Just A Little Taste
JUST A LITTLE TASTE
by
Farrah Rochon
Nicobar Press
Kindle Edition
Copyright © 2014 by Farrah Roybiskie
Cover by Mae Phillips of CoverFreshDesigns.com
Edited by Karen Dale Harris
ISBN: 978-1-938125-09-6
Kindle Edition License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please do so through your retailer’s “lend” function. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Just A Little Taste
A Moments in Maplesville Novella
Chapter One
Kiera Coleman was stalling.
With good reason.
She had been dreading the meeting to discuss outfitting her food truck since the moment she received an email from her former culinary school partner recommending the person who had renovated his rig. She’d stared in shock at her computer screen for a solid five minutes, sure the name must be a sick, twisted joke.
But it wasn’t a twisted joke, just a horrible coincidence.
Trey Watson.
After more than a decade, he was back in Louisiana, back in their small hometown of Maplesville. In less than an hour, she would be face to face with he whom she’d vowed years ago never to think of again.
Instead of pacing back and forth or kicking the wall, she concentrated on her work, praying that it would have the usual calming effect. So far, so good.
As she lifted the lid of the 32-quart aluminum stockpot, she was inundated with a heady blend of garlic, cayenne, and cumin. She inhaled a deep whiff of the spicy aroma, focusing on its essence as it hit the back of her throat. She stirred the tender chunks of chicken breast and Cajun sausage swirling throughout the dark brown stock.
Satisfied that the balance of seasoning in the jambalaya her long-time client, the Chamber of Commerce, had ordered for their monthly meeting was up to par, she scooped in six cups of long-grain rice, gave the mixture another few stirs and slid the lid back in place. Then she marched to the industrial walk-in cooler, one of two in her catering company’s main kitchen, and grabbed a stainless steel bowl filled with her special recipe of lump king crab meat, cream cheese and herbs.
As she positioned a fourteen-inch pastry bag inside a funnel, Kiera caught herself whistling Erykah Badu’s “Love of My Life.” The pastry bag slipped through her fingers, sending the funnel skittering across her prep workstation.
“Dammit,” she whispered.
She hadn’t so much as thought about that song in years. The nerve of her subconscious to bring it up today of all days.
She righted the pastry bag and, with more force than necessary, began stuffing the crab mixture inside.
“Macy, is the first set of pastry shells ready?” she called out to the only full-time employee she could afford to keep on Catering by Kiera’s payroll.
“They’re lined up,” Macy Bardell answered from right behind her, making Kiera jump. “The next set has about three more minutes in the oven, then I’ll slip them into the cooler for a few minutes. Are you ok?”
“Perfect,” Kiera said through gritted teeth. “In this heat it’s important that the crab tarts are nice and chilled before we transport them. I’ll start filling the first set. You get back to the bacon-wrapped dates. Some of them looked on the small side.”
“The dates are already done, with more than enough to cover the order.” Macy lifted the pastry bag from Kiera’s hands. “I’ll take care of filling the pastry shells, too. You have more important things to do.”
Kiera cast her assistant an annoyed look, which, of course, Macy ignored.
With bright turquoise hair, and tattooed within an inch of her life, Macy was Kiera’s complete opposite. Never mind the difference in race—that was a non-factor. Where Kiera was tall and willowy, Macy was short and curvy, and the most outrageous thing Kiera had ever done to her ordinary dark brown hair was adding gold highlights on the same day she had her usual sleek bob trimmed just above her chin. That move had started the tongues around Maplesville wagging.
Their physical contrast was nothing compared to the difference in their personalities. Macy had enough attitude to choke a lion, while Kiera was normally the queen of playing it cool.
Except for today.
“I don’t get why you’re not dying to get to your meeting.” Macy’s left brow lifted, causing the turquoise barbell she had pierced through it to twitch. “You’ve been looking for someone to remodel the Kiera’s Kickin’ Kajun food truck for months and this guy came all the way from Houston just to meet with you.”
“I can’t leave until Sammy delivers the seafood order. I need to work on my recipe for the cook-off later.”
“I’ll be here to accept the delivery from Sammy. And I already told you that your take on Shrimp Napoleon—turning it into a wrap—is a shoo-in as a finalist. Kiera’s Kickin’ Kajun is what you need to work on now. If you don’t hire someone, you’re never going to get it up and running in time.”
“I know.” Kiera sighed. Deep and dramatic. It had been a long couple of months. She deserved that sigh.
The goal was to have her new food truck operating by the start of the Louisiana Shrimp Festival—less than five weeks away. The three-day event, which took place during the first weekend of September, was slated to have over a hundred thousand hungry visitors. And, if the gods were really smiling down on her, she also would be chosen to compete in the shrimp cook-off. As a finalist Kiera’s Kickin’ Kajun would be promoted throughout the event. She would have those thousands of festival-goers eating out of the palm of her hand—literally. And, hopefully, she would top off the weekend by winning the $25,000 top prize.
Yeah, that was a lot of dreaming, but dreaming was the first step, wasn’t it?
“I say get to your meeting and snap this guy up before someone else does,” Macy said as she filled a second pastry bag. “From what you’ve told me he’s a genius at renovations.”
Kiera snorted. “I doubt I used the word genius.”
“You raved about the job he did on your friend’s food truck, and he’s local. This guy sounds perfect.”
This guy.
If she wrote up a list of guys she never wanted to encounter ever again, this guy would hold spots one through ten.
She couldn’t dispute Trey Watson’s talent. He’d performed magic on her friend Mychal Dickerson’s food truck. When she scrolled through the before and after pictures her culinary school partner had forwarded her, she’d been blown away.
And, yes, Trey was local. At least temporarily. It was that particular tidbit that sent a lightening bolt of unease racing down Kiera’s spine. Of all the custom renovators in all the world, why did he have to be her only hope of having her food truck ready in time?
She’d spent the past several months researching outfits across the country that specialized in mobile kitchen renovations, but either they were too far away, too expensive, or they wanted to sell her an already-outfitted truck.
She couldn’t afford to buy a brand new food truck. She needed someone local who would renovate the truck she’d already purchased for a ridiculously high price. Sight unseen. From a guy on Craigslist.
She needed Trey Watson. The sooner, the better.
Lord, help her.
She glanced over to find Macy staring at her with another of those challenging looks. Kiera held her hands up in surrender. “Alright, alright. I’m going. But don’t get your hop
es up. He might be too expensive.”
“Think positive. The sooner you show him what he’s working with, the sooner we can have Kiera’s Kickin’ Kajun out on the street making money. Now, go.”
Kiera trudged to her office at the rear of the corrugated building that housed the company she’d started five years ago. Owning her own catering business had always been her dream, but she didn’t feel like a success yet. Probably because she hadn’t worked as hard as some people probably thought she should have, even though she’d balanced her catering with a full-time job as a public affairs research analyst up until a few months ago.
She’d gotten much of the seed money to start the business from her share of her late father’s life insurance, and what that didn’t cover, her older brother, Mason, had. Just a few months ago, Mason had once again come to her rescue, loaning her enough money for renovations and the kitchen equipment needed for the food truck, after she’d sunk all of her savings into buying the actual truck. From Craigslist. For $20,000.
Cash.
“What were you thinking?” Kiera whispered, closing her office door and lightly thumping the back of her head against it.
That was the problem; she hadn’t been thinking. She had been so damn eager to get a piece of New Orleans’s growing food truck market that she didn’t give a second thought to purchasing a truck she only saw in pictures posted online. Sure, she noticed a few dents and scrapes, but she figured with just a little elbow grease, Kiera’s Kickin’ Kajun would be hitting the highway in no time flat.
Yeah, well, that hadn’t worked out quite the way she planned.
Estimates for getting the truck up to code ranged anywhere from another thirty to another fifty thousand dollars. She tried to take out a loan, but Mason convinced her it made more financial sense to borrow the money from him, interest free.
Kiera couldn’t argue with his logic, but she was so damn tired of being indebted to him. She was thirty-two years old. When would she stop looking to her big brother to bail her out?
“Right now,” she said in a fierce whisper.
She had a plan this time—a well-thought-out plan. The contract she’d just signed with the Magnolia Ridge Country Club to cater several of the huge galas they held throughout the year would be a significant boost to her company’s profits. And if things went the way she envisioned with the food truck, she would be able to pay Mason back in less than a year, with interest. Though Kiera knew her brother would swim through a river of honey and let an army of fire ants snack on him before he accepted interest from his baby sister.
The ability to repay Mason was important, but it wasn’t the most crucial part of her plan. What really mattered was that, if she played her cards right, she would soon be solidly on the road to realizing her ultimate dream, owning her own restaurant.
The first step was getting Kiera’s Kickin’ Kajun up and running. Ever since Mychal had regaled her with tales of the mind-blowing business he was doing with his food truck in Austin, Texas, Kiera had been clamoring to tap into that market. New Orleans’s food truck community wasn’t nearly as robust as Austin’s, but in the last year it had grown exponentially. She wanted to be at the forefront, and every day her truck sat idle it was another day she fell behind.
She’d finally secured everything she needed—the truck, the NSA-certified kitchen equipment, even the company that would shrink-wrap the logo around the truck’s exterior. All she needed was someone to put it all together.
Trey Watson.
She managed to contain her sigh this time, but just barely.
It had been fourteen years since she’d last spoken to him, so she hadn’t known what to expect when she’d sent the initial email asking if he was available to work on her renovation. She’d rewritten it at least a half-dozen times, changing the tone from lighthearted and friendly to severely professional. In the end, she’d settled on informal and efficient.
She’d prepared herself for a range of responses. Anger. Resentment. Indifference.
Instead, his response had been simply…Trey.
There was no other way to describe it. Even in those few words, letting her know that he’d just finished a job and could be in Maplesville in a matter of days to check out her truck, Kiera had gotten a sense of the carefree, laid back boy who had captured her heart. And then broke it.
She pressed a hand to her stomach, trying to quell the queasy dread she felt every time she thought about putting her dreams in his hands. Again.
Dammit. It shouldn’t matter that it was Trey. Their brief time together, while the most intense romance she had ever experienced, had ended back when she was still a starry-eyed girl.
She was a professional now, and this was business. Her business.
Getting the Kiera’s Kickin’ Kajun food truck up and running before the shrimp festival was paramount to her plans. If it meant temporarily working with the man who represented both the best and worst of her past, that’s just something she would have to do.
Lord, help her.
***
Kiera pulled into the entrance of the industrial park where she’d told Trey to meet her. She immediately spotted a black quad-cab pick-up with massive chrome wheels and a gleaming silver stripe that rimmed the exterior. A warm, almond brown arm, roped with tight muscles and glistening with sweat, hung out the driver’s side window. A colorful serpent tattoo she hadn’t seen in years wound its way down to the wrist.
She caught sight of his tapered fingers drumming a rhythm on the door panel. Suddenly all she could think of was the myriad ways those skillful fingers used to drive her wild.
Kiera groaned.
This was going to be torture. Pure, sweet torture.
Get it together.
She honked her horn twice, and motioned for Trey to follow. The owner of the industrial park was a good friend of Mason’s and he allowed her to keep her truck parked on the undeveloped lot at the rear of the property.
She pulled up next to the twenty-six-foot former moving truck she’d purchased several months ago. Kiera struggled to stave off the wave of disappointment that tended to wash over her whenever she laid eyes on the truck.
It was the high hopes she’d had for this venture, juxtaposed against it’s current reality—a dilapidated truck with rust spots as big as her head—that made this situation so hard to stomach. The truck would have to be completely overhauled if it had any chance of ever getting on the road.
But she refused to wallow in her foolish mistake any longer. It was done. Thanks to her brother—yet again—she now had the capital to move forward with her plans.
Kiera glanced in her rearview mirror and saw the door to Trey’s truck open. He stepped out and her stomach flip-flopped.
“Good Lord,” she breathed.
He still looked like her Trey. Except fourteen years had made him fourteen times sexier.
How was that even possible?
Her finger hovered over her Mazda CX-5’s push-button start mechanism as she continued to watch Trey through her rearview mirror. His lean frame strolling toward her with that easy, confident stride that she remembered so well momentarily mesmerized her.
He stopped a couple of feet from her door, and Kiera had to talk herself out of throwing the car in reverse and saying to hell with this meeting.
Stop it! She was not the same foolish, love-struck girl Trey Watson walked away from all those years ago. She could do this.
She shut off the engine, got out of her car, and turned to Trey.
And had the breath knocked out of her.
Oh, God, yes. He was still her Trey.
Tall and lean, but solid and sinewy, with buttery smooth skin that stretched tight over well-defined muscles. If she closed her eyes and concentrated hard enough, she could still taste his spicy, unique flavor on her tongue.
He took off his sunglasses and smiled the panty-dropping smile that used to convince her to do things she couldn’t think about now without blushing.
“How�
��re you doing, Slim?”
Things inside her went liquid as the nickname he’d given her all those years ago rolled off his tongue. Thinking of his tongue immediately conjured images she’d spent the better part of a decade trying to banish.
“I’m fine,” Kiera managed to say, her voice cracking slightly. She swallowed and tried again. “How about you?”
He shrugged a well-sculpted shoulder. “You know me. I’m always good.”
Yes. He was. Every single time she’d been with him, he had always been more than just good. He’d been the very best.
He’d also been the very worst.
Of all the people Mychal could have recommended, why, why, why did it have to be Trey?
Not that she was all that surprised that Trey was in the business of fixing cars. The summer they were together, he spent countless hours restoring that stupid Pontiac GTO he bought with the money he earned at Decker Anderson’s auto body shop in neighboring Gauthier. She remembered the first time he took the GTO out for a spin and got suckered into a drag race and cracked the car up against a tree.
He was so damn reckless. With everything. Her heart included.
Trey Watson was the epitome of a bad boy, which is why she had been so drawn to him from the very beginning. He was the boy that every girl had been warned against. The one who could make a girl’s knees go weak with just his smile, and make those same knees spread open with just a few sweetly whispered words.
She should know.
Stop thinking about that!
Kiera shook her head to get her mind off things she had no business thinking about right now.
“Thanks for meeting with me.” She gestured toward the truck. “Let me show you around.”
“Whoa. That’s all I get after all these years?”
“This is business, Trey. I have a very tight schedule and there’s a lot of work to be done.”
His jaw went rigid and the smile that had glinted in his eyes just a second ago faded.