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It’s what Dad would have told me to do.
“What’s your favorite color?”
I stopped mid-slice to look up. “What?”
“Your favorite color,” he repeated. “What is it?”
“Why?”
I could feel my neck getting warmer already. I couldn’t explain it, but it was just so strange to have him ask me something so… personal.
“Let me guess,” he said, leaning back on the stool a bit. His eyes trailed up and down my body, and I felt at once both incredibly sexy and intensely desired. His gaze had more than promises of pleasure, it had a guarantee. For both of us. I was having a hard time catching my breath.
“Alright,” I said. “Go for it.”
Those eyes trailed back up and stared deep into mine. It was as if time stopped for a moment, though I was aware of movement around me. I could hear my heartbeat, thumping harder and faster in my chest, throbbing up through my ears and making me feel like I might pass out.
“Purple,” he said at last.
“Hah,” I said.
“Am I wrong?”
I paused, then shook my head. “No, you got it,” I said. “But how?”
He grinned, and I wilted in the expression. If he was anyone else, I would have given him my phone number by now.
“I was cheating,” he said. “You wear a purple bracelet sometimes. And you have that dress with the purple lines and purple heels. Also, you’re wearing purple under your shirt. It was hard to tell in this light, but that’s a purple tank top, isn’t it?”
“It is,” I said, biting my cheek to keep my composure.
“See, I know you a little bit,” he said. “Do you expect a bunch of margaritas?”
He was motioning toward the cutting board, which I had been staring at so I didn’t have to look at him, and where I had been relentlessly cutting limes. I was up to sixteen slices now.
“I… You never know,” I said lamely. “Plus, I can just put them in the fridge and they are ready to go tomorrow.”
“Ahh, yeah, I guess that’s smart,” he said.
Our eyes lingered on one another, and something clicked in my mind.
This was real.
What was happening right now was real. He was actively flirting with me, and I was flirting back with him. And all that tension, the emotion and excitement of the night he kissed me, it was flowing back. It was juicing up the atmosphere in a way that was palpable. I could almost taste it.
I could almost taste him.
Over the next hour, I served him another drink and he drank it slowly, mostly talking with me about small stuff, little things that ultimately didn’t matter and I couldn’t remember five minutes later. What we said didn’t matter. What mattered was the way we were saying them.
There was no pretense, no fakery or dancing around who we were to each other. It was almost like we had just been old acquaintances rather than me working for him. The awkwardness of the boss and employee relationship melted as our conversation heated up. I could tell his eyes were flickering down to the low dip of my tank top under my shirt and I not only didn’t mind, I found myself subconsciously lowering it. When I dipped into the bathroom, I made sure the bra was as tight as I could get it and the girls were pushed together, and the tank was low and tucked tightly into my pants.
I was going for it.
And he greeted me with a smile when I came back.
Something about his attitude, the way he’d acted since he came in, it was so much softer. More vulnerable. It was an entirely different side to him than I’d seen before, and when last call came, he paid for his drinks, and stood. Most of the bar had emptied out and Mom was already in the newly built closet-sized backroom counting down the tills. My sister was holding open the door and chatting with a customer when I went around the bar, just out of her eyesight.
“So, this is the pub,” I said. “Now you know a different side of me. It’s kind of all of the rest of me, really. Not much else here than work and… work.”
