Page 3 of Dirty Boss

Like how little I thought of him and how much I’d faked it with his lunch mate. How much he and his ilk disgusted me. How much I resented his kindness.

There went my tip.

He leaned back in his chair, the seams of that polyester suit straining at his shoulders as he stretched his arm out across the seat next to him. His dark hair was tousled, but not in a thousand-dollar-haircut kind of way. More like “I buzz my head every four months over the bathroom sink with clippers I bought at Walmart, and I’m due for a chop” kind of way.

He didn’t lookbad. He wore it as well as a guy could. But if he was attempting to rub elbows with the kind of man who had just walked out of this lunch meeting, he had entirely the wrong look.

Not that I cared. I wasn’t part of that world, either. Not anymore.

The man looked at me, and I felt like a bug under a microscope. “You don’t seem surprised,” he noted.

“That he walked out on you and left you sulking?”

“Sulking?”

“What would you call it?” I picked up the empty bottle of wine and put it on my tray beside the other man’s glass, arching a brow at him. Cheap Suit hadn’t partaken in the wine that the old lecher ordered. He hadn’t even pretended to indulge, the fool.

“I’m not sure I like your tone,” he said, and there was a warning in his eyes.

I held the tray in one hand and planted the other on my hip. “I’m sorry to hear that,” I replied, and smiled.

His eyes narrowed. “It’s one thing for an investor to tell me that he’s passing on my company,” he rumbled, “but being patronized by the fucking waitress is not why I came here.”

I reared back, and the empty bottle on my tray wobbled. I grabbed the neck of it and held it in my free hand, glaring at him. “‘The fucking waitress?’” I repeated.

“Pardon me. The fucking server.”

A squeak escaped me, and my temperature went up a few degrees. I ground my teeth. “I see. You were made to feel smalland now you want to turn around and do it to someone else. How utterly predictable. I guess you being my valiant defender was just an act earlier?”

He scoffed and leaned forward, eyes boring into mine. “You couldn’t wait to walk over here and point out that I got rejected.”

“Sounds like you enjoy making up stories in your head, buddy.”

“Sounds like you don’t like being called out on your shit.”

I opened my mouth. Closed it. My breaths came fast and hard, and fantasies of eye-stabbing returned. My grip on the neck of the wine bottle tightened.

The man smiled and leaned back. “The bill, princess. And if you wouldn’t mind, make it quick. I need to get back to work.”

I clomped away from him, rage boiling in my gut. Howdarehe. How dare he!

I mashed the screen on our cash register and ripped the bill from the printer. The leather bill fold snapped closed in my hand. I glared across the dining room, ready to march back over there and?—

“Alba.”

I turned to see the front-of-house manager staring at me with narrowed eyes. Elena was a short woman with ink-black hair and skin a few shades darker than mine. She’d been in the service industry since she was twelve years old, and she terrified me a little. Misbehavior was not tolerated on her watch. Lord knew why she’d given me the job. Nothing I did was up to her standards.

I stood up a little straighter, swallowing past the constriction in my throat. “Yes?”

“Take five,” my manager said, and held her hand out for the billfold. Her head angled toward the back, where she wanted me to go.

“I’m fine,” I ground out.

“It wasn’t a suggestion.”

I bit my lip and handed her the check, then watched her walk toward my table. Then I took a deep breath and went through the swinging door into the kitchen. I ducked through the hectic space, calling, “Behind!” as I passed each of the cooks, and then pushed through the door to the back alley.

Winter wind bit at my neck and face, and I gulped down a deep breath of cold, garbage-scented air. I wanted to cry. Leaning my hands on my knees, I parked my butt against the brick wall of the restaurant and stared at the icy, gravel-encrusted ground between my feet.