Special of the Day Read online

  ELAINE FOX

  Special of the Day

  For my mother, Connie Atkins,

  who spent my school years

  polishing my grammar

  and correcting my punctuation,

  and without whom

  I would never have been able

  to embark on this career.

  Contents

  1

  Roxanne Rayeaux raised her hips and let out a little…

  2

  Springsteen throbbed over the sound system. Hard to Be a…

  3

  There was no disguising it this evening, Steve thought, as…

  4

  Roxanne wrestled with taking the wine, then decided she was…

  5

  P.B. sidled up to Steve near the bar. “So, how’s…

  6

  “I can’t believe you did that.” Roxanne pressed the button…

  7

  “How come you sound so muffled?” Steve’s sister, Dana, asked.

  8

  Roxanne must have been crazy to have agreed to a…

  9

  Okay, so he was attracted to her. And okay, so…

  10

  “Roxanne, baby. Glad you called.” P.B.’s voice seemed too loud…

  11

  Steve drummed his fingers on his desk and looked at…

  12

  Steve hunched over his notebook, open books spread on the…

  13

  Steve looked suspiciously from Officer Stuart to Roxanne to P.B.

  14

  “So what’s the shelf life on these things?” Skip asked,…

  15

  The restaurant was crazy. Just when Roxanne thought she’d surely…

  16

  Steve couldn’t sleep. He rolled onto his back and stared…

  17

  Roxanne wasn’t sure why there had been no evidence of…

  18

  Roxanne walked down the stairs in a trance.

  Epilogue

  The knock on Roxanne’s door came at 7 p.m. exactly.

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Other Books by Elaine Fox

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Bar Special

  Fish House Punch—expect the unexpected…

  Light and dark rum, brandy, peach brandy, lemon juice, sugar

  Roxanne Rayeaux raised her hips and let out a little moan. She tilted her head back, exposing her throat, and arched her back, moving one shoulder to release the tangled locks of her long hair from beneath her.

  Enveloped in darkness, surrounded by mystery, she had to admit she was nervous. Yes, very nervous.

  She bit her bottom lip and reached out, palms sweating, to find the steely shaft in the dark. Cupping it with uncertain hands, she felt its length. Could she find the right spot? She hoped she wouldn’t get wet.

  She tried to remember the page in the book that had shown this maneuver. She was not at all sure she was in the right position; it certainly didn’t feel like the right position. She was…uncomfortable.

  Though she would have admitted it to no one, she had never done anything like this before.

  If only she’d thought to light a candle. She could at least have made sure she wasn’t lying down with a rat.

  She didn’t have a flashlight, not one of her lamps would fit in here, and her body blocked most of the light from the cabinet door.

  She was alone under the sink with the pipes. And a more inept plumber she’d be hard pressed to find.

  Steve Serrano knocked again on the oak-paneled door, then tilted his head to align an eyeball to the opening. A woman’s shoe kept the door from closing completely, leaving a crack through which to see the inside of the apartment.

  Nice furnishings. Some boxes. Classical music on the radio. Or no, he leaned further to the right, on the high-end CD system he could see in the corner against the exposed brick wall.

  He pushed on the door and it swung wider.

  “Hello?” he called.

  An orange cat bolted from the couch, lit out across the room and disappeared through a door down a short hallway.

  Steve stepped inside the apartment. This one was definitely nicer than his, but maybe that was because there were real oriental rugs on the hardwood floor and actual artwork hanging on the walls.

  He moved into the living room and put his hands on his hips. This was one high-class woman. He’d seen the truck from his window when she’d moved in two weeks ago, but he’d never seen her. And he’d expected to. She’d just bought the restaurant downstairs in which he worked as a bartender.

  He set the bottle of wine he’d brought as a welcome gift on a sleek glass-topped coffee table and moved toward the kitchen. She had to be home. Why else would her door have been ajar?

  He stopped at the entry to the kitchen, his attention caught by the sight of two long jean-clad legs sticking out from beneath the sink. Above the waistband, where her shirt had hiked up, he saw the jut of a hip bone and the curve of a small waist.

  He strode across the black and white tiles to look down the drain opening. There, in the dim light, glowed the pale profile of a woman.

  “Hey,” he greeted mildly.

  She gasped, and dropped something loud and metallic beside her.

  “Damn it,” she hissed.

  To herself, he thought, though she could have been swearing at him. Then she started to push herself out from inside the cabinet.

  As she wriggled from the space he couldn’t help noticing—objectively, of course—that she had a lithe, agile body, if a little on the skinny side. But when her head emerged, complete with a tangled mass of dark hair and black smudges on her forehead and cheek, his breath about left his body.

  She was—again, objectively—gorgeous. Maybe the most gorgeous woman he’d ever seen in real life.

  Even sitting on the floor, covered in dirt, a spiderweb in her hair, she looked like something out of a movie. Her dark eyes flashed above high cheekbones and her mouth was so sensually shaped he couldn’t help picturing it sucking strawberries on the big screen.

  He almost glanced around to see if someone was playing a joke. As if he might have stumbled into one of those homemaking reality shows, one that pitted beautiful women against average men in some kind of plumbing contest.

  She ran one hand across her brow, moving locks of long hair to the side of her face. “You scared me.”

  “I, uh, I didn’t mean to.” The words came out like bricks. He’d never been struck so dumb by a pretty face. “I thought you heard me coming.”

  “What, over the music?” She threw a hand out toward the sound system. She was over her fright now and clearly getting angry.

  “Well I was singing along.” He couched this with a smile.

  Slim, arched brows descended over luscious, inky eyes. “Who are you? And what are you doing in here?”

  He motioned behind him, unable to pry his gaze from her face. “The door was open.”

  “And that looked like an invitation to you?” Those lips quirked in a sarcastic—attractively sarcastic, God help him—manner.

  “Well, I thought, you know, I had this wine…” He looked around for it, had forgotten what he’d done with it.

  She exhaled. “Listen, I’m not interested, got it? And next time, knock. Though I’d appreciate it if there wasn’t a next time.”

  He looked back at her. She had one hand on her hip, clutching a wrench. The other hand was slimed from nails to knuckles with trap grease. Still, she managed to look haughty.

  He laughed once. Amazing how beauty could dim with the wrong personality attached to it. Words flooded back to him.

  He raised hi
s own brows. “No problem, Cinderella. I just thought you should know your door was open.”

  “Oh my God, the cat—”

  “Took off for your bedroom. And I brought the wine as a housewarming, though with the chill in here I probably should have brought a case. I’m your neighbor from upstairs.”

  She didn’t look abashed, exactly. It was more that she looked less combative.

  “Oh. All right. Well, thanks—”

  “No need to thank me.” He held up one hand as if she might get effusive. “But I’ll know from here on out to leave you alone. You obviously know what you’re doing.” He let his gaze sweep her from messy hair to greasy hands to dusty pants, a half smile on his face. “And it’s none of my business if you like to leave your door open.” He started for the exit. “But, for the record?” He turned before walking out of view. “I’m not interested either. Okay?”

  He flashed her a smile and left.

  Roxanne’s cheeks flamed as she watched the door close to shoe width behind him. She’d forgotten to close the door after bringing the last box up from her car. How could she have done that? Cheeto, her cat, was a master escape artist. He must still be freaked out from the move, she thought, plucking the shoe from the door and closing it firmly.

  She had just gotten the last of her things from New York that had been shipped to her rented storage unit before she’d settled on this place. Between that and hauling up the toolbox she’d bought at a yard sale to fix the sink, she’d forgotten to lock the door. Or even close it.

  Seems she thought she was back in the Virginia of her youth. When you didn’t have to lock your doors to keep strange men from wandering in.

  She hadn’t even gotten his name. Had just assumed he was some jerk who’d recognized her on the street and followed her home. It had happened before.

  Still, this was Virginia, and not New York City. She should refrain from jumping to such conclusions. She’d lived in New York for so long she didn’t know how to respond to simple Virginia neighborliness.

  He probably thought she was a first-class bitch.

  And maybe she was. Now.

  As she passed the coffee table, her eyes strayed to the bottle of wine. She wiped her hands on her jeans, frowned at how ineffectual that was, then picked up the bottle.

  A ’94 Bordeaux. The guy knew his wines. She looked again at the door.

  He hadn’t seemed to know who she was. Evidently he wasn’t one of those guys who drooled—or worse—over the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition every year. She’d met some who could rattle off what year each supermodel had appeared and even describe the suit they were wearing. Which surprised her, considering that she’d always thought they were trying hard not to see the suit at all.

  So she would apologize to him later if she saw him, she told herself. Not that it mattered. She didn’t care what any guy’s opinion of her was. She was done trying to figure out what they even thought in the first place. Men were inherently untrustworthy where women were concerned.

  Okay, sure, not all men. Her dad was a great guy. And her high-school friend Skip. Even Marcel Girmond, her chef due to arrive from New York next week. To all of them she had trusted her heart in some way.

  But she was through with romance, at least for a while. Right now she had bigger fish to fry. Or rather, eclairs to bake. She had just finished an intensive course at the Culinary Institute of America and was ready to fulfill her lifelong dream. She’d bought herself a restaurant to convert into a fancy French bistro. And Step One was about to begin.

  In approximately twenty-one hours she was to meet with the staff of Charters Fish House, the failing restaurant in the ground floor of the rowhouse she’d just bought in Old Town Alexandria. Her plan was to offer jobs to any of them who cared to stay on and learn the fine art of French restaurateuring. This meant waiting tables with professionalism and aplomb, clearing tables with the subtlety of first-class servants, serving wine with the decorum of a seasoned sommelier, and generally behaving as differently as possible from the pub workers they currently were.

  Roxanne was pretty sure she would lose or get rid of three quarters of the staff, but it didn’t matter. She had the most important people in place. Her chef, the award-winning Marcel Girmond from New York; his sous-chef, Bertrand Noor; and her maitre d’, the ostentatious Sir Nigel from Carruthers’ in downtown D.C., where it was rumored the front-room staff trembled in servile awe when he issued an edict. Everyone else could be trained—or hired away from the finest restaurants in town, if need be.

  Then she was going to close the place for a few weeks to remodel and re-open it as Chez Soi, which was a French idiom she’d always found charming that meant “to have company.”

  This was going to be the crowning achievement of her life, she’d decided. A life that so far had been spent making money on her looks. For the last ten years she’d worked as a model in major magazines and a few television commercials. But while the living had been good, her looks were something she had done nothing to earn and she knew full well that they would fade before long. When they did, she’d vowed, she would have something real to fall back on. She’d planned to use the money she’d socked away to start her own business.

  It was a risk, sure. Nobody with a brain started a restaurant without knowing they could lose their shirt. But the restaurant business was in her blood—and it was one thing she was passionate about. She knew good cooking, she valued excellent service, and she craved a warm atmosphere.

  So she would create it. The perfect restaurant. And she would prove to herself that she could make money with her brain instead of her body.

  It had been sheer chance she’d been born with looks that would sell magazines. It was going to be sheer smarts that would make her restaurant a success. Of that she would make certain. She would succeed if it killed her.

  And it might. She was already as nervous as a wet cat at the prospect of addressing the restaurant staff tomorrow. Though she’d been raised in the restaurant business—she’d been “discovered” while working as a waitress in her parents’ homey Italian restaurant in downtown D.C. when she was seventeen—she had never taken on a venture as complicated as this one would be.

  She would just have to fake it.

  But before that…she tossed the wrench in her hand and turned back to the kitchen…she had to finish replacing the trap under the sink. She was pouring nearly every penny she had into the restaurant and saving what was left to deal with restaurant emergencies.

  Everything else, like household plumbing, had to be done by herself or not done at all.

  Steve plopped his plate of cheese fries onto the bar and pushed them toward the plucky redhead across from him.

  “So you say she’s a bitch, huh?” the redhead said, never one to mince words.

  Steve chuckled. “Now, now, Rita. I said she seemed a little tough. Tougher than she looks. So don’t be fooled.”

  He picked up a fry, stirred it around a mound of yellow cheese before putting it in his mouth.

  “Sounds to me like she’s gonna fire us. Hey, Georgie, think the new owner’s gonna fire our asses?” Rita gave George, another waiter showing up for the meeting, one of her trademark devil’s grins. “Rumor has it she’s a bitch.”

  “She?” George slid onto a barstool and unwound a scarf from his neck. “There’s your first clue right there. Hey Steve, gimme a Bloody Mary, would you? My head feels like it’s wearing a mashed potato helmet.”

  “Told you you shouldn’t have had that last kamikaze last night. How about a Coke?” Steve bent to fill a glass with ice and pushed the Coke button on the dispenser.

  “You are such a sexist,” Rita said, pushing a cheese fry into her mouth. “I hope she rips you a new one for dropping that case of Sam Adams last night.”

  “How’s she going to know about that?” George fixed her with a red eye. “Unless some other gossipy female tells her, huh?”

  Rita laughed and tipped her spiky red hair back as she p
opped in another cheese fry. “You just guaranteed it, my brain-dead friend. These fries are gross,” she said to Steve.

  Steve ate another. “I know. They were left over from last night. I nuked ’em.”

  “Eww.” Rita swiveled on her chair as two more waiters arrived and sat on bar stools.

  Before long the whole crew had assembled, four waiters, two waitresses, two bartenders, three busboys and two line cooks. Their numbers were down since the bar had started doing so badly. Mostly, Steve knew, because of the quality of the food. Which would explain why the main cook had yet to show. No doubt he’d already been fired.

  Which was great. Because all it would take to save this place was a reliable chef, a plentiful happy hour and a little bit of advertising. He had a bunch of ideas he planned to share with their lovely new boss, once she untwisted her britches over the fact that he’d let himself into her apartment.

  Steve looked at his watch. Eleven ten. She was late. That wasn’t exactly the right example to set for this crew, he knew. He’d add that to his list of suggestions. Waitstaff were like children, he would tell her. You have to be nice to them, but don’t let them get away with a thing.

  He glanced at George, who cradled his head in his hands as if it were a delicate scientific instrument trying to get a reading off the bar top. Poor guy had worked a double yesterday and thought he needed the kamikazes to get to sleep last night. He’d obviously forgotten about today’s meeting. Steve was about to cave on the Bloody Mary when the door opened and Her Highness swept in on the frigid January breeze.

  Her hair was piled onto her head in a casual style with wisps running loose next to her wind-pinkened cheeks. Her dark eyes actually sparkled in the dim light of the bar.

  She held a big piece of corrugated cardboard under one arm, a stack of papers in one hand and was unzipping her white ski jacket with the other.