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“He didn’t send me. No one did. I was walking down the street and saw the sign.” His full lips thinned below flared nostrils, and he slashed his gaze back toward the dining room while addressing her. “Saw how one of your . . . customers . . . treated you while you were trying to clean up.” That steely jaw of his ticked sharply to the right at the word customers, as if he needed to grind down the letters in order to spit the word out. Then he rested an anything-but-casual shoulder against the doorframe. “Didn’t know you worked here. Used to be called something else.”
“Serendipity. Yes. I bought the place out before the property could be sold at auction. It’s been a hell of a few months, let me tell you.” Years, really, but who was counting? Molly cinched her apron tighter around her waist to prevent the knot in her stomach from rising.
“You still need help.” He nodded toward the sign. “Tell me what to do.”
Tell. Me. What. To. Do?
All gears in an eight-block radius ground to a halt in her mind. She could have sworn the din from the dining room lessened, and Benny had turned down his music. Had Brass just asked?—
“I’m sorry. Do . . . what?”
“Work.” He twisted the sign toward him and leaned in closer to read the words at the bottom. The words she had hastily scrawled on there that encompassed pretty much everything that needed to be done in a restaurant in the impossible embodiment of a single individual.
Christ, she’d become a one-woman corporate greed machine. Yay, capitalism?
“Says here you need a dishwasher and busser, with duties not limited to the back and front of house.”
“Yes, but it’s not really a job ad.”
He raised a brow in question. “Oh?” Then he tilted his lips. “Looks like an ad to me.”
“It’s an ad,” she scrambled to clarify. “Of course, it’s an ad. Obviously. It’s just not really?—”
“Filled. Now it is.” He pushed off from the doorframe and swiped one of her newly printed menus off her desk. “Besides, dishes are dishes. I’ve washed plenty, so what’s a few more? And I doubt you bought this place so you could nearly get knocked over by some nose-in-the-air mongrel who drives a BMW coupe with a soon-to-be missing spark plug.”
Damn. He’d seen that?
Embarrassment flooded her frame. “No, I didn’t— Wait, what about his spark plug?”
He waved her question away. “Never mind. The point is, you need the help. I’ve got the time and skills. Besides, Drea would never let me live it down if I abandoned her best friend to such a cruel and unusual punishment.” This he said with a note of levity, though Molly failed to see the humor in the situation, unless, of course, this was all some planned prank.
A prank! Yes!
Any minute now, Drea would come waltzing in, iced coffees for the two of them in hand, and a giant gotcha! painted on her face. Molly waited for a heartbeat, then two. After the tenth pounding against her pulse points and her best friend still hadn’t appeared, her skin tightened. Breath sawed in and out of her ever-constricting lungs. Was this really happening? “It’s not cruel,” she added, grateful to have finally found her voice again.
His lips teased one corner of his mouth higher, and everything changed. The tiny office’s air thinned to an impossible degree, surely. It was the only explanation for her heart fluttering wildly behind her ribs and definitely not the lessening space between them as Brass took a step forward and grabbed her hand. A rough thumb swiped gently over her knuckles before moving down each finger and caressing the multitude of knife scars on each pad.
“What’s cruel is hiding these skilled hands away in soapy water all day.” Then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. A breath they both held.
Brass was touching her. Touching her! And she didn’t know whether to lean into it and beg for more or tug her hand free and scramble up the wall like some frightened monkey.
Both sounded like solid choices.
When his eyelids finally swung open, a familiar calm returned to his features, even as he analyzed hers. Whatever tension he’d rode in on had clearly been expelled through several deep-chested breaths. A lightness that hadn’t been there before lit his expression and called to mind the intrepid and quiet demeanor he’d always maintained the other few times they’d been around each other.
With the precision of one of the King’s Guard, Brass swiped the menu into an inside pocket of his coat and dipped his head. “See you tomorrow morning at five.”
Molly hadn’t even had time to correct him that the restaurant opened at six, not five, that only she ever showed up that early, before the swish of his coat against the doorframe finalized his exit.
Chapter 5
Waiting until her phone’s display rolled over to four thirty was the kindest form of cruelty Molly could think to inflict on her dearest of dear friends before she called her.
If Molly was truly feeling vindictive, she’d have called Drea at four am when she’d first gotten into work. See? Pure kindness.
“Mmm, hello?” The muffled groan tumbling through the receiver was a barely intelligible stretch of syllables that would have been right at home among a herd of pissed-off pachyderms.
Good. It was best Molly’s prey didn’t see her coming.
