“I got this. New guy gets to put in some extra hours, pay my dues. Don’t worry about me.” There’s plenty to be done here, and besides, it’s not like I have anywhere else to be.
“Well, I gotta pick up my grandkids, so I’ll see you later.” With a final salute, he’s in his pickup—the whole parking lot is full of ’em—and he’s off.
The staff only exit closes behind me with a heavy thud and an echoing click as I walk through the back hallway toward the front of the restaurant.
Wandering through to the kitchen, I grab my clipboard from the steel work surface and review my notes, doing a mental tally of when what needs to be done by when, scribbling as I go. My cheeks puff out and I let a big breath out. This shit is getting cut close. I’m gonna need to schedule a meeting with the manager ASAP and get us on track. We don’t even have our final health inspection scheduled yet, as far as I could find out when I tried calling the inspector’s office.
Making myself comfortable, leaning down, elbows on the metal surface, I jot out a plan in my chicken scratch that no one else but me could ever decipher.
With my cutting skills and this handwriting, I could’ve been a doctor, maybe a surgeon.
Too bad I’ve broken more bones than I’ve fixed.
A noise in the front of the restaurant has my head jerking up, grabbing my knife set for protection, and I stalk silently to the doorway to check on it.
Maybe fate’s looking out for me after all.
The gardener girl is back in the restaurant. Samuel must have forgotten to lock the front door before he left.
Today she’s wearing loose-fitting jeans that look new, and a top that’s not very practical for gardening in. Puffy white sleeves,low cut and a big bow in the front, she looks like a package I’d unwrap with my teeth.
Her ample breasts bounce with every step she takes, and it’s filling my head with filthy thoughts. The way they’d bounce if I was pounding into her. How they’d feel between my teeth, under my tongue as I’m fucking her, cock bottoming out as I make her whole body ripple with each thrust.
This is a dangerous path to let my mind wander on as the sun is setting, casting her in a reddish glow and highlighting how absolutely edible she looks. “If it isn’t gardener girl,” I croon as she steps within hearing range.
She startles at my voice but doesn’t say anything.
I jerk my chin toward the window display up front, the flowers she did there. “You did so good,” I tell her.
And there my mind goes again, taking off on its own thoughts, all the ways I could praise her. But if I had to guess, this isn’t a girl who wants praise. She wants to be owned, and she’d probably fight tooth and nail the whole time, making sure I earned her, and loving every second of it, a real-life tiger.
I feel my eyes blaze at the thought, but it looks like I’m not the only one whose mind lives in the gutter, because dots of pink bloom on her cheeks just as quickly, those brown eyes finding anything around us but my own.
“The flowers,” I clarify. “They look great.”
“Thanks,” she says brusquely.
Awful short with me for someone who I caught, carried, hydrated, and fed after she fainted in my presence.
I kinda wanna tease her about it, the way I nursed her back to health, crack this tension she’s encased in, but something tells me she wouldn’t respond well to it. It’s that same instinct that tells me she wants passion and vigor, not sweet nothings.
That voice has been right a lot in the past, kept me alive during my worst years, so I listen to it.
The woman I can’t stop thinking about looks between me and the front door of the restaurant, then she asks, face innocent, “Are you working here?”
Waving one hand down the front of my body, the chef jacket, the black pants, the black Crocs I’d never set foot in a kitchen without. Bag in my other hand carrying my knife set, but maybe that’s not something she’d recognize unless she was in one of two industries. The only two I’ve ever been in.
“You can call me Chef,” I tell her, winking.
“You got the job?”
“I did. But you tasted my food. You knew I’d land it.”
“Congrats,” she says unconvincingly, rolling her eyes.
“Back for another taste?” I tease her.
She steps closer, and I realize she’s pink again, but not just from the flirting. She looks like she’s overheated once more.
