“Night, then, Miss Mackay.” Robby nodded his shaggy head. “Take care.”
“Good night, Robby.”
She closed the door and locked it. She paused for a second, then turned, tossed the food to the table, and faced Alex.
“There’s your damned food. What you don’t want, put in the fridge. You can eat it tomorrow night. I’m going to bed.”
And he let her go. She felt his eyes on her, felt the hunger behind her, but he let her go. Only Fat Cat followed, meowing softly as he jumped up on her bed and stared at her as though questioning why she wasn’t watching the news. Why she was crying.
And yes, there were tears. For just a moment. As she sat at the edge of the bed, risked Fat Cat’s displeasure, and pulled him into her arms.
His fur caught her tears, but the ragged sobs were contained inside her chest. Where they had always been contained, all her life.
The man she had always fantasized about had touched her, and he was ashamed of her. Now just how was that for hell?
FIVE
“Faisal, Desmond needs more cilantro for the dinner course this evening. I need you to run to the grocery and pick up whatever you can find.” Janey caught Natches’s adopted son as he entered the restaurant several days later.
The young man, dressed in black slacks and a white shirt for waiting tables, moved to her quickly, his black eyes and desert-dark skin a sharp contrast to the white shirt.
“Janey, Mary Lee just called in sick,” Hoyt called out from the register counter. “I’m calling Tabitha back in if she can make it.”
Janey shoved the cash into Faisal’s hands. “Do that, Hoyt,” she called out before turning back to Faisal.
“Jane, Natches says I am to stay here. I’m not to take my eyes from you,” Faisal told her softly, concern reflecting in his dark eyes. “He will be upset if I go to the grocery.”
“I’ll be more upset if you don’t go,” she told him impatiently. “Look at this place, Faisal. Who would be crazy enough to try to attack me in this chaos?”
Waitresses were moving around preparing the tables and waiting stations. There was pandemonium, as usual, just an hour from opening.
“I need that cilantro and I need you to go after it now, before Desmond has a meltdown in the back. If that happens, I’m going to tell him it’s your fault.”
Indecision and a flicker of wariness flitted through Faisal’s dark gaze. Everyone was scared of Desmond’s wrath, even Janey.
“Go.” She pushed at his shoulders. “Natches will never know. Cross my heart.”
He went reluctantly, casting a worried look over his shoulder as he headed out. Janey smoothed her hands down her pencil-slim skirt and moved quickly to help the waitresses prepare for the first rush of customers. Once the dining room was prepared and the doors opened, it was a madhouse of keeping service and quality at perfected levels while ignoring the jibes and comments of many of the customers.
“Hoyt, we’re going to need more flowers from the florist.” She moved quickly to the register and wrote the sticky note before taping it into the memo program of the register computer. “We’ll be in sorry shape if we don’t have them first thing.”
The assortment of small flowers in a tiny vase at each table was a personal touch that she knew would be missed if they weren’t there.
“I can pick them up on my way in.” Hoyt nodded, making a note in his PDA as well. “I should have the
morning clear. The nurse will be with Mother in the morning.”
A frown creased his forehead as he made the note.
“How is she doing?” Janey paused to lay her hand on Hoyt’s shoulder. He’d lost his father in Iraq several years before, and now, with his mother’s illness, the young man seemed more worn with each passing week.
“Her medication seems to be working better.” He gave her a thankful smile. “Hopefully, she’ll rest this week.”
“I hope so . . .”
“Janey, this simply will not do.” Desmond was rushing from the kitchen, a frown on his dark Italian face, his brown eyes snapping with ire as he waved a limp stalk of celery in her face. “This produce is inferior.”
“Call Faisal’s cell. He’s at the grocery.” Her lips tightened at the sight of the celery. “I’ll call the produce company in the morning and take care of it.”
Desmond’s lips thinned. “You will call a different produce company and demand a quality product,” he ordered her. “This company, they do not know quality and deliberately give us their worst.”
Story of her life.
“I’ll take care of it in the morning, but produce could be later arriving in the day,” she warned him.
“Rather later than this inferiority.” Desmond raged as he turned back to the kitchen. “I have had enough of this. I will call a produce provider.” He threw her a furious look over her shoulder. “You are too nice.
You do not yell when you need to. I will take care of this.”
Janey sighed, shaking her head before turning back to the register counter and smiling at Hoyt. “He’s probably right.”
“Probably.” Hoyt’s smile was tentative.
She returned to the tables, preparing for the dinner crowd, knowing exactly why she was getting inferior produce from the local vendors. Maybe she should talk to Natches about it, but he had made it clear he wanted nothing to do with the restaurant. He’d just as soon see it burn to the ground.
Besides, she had promised herself she would fight her own battles; Natches had fought enough of them when she was younger, and he had the scars to prove it.
“I’m here, Miss Mackay.” Tabitha rushed in the door and moved quickly to the waitresses’ station for her apron and to assess where she was needed the most.
From there, the restaurant was so busy, jumping from minute to minute as each of them fought to keep up with the crowd, that there was little time to think, or to consider the mess she had gotten herself into with Alex.
He’d worked her, her brother, and her cousins. She’d realized that over the past several nights, as he worked at his laptop at the table or disappeared into the room she had given him. He was still working her. Those dark, heated glances, the promise in his eyes that he was merely biding his time, that she hadn’t quite escaped him yet.