Angels Fall

up for the day. He stood at the window of his office now, with coffee, picturing the change. It could be good. One chair or two? he asked himself as he imagined the deck. If keeping the cabin was a big step, keeping the woman was a giant leap over a chasm.
    He'd always enjoyed women, for their brains as well as their bodies. But if anyone had told him he'd one day want a very specific woman around all the time, he'd have reeled off a long list of reasons why such a possibility wasn't for him.
    Now, with Reece, he couldn't think of one item for the list.
    Having her around started his day early, that was true. And he'd gotten into the habit, once he'd quit the  Trib  , of rolling out of bed whenever he damn well felt like it. But there was always coffee, really good coffee he didn't have to make himself. And food. Hard to overstate the advantages of getting up to food and coffee every morning.
    And her voice. The smell of her. The way she  arranged  things. Ingredients for a meal, her clothes, the pillows on the bed. He'd found himself ridiculously charmed by the way she folded the bathroom towels over the rung.
    That was a little sick. Probably.
    But what man could resist the way those amazing eyes of her stayed a little blurry for the first half hour in the morning?
    She was a more compelling reason to get out of bed every morning than the most spectacular sunrise. She was troubled, complicated and would probably never shake off all her phobias and neuroses. But that's what made her Reece, made her interesting. What sucked him in. There was nothing, absolutely nothing run-of-the-mill about Reece JG.
    "Two chairs." he decided. "It's going to have to be two chairs." Turning away from the window, he went to his desk. He picked up the thumb drive she'd given him. When he booted up, he saw there were two documents on the drive. One headed CMB the other LIST. 
    "Cookbook thing," he mumbled, and wondered if she meant for him to have it, or had slipped up. Well, either way, he had it now.
    He opened that first, started reading the text she had headed as INTRO.

    The in-laws are coming into town unexpectedly —  tomorrow… It's the third date, and you're   making her dinner. And hoping to follow it up with breakfast in bed… It's your turn to host your   book club… Your perfect sister invited herself and her fiance —  the doctor —  to dinner… Your son   volunteered you to make cupcakes for the entire class …
    Don't panic.
    No matter how busy you are, how overwhelmed, how inexperienced you might be in the kitchen,   it's going to be fine. In fact, it's going to be spectacular. I'm going to walk you through it, every   step.
    From the sumptuous to the casual, from tailgate parties to elegant dining and everything in   between, you're the chef.
    All right, I'm the chef. But you're about to become a Casual Gourmet.

    "Not bad," he decided, reading on. She'd woven in little bits about time, equipment, lifestyles. Kept it all light, a little frothy. Accessible.
    After the introduction, she'd included a basic summary of the tone of the book she was proposing, then half a dozen recipes. The instructions—with bits of pep talk—were clear enough that he thought it might not be completely impossible for him to follow one through himself.
    Topping each were stars, running from one to four. Degree of difficulty, he noted. Smart. In parentheses, she'd made a note suggesting the asterisks might be chefs' hats.
    "Clever girl, aren't you, Slim?"
    He considered for a moment, then composed a quick e-mail to his agent. And attached Reece's file. He closed it, opened her list.
    Oh yeah, she was clever, he thought again. Her little sketches of the men were insightful and on target. Maybe it surprised him to find names like Mac Drubber and Doc Wallace, but she was thorough. And he enjoyed reading comments about Mac such as  mildly flirtatious, likes to gossip  . He'd have to ask Reece what she'd have put after his name if she'd included him on her list. He edited in some of his own comments, observations. She couldn't have known, for instance, that Deputy Denny had gotten his heart broken by a girl who'd worked as a maid at the hotel, had strung him along for six months, then blown out of town with a biker the previous autumn.
    He saved the updated file, copied both it and the cookbook data to his machine. When he'd finished, it was still shy of eight in the morning.
    Nothing left to do but go to work.
    He broke at