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I paused, wondering if I ought to press him further when he was obviously in an agitated frame of mind. “Have you given any more thought to what we talked about?”
“Remind me what that was,” he said. He stretched his arms, hooking his fingertips to the top of the doorframe and causing his shirt to stretch over his chest muscles in a way I couldn’t stop staring at.
“The happy hour menu,” I said. “Downtown is loaded with young professionals looking for the next trendy spot to land after a long work week. That spot could be Esposito’s.”
Dominic dropped his arms and was shaking his head before I finished talking. “That’s not really the kind of vibe we’re going for. This is a family restaurant, not a sports bar.”
I frowned. “I don’t understand why you’d close the door on an opportunity. Did you look at the area demographic charts I sent you?”
Dominic squeezed the back of his neck and made a face. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. I really hoped he would dash home to shower and clean up before the publicity shots happened. Right now his appearance was closer to a prison inmate’s than a successful restaurateur’s. The fact that he managed to pull it off, looking like a sex god, was beside the point.
“Not yet,” he admitted. Then he stopped glowering and gave me a frank stare. “Melanie, I know I’ve been running around here like a lunatic, and I haven’t taken a moment to thank you for the great job you’ve done. I do notice, though. I do appreciate it. Believe me, every day when I walk in to work, I’m extremely glad you’re here.”
I dropped my pen. My jaw might have fallen. In fact I was so stunned I couldn’t summon any words to respond with. It didn’t matter, though. Dominic was already gone.
Payroll still needed to be processed, or else there’d be twenty-seven livid Esposito’s employees with no money in the bank on Friday. Yet I was finding it tough to concentrate. After working closely with him, I’d come to realize that praise didn’t come easily or naturally to Dominic Esposito. Generally if he wasn’t scowling or shouting, it meant you weren’t screwing up too badly. Words of encouragement had so far seemed to be as rare as a supermoon.
“I’m extremely glad you’re here.”
That last line was probably just an offhand comment, yet it kept running through my mind, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I also couldn’t do anything about the way my heart started hammering like a heavy-metal drumbeat every time Dominic Esposito looked in my direction. That side effect was purely involuntary.
I felt myself blushing as I remembered the day Dominic had abruptly run his fingers through my hair and caressed my neck. Right then I wanted him so much I thought I would pass out. But then Gio walked in, and we practically recoiled from one another. We hadn’t touched since, not even accidentally. Whatever this thing was between us, we didn’t dare acknowledge it out loud. Even though the practical side of me understood that screwing around with my hot boss was not an excellent decision, I fantasized at least ten times a day about what kind of lover Dominic would be. It was becoming a tough habit to break.
Shaking myself out of my reverie, I returned to work. Once all the administrative priorities were out of the way, there was nothing keeping me inside the office. When I stepped back into the restaurant, it was like stepping into the calm before the storm. The tables were all impeccably set, and the servers were milling around, nervously polishing and straightening. I greeted several of them warmly and then made my way to the kitchen.
“How’s it going?” I asked. Gio was back there with Tim, Adam, and Gilberto, a good-natured fellow who’d worked for years in the kitchen of a famous gourmet taco shop before it closed six months ago.
“Hey, Melanie,” Gio said cheerfully as he peered into a dough bin. Unlike his brother, he seemed calm and collected. Dominic was nowhere in sight.
Tim was hovering by the ovens. “Gio, you still want to do one more test run before we get crowded?”
Gio mulled that over. “Yeah, let’s do that. Who wants some pizza?” he shouted into the dining room.
“But Dominic said to avoid messing up the kitchen,” Adam said as worry wrinkles deepened between his brows.
Gio only laughed. “It’s a pizzeria, folks. The kitchen is supposed to be messy. Besides, I’m hungry. Aren’t you?”
I watched as they all jumped into action. Gio checked out the fire burning at the rear of one of the mammoth brick ovens. There was something comforting and rather old-fashioned about the sight of the fire within the wide brick structure. Tim and Gilberto began rolling out the round, equal blobs of dough that would be shaped into individual pizzas. Adam uncovered the bins of sauce, cheese, and toppings while Gio waited, whistling softly with pizza peel in hand.
“Did Dominic leave?” I asked him.
“Yup,” he nodded. “He was here until three a.m. and is working on two hours of sleep. I sent him home to go make himself presentable. Nobody wants to order pizza from a belligerent woolly mammoth.”
“Can’t disagree with you there,” I said, smiling at his description. “I’ll bet he argued with you, though.”
Gio grinned. “Course he did. But I know how to win every now and then.”
When the pizzas were ready, Gio called the staff into the kitchen for a snack and a short meeting. He made everyone laugh with some stories of near disasters during the opening of Espo 1 four years ago, including an incident where Gio himself dropped a vat of marinara sauce on the floor an hour before opening.
“Swear to god, you guys, it looked like a crime scene,” he recalled, “or maybe the set of a horror movie. But you know what? We all pulled together, got everything cleaned up, and by the time the doors opened, no one was the wiser. So the moral of the story is, whatever happens tonight, don’t panic. Come see me. Come see Dominic. Or, if we’re not available, go to Melanie. We’ll handle it together.”
The staff enjoyed their pizza and relaxed for a few minutes. Gio was good at things like this, putting nervous minds at ease. Dominic would have probably said something terse and semithreatening like, “Don’t fuck up, or there’ll be hell to pay.”
A few last-minute glitches cropped up. There was a problem with the sink in the ladies’ room, so I had to call a plumber to make an emergency call. Gio made the decision to seal off the back patio since that space wasn’t entirely ready for prime time. Tim managed to smack his head on a kitchen shelf, and at my insistence, sat at a corner table with an ice pack pressed to his forehead, which was already purpling.
In time a clean-shaven and calmer-looking Dominic returned. On his arm was a tiny, elderly woman whose faded, blue eyes danced as they took in every detail of the restaurant. I’d never met her, but I was sure she was Donna Esposito, the legendary family matriarch I’d heard so much about.
“Donna,” Gio shouted, and ran over with open arms.
