another notch. “I’m sort of still in the planning stages.”

Cord drew a slow, deep breath. When he’d walked in, he had thought that he could write out a couple of checks, make sure she got an even better truck than the one she’d had so she would have no cause for complaint, and hope that would be the end of it. There was also the little matter of getting her to sign a release of claim for Callaway Construction, but there were details to iron out first.

“You can practice on me,” he concluded, tightening his grasp on the only negotiating tool he’d been able to find. “I’m having a few people in this weekend. Saturday night. Nothing formal,” he assured her, since that seemed to be a concern. “I’m not a formal kind of guy.” That was his family’s forte. He could hold his own with a wine list, and he enjoyed the finer things as much as the next man. He just didn’t like having to put on a tux to do it. “I thought I’d call a restaurant and have them deliver, but the job is yours if you want it.”

When Madison felt excited, nervous or uncertain, she needed to move. Needing to move now, she slid from the booth, took a step away, then turned back.

“You want to hire me?” she asked, looking incredulous, sounding doubtful.

“It works for me, if it works for you.”

Madison promptly started to pace. Three steps one way, three steps back. Cord Kendrick had connections in circles it would take a miracle for her to enter on her own. And there he was, his impossibly blue eyes following her every move while he waited for her to accept or decline the offer of her lifetime.

His mother had been royalty.

His older brother was the governor of the state.

His father was related to the Carnegies or the Mellons. Or maybe it was the Vanderbilts. All she knew was that he’d come from old money that had made tons more.

Granted, from what she’d read, the Kendrick family had little to do with Cord himself, but the circle he reputedly ran in wasn’t that shabby, either: Grand Prix racers, supermodels, platinum recording artists. Owners of large, multimillion-dollar construction companies.

“I don’t know,” she murmured, pacing away from him. “I’d planned to practice more on my friends first.” It was one thing to help them out with their parties. She knew what it took to please them. But catering was all about referrals. “What if your dinner is a disaster? If I’m really not ready, I could end my career before I even get started.”

Because she kept turning away, and because her voice was still low, Cord was having trouble catching what she said. Wishing she would stand still, he levered his long frame out of the booth and caught up with her two empty booths down.

“You’ll be fine,” he assured her.

“How do you know?”

“I’ve tasted your cooking.”

Her tone went flat. “You had a muffin,” she reminded him over the scream of race cars on a motor oil commercial. “That’s not exactly chicken Florentine.

“Can you make chicken Florentine?” he asked as she paced the other way.

“I can make lots of things.” She tried out new recipes and new twists on old ones on her family all the time. “There are just some things I’ve never made for more than four people.”

“This will only be for seven or eight. And Florentine would be great. Throw in some pasta, a salad and something for dessert and you’re home free.”

Her uncertainty remained as she turned back. “What kind of pasta?”

He shrugged, took a step closer. One dinner party disaster would hardly be the end of the world for him. But if it wasn’t a disaster and he could help her get more business, he would have made up for the loss of work she was so upset about now. “Something northern Italian. White sauce, not red.”

She started pacing the other way. Grabbing her arm, he turned her right back. “Will you stand still?”

Her faint frown met his. “I think better when I’m moving.”

“Well, you’re making me dizzy.”

“Hey, Madison. Everything okay over there?”

Apparently grabbing her hadn’t been the wisest thing to do. Dropping his hand, Cord turned to see the burly bartender scowling at him from the other side of the bar. The two men bellied up to it weren’t looking too friendly toward him, either.

“Everything is fine,” Madison assured the man. “We’re just talking.”

“You sure?”

“Positive.”

The ledge of Mike’s brow lowered with the glance he gave Cord before looking back to her. “You just let me know if you need anything.”

“Honest, Mike. Everything’s okay.” A smile smoothed some of the strain from her delicate features as she glanced toward the other men. “Thanks, guys.”

Cord watched the customers turn back to the mirror, where they could keep an eye on his and Madison’s reflections. As if to be sure she truly wasn’t being harassed, the guy she’d called Mike kept a more direct focus on them. At least, he did until the ring of the phone demanded his attention.

The quick concern of the men for her had seemed almost brotherly. As if they regarded her as…family. He’d had that same impression from some of the men around her truck at the construction site, too.

Cord hadn’t had a lot of experience with the sort of protectiveness he sensed here. And certainly not within his own family. Not that he could identify, anyway. But he had friends. More than he could count. There just weren’t many he truly trusted, and of those not a single one was female.

He had discovered long ago that women only wanted two things from him: a good time and his money. He’d never been opposed to a good time himself, and as long a woman was willing to play by his rules and keep her mouth shut around the press, he’d take her along for the ride. But this woman was nothing like anyone he’d ever met. She had workaholic written all over her, and she didn’t seem interested in his money at all. At least not beyond what it would take to replace her truck.

The thought of the press had him heading back to their booth and picking up his pen. After writing out a check, he used her curled-up napkin to write his address on.

“My home and cell numbers are on that, too,” he said, handing the napkin and check to her. “The check is for whatever food you have to buy for the dinner. You can give me a bill later for whatever you want to charge for your time.

“I have to go, but there’s something I need you to do for me,” he continued, his back to the bar as he glanced from his watch to the confusion in her expression. He hated to rush, but he had already bailed on Matt to take care of Madison, and he needed to get back to their meeting. Callaway Construction’s next construction draw hinged on the reports he had to review and sign. He tended to blow off responsibilities others imposed on him, simply because they were someone else’s idea of what he should do and not his own. The responsibilities he chose himself, however, he took quite seriously. He wasn’t about leave his best friend to cover paychecks and costs for materials from his own pocket.

Three other customers walked in, men coming in for a beer after work, from the looks of their grease-streaked clothes. They didn’t seem to notice him and Madison. Not yet, anyway. They were too busy bantering about the Lamborghini outside as they headed for the bar, and speculating about who it belonged to. It wouldn’t be long before they did notice them though. And the fewer people who recognized him, the better.

His voice dropped. “I need you to keep any conversation we have just between us.” He was going to take a chance that she was exactly what she seemed. A woman who just wanted her business back. She hadn’t said or done a thing that would lead him to believe that she was looking for a quick million dollars the way others had when they thought they had something on him. And she definitely didn’t appear to be interested in acquiring his money by showing any interest in him personally.

That part actually stung a little.

“Just between you and me,” he continued, pocketing his checkbook before the newcomers could glimpse much more than his profile, “I have a real knack for drawing bad publicity. It will be a lot easier for both of us if you don’t mention my name to anyone. Especially to the press. Just tell your friends that everything is being handled by Callaway Construction and that I’m its representative. Things are only going to get complicated if we don’t keep the details just between us.” He held out his hand. “Okay?”

Madison glanced from his hand to the odd intensity in his eyes. Despite his casually confiding tone, she couldn’t help feeling that her agreement meant far more to him than anything else they’d discussed.

Living in the Ridge, she knew how crazy things could get when other people started poking their noses into someone else’s business. She had never considered it before, but she supposed that poking its figurative nose in people’s business was exactly what the press did every time something went into print. It occurred to her that he routinely faced the nosiness of the Ridge on a global scale.

“Okay,” she said. Considering all he was willing to do for her, and having no desire to sabotage any of it, she took his hand. “Just between us.”

His grip tightened. “Thank you.”

Her heart did an odd bump against her ribs at his relieved smile. Not sure what to make of the little tug of sympathy she felt toward him, she slowly withdrew her hand.