Free Trouble In Triplicate by Barbara Boswell

confessed to being dazzled by her, she thought. Wholesome girl-next-door types like her and her sisters seldom inspired such responses. For a moment Juliet felt as alluring and glamorous as one of those bona-fide beauties whose pictures hung on Caine's restaurant wall. And then she remembered that Caine Saxon undoubtedly had more lines than a fisherman and that she was not about to be caught with one.
    She carefully withdrew her hand from his. "Everything on the menu looks delicious." She spoke in the polite, impersonal tone one would use in talking to a stranger in a bank line. "What do you recommend?"
    "I recommend that you forget about my past and those pictures on the wall. I'm here with you tonight, Juliet."
    Her heart jumped, but she ignored his comment. "I think I'll try the chicken pot pie. I've never had it homemade, only the commercially frozen type."
    Caine sighed. "Okay, we'll play it your way. This is our first date. We know nothing about one another and we have to make polite small talk over the menu. My, doesn't the sherry tomato bisque soup sound interesting? I wonder if they serve it with crackers."
    Juliet did not react to his sarcasm. Instead, she chose to answer him seriously. "I don't know. Perhaps you could request them. And the sherry tomato bisque does sound interesting. I think I'll order it myself."
    Surprisingly enough, their superficial discussion of the inn's menu led to a more natural conversation about their own respective businesses.
    "My sisters and I always loved to cook," Juliet found herself confiding in response to his question of how and why the Posts had begun their catering business. "After we graduated from college with liberal arts degrees and no marketable skills, cooking seemed to be our strongest talent. We thought of opening our own restaurant, but we didn't have the necessary capital. It was Mark Walsh, our next-door neighbor, who suggested catering out of our house. Our folks were retiring and moving to Arizona, so they left us the house and we started cooking."
    She smiled in reminiscence. "Our first customers were the Friends of Mr. Jefferson Lawn and Garden Club. They hired us to do their annual luncheon. It was held in one of the ladies' homes and was a huge success. We do the luncheon every year now. It's sort of an anniversary for us."
    "Funny how you always remember your first customers. The first people to set foot in our restaurant were a group of fraternity boys, football players on the university team. Grant and I talked to them for hours! Which was fine, since very few others showed up that day."
    "Business certainly has picked up for you since then," Juliet said. "I hear you have overflow crowds almost every night."
    "The restaurant has been an amazing success." Caine shrugged and smiled. "Oddly enough, we never intended it to turn into a gold mine. Grant and I could both live comfortably on our various investments, but we wanted to do something after retiring from the pros, and opening a restaurant in our old hometown seemed like a good idea. Since it's been so successful we've hired a restaurant-management-school graduate and really aren't too involved in the day-to-day operations anymore."
    "It sounds like you Saxons have the golden touch. Everything you do turns out well."
    "We used to call it the 'Saxon touch.' And you're right, it seemed like we would actually have to work at failing. Good things just seemed to happen naturally to my brother and me—the big pro football contracts, the product endorsements, the commercials." He paused and frowned. "And then Grant's luck seemed to run out. He was dumped by his fiancee two weeks before his wedding without even being given a reason."
    "Randi was terribly hurt by it all too," Juliet said, compelled to defend her sister. "Aside from the usual adolescent crushes, Grant was her first real love—her first lover!"
    "And is Bobby Lee Taggert Olivia's first real love and first lover?" Caine asked thoughtfully.
    Juliet