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I started to put together a dipping sauce, letting the motion of the cooking take me away from the worst of the thoughts and consume me with what I needed to do. At least, until I heard the dining room door again. This time, when I looked over, Mark was standing in the doorway, propping the door open with his body so that he could talk to me without ever technically being in an employees’ only area.
“I’m not interested right now, Mark,” I said softly. “I just… I want some time alone. Let me cook in peace.”
“I thought you’d be making something more celebratory than chicken strips,” he pouted. “After all, this could very well be the start of something new. Something better than what we had before.”
I gripped the spatula hard. If I had almost broken it when Rick had asked about his proposal, hearing Mark talk about our lives together as if I had already said ‘yes’ was probably going to be what caused me to really break the spatula.
“I said to get out of the kitchen,” I said.
My grip on the spatula included white knuckles, and I knew that if he didn’t leave, I’d have to call for Luke or Rick.
“Geez, I’m just wondering why you’re not celebrating,” Mark said as he rolled his eyes. “After all, we’re a match made in heaven. That was your saying when we were together. Not mine.”
With that, he walked away, leaving me a ball of fury as I tried to cook and finish the meal. If Mark was trying to get me fired, he’d have to try a lot harder than that.
Chapter twenty-two
Luke
A couple of days passed tensely in the lodge, and other guests started to show up. I hadn’t wanted to cause any further issues with Laurel, but I could not stop thinking about the kiss we had shared. It didn’t help that for those two days, Mr. Wilson had been incessantly following Laurel around everywhere. If she was in the kitchen, he hovered in the dining room. She never came out to the lobby, and always took the back stairs up to her room to avoid him.
Laurel simply wanted to be left alone. I had managed to step in a few times as her employer and tell Mr. Wilson to leave her alone during working hours, but that only worked for so long each day.
Today, however, Mr. Wilson had proclaimed that he was going to see what else there was to do in this ‘Podunk town in the middle of nowhere’ and had left early. Even before Laurel had gotten up to make breakfast. I was up to salt the sidewalks so that no one fell on the remaining ice, but it only earned me a glare as he walked past me.
What Mr. Wilson didn’t know was that he had just given me the perfect chance to talk to Laurel when she woke up. The problem was that I wasn’t quite sure how to go about doing it because I had things to do around the lodge as well. Also, with the lodge filling up with guests, I didn’t want to distract her from her work. And I guessed Mark would probably be back by noon to make sure he could try and chat with Laurel during the lunch rush.
The thought made me shiver.
I made my way to the back of the property to start bringing in some more firewood. Since Laurel’s and my hike in the woods, I’d kept a blazing fire in the lobby to help keep the late spring chill out. I think part of me also hoped that Laurel would see the fire and remember our kiss in the snow. Mark did not deserve someone like Laurel.
While guests had started to trickle in, the weather had caused more cancelations and the lodge was still mostly empty. If there were more guests around, Laurel would have had more to do to keep the guests happy and less time for Mr. Wilson’s crap.
Each time I saw Mr. Wilson with Laurel, my heart shriveled a little more. He was doing his best to ensnare her again, and I didn’t know how to stop him without significantly overstepping. What was worse was that it was beginning to look like Laurel wanted to be ensnared again, despite the way she had been talking about how much the betrayal had hurt just a few days earlier.
Or maybe it was just my own insecurity making me think that she was beginning to listen to Mark.
I hoisted a large piece of wood off the pile and took it inside. At the same time, someone else was coming out of the lodge. We both fell to the ground, with me doing my best to protect the log from the snow and the ice on the ground. That failed because it hit the ground, and I fell right beside it.
However, it was Laurel who fell on top of me as she lost her balance from the impact.
“Oh my gosh…” I felt my face grow cold. “Are you all right, Laurel?”
Our faces were only a few inches apart at this point, and her bright blue eyes sparkled as she looked down at me.
“I-I’m… yeah, I’m fine.” She cleared her throat. “Um… this just keeps happening to us, doesn’t it?”
“We’ll be all right. There are plenty of logs where that one came from, and a day or two in the lodge should help it dry out.”
I moved my hand before I could stop myself, and it came to rest on her arm. Her cheeks gained a rosy hue, more so than the cold could have provided at this point.
“We should… we should stand up.” Laurel’s words made sense, but neither of us made a move to stand up.
Either she was just as embarrassed about what had happened as I was, or she just didn’t want to get up because this was the first time she had felt something other than annoyance at the way she had been approached. I decided that this was my chance. If there was nothing more to risk, then at least I would have been able to get my feelings off my chest.
And if she broke my heart, then I would deal with the consequences later.
I leaned in and pressed my lips softly to hers once more. I could feel her body relax into mine as she pressed her lips against mine, but an unwelcomed cold wind separated us. I now realized Laurel was not wearing her coat, though she did have on some sort of jacket.
