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There’s no way around it now. I know I’m not going to get out of this unscratched, no matter how much I protect myself. I’m weak against those Levidis charms.
And to prove the point, as soon as I passed Vassar in the kitchen, trying to disappear into my office, he swiftly slid out of his workstation and silently followed me.
“Kira,” I hear him growl as the door to my office shuts behind us.
“How can I help you?” I try to keep my voice indifferent. As if I didn’t just spend the whole morning with his daughter, pretending to be someone important in her life like the imposter I am.
“How can you help me?” His eyebrows hike up, arms crossed over his chest. Okay, he won’t leave me alone until we talk. “I don’t know! How about you tell me what the hell that was this morning? Why did you go with my daughter to her school?”
“Like I told you before we left, this was nothing special. Vee needed some female to go with her, and so I did.” I shrug nonchalantly and keep pretending this wasn’t the most terrifying yet the best day of my life. Keep fighting the demons in my head that are at war with everything I know I will never have and everything I desperately want.
“And you just volunteered out of the kindness of your nonexistent heart?”
“Shesh, don’t hold back, would you?”
“Kira, this is my daughter we are talking about.” The way he’s looking at me tells me he wants me as far away from his daughter as I can possibly be, and I can’t say I disagree even if it hurts so much, I didn’t know I could hurt like that ever again.
And I’ve spent all of what…six hours with the little girl?
“If you didn’t want me to go with her, why didn’t you say so in the first place?”
He is silent, just breathing heavily, his chest rising and falling vividly.
“Why did you go?”
“I already told you it was no—”
“If your mouth utters the words ‘nothing special’ one more time when you are talking about Victoria, I swear I will lose it, Kira. So, again, why. Did. You. Go?” Vas shoots his daggers into my eyes, and I send them right back.
He’s asking questions I don’t have answers for myself, but he’s right. I should never say ‘nothing special’ when it comes to Vee.
“Kira,” he nags me to answer.
“Because! Okay? Just because!” I yell out, my hands flying up as I lose it.
“That’s not an answer.” He steps in closer to me, and my lungs instantly fill with him.
“Well, that’s the only one you are going to get.”
It looks like Vas is about to get into it with me or fuck the answer out of me, but a knock on my door snaps us out of it.
“Um, Chef?” I hear the nervous tone of my hostess.
“We are not done with this conversation,” Vassar says as he opens the door.
“Che—oh, Vas, I didn’t know you were here.” Bianca’s face morphs from a nervous to a lust-filled one as she eyes my man up and down with her baby blue eyes, snapping her back straight and thrusting that ridiculous cleavage up his nose.
Vas…she called him Vas!
“What is it?” I snap before he could answer her and push him out of her line of sight.
“Oh, Chef,” she says to me, but her smile is directed at the man behind me, and I feel my blood heating up by a second. “Um, Mr. Halter and Mr. Bloom are here for you.”
My head tilts as I let her words wash over my rage-filled brain, and then it snaps in place. “I don’t know who the hell Mr. Halteris, but what is Mr. Bloom doing here?” Esteban Bloom is the world’s most-awarded restaurant critic and appraiser. He has been to each one of mine a few times, but I wasn’t made aware of him coming here today again.
“Hm?” Bianca looks lost, and I feel my back molars grinding into dust and I fight the urge to fire her right on the spot. She isn’t paying me any attention because it is all on my Sous-chef.
“I asked you a question.” You can hear the deadly tone in my voice.
