Chapter 1.1

“Yes. Palms up.”

Wade tucked the newspaper beneath his arm and held his hands out, palms up, suddenly grateful for time spent on the tennis court.

She grasped his hands and ran her thumbs over the slight calluses along the pads of the fingers of his right hand. “Well, I guess you’ve done some work before.”

He just shrugged. “I’ve worked.” Not manually, not for many years, but he’d worked his butt off in more than one boardroom. He thought it ironic that playing tennis, which he did to relax, would turn out to be more important in getting him a job than having been CEO of the nation’s largest media conglomerate. The latter had not put calluses on his hands.

“Were you interested in night cooking or daytime dishwashing?”

While he could cook—he was a bachelor and didn’t like to starve—he doubted his repertoire matched the diner’s menu. Also, the woman before him was the key to the boys he was looking for, and she obviously worked days. Sticking as close to her as possible seemed his best bet.

“Daytime dishwashing,” he told her. He only had to do it long enough to get a handle on McCormick’s boys. A few days at most.

She stared at him for a minute, doubt furrowing her brow. Then finally, when he was about ready to squirm like the only kid in class who hadn’t finished his homework, she gave a nod and took him by the arm.

“All right, I’ll give you a try.” She led him behind the counter, through the swinging doors and into the kitchen. “Not that I think you’ve ever washed a dish in your life,” she muttered just loud enough for him to hear. Then, louder, “Pops, help is here. This is Wade. Wade, Pops. He’ll show you around.”

Pops was a wiry, gray-headed old man with more wrinkles on his face than anyone had a right to. He stood maybe five-five on legs so bowed he looked as if he might still be straddling a horse. No telling how tall he’d be if those legs were straight. The toes of his boots were worn and pointed. He smiled and flashed a mouthful of blindingly white teeth.

“Howdy,” the old man offered, his eyes narrowed to slits. “You don’t look much like you need a job.”

“Pops,” Dixie said in a scolding tone. “Be nice or wash the dishes yourself.”

Pops flashed his teeth again. “This is me being nice.” “Good boy,” she told him.

“Whatever happened to respecting your elders?” Pops muttered. “That’s what I wanna know.”

Dixie showed Wade around the kitchen and explained what he was expected to do.

The kitchen was narrow and ran the length of the establishment. A stainless-steel-lover’s dream. Oven, stove top, grill on one side, several sinks and countertops and a prep area on the other. Refrigerators, freezers, dry goods, canned goods, condiments, all on the far end, near a door to the back alley.

“And for every table you bus,” she told him, “I’ll give you a share—a very small share, but a share—of my tips.”

Wade nodded. It could be a lot of work when business was rushed, but nothing he couldn’t handle. “Bus, scrape, wash, stack, take out the trash.

Anything else?”

“If I think of anything, I’ll let you know.”

Wade blinked. She was serious. As if she hadn’t already given him a full day’s worth of work.

Out in the dining room, the bell over the front door dinged and more customers entered the diner.

“When can you start?” Dixie asked. “Whenever you want me,” he offered. “Now?”

“Sure.” He started rolling up his sleeves. “Order up,” Pops called.

“If you last until Lyle comes in at three to take over from you and you still want the job, we’ll talk. Anything you want to ask me?”

The look on her face suggested he had overlooked something. “Such as?”

“Money?”

Wade felt like an idiot. Thousands of employees across the country had for years counted on him for a regular paycheck, hundreds of thousands of other people had their money, their retirement funds, sometimes their entire life savings, invested in Harrison Corporation, of which he’d been CEO for several years. Until his heart trouble, he’d worked his tail off making sure that neither their trust nor their money was misplaced. Harrison was profitable, its employees felt secure, its investors earned a tidy profit on their investments, because Wade and his sisters and their father, and his father, and his father, had done their best to see to it.

The Empire, as they jokingly referred to it in the family, had started with his great-grandfather and one small-town newspaper. Today it owned newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, a film studio and an ad agency. Not only had Wade held it all together as more and more of the responsibility had fallen to him over the years, he’d made it all flourish.

And he was damn proud of it. And he couldn’t negotiate his own hourly wage at a local diner?

He wouldn’t be sharing that little detail with his family.

“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “I was getting to that. What does the job pay?”

When she told him the hourly wage—before taxes, she explained—he nearly choked. He would have to work for three weeks to buy a new jock strap. So this, then, was how the rest of the world lived, he thought.

But he said nothing. Instead he nodded. “That’ll be fine.”

She looked at him as if she didn’t quite trust him, but said, “Great.

There’s the dishes.” She indicated three plastic tubs of dirty dishes. “Help yourself.”

“In other words, get to work?” he asked with a smile. “You read my mind.”

“Order up,” Pops said again.

“I’m coming.” She loaded a tray, grabbed a folding stand and disappeared through the swinging door.

“Now,” Pops said, putting down his spatula. He turned toward Wade and folded his arms across his scrawny chest. There was nothing scrawny, however, about the look on his face. “You may have pulled the wool over her eyes, but I’ve got better than twenty-twenty vision, boy. Who are you, and what are you really doing here?”

Wade paused in the middle of tying a dish towel around his waist as an apron, the way Dixie wore hers. “Pardon?” he asked to stall for time while he decided how to answer.

The old man snorted and turned back to his grill to flip a burger. “You heard me. You’re not some down-on-his-luck street bum lookin’ for a job that pays peanuts.” He turned to face Wade, the spatula still in his hand. “Who are you and what are you after? If you’ve come here to mess with the girl, you’ll think you’ve been pulled through a knothole backward when I get through with you. I might be old, but I ain’t dead yet.”

“The girl? You mean Dixie?” Wade asked, incredulous. “You think I’ve come here to, what, mess with her? I don’t even know what that means. But no, I’m just a guy looking for a job.”

“Bull hockey.”

Wade would have laughed at the old man’s verbal expression, but the look on his face was deadly serious and nearly compelled him to blurt out the truth. It was a good thing he’d never had to face those eyes during a takeover negotiation or Wade might have buckled.

But if he told the truth, a lot of people would freak out. He chose to stick to as near the truth as possible.

“Whatever my reasons for coming here,” Wade said, looking Pops straight in the eye, “they’re personal. But I will tell you that I mean harm to absolutely no one, and certainly not the woman who just trusted me enough to give me a chance.”

Dixie served the Mexican Platter, heavy on the jalapeños, to George Miller at table three, and a bacon cheeseburger with chili fries to Sonja Guitierez at number eight. After making the rounds with her tea pitcher, she went back to the counter.

A few minutes later she stepped into the kitchen. As she had every time during the past couple of hours, she gave a start at the sight of her new dishwasher. At least six feet of lean, gorgeous man who so obviously did not belong in her small diner kitchen, but who somehow looked just right with his sleeves rolled up and his arms plunged to the elbows in soap suds as he scrubbed one of Pop’s skillets. The open collar of his shirt revealed a scar that disappeared down inside his shirt. She had a sudden urge to find out how far down that scar went.

At the thought her pulse raced and an odd tickle danced around her insides.

Whoa. Was she having a physical reaction to a man? A physical reaction of a…well, okay, just say it, of a sexual nature? Sheesh. It had been so long since she’d felt any such stirrings, she didn’t know what to make of the situation.

Should she run for her life, or jump his bones?