Page 50 of Windward Hearts

As Eleanor reached to click out of the call with her car’s hands-free system, she noted the time. She would have to hurry if she wanted to get home in time to finish making dinner for her brother, Winnie, and Garrett. Still, she would never think that time spent helping a friend was wasted.

Even so, she picked up her pace as she went into Riverstone Kitchen.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

There were jobs where getting distracted was just fine. If you got distracted while filing documents for a desk job, for example, you could just check to make sure you’d put something in the wrong place. Or if you worked in a grocery store, like Jared had in high school. He’d gotten distracted there all the time, mostly because he was thinking about how he would use the different things he was shelving in recipes. It had only slowed him down, which was, again, no big deal.

There were, however, jobs where you absolutely could not let yourself get distracted. Like… if you were a surgeon. Or one of the people who worked on those super dangerous deep-sea fishing boats. And Jared didn’t want to say that his job was anything on par with those, when it came to the risk of having his head elsewhere, but he was liable to lose a darn finger if he kept letting himself think about Hope when he was supposed to be chopping a literal mountain of onions.

But she had just looked so pretty, there on her porch. The warm porch light had competed with the cool moonlight to reveal different highlights in her chestnut hair. She had smiled so broadly when he’d complimented her quilting. He could scarcely stop thinking about the way her eyes had shone with pride and excitement when he suggested that people would want to buy them.

He had been driving himself nuts thinking about how their hands had brushed. It had felt… really nice. Like the thing between them was special. He wondered if she had felt it too.

Except he was totally getting ahead of himself. There wasn’t something between them, at least not beyond the employer-employee relationship that he was ever so slightly kicking himself for suggesting, if only because it made a potential personal relationship more complicated.

But, no. He couldn’t regret it, not even the smallest bit. Because Hope was a natural. The customers loved her. The rest of the wait staff loved her. And why wouldn’t they? She was wonderful.

A small sound from the pick-up window grabbed his attention, making him realize both that he had been completely ignoring his customers and that he had been working on the same onion for the past five minutes. Goodness, his teachers at culinary school would have made him do nothing but knife skills for weeks if they saw how slowly he was moving.

But that had to wait, because Eleanor Ridley was waving at him.

“Eleanor, hi,” he said, wiping his hands on the towel slung over his shoulder. He glanced up at his ticket queue. There weren’t any open orders. “Did you call something in?”

“Oh, I talked to Hope, and she said I could come grab a whole tiramisu?”

Jared felt his face flush. There was something about hearing Hope’s name right after he had been thinking about how cute she looked when she shimmied her shoulders, something she did when she was happy and teasing, that made him feel like he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t.

“Yes, of course,” he said. “I have it in the walk-in. Let me just…” He looked around his kitchen, feeling uncharacteristically flustered. The kitchen felt like a strange location, even though it was probably the one place where he spent the most waking hours. “Let me just wash my hands.”

Eleanor was looking extremely amused. He tried very hard to ignore it. He was not having a whole lot of success. The chill of the walk-in refrigerator felt very good on his flaming cheeks.

He still felt a little bit frazzled when he came out of the walk-in, but he told himself that he was covering it well. That illusion was shattered when Eleanor said, “Uh, Jared?”

He blinked. “Yeah?”

The entertained smile was even bigger now. She pointed at what he was doing. “You are about to put what looks like pasta sauce on my tiramisu.”

He only stopped himself in the nick of time, because, yeah, that was exactly what he had been about to do.

“Shoot, sorry,” he said, hastily returning the ladle to the pot of sauce. “I guess I’m a little…” He waved his hand around his head to demonstrate his current mental state.

“Hey, it happens to the best of us,” she said, waving off his apology. “Any chance there’s a specific reason for your…” She copied his waving hand motion, but it didn’t feel like mockery. There was something in her eye that made him think that she absolutely knew what, or rather, who, had taken up permanent residence in his thoughts.

“Nope,” he said. He’d never been a good liar.

“Really?” she asked, eyebrows high on her forehead.

“For sure,” he said. “Totally. Just regular stuff. You know. Totally normal. For sure.”

“Convincing!” she said brightly.

He was trying to convince himself that saying something more would make him sound even less believable, no matter how much he was tempted to keep talking. And talking.

Why did he suddenly feel like he was thirteen and trying to convince his parents that he’d totally already done his homework and should be allowed to play more video games before dinner?

The whole situation became even more challenging when Hope walked into the kitchen, already mid-sentence.

“Jared, hey, so I just wrapped up my last table for tonight, and I’ve got all my stuff put away, and—oh! Hi, Eleanor! Coming by to pick up that dessert?”