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I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of having a lover. It sounded weird. Or that I should ever be going to Dakota for relationship advice. Then again, she had basically saved Savannah from screwing up her relationship with Maddox.
“So tell me exactly how I’m supposed to do that,” I said, because I felt hazy on these details. “I’ve never had a lover before.” Just saying it out loud made me snort.
“I love this lover thing on you,” Savannah said. “It’s right up your alley, Isla.”
“Can we all agree to stop saying lover?” I requested. “Can we just say hanging out? I like that a lot better.”
“That’s because you want to downplay your feelings for him,” Leah said. “It makes him no different from a random stranger. But he is different. You care about a lover, even if there is no future.”
Damn it. “Fine. Lover. He’s my lover. I have a lover, ladies.” Then I looked around the table and we all burst out laughing.
“This is amazing,” Dakota said. “It’s the best of both worlds. You get some D and Sean will be driven to such distraction he’ll oversalt the salad. He’ll quit because he can’t deal with your hotness and you’ll be head chef.”
“Why do you keep saying he’s going to oversalt the salad? Is that some kind of euphemism?” I asked, because who the hell salted a salad?
“No. I just mean he’ll put too much salt on the salad. Why?” Dakota looked baffled.
Apparently Dakota salted her salads. I was going to have to watch for that in the future.
“More to the point, what am I going to do about Martin stealing my menu?” I had mixed feelings about Sean quitting. I definitely didn’t want him to get fired. I didn’t want to get fired. No one needed to be fired. But I did want to be executive chef myself sooner than later. And I wanted Martin to suck a bag of rocks for being a douche.
“Can you sneak into the kitchen at his restaurant and oversalt his dishes?” Dakota asked. “Or flirt with him?”
I started laughing. “Stop it with the salt. We’re done with the salt. I cannot sneak into Martin’s kitchen and sabotage him. And Martin is married. And I’m having a thing with Sean. So I can’t flirt with Martin.” But there had to be something I could do. Sean had initially done nothing wrong other than be annoying, dent my ego, and take a job he hadn’t known I’d wanted. Martin was a thief, plain and simple, and I wanted a way to blow the whistle on him. No one should be allowed to get away with stealing ideas.
My friends were obviously on my side and were outraged on my behalf. But they didn’t really understand how powerless this made me feel and how much I hated that. The only one who would really understand my anger at having my menu nicked would be Sean.
But did I trust Sean? I wasn’t sure. I wanted to. He hadn’t given me a reason not to.
But that combined with the fact that I was definitely catching feelings for him, it scared me.
I hated being vulnerable.
Eleven
“This is a matchmaking attempt,” Isla said, as we walked down the sidewalk to her friend Savannah’s apartment. “A blatant and obvious matchmaking attempt.”
“I thought you said you already told her we’re seeing each other.” Mondays was our only mutual day off since Bone was closed, so I had readily agreed to go with Isla to Savannah’s to babysit. I wanted to spend as much time with her as possible.
She pursed her lips and gave me an amused look. “I did. They want me to call you my lover. That something in between a hookup and a boyfriend.”
“A lover?” I asked. “Sure. Call me whatever you want as long as you’re still calling me something.” I can’t say I had ever once been referred to as a woman’s lover but I didn’t object to it.
After having spent all of Saturday night after work getting to know each other in bed, we most definitely were not a casual hookup. I wasn’t sure what we were but we were moving in a forward direction and I was just rolling with that for now.
“Oh, I can call you a lot of things.”
I bet she could. “So why is Savannah matchmaking if we’re already seeing each other? You haven’t explained that.” We stopped in front of a building and Isla pulled out her phone.
“She has a thing for romantic comedies and she has decided we had a meet cute and are destined to be together.” Isla looked up from her phone. “She wants to rush things along.”
In the past, that would have annoyed me. I didn’t like being pushed to make a commitment I wasn’t ready for, but in this case, it didn’t bother me. For the first time in a long time, I could see myself being in a relationship. But we were just feeling our way through and having fun. “I’m not proposing to you at the end of the night. So don’t get your hopes up.”
Isla stuck her tongue out at me. “If you proposed to me tonight I would freak out and run away. I’d probably get hit by a car after running into the street in a blind panic, trying to get away from you.”
“Then you would be in the hospital with amnesia and then I could enter the room and tell you that we were already engaged and you would have to believe me because of the amnesia. That’s how it works in movies, right?”
“That is scarily accurate.” The door was buzzed open and Isla grabbed it.
