The front door to the bar is propped open, and I’m inside before I can blink.
Happy hour is kickin’. There are bodies pressed against bodies and I have to suck in my chest to squeeze through. It doesn’t feel good, but it’s not fatal either. I make it to the bar without hyperventilating, and Tanner greets me with a grin. “Feeling brave?”
“Feelin’ something.”
His grin broadens, showing me teeth that gleam white in the dimmed light of the bar. Then he sobers and inclines his head toward the kitchen. “Joss is in there.”
“What? Why? The student guy didn’t work out?”
Tanner winces a little. “He’s not the worst, and we run a reduced menu on Mondays so he can keep up, but Joss caught him sending out something…I don’t know. Whatever it was, he didn’t fucking like it, and he’s been taking names in there ever since.”
“He’s mad?”
Tanner sidesteps to serve a customer. He doesn’t have the charm of most of his other bartenders, but he makes up for it with lightning-fast efficiency.
He’s back before I can swing a glance to the kitchen door. “Yeah, he was pretty mad. Trent got both barrels, and I didn’t intervene. The kid’s nice enough, but I caught him making a TikTok when he shoulda been cutting fries, so…”
“Did you tell Joss that?”
“Hell no. Trent would be wearing his asshole as a hat by now if I had.”
It’s quite the image. I try not to picture it or read too much into how Tanner’s penetrating stare lingers on me as I back up from the bar and step toward the kitchen, dodging servers as they congregate at the tray-dump spot.
Bodies on bodies on bodies.
I squeeze around them and push into the kitchen, expecting the music and productive chaos I usually find when Joss is at work. But deathly silence greets me, punctuated only by the sizzle of the grill, the whir of the overhead fans, and the periodic slam of the refrigerated drawers.
Theangryslam that somehow I know comes from Joss’s hands before I even set eyes on his ragin’ face.
Goddamn, he’s beautiful.
It’s the first thing I think, an instinct more than a thought. Then I catch his flushed cheeks and set jaw. His hyper-focused glare as he smashes a cleaver through a chicken, separating the legs from the body with furious precision, and I know it’s bad.
Real bad. He’s warned me what he’s like when his temper blows. How he can’t be talked down, and it has to burn out in its own time. I wonder what the hell Trent did to make him pop so fuckin’ nuclear, but I’m sensing it’s not the time to ask.
I approach with caution, rounding the counter he stands behind. “Hey.”
Without glancing up, Joss brings the cleaver down again. “All right, mate?”
It’s a greeting he and Jax use all the time, but without Joss’s laughing eyes on me, it hits different. Flat.
Cold.
I tilt my head, waiting for him to look at me.
He doesn’t.
Just keeps hacking away at the carcass until it’s in a thousand pieces far too small for his fried chicken sandwiches. He realizes and I see the fury rise in him. Watch his fingers clench around the cleaver.
Fuck no.
I take it too fast for him to object.
He finally looks at me and turns his fierce gaze on me. “I wasn’t going to throw it.”
“Never said you were.”
“Give it back.”
