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It was the single most intrusive thought that had been nipping at her scrambling heels ever since she’d opened her doors and realized far too late that she’d not only bitten off more than she could chew but was at dire risk of choking gruesomely on her bad decisions. Just what the hell had she been thinking?
She hadn’t been, not with the appropriate cranial lobe anyway, and that was the grand freaking problem. When stormy emotions and the threat of personal defeat had towered over her in a pillar so high that it warned of pummeling her career into the dust, she’d just reacted. Whatever part of her always bristled at her never-ending karmic bullshit had simply decided, like always, to hike up its pants, throw its shoulders back, and storm the castle.
Except her castle was a newly remodeled short-order eatery built on more clouds than support columns.
Molly barely made it over the back office’s threshold before she whipped off her apron and collapsed into the blue velvet wingback accent chair she’d scored for a deal from an estate sale a few weeks ago. The thing was about as impractical as they came in terms of office furniture, but then again, so was she.
Impractical. If there had ever been a better word to describe Molly, let alone her situation, it certainly wasn’t in a language she was familiar with. As she glanced around the space, a whole boatload of impracticality lined up to throw sucker punches at her kidneys. The basic wood paneling had been replaced with standard drywall papered in teal and gold imagery that depicted a blooming forest with clusters of berries on branches and pinecones nestled among spruce needles. An unnecessary expense, her designer had warned her. It was a restaurant’s back office, after all, not a therapist’s sitting room. Never mind the fact that these simple four walls had been her therapy, much like the scented candles and first-edition cookbooks she’d taken great care to shelve right at eye height on the wall directly across from where her laptop sat.
A laptop she hadn’t been able to open as regularly as she should because she’d been torn in as many directions as there were corners in the building. Even now, the darn thing seemed to take up more space in the little office than it warranted, glowing and growing in her mind with all the orders she needed to place, P and L reports she needed to sift through, and don’t even get her started on the tax documents?—
“You need help.”
If Molly wasn’t a thousand percent certain the office didn’t have any windows and, therefore, no access to the deep rumblings of semitrucks, she’d have sworn those resonant low-pitched words would have been conjured from her mind. Plucked plum out of there in the way one can recall favorite movie lines or song lyrics.
Or a certain man’s unmistakably resonant voice.
The hulking figure in her doorway could have been ripped from any comic book drawn in an age when pencils produced more than just pictures on pages but raw, primal power.
A power that, every single damn time, would leave her slack-jawed and running for the nearest safe space so she could give her body a chance to collect itself. And for her mouth not to open up for business and say something that would turn all parties involved into nine shades of beet red.
Molly flattened herself against the chair, wondering whether she could pretend she was part of the furniture if she covertly grabbed her apron and covered herself with it, then stayed still long enough.
Holy butter on a biscuit. Brass was here? In her restaurant? The man of few words and even fewer body fat percentage points? The most gorgeous, yet oddly nicknamed man she’d ever had the privilege to lock gazes with, only to run and hide from like she was a five-year-old and he was a carrier of the dreaded cooties?
A man who had distraction and destruction written all over that perfectly chiseled jawline?
Mortification heated her cheeks, and his penetrating amber eyes missed exactly none of it. No hope for pretending to be the furniture, then.
How? How, of all people, did he get here? And not only here but in her private office? They’d only met a few times when Drea’s boyfriend enlisted Brass and a few other brothers to keep an eye on their apartment after Drea had been run off the road by an unknown assailant at the time. And then there was the little matter of Drea’s moving day, where Molly had tried to stay out of sight while simultaneously making sure Brass’s best attributes stayed very much in sight. The sum total of all the words they’d spoken to each other could have been iced on a birthday cake.
Not that she’d counted them or anything.
The man had been too beautiful, too stoic, too devastatingly mesmerizing that she’d sooner throw herself into a vat of hot oil than risk the verbal diarrhea that would inevitably fire hose out of her mouth if she tried to talk to him.
So how the heck did he wind up here, crowding out the light from her doorway and robbing her of whatever meager air was left in her lungs?
She needn’t look any further for clarification of his presence than the granite shoulders testing the strength of her doorframe’s construction.
The restaurant wasn’t the only thing solidly built, apparently. Brass’s well-toned physique was tucked tightly into a black leather trench coat that skirted past leanly muscled thighs until it just dusted his knees. A high-backed collar swung up and wide, encircling a throat thick with tension, barely kissing the closely cropped auburn hairs around his ears and nape. The only acquiescence to his usual calm demeanor, as far as she could tell, was the thicker and longer hair in the front, which fell haphazardly over a broad forehead. Those amber eyes, again, pinned her to the chair, momentarily dazzling her out of whatever had landed her there in the first place.
Were men allowed to be beguiling? Because he really was beguiling . . . Until he opened his mouth.
“You need help,” he said insistently.
Crap. He’d said something already, hadn’t he?
Before she could rewind the last few minutes of her meltdown, he smacked a large and painfully familiar Help Wanted sign on top of her desk.
Ah, yes. Her call to the universe. Too bad said universe had a twisted sense of humor if it thought Brass should be the one to help with her employee search.
Molly smoothed down the corner of her sign, which had sustained a wrinkle or two during its rough transit from against the window to under her nose. “That’s what I hear.” She sighed, not at all pumped to be having this conversation again, let alone with this particular person. Of all people, he didn’t need to know her problems.
“Where is the rest of your staff?” he asked, momentarily stepping back into the hall to scan for more employees. When his eagle-sharp eyes landed on Benny, who had just tossed a spatula in the air and completed an annoyingly perfect full spin before gracefully catching the thing, Brass’s face fell into a mask of calm, if cautious, reserve. Then he took in the customer-laden yet waitstaff-deprived dining room.
Nope. There will be none of that, thank you very much.
She launched herself out of her chair and lunged for her apron before that discerning gaze had a chance to unnerve her again. “Did Drea send you here? Or Chrome? I adore your brother, but he has no-goodnik written all over him when it comes to minding his own business. I thought the overbearing protective act would go by the wayside once Drea moved in with you guys.”
