Stay for Dinner: A Small-Town Montana Secret Identity Cowboy Romance

A magazine is sending a writer to this lodge sometime this season. Unannounced. No date, no name. Any guest at any table could be him, and two seasons of bookings ride on what he writes.By seven that first morning my entire family was auditioning at breakfast. My brother wore his good hat indoors, at the table, in the light, a man who has never worn a hat at a table in his life. My sister ran the occupancy figures out loud and landed them gently where a stranger could pick them up. Every kindness in that room had its brim angled toward the door.Nobody asked the kitchen.Nobody ever asks the kitchen. I am the youngest. The food will be there the way the lake will be there, and you don't interview the lake.Then table four ordered the corned beef hash.Opening day. Trout on the menu, first asparagus, bread with something to prove, and a man alone at the window orders the one dish on that board nobody brags about. The plate came back wiped. Not finished. Wiped, the way a crew wipes a plate.Then he asked for whatever the kitchen was eating.So I sent him the pan's truth, out of spite. Greens with the cold frame still on them, two eggs over, yesterday's bread fried in the fat, salted the way you salt for people who work. That came back the same. He thanked my waitress twice, she says. Once to her, and once, she believes, to the plate.Here is what my family says to me, warm as bread, three or four times a season, and has said for as long as I can remember.You don't have to.They mean it kindly. Every single time. I stopped hearing it as anything but a door a long while ago.The lake is low this year and the water is short, and at supper the family passed the bad news around like gravy, and nobody at that table mentioned the garden, or the kitchen's twenty acre-feet, or my mother's beans two leaves up and reaching in a row I have kept alive since she died. They had already spent my share in their heads and were being kind about it out loud, at volume, about something else.The man from table four put his fork down and didn't say the number either.He wrote it down instead.He has spent eleven years on the outside of dining rooms.I have spent my whole life at the pass of my own family.One of us is going to have to sit down.Stay for Dinner is a small-town cowboy romance: a chef who has never once been asked, a man who has eaten eleven years of other people's dinners under a name that isn't his, a lie that gets harder to hold every week, dual POV, a slow burn that pays off, open-door heat that takes its time, and a guaranteed happily ever after. Dry banter, high tension, no third-act misunderstanding. Perfect for readers of Devney Perry, Lyla Sage and Elsie Silver.Every Sorrel Lake Ranch book stands alone. The family's fourteen years run through all six.Come for a week. Stay for a life.