Spooning Daisy by Maggie McConnell Read Free Book Online Page B

come out in the laundry.
    Yet, here she was on a slow boat—“Boat, ship, whatever!” Daisy grumbled—heading to Otter Bite and the Wild Man Lodge. The idea of being executive chef at Wild Man hadn’t sounded so bad when it was just something she was going to do. But now that she was actually doing it . . .
    Trying to bolster hope, Daisy retrieved the manila envelope from her suitcase, spread open on the compact couch. Inside the envelope was everything she knew about Wild Man Lodge: the PR brochure, a copy of the menu, photos off the website, and correspondence from Rita Jakolof, including the letter offering Daisy the job and the agreed-upon salary.
    Rita had come to Seattle to interview Daisy, as well as three other applicants. All men , Rita had confided, intimating that Daisy’s gender gave her the advantage—although she heard Rita mumble something about catching hell. Apparently in Otter Bite women were at a premium, and Rita was starved for female friendship. Nor did it hurt that Rita couldn’t get enough of Daisy’s cooking, being particularly enamored of her mango chutney on salmon. One thing could be said about Rita, she was a robust eater. Four hors d’oeuvres, two salads, one soup, three entrées, and four desserts later, she had found her chef.
    An Otter Bite native who could trace her fraternal roots back to the Russian settlers of the 1800s and her maternal roots back to the Alutiiq people a thousand years before that, Rita was the lodge manager and a Jill-of-all trades handling a plethora of duties including supervision of the kitchen and housecleaning staffs. With long raven-black hair, luminous brown eyes and latte skin, she might’ve been plucked from the pages of a Zane Grey novel, except of course for the designer jeans and tight sweater accentuating her voluptuous figure. Rita was as easygoing as Daisy was tightly wound, seemingly unconcerned that the lodge was fully booked for the season and had no chef. Nor did she care about Daisy’s impressive credentials—
    “The royal what?” Rita had asked when Daisy rattled off her membership in the Royal Academy of Chefs. “And all they give you is a spoon? Doesn’t seem worth belonging.”
    Nor did the reason behind Daisy’s job search faze her; Daisy hadn’t cared enough to gloss over it. In fact, her problems with Jason seemed to be a plus.
    “Grandmother poisoned Grandfather once,” Rita had said. “She found him messin’ with Kitty Shelikov. Wasn’t lookin’ to kill him. Just wanted to give him something to think about.”
    Rita Jakolof was immensely likeable.
    Perusing the brochure, Daisy wished now that she’d asked more questions; for instance, who was this M. K. Endall listed as owner/pilot, and what was he like? Wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, the man was but a small part of the photo, which was consumed by an old floatplane looking glued together and bearing the faded words Wil Man odge on its fuselage. A website photo had him holding a fishing pole on the deck of a small barge that looked like it had been resurrected from the ocean bottom. But Daisy hadn’t asked that question or all the others now filling her head because she hadn’t actually expected to take the job. She’d sent in her résumé between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when she was at her most depressed and the prospect of getting out of Seattle seemed like a godsend. Two months passed. Two months of unreturned phone calls and no job offers. She had forgotten about Wild Man, and then Rita called. The day of her cooking interview, Daisy had received two rejections from restaurants in San Francisco. In a panic, she’d accepted the job at Wild Man, grateful for someplace to go and relieved to be wanted. The questions never materialized. At least the salary was generous—surprisingly generous, given the dilapidated look of the lodge—and it came with room and board, although she dreaded what that might entail, since that was another question she