His Convenient Royal Bride. Cara Colter

band to officially open the summer season with a huge outdoor concert tomorrow night.

      The hope was, once they had sampled the pristine charms of Mountain Bend, the throngs of people who had purchased tickets for the concert would return. Plan vacations here. Buy some of the empty miner’s houses for summer cottages. Spend money on coffee and groceries and gas. Save the town.

      It was a long shot, at best, but Maddie baked a back supply of scones, and printed off dozens of business cards, just in case.

      “Well, the locals know the best sights,” Sophie declared. “I’d be happy to show you around.”

      “Sophie!”

      “After work,” Sophie amended reluctantly.

      Lancaster handed her his menu and folded his massive arms over his chest. “I’ll have the Bend-in-the-Road.”

      “I think you’d prefer the Mountain Man,” Sophie said sweetly.

      “Could I see you for a moment?” Maddie called sternly and urgently.

      Sophie ignored her. “Or maybe a few scones? That would make you feel right at home, wouldn’t it?”

      “If I wanted to feel at home,” Lancaster said coolly, “I would have stayed there. And it’s pronounced scone, as in gone, not scone, as in cone.”

      “I love a man who knows his scones,” Sophie said, not insulted.

      “I want the Bend-in-the-Road. I’m pretty sure I cannot get an edible scone in Mountain Bend, Oregon.”

      Maddie was pretty sure he was given a little nudge under the table with the other’s foot.

      “They happen to be the most delicious scones in the world,” Sophie said loyally. “Maddie could have had a shop in New York someday, but—”

      This was going seriously off the rails!

      “Sophie!” Maddie called again, before it developed into an argument or a tell-all about Maddie’s broken dreams and bad boyfriend.

      Still, she could not help but be annoyed. You couldn’t get a good scone in Mountain Bend? That was a challenge if she had ever heard one!

      Sophie gave her a disgruntled look, and the customers a reluctant one. “Sorry,” she said. “Duty calls.”

      But then, before duty asked too much of Sophie, she leaned both elbows on the table, put her chin on her hands and blinked at Lancaster.

      “So, do you ever wear a kilt?” she purred.

      The big man looked stunned. After an initial moment of shocked silence, Ward threw back his head and laughed. If he’d been gorgeous before, it was now evident that had just been the warm-up. His laughter was pure, exquisitely masculine, entirely sexy.

      Danger, Maddie reminded herself firmly.

      Before Lancaster could answer, Sophie giggled, straightened up from the table and headed over to Maddie.

      “What do you think?” she asked in a happy undertone. “Match, game and set to me?”

      What she thought was that she envied Sophie’s relative innocence. The younger woman thought you could play at this game with no one getting hurt. Both those men had a masculine potency about them that spoke of experience.

      No doubt both of them had a string of broken hearts in their pasts. She didn’t care if the assessment was completely unfair. It was better safe than sorry, and Sophie was a naive small-town girl.

      Just as she herself had been when she met Derek. Maddie felt, again, protective of the younger woman.

      “This is not how you interact with customers,” she said, firmly. “You do not flirt with them. These shenanigans will end now.”

      “Shenanigans?” Sophie asked.

      “A kilt?” Maddie demanded in an undertone.

      “Don’t say you don’t want to know the answer,” Sophie said, grinning impishly, unintimidated by the neighbor she had known her whole life.

      Maddie made to deny it. Her mouth opened. But her gaze, of its own accord, slid back to Ward. His strong, tanned legs were tucked under the table. A kilt? Good grief! She could feel herself beginning to blush!

      Sophie laughed knowingly.

      “Look,” Maddie said, pulling herself together, “you’re being way too inquisitive. They’re customers. They’re here for breakfast, not to exchange life stories. And they’re not Americans. They won’t appreciate your friendliness.”

      Sophie pursed her lips together, miffed at the reprimand, as Maddie had known she would be.

      “Or apparently your scones,” she said, pronouncing it as gone rather than cone as Maddie always had. Then she flounced through the swinging doors into the kitchen and gave Kettle the order.

      “We ain’t open yet.” This declaration was followed by a string of cusswords used creatively and representing a long military history. “I don’t make exceptions. And that includes the apron. And tie your hair back. We have standards.” He put enough curse words between have and standards to impress a sailor.

      Sure enough, Kettle himself stomped through the kitchen door. Despite the scowl on his grizzled face, Maddie felt a rush of affection.

      Kettle had been her father’s best friend, there for her and her mother when her father had been killed in a logging accident. He’d been there for her again as her mother, heartbroken, had followed on her father’s heels way too quickly, leaving Maddie an orphan at eighteen.

      Maddie’s fiancé, Derek, had not gotten it when she had felt compelled to return to Mountain Bend after Kettle’s accident, to manage the café. This was the code she had been raised with: you did right by the people who had done right by you.

      So Kettle’s stomp was a good thing. He was nearly back to his normal self after he had fallen off the restaurant roof while shoveling snow in the winter and had a complicated break to his hip that had required several surgeries.

      Kettle had spent a military career he would not talk about with Delta Force before returning to Mountain Bend. Now he skidded to a halt, surveyed the two men with a certain bemused expression, and then turned back to the kitchen in time to intercept Sophie, who was coming out behind him.

      “Maddie,” he said gruffly, “you handle them customers. Sophie, you can help me in the kitchen for now.”

      Sophie looked as if she planned to protest, but she knew better than to argue with her uncle, especially her first day of working for him. She cast one last longing look at the table before reluctantly obeying and going back into the kitchen.

      “I trust you to be sensible,” Kettle told Maddie in an undertone. In other words, he trusted she’d outgrown the kind of shenanigans that got small-town girls, like her and Sophie, in all kinds of trouble.

      Yes, she thought with a sigh, she was the sensible one now.

      “I’m sure you won’t be imagining anyone in kilts, or any other romantic nonsense, either.”

      So, he had heard something of that. She hoped she wasn’t blushing, again, but Kettle wasn’t looking at her, but watching their first guests of the day with narrowed eyes.

      “What did they say they’re doing here?” he asked quietly.

      “The Ritz concert.”

      “The big one’s security. Written all over him. Maybe doing an assessment before the band arrives.”

      “What about the other one?” Maddie asked, keeping her tone casual.

      “Well, that’s the odd part.”

      “In what way?”

      “He looks like the principal, to me.”