Chrome and Roses!

CHAPTER SIX: SUGAR AND SALT

She had built the business the hard way, which was the only way she knew.

Sugar & Salt had started as weekend pop-ups out of her home kitchen — jars of preserves, small-batch pastry, the salted caramel sauce that her college roommate had declared dangerously good. She'd saved for two years to rent a commercial kitchen by the hour, another year before she could afford her own van, another before the catering contracts started coming in large enough to matter.

She had done all of it without a safety net. Her mother was in Asheville with a new husband and a polite distance. Her father, Dutch's old acquaintance, had died three years ago — a heart attack, quiet and fast, in the house she'd grown up in. She had sold the house to cover the business loan and told herself he would have understood.

On Wednesday morning she was prepping for a Thursday corporate lunch when her assistant, a twenty-year-old named Bree who missed nothing, looked up from the order sheets.

"So the biker."

"The what?"

"Bree gave her a look that communicated volumes. The one from the festival. Word is he's Iron Saints."

"Word travels fast."

"Hollow Creek is thirty-two square miles, Ellie. Everything travels fast."

Ellie kept her hands moving — portioning the spiced pecans, not looking up.

"He's a client."

"He's not a client. We don't have a contract with the Saints."

"Then he's a person I've met."

"A person you went riding with on Sunday morning before six a.m."

Ellie looked up. Bree was watching her with the expression of someone who had already formed an opinion and was simply waiting for permission to say it.

"Say what you're going to say."

"He's dangerous, Ellie. Not like interesting-dangerous. Like actual-dangerous."

"I know what he is."

"Do you know what the Saints did to the Road Kings two years ago? On Route 9?"

She didn't. She had been deep in a catering contract during whatever had happened on Route 9 — she'd heard something, a fight, someone hurt, she hadn't paid close attention. She paid attention now.

"Tell me."

Bree told her. It took four minutes and by the end Ellie's hands had stopped moving.

She stood there for a moment. Then she started portioning the pecans again.

"Thank you for telling me."

"Ellie—"

"I heard you, Bree. I'm not dismissing it."

She wasn't. She was filing it next to everything else she knew — the careful handshake, the two dollars on the table, the way he'd said thank you like it cost him something. People were not one thing. She had learned that young.

It didn't make the Route 9 thing disappear. But it didn't disappear him either.