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“It seems as if I’m upsetting you and I don’t mean to do that. Maybe I should go.” He started to rise.
She put her hand on his arm and the firm muscles beneath his jacket tensed under her hand. “No. Please. It’s not you. It’s just that, well, you look so much like someone I used to know. Someone very special I lost.”
His gaze softened and Janel noticed something else in the depths of the eyes so familiar to her. He’d also experienced grief. “I’m very sorry for your loss. I should go. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”
“No. Please don’t go. I guess what they say is true about everyone having a double somewhere in the world. You both look similar, but now that I see you closer, also different.”
“He must have been important to you.”
She smiled and let herself remember something she tried not to do too often. “He was.”
Snapping out of the past, she straightened her shoulders and got back to the present. “Now, may I recommend the chicken-fried steak and gravy?”
“That sounds contradictory.”
She grinned. “Not really. You must not be from around here.”
“Guilty. I’m just here for work, passing through really.”
Why the thought of him leaving town made her sad wasn’t a thought she would look at too closely. “Well, chicken-fried steak is really a beef steak that’s battered and fried like chicken.”
He nodded in understanding. “Thus, chicken-fried steak. Brilliant. I’ll take that.”
She made the note on the order pad. “Excellent choice. Can I get you anything else?”
“Your number?”
Janel startled in writing his order down and her eyes flashed to his. Did she hear him correctly? Was he flirting? No. Surely not. “What?”
“I said are you from around here? I catch a bit of an accent.”
Her brows pulled together. She could have sworn that wasn’t what he said. “Um, no, I’m not originally from here. I’ll be right back with your food.”
* * *
Demonte
“Idiot,” Demonte mumbled under his breath as he watched Janel scurry behind the counter and snap his order to a wheel hanging above a half window through to the kitchen. He had to slow down. He was going too fast.
He was such a moron asking her for her number. He hadn’t been prepared for actually meeting her. She’d mostly only been a flat unemotional picture or video for all the years he’d known of her. He’d caught glimpses of her from a distance, but never had she set those eyes on him. Even if her vivid blue eyes were concealed behind brown contacts. It was probably wise that she was disguising them. Her presence and her beauty had hit him hard. She had an effect on him he wasn’t prepared for.
He had to keep his focus on why he was here and then get the hell out of there and leave his men behind to protect her. Or, better yet, escort her to the airport so she could get the fuck out of his life. He didn’t need his headspace taken up with confusing emotions. Not now. Now when he almost had everything he’d dreamed of since the night he got the news his brother had been killed.
“Here you go.”
A heaping plate of food was placed in front of him. A mountain of mashed potatoes on the bottom with a brown slab of meat lying across the top and then everything was smothered in a gelatinous brown substance. The only colorful thing on his plate were the green beans.
His first instinct was to push the plate away. “Interesting. And you’re sure this won’t kill me?” he said jokingly, but he wasn’t sure it wasn’t an accurate assumption.
Her clear, pure laughter caused a riot in his belly that had nothing to do with his unappetizing meal. “Well, not right away, it won’t. Twenty years down the road, all bets are off.”
He nodded and picked up his fork, unsure where to start. “Good to know. Won’t you join me? Keep me company while I eat.”
She wanted to decline his invitation, he could tell, but he also picked up a curiosity. Perhaps because he resembled someone she’d known. That reason didn’t sit well with him.
“I really shouldn’t.”
He looked around the empty restaurant. “I am literally your only customer. Isn’t your job to make sure I have a pleasurable dining experience?”
