One Autumn Night

Chapter Nine

Abigail frowned as she surveyed the tsunami of food in her kitchen. There were a hundred and seventy five sausages—twenty five extra just in case—grilled and ready to star in the main dish of Bangers N' Mash. There were trays of mashed potatoes warm and covered in chafing dishes with extra cups of chicken broth on the side in the event they started to get too dry from sitting out.

She wanted to be well prepared for anything that could happen. Extra sausages, extra broth, extra whatever to make sure she pulled off the job without a hitch.

She drowned out the chatter around her and checked items off her list—the trays of lettuce for the Pub Salad, the assortment of additional ingredients that would be served as topping to the lettuce—tomatoes, cucumbers, pickled green beans she'd found on sale when she'd gone on her second shopping trip, and eggs that had been hardboiled, to be sliced on site.

"I changed my mind," she said though everyone was occupied with their own tasks. After a quick check of who was doing what, she deemed Danielle's current task to be a lower priority—the marinade for the cheese cubes was emulsified thoroughly enough.

"Danielle? Will you please hand the marinade off to Ben to finish, then slice these eggs and set them back in the serving trays? If we cut them on site they're going to stink up the tent. Especially with heat lamps amplifying the scents of things. I'd like the sausage and onion gravy to be the stars, not hard boiled eggs."

"Yeah, sure. Smart." Danielle buoyed over. "And I'll arrange them in rows so they look pretty. The white and yellow circles, all lined up in the tray."

"If you spent the same amount of time on boys as you do on organizing eggs, maybe you'd get more sex," Kelly told Danielle as she heaped pickled green beans into a stainless steel container.

"There's always upstairs," Beckett offered cockily from his station at the oven. "I'm happy to oblige the undersexed."

"A selfless man," Declan tossed in.

"A regular saint." Ben rolled his eyes.

"A saint of sex. I like it. That's me."

"You can't be that good," Kelly put in. "Danielle, go have sex with Beckett upstairs then tell me how it is."

Abigail listened to the banter, the male jabbing and flirtations, the female strikes and giggles, that filled her warm kitchen and wondered if she'd ever been that flirty, that giggly when she'd been twenty-one. Probably not, she decided. She'd just never been much of a giggler and had never wanted to flirt with anyone but Declan.

A memory swayed in her mind of Declan after one of his lacrosse matches. He was sweaty and sexy in that confident male kind of way, and there'd been girls around, always girls who circled. And as she'd been waiting on the side of the field on that particular day, she'd watched as a gaggle of sophomore girls huddled outside the men's locker room and walked with Declan as he'd left.

But he'd walked to her, his attention focused only on her, hadn't he?

A tremble shook through her and she waved the memory away, kept on, moving down her list. "Becks, how's the next batch of gravy coming along?"

"Declan's on it."

Abigail glanced up to watch Declan pour gravy from a large cast iron pan into a square graduated container. "How many batches are done now?"

"This is the third. One more to go. Think that's right."

"We can thin what we have with chicken broth if we get desperate. Actually, Ben, will you add to your backup list to bring enough ingredients for another batch of gravy? We can always whip some up on site."