AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Unfortunately, I couldn’t spend all my time in bed with Jamie and Rowan. I had to earn a living to keep the roof over the bed.
“Call out the weights and I’ll write them down,” Thacker said from across the room. I shot him a withering glare.
“Yeah, I’ve done inventory before.” I could hear it. I sounded like a petulant child. But I couldn’t help the way he riled me, like he was rubbing every nerve the wrong way. No one but Thacker had ever irritated me with the sound of their breathing. Was that what it was to hate someone? Wishing they’d stop breathing so you wouldn’t have to listen to it anymore? I wasn’t saying I wanted Thacker dead or anything. He just managed to push nearly all of my buttons every time he spoke to me. I knew he wasn’t doing it on purpose. He just had barbs in all the right spots.
I heard footsteps coming closer, and then Thacker squatted down beside me. I was on my knees on the well-scrubbed tile floor, pulling the bucket of flour out to weigh it.
“Here, let me get that,” he said, reaching for it. At that moment, it slid free from its shelf and I stood up, glowering at him as I placed it on the scale. He stood up more slowly, raising his hands in front of his chest, palms out, like he was trying to ward me off. I was a female in a field that was dominated by men. I didn’t get there by asking people to pick stuff up for me. “Look, Hope, I’m sorry for being short with you earlier.”
I frowned at the scale’s display without reading it. His sudden shift in tone had hooked me. He sounded like a real human being for once.
“Things have been a little bit…difficult lately.”
Letting my wall down a couple of centimeters, I peeked over at him. His chiseled jaw was set, his eyes focused on something far away. How bad could it be? We did a good business. Not big-city numbers, sure, but we were one of the top restaurants in Casper. Hell, in the state of Wyoming.
“I didn’t realize,” I said. He glanced over at me and gave me a brief smile that didn’t reach his eyes. I turned to face him, propping my hip on the prep table and crossing my arms over my chest. “I’ll do whatever I can to help, Thacker. But you’ve got to find some other outlet for your frustration. You can’t keep venting it at me and the rest of your staff.”
A shadow crossed over his face. He covered it with his hand, rubbing his temples and then sweeping his palm all the way down to his chin. He sighed and turned to mirror my stance.
“Do I really do that?” he asked. I stared at him, trying to suss out if he was pranking me. Fighting to keep my face neutral, I nodded.
“Yeah, you do that,” I said. I was treading carefully. I didn’t know how to handle this Thacker—vulnerable, soft-spoken, worried. I wanted to run a hand through his dark, rumpled hair, brush my thumb over his temple where the gray was starting. Tell him everything would be okay.
I realized that I was leaning toward him, and he was staring at my mouth. I froze, adrenaline dumping into my bloodstream, bright pops of swooping fear and anticipation in my thighs, in my stomach. In my heart.
Just like that, he blinked and straightened up, clearing his throat.
“What does that scale say?” he asked gruffly. At first, the words were gibberish, but after a few seconds, they fought their way through to my lust-addled brain.
Maybe I was becoming a sex addict.
“Thirteen and a half,” I read out. I was as willing as he was to shift the subject back to familiar ground. But standing this close to him, I could feel the energy between us like static electricity. Crackling and hot.
27.
Thacker
I wrote down the values as she called them out, fighting to keep my mind on the task at hand.
We were colleagues. No, scratch that. She was myemployee. She was taken. And she was the only chef worth a damn in a two-hundred-mile radius, at least. My feelings didn’t matter. I spent my entire life wanting what I couldn’t have. Starting with my mother’s love.
Stereotype of an alcoholic, that’s me. She was too deep in her drug-addled sleep to even notice that I existed. But her parents were rich, and they put us up in a nice apartment, paid for me to play baseball. I was all-in on the sport when I realized I was good at it, and that it earned me the kind of praise and adoration I didn’t even realize I was desperate for. These were the things I paid therapists and rehab centers thousands of dollars to teach me. Whatever the motivation, my drive to not just play but excel at baseball was what made the rest of my life possible. Otherwise, I would have been a homeless wino somewhere. Of that, I was sure.
“Six pounds,” Hope said, bringing my attention back to the present. She replaced the salt on the lower shelf, and I wrote down the number. “That’s everything out here.” I nodded, but kept my eyes on my clipboard, afraid to look at her. Afraid of what stupid, self-destructive thing I might do if I let myself pay too much attention to the hollow of her throat, already glistening with a thin sheen of sweat. Her old patched jeans that clung to her hips. That perfect mouth.
But when she cleared her throat, I had no choice. I raised my eyes to meet her steely gray ones.
“Want a cup of coffee before we move on to the walk-in?” she asked. I could tell she was forcing her voice to be light and pleasant, not to betray her annoyance with me which, as far as I could tell, was omnipresent. I understood the feeling. Some days, just the sight of her was enough to piss me off. I wanted her so bad, it made my obsession with whiskey look like puppy love. And the more unavailable she was, the more she hated me, the more I wanted her. I was a glutton for punishment, after all.
“That sounds good,” I said, tossing the clipboard down on the prep table and walking over to the ancient, giant espresso machine I’d picked up at a flea market third-hand. She came over to stand beside me and reached up to take the can of coffee out of the upper cabinet. I watched her in my periphery. Her threadbare T-shirt clung to her body, showing the dip of her waist and those big, heavy tits that I dreamed about.
I closed my eyes, swallowing a grunt. I was getting a semi, and there was no fucking way that could happen right now. Normally the suggestion is to think of baseball to calm yourself down, but that just got my blood pumping harder. So I had to go straight to grandma. Thankfully, the nuclear option always worked. I might as well have doused myself with ice water.
I put the coffee into the machine without further incident and set out our tiny cups. She had crossed the kitchen to open the walk-in and peer inside.
“When’s the last time we took a full inventory of this thing?” she asked. “I can’t even remember.”
“It’s been a while,” I said. “Too long. Probably before I hired you.” She looked at me over her shoulder, and suddenly I felt defensive, like she thought I’d orchestrated all of this just to get close to her. The truth was, either I was really bad at math or something wasn’t adding up in the books. The only way to find the problem was to put my hands on every last item in the kitchen, to see where I was leaking away profit. “It’s overdue.”
