I rubbed my hands over my face again. It had been a long day.
“It’s, just…” I shook my head wordlessly. “I don’t know how much I can say until it’s all done.”
Beau seemed to accept that, sitting back and staring out across the kitchen with me. I couldn’t speak for him, but if he was feeling anything like I was, then he wasn’t getting up and going home because he was simply too tired to move.
“How do you feel about that?” he asked.
I blinked and looked at him. “Huh? I mean… it’s not great that we’re going to be short-staffed.”
He tilted his head sideways at me. “That’s it?”
I looked down. “It’s not how I wanted to get the job.”
“So, you didn’t maybe want him to get fired just so you could be Head Chef?”
“No!” I exclaimed. I looked indignantly at Beau and hit him lightly on the side of his arm. “Beau Weaver, how long have you known me? You think that’s how I do things?”
He gave me a light smile. “No, I don’t,” he admitted. “Just had to check.”
“I don’t want him fired,” I said. I looked down at my hands, at the fingers covered in blue band-aids and the various burn and cut scars I bore from my years in the kitchen. “Not like this, and not any other way, either.”
“You don’t want to be Head Chef?” he asked with a note of surprise.
“No, I…” I paused, trying to figure it all out myself. “I just… you can’t ever tell him this, but I kind of like having him in the kitchen.”
Beau chuckled. “You have the hots for him.”
“No!” I exclaimed. Beau was giving me a lot of reasons to exclaim, today. I was starting to feel like a teenage girl gossiping in the school hall. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“What? You don’t think he’s attractive? You flirt with him all the time.”
“He flirts with everyone,” I said dismissively.
“But you don’t.”
I stared at Beau for a moment. The revelation floored me. I hadn’t even really noticed it, but he was right. I’d given myself away easily to anyone who knew me.
I’d flirted back.
“Right,” I muttered. I cleared my throat. “I, uh. I guess I find him. You know. Slightly. Just… a tiny bit attractive.”
Beau laughed, but it wasn’t unkind. “You should tell him,” he said. “Especially if he gets fired. If you don’t tell him before he leaves, you might not get the chance.”
“No, I’m not going to tell him,” I said, resting my hand on my knee and my chin in my hand. “I don’t want to have some kind of one-night stand with him. I get the feeling that’s all he’s interested in.”
“You don’t know until you try,” Beau argued.
“Exactly.” I picked at a sewn-in patch on my trousers, my favorite loose pants that I loved to wear in the kitchen but that had been caught on snags or damaged by fire or spills a good number of times. “I don’t know. And I don’t want to get hurt.”
Beau snorted. “You’re crazy,” he said. “If I had someone I liked like that, I’d go after them no matter what. You might think he’s only into one-night-stands, but maybe once you actually had sex, you’d find out you were ridiculously compatible and he wouldn’t be able to resist.”
I scoffed. “Yeah, sure, if this was a book or a TV show. It’s not. It’s real life. That kind of thing doesn’t happen.”
Beau shrugged his shoulders. “It might. You just have to actually give it a chance first.” He got up. “If you really don’t need me, I’ll head out.”
I nodded in agreement. “Yeah, you go on ahead,” I said. “It’s fine. Things have wound down enough out there that I don’t think we’re going to have anything else coming in, anyway.”
Beau nodded. “I’ll head out front and tell Nikolai the kitchen’s closed, then I’m off.”
