If Drake was here, he would have defused it.
An odd feeling settled over me. I had grown used to standing shoulder-to-shoulder at the counter with him over the past month. I had come to expect to hear his stupid, flirty jokes or even just the sound of his voice as he moved behind other workers in the kitchen, warning them he was back there.
I missed having him here.
Which was stupid, on a number of different levels. First, because he was a pain in the ass who never shut up, always moving things to the wrong places and completely disregarding the rules of the kitchen. Second, because I hated it when he flirted with me because it made my heart beat faster and my face flush and took away my concentration from the food.
And third, because there was only another month or so before Grey would make his final decision, and then only one of us would be working here. The other…
Well, if he got the job, I supposed Grey would expect me to carry on working, supporting him like I had done for Jesse. But I wasn’t sure I could do that. I didn’t know how my ego would handle it. Could I take orders from him? Watch him mess up all my systems and stop enforcing them? Could I really let go of the role I’d been working all this time?
And if I got the job, I had no doubt that Drake would be going somewhere else, because it was clear that his ambition was about being a Head Chef – not about working for The Crow in particular.
Once Grey made his decision, I wasn’t going to see Drake ever again.
The thought left a hollow pit in my stomach that I tried hard not to think about for the rest of service, but when I returned home to my empty apartment for the night, it became that much harder to ignore.
Drake
I adjusted the strap on my wrist, trying to get the tension right. The brace was always either too tight, cutting off my circulation and making my hand throb in a different way, or too loose so that I could easily move my wrist in the wrong way and hurt it again.
“How’s your wrist doing?” Beau asked, glancing up from the prep station beside me.
“Fine,” I said, giving him a brief smile. I always said it was fine, even when it was throbbing so hard I couldn’t think. If my voice was strained when I said it, no one seemed to notice.
The atmosphere was strained enough to cover it.
It had been like this since the afternoon I took off, a month ago. No one was interested in telling me, but I figured out for myself that the glimpse I’d caught of Beau and Grey in the office hadn’t been a coincidence or a misunderstanding. They were sleeping together, and apparently, everyone else hated it.
It wasn’t that they were treating Beau badly, turning their backs on him for fucking the boss. Actually, it seemed to be the opposite. They were all so keen to look after Beau and shield him from Grey that he was actually frustrated with them, and it was Grey who was getting the cold shoulder from absolutely all of his employees.
Except for two, of course. Beau, who made round moon eyes at him whenever he entered the kitchen, and me – because I knewwhich side my bread was buttered, and I wasn’t about to throw my job away over my boss’s relationship.
Why should I give a fuck where he chose to stick his dick, so long as it wasn’t interfering with the work?
And it wasn’t – if anything, it was nice to have time without Grey walking into the kitchen at all hours, wanting to talk to us or flirt with people in the storage area. He kept mostly to his office unless there was something important to announce, so we could get on with things much more easily without fear of oversight.
I flipped the meat I was flash-frying with a flick of the tongs and clenched my teeth to avoid a hiss leaving my mouth. The strapping on my wrist was supposed to make it stronger, but it seemed to be getting worse, not better. Whatever I’d done that day in the walk-in had really fucked it up, and nothing the doctor had suggested seemed to work. All I could do was keep topped up on my pain pills, and that wasn’t something I wanted to risk here in the kitchen anymore in case Rafael wanted to throw any more accusations my way.
The man himself rocked up opposite me, standing on the other side of the counter at another station, and I looked up without meaning to. I caught his eye and we both averted our gazes almost immediately. It had been this way all month. No one talking. No one looking at each other.
Absolutely, definitively no one kissing each other.
Which was a shame, because I couldn’t help but think that I needed to scratch this itch. It was like when you got a song stuck in your head so deep it was driving you insane. You needed to listen to it, just once, and then it would go away – like the worms in your brain were satisfied now that they’d heard it at last. Sometimes, you just needed to remember that one line or how that riff sounded.
It was the same thing with Rafael’s lips.
Whenever he stood opposite me like this, I couldn’t help myself. My eyes flicked up to those beautiful lips and remembered how they tasted. How they felt.
And they craved one more taste.
Just once, I thought. Just once would get him out of my system.
But I knew even as I thought it that I was just lying to myself.
It was an excuse – a way to justify the fact that I wanted him in my bed, spread open, begging me to fuck him. That I wanted my name on his lips as he came. That I wanted him far more than I wanted this fucking job.
I could finally admit it to myself, but it didn’t change a thing, because Rafael hadn’t made a single move in my direction since that one kiss a month ago.
