The Taste of Staying
Sadie Monroe quit a Chicago kitchen in front of a full dining room. Now she has a camp cook's job on a Montana ranch and a letter to prove it.
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The story
The story
Sadie Monroe quit a Chicago kitchen in front of a full dining room. Now she has a camp cook's job on a Montana ranch and a letter to prove it. She arrives on branding morning to one man, sixty eggs and a cold griddle.
Tate Lawson hired a cook named Sid: sixty, thirty years on a chuck wagon, built from two initials and a paragraph about biscuits. He got Sadie, whose mouth runs three feet ahead of her and whose hands take over his stove before he decides what to do about her.
He tries to send her home. She hands him the egg bowl.
Tate fixes her oven hinge unasked, rides out when she's lost on the creek's wrong fork, and tells a hired hand, in front of the crew, "She's with me." His seven-year-old daughter picks Sadie as her person for kids' camp week.
It was meant to be one summer, no attachments. Sadie has a professional interest in his forearms that has nothing to do with hinges.
A steamy, slow-burn ranch romance.
Spice map
Where it gets hot
Heat, chapter by chapter. No spoilers, just warning.
The world
Know your way around
Character
- Dutch
- The first of the crew through the cookshack door, hat in hand, sniffing the air like a dog. He takes in the woman at the stove, raises his eyebrows one full inch, and asks whether she can ride. Eli's answer is that she can biscuit.
- Eli Lawson
- Tate's youngest brother, cap on backwards, hair mashed flat under it. He eats bacon off the pan standing up, tells Tate he should have interviewed the cook on the phone, and loses it completely when the cook turns out not to be Sid. Before breakfast is over he is taking orders from a stranger at the stove, with a smile on his face.
- Sadie Monroe
- A Chicago sous chef with a knife roll worn soft at the straps and a mouth that runs three feet ahead of her. She answers Tate's ad for a camp cook and turns up on branding morning with his letter folded in her pocket, only to learn he hired a sixty-year-old man named Sid. She hates leaving a line short-handed, so she takes over his stove anyway.
- Sid
- The camp cook Tate thinks he hired: sixty if he's a day, thirty years on a chuck wagon, a man who would want the stove moved two inches to the left and otherwise need nothing from anybody. Over four weeks of letters signed S. Monroe, he became Sid in Tate's head. The real S. Monroe's verdict: 'You built yourself a cowboy out of two initials.'
- Tate Lawson
- Runs the Lawson ranch and has for longer than some of his crew have been alive. He has decided where every fence goes and how every one of these men spends his summer, and this morning he has a hundred and forty calves to brand, a crew to feed and a cook who is not the man he hired. For the first time in years, every move in front of him costs something.
Place
- The cookshack
- The ranch's camp kitchen: a steel counter, a griddle, a utility sink, a window on the corrals, and a corkboard by the icebox where Tate pinned the letter from S. Monroe. The oven door has a hinge Mason says is about to let go and Tate says has been about to let go for two years. On branding morning it has one man on bacon and twenty hungry men waiting at the corrals.
Spoiler-safe. Only what you learn in chapter 1.
