Tristan continued to be ashamed that he’d ever thought he loved her.
She stopped in her tracks as soon as she saw him, smiling brilliantly.
“Tris! Did you get me a job here?”
“Oh, I definitely want to talk to you about one.” Cutting her off, Owen gestured toward the chair in front of his desk, ice in his blue eyes as he took a seat across from her, pressing a button on his desk phone.
“Great!” She sat, adjusting her tight, purple dress, oblivious to the hatred from the people around her. Trembling with molten anger, Tristan had to bite his lip because he couldn’t speak, not yet.
“It turns out that we’ve been looking for a certain someone who can help us,” Owen stated, steepling his fingers.
“I could be that someone.” Crossing her legs, she flicked her long, dark hair over one shoulder, but all that feminine charm was lost on Owen.
“I think you already are,” Owen declared, and Eve looked like the cat that caught the cream, but her expression quickly flickered to shock when the door opened and Derrick walked in, Angelo right behind him.
They’d hooked Derrick with the same bait, and he most likely thought that he was about to rise another rank in the kitchen, but he was already fired.
Derrick stopped three steps in, panic across his face and sweat on his brow as he realized that Eve, Owen, Tristan, and Marci were all staring at him.
Turning, he looked at Angelo, who shooed him toward the desk.
“Why don’t you take a seat next to Eve? You two know each other. And I’ve got something to show you.”
“Fuck…” Derrick muttered under his breath, and Tristan would be lying if he said that he didn’t feel a bit of schadenfreude. Stiffly, Derrick walked over and plopped down next to Eve, giving her a hard stare.
She’d recovered, looking back coolly until Owen handed them the prints of Tristan’s photos; more than one showed her handing Derrick money. While she didn’t say a word, her eyebrows went up a bit. Tristan had known her long enough to read that as fear, but she could be ferocious when backed into a corner.
“I can fuck her if I want.” Derrick tossed the pictures back on Owen’s desk. “What? I’m not allowed to have a life outside work?”
“You can have a life,” Owen’s voice turned harsh, his eyes flashing. “But you can’t sabotage our sous-chef and The Pointe.”
“I did some hunting,” Angelo added, not letting Derrick reply. “The guy you borrowed the key from? He sold you out, and we have video evidence of you leaving the walk-in.” The latter was a bluff but the former held true, and that seemed to be enough to convince Derrick, because he sat on that information for less than three seconds before rounding on Eve.
“I told you that was a shit idea!” he yelled, and her eyes went wide, but she couldn’t reply because Angelo slammed his hands on the desk, making them jump.
“You fucked with my kitchen, Derrick.My. Kitchen. Over what? A jealous girlfriend?”
Derrick cracked like a fresh egg at the bottom of a grocery bag.
“Naw, her pussy ain’t magic. She paid me to.” He jerked a thumb at her and she swatted it away, her face twisting.
“And you fucked up the job, you idiot!” she screeched at him, forgetting where she was.
“You break into this place then!” He stuck two fingers in her face. “I had to hide in the bushes for two hours until they left. A raccoon almost bit me!”
“A raccoon almost bit me!” She mimicked him in an even higher voice. “I gave you a lot of money-”
“Enough!”Tristan bellowed, unable to take it any longer.
When he’d originally left the relationship, he’d been the victim of Eve’s anger, letting her smash every plate in the kitchen and rip down the curtains mid-tantrum, absorbing whatever she’d thrown at him. But now he was about to return all of that to sender with the help of his new fortitude, which had been laced with steel.
Because he had been angry too. She’d stolen a decade from him, ten years of feelings and emotions that she’d never intended to return, and when he’d moved on, she came back into his life and caused chaos, tearing everything apart.
Tristan could barely stand the sight of her, and he became a volcano of rage, ready to spew lava-hot words since it was finally his turn to speak.
“You came here threatening to cause trouble for Rain and me, and I paid you to stay away. But you didn’t stay away, you took that money -mymoney - and gave it to Derrick,” Tristan spat, staring at the line cook so hard that he looked down at his feet. “To sabotage Jax.”
Eve rolled her eyes.
