“You’re alive now, aren’t you?” he asks.
“Only in body,” I say as I take a bite, and he laughs, and for some reason I feel like I won that one.
“So, how is it?” he asks after a moment.
“The food?” I ask. “You were right. The tamales are incredible.”
“Say that again,” he nods towards me.
I blink, chewing more slowly. “The tamales are…?”
“No, the other part,” he cuts me off, and I see where he’s going with this.
“You were right,” I smirk, and he winks. I shake my head.
“No, I meant what’s it like being a waitress at one of his restaurants?” he asks.
Here we go.
“It’s fine.”
“Just fine?” he presses.
“I love the restaurant industry,” I say.
“You love being a waitress?”
“I want to be a bartender eventually, but–”
“But what?” he chops my sentence in half, and I stop. “Why aren’t you behind the bar now?”
I continue chewing. “Because that’s not my job.”
“It should be,” he says, and he hasn’t stopped staring at me since the conversation started. “You’re good at it, Harper.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not always the way it works,” I say softly.
“It is at my restaurants,” he says, then his mouth screws into an inquisitive smile. “I find it kind of ironic that a good girl likeyou, who hardly drinks and never does anything rebellious, has an affinity for cocktail mixing.”
It makes me smile too, though I bite it back a little. I’m not going to give this man that much satisfaction. “There’s a lot about me that you don’t really know.”
Later that night I am standing by the window staring at the stormy sky. It’s crazy how places like this go from paradise to chaos all because of some rain clouds.
“It’s like boiling water,” Asher says from the couch. He’s watching a soccer game in Spanish, his feet kicked up and a beer in hand. “It’s not going to go faster if you stare at it.”
“Sorry for being bored. There’s not much to do in a beach house when you can’t go outside,” I say with a sigh.
“You could take a bath,” he suggests. “Women love baths. And from the looks of it, this one’s pretty nice.”
“Are you trying to get me to take my clothes off?” I ask half joking.
“I mean, you could bathe fully clothed if you want to. Doesn’t matter to me. It’s your honeymoon.”
I roll my eyes and look at my phone. No new messages aside from an eggplant and cocktail emoji from Darlene. So I take Asher’s advice and take a bath. He wasn’t wrong about it. It’s a freestanding tub, and it’s deep enough that the water comes nearly up to my collarbones. I infuse it with oils I found on the counter: grapefruit and patchouli. Then I grab my book and let out a tired sigh as I pick up where I left off.
Taming the Beast by Ella Charm
Chapter 12
