“I need your help,” Ginny said. “Please, Shepherd. I need you.”
Shepherd sucked in a breath and looked at his beautiful employee, who only moments ago had been calling him a coward. “What do you need me for?”
“She’s here to take me home. I can’t go back home! Please. I need your help.”
“So you’ve said, but you haven’t explained how.” She also hadn’t let go of his wrist. Not that he was focused on the feel of her cool fingers on his warm skin, sticky from the humid air. “You are a grown-up. You can tell your mom to shove off. Granted, your mother is terrifying. But you still have the right to do whatever you want.”
Ginny simultaneously rolled her eyes and blew her bright red bangs off her face. “You don’t understand.Theysent her.”
“They? Who the hell isthey?”
“My family!” She yanked his wrist, pulling him off balance.
Shepherd wrenched his arm away and set his hand on her shoulder. “Easy, easy. Come on now, what’s wrong with your family?”
“Are you kidding?” She shoved both hands in her hair and pulled. “You didn’t google me when you hired me?”
He shrugged. “Like I said, you’re cute. That’s all the references I need.”
“Gross,” she said. “And thanks. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is that my family is crazy. And I don’t mean in a funny way. Like, oh, we drive each other crazy but we do a hilarious white elephant gift exchange every year and laugh over pumpkin pie. I mean, legitimately, my family is insane. Working for them led to my viral breakdown, which put me in a bougie rehab facility for a month before moving away to work here.”
Shepherd furrowed his brow. “Viral breakdown? What’s that—like, herpes?”
“No, not like—ugh.” The hands that had been pulling at her hair were now wiping down her face. “Someone filmed it and put it on the internet, and it went viral.”
“Filmed what?”
“My breakdown! God, Shepherd!” She tapped her fingers against her plump lips. “Could you please focus right now? I worked for my family as a lawyer. OK? My family are all lawyers. Defense attorneys. And I ended up having a nervous breakdown in a conference room, and one of the aides or secretaries or somebody filmed it and put it up on YouTube as ‘Ginger Chick Goes Crazy.’ I can’t go through that again, Shepherd! I can’t!”
The customer that Shepherd had blown off was laughing at his phone screen, a quiet almost tinny sound playing from the device in his hand. “Oh, man,” he said, flashing the phone at his girlfriend, “she’s not kidding. This is hilarious.”
Ginny glared at the customer and pulled Shepherd slightly further away from the table.
“Just one more minute,” Shepherd said.
“Hey, no worries,” the customer replied. “This is brilliant.”
Her fingers were much warmer now against the inside of his wrist. Shepherd twisted around in her hold until they were palm to palm. “What do you want me to do, Ginny? Your mother is terrifying. She said that my restaurant name wasn’t a pun. But it is! Itisa pun, Ginny!”
“I know it is, I know.” The pads of her fingers tickled his hand. “It’s one hundred percent a pun. Why did she say it wasn’t?”
“Apparently, a pun is where you take a word that sounds like something else and change it, and what I did was change the definition of words.”
“Shepherd’s Pies is a play on words. You think, oh, it’s that mashed potato dish English people eat, but surprise! It’s pizza! That’s a pun, Shepherd.”
“I know! Tell her that!”
“We have gotten wildly off track. I don’t want to leave here. I don’t want to move back home. I don’t want to work for my family. Definitely not now. Maybe not ever again.”
He moved his hand away from hers, flexed it at his side. “So why don’t you explain to me how I can help?”
“You need to be my boyfriend.”
TWO
The hand that Ginny touched was on fire. Shepherd shook it out, stuck it in his pocket, took it back out. Had he grown an extra hand? He had so many hands, it couldn’t be right.
A confused but hopeful chicken pecked at his aglet. If that was the universe’s way of shoving a metaphor at him, he wasn’t going to acknowledge it.
