Agnes and the Hitman by Jennifer Crusie Read Free Book Online Page A

local boy making good. Well, he’s forty-four, so the boy part is probably pushing it. He’s worked his way up through the kitchens of most of the area restaurants, and now he’s chef on the best restaurant on the Island over there on the other side of the Intracoastal.” She nodded in the direction of the water. “He’s a real self-made man, a hard worker, and a truly good chef. We’re just about finished with a cookbook that’s going to be a bestseller because his recipes are great, and that’s going to set up the catering business he’s going to run out of the barn he just renovated here. He has nothing to do with the mob and absolutely no reason to send anybody after Rhett You choosy about your eggs?”
    “I don’t want eggs,” Shane said. “You don’t need to feed me. Would he gain anything if you died?”
    “I want to feed everybody.” Agnes flipped a chunk of butter into the pan. It slid across the surface and then began to melt slowly, lighting with the coffee and the sausage for Best Morning Smell, Kitchen Division. “If I died, he’d get Two Rivers. We have a partnership agreement for the cookbook and the catering business, so the survivor gets it all. But he needs me to finish the Two Rivers Cookbook —his future’s riding on that book. It wasn’t him.” She picked up the red pepper, ran a knife around the stem, twisted it, and popped out the core with one smooth motion.
    Shane was impressed. “Did your mother teach you to cook?”
    “Oh, please,” Agnes said, taking down a knife. “My mother barely ate. She had a waistline to maintain. I didn’t taste butter until my best friend’s mother melted a chunk of it in a pan in front of me right here in this kitchen when I was fourteen. After that, there was no turning back. Any boy with a milk shake and a cheeseburger could have me.”
    “That explains Taylor,” Shane said.
    “Humor. Har.” Agnes began chopping the pepper with machine gun-like efficiency.
    “A catering business. I thought you were a newspaper columnist.”
    Agnes shot a guilty glance at her laptop, and kept chopping. “I am. But Taylor wanted the catering business and I wanted Two Rivers. So we bought it from Brenda together. I can write anyplace.”
    “Brenda,” Shane said, remembering Joey last night on the phone saying, “the old Fortunato place.”
    “Brenda Dupres,” Agnes said, introducing the pepper to the butter. “The Real Estate King’s widow and the closest thing to a mother I ever had. Closer than the one I did have, anyway. She’s the one who fed me butter. Fabulous cook, throws terrific parties, knows—”
    “Brenda Fortunato,” Shane said.
    “That was before the Real Estate King,” Agnes said. “And before I knew her. Mr. Fortunato was sleeping with the fishes by the time Lisa Livia brought me home with her.”
    Cousin Lisa Livia. Vague memories of an intense dark-haired girl time back. And Aunt Brenda. Good food, he remembered. Fancier than Joey’s, but that was before Joey had sent him to military school and everything in his old life had stopped like a slammed door.
    Fuck that. He inhaled the melting butter and put his mind back on the problem at hand. “But this wedding will be Fortunato not Dupres. The bride’s mother is a Fortunato.”
    “Lisa Livia? Yes.”
    “What about her father?”
    Agnes hesitated and then said, “He’s not around. LL never married him, so Maria’s a Fortunato, too.”
    Great. All Fortunatos, all the time. “What happened to him?”
    “Nobody knows,” Agnes said, turning away. “He was a bad choice. Twenty-seven-year-old wiseguy meets an eighteen-year-old high school senior. Lisa Livia went bananas for him until she caught him cheating. Then she went off on him and he hit her and that was it for LL.”
    Shane felt pretty certain he was missing something. “That was it?”
    Agnes nodded. “I had a scholarship to a college in Ohio, and we were graduating, so she decided to come with me. Johnny