So Irresistible
Page 14
“Said what?” she asked, forcing herself back to the matter at hand. The brewpub’s patrons mobbed around her, laughing and drinking. Across the table, Frosty glanced at her curiously.
Shane gave Frosty an agreeable nod, then returned to Gabriella. “Said how much you appreciate your crew. Said how you couldn’t have gotten along without them today. Said thank you.”
“I don’t have to say thank you.” Especially when it might call attention to how I dropped the ball today. “I’m their boss.”
“Everyone likes to hear thank you.”
“I already said thank you,” Gabriella insisted. She downed more porter. “During service. I was expeditor. I said thank you.”
“As pies were being served, sure.” Patiently, Shane waited for her. His beard stubble had grown out over the course of the day. He looked like a delectable mop-wielding lumberjack, out for a fun night of forced appreciation. “But not afterward.”
Exasperated, Gabriella glanced behind Shane. At their booth and at the bar, her crew stared straight back at her. As one, they caught her looking. They all jolted, startled, then busily went back to … looking busy. Huh? What was going on here?
“The only person who’s even come over to my table tonight is Frosty.” With dignity, Gabriella nodded at him. “Everybody else stayed away. They didn’t even invite me to come here for after-work drinks! I pushed my way in, the same way I’ve been doing all week. At least I’m trying to be friendly.”
“No, you’re not. You’re infiltrating,” Shane told her. “It’s not the same thing. Just come and say thank you.”
As he said it, Shane seemed peculiarly … self-conscious. But that impression faded quickly, burst apart by Gabriella’s rising indignation. “No. I won’t. Whose side are you on, anyway?”
Because I thought it was mine, Gabriella wanted to say. She stopped herself just in time, but Shane caught her meaningful look anyway—and it seemed to force him to recall all the very intimate, very personal things they’d shared only hours ago in her office. Uneasily, he shifted. He glanced over his shoulder.
It became suddenly obvious to Gabriella that Shane didn’t want anyone to know they were involved. That’s why he’d stayed away from her tonight. That’s why he hadn’t touched her again.
The realization hurt. Maybe Shane didn’t want to be linked with her, now that she was becoming a stressed-out screwup at work.
No, that was silly, Gabriella told herself. She was going to be fine. Just as soon as she figured this out. On her own.
God knew nobody wanted to help her. She gulped more porter.
“I’m on your side,” Shane said patiently, frowning as she drank. “And I’m on Campania’s side. If we’re going to succeed—”
“Oh, so now we’re a ‘we’?”
“—we’re going to need a lot less stubborn defensiveness.”
It was, practically to a word, what Pinkie had said to her.
“I’m not stubborn.” Gabriella crossed her arms. “I’m not defensive, either! I’m persistent and passionate.”
“That’s right!” Frosty broke in. “Screw those losers!”
He held out his IPA in one beefy hand, augmenting his earnest defense of her with a toast. Gamely raising her bottle of porter, Gabriella felt herself on the brink of … something.
Her friends weren’t losers. She couldn’t do this.
“Sorry, Frosty.” She lowered her bottle. “That’s sweet of you, but Shane is right. I have my pride, but this time it’s holding me back. I need to try harder. There’s a lot at stake.”
“You’re already trying harder! You just said—”
“That I’m at my breaking point. I know.” Acknowledging that, Gabriella nodded. She glanced at Shane, feeling a wave of heartfelt (if silent and secret) approval course from him to her. “But if this is that important to me that I’d drive myself to the brink of exhaustion for it, shouldn’t I try everything?”
Across the table, Frosty slanted Shane a disgruntled glance. Then he looked at Gabriella. “I guess so. Okay.”
Gabriella felt sorry for him. “Maybe you’re a little mad because everyone was so hard on you in the beginning,” she diagnosed. “But that was just hazing. It’s the biz. You can’t hold a grudge forever. In the end, it’ll only hurt you.”
“Wise words.” Shane touched her shoulder. “Also? Touché.”
It wasn’t difficult to catch his implication. She was also hurting herself by not moving on with her staff. Right now.
“Okay.” With a resolute smile, Gabriella rose. “I’m on it.”
By the time another two days had gone by, Shane had mastered the “dishwasher” stage of trailing at Campania. While apprenticing with Scooter, he’d learned to properly load the big stainless steel dishwasher, use the caustic industrial soap without stripping the skin from his hands, and spin the correct dials—even though their settings had worn away long ago.
“Sometime during the Clinton administration,” Scooter had informed him with a chuckle. “That’s when this baby was new.”
“Were the other pizzerias better equipped?” Shane had asked him, curious to get the longtime employee’s opinion. “Better decorated? Different menus? Before they closed, I mean.”
“Nah. They were all about the same,” Scooter had told him, effortlessly handling a huge rack of dinner plates. Despite his advancing age, his biceps bulged with strength. His mind was as sharp as Gabby’s treasured chef’s knife, Buster. “Mr. Grimani got it in his head to redo everything. Spiff ’em up, you see.” Pausing to think, Scooter had nodded, then added, “’Bout ’98, I’d say.”
So. Over fifteen years without a revamp. No wonder Gabby was frustrated, Shane realized. Knowing her, she wanted to put her own stamp on the family’s pizzerias. Knowing her, she wouldn’t feel she’d earned her place until she did … something new. He wondered if she realized that, on a conscious level.
If not, Shane knew he could make her see it. Then she could deal with it, head-on. Just as he’d finagled her into having a real heart-to-heart with her staff a couple of nights ago after the broken oven debacle (having wisely laid the groundwork with Bowser, Pinkie, Jeremy, Hypo, and Emeril beforehand), Shane could give Gabby a chance to achieve something she wanted but refused to admit. Shane knew she still wanted to change things at Campania. Every time he questioned a rule, sidestepped the chain of command, or didn’t recognize the tradition in something, Gabby was there to remind him. But she was also beginning to wear down. The proof of that came on Shane’s next day at work.
“At this stage,” Gabby was telling him, “you’ll be moving on to stocking the storeroom and the walk-in. You’ll learn—”
“Why?” Shane asked, alone with her at Campania.
Confused, she blinked. “Why what?”
“Why are the storeroom and the walk-in next?”
“They … just are.” Seeming flummoxed, she gave a dismissive wave. Around them, the pizzeria was quiet. “They always have been. That’s the way my dad trained me. That’s the way it is.”
“Okay.” Shane nodded, satisfied for now to have persuaded her to think about it, at least. “I bet your dad wouldn’t have given a better speech at the brewpub than you did the other night, though. That was genius. You brought the house down.”
“I kind of … did, didn’t I?” Gabby smiled. “I don’t know what it is about it, but ever since that night, things have been much smoother around here. Jeremy isn’t so snippy. Bowser isn’t so hostile. Emeril isn’t so stressed out. Pinkie isn’t so ready with the killer death-ray looks. And Hypo isn’t quite as much of a hypochondriac as usual.” She grinned. “Maybe I cured him.”
“Maybe I cured him, you mean.”
“Penguins!” they both shouted jubilantly.
Their shared competitiveness should have driven them apart, Shane knew. Instead, it seemed to cement their togetherness.
“Maybe we’re a good team,” Shane told her.
Unwisely and naïvely, he beli
eved it. Even though Gabby didn’t know he was working behind the scenes, so far he’d only helped her. With her staffing and morale problems. With her unrelenting stubbornness. With her skyrocketing stress level.
Shane really liked helping Gabby with that one. There was nothing like a laughter-filled romp in his bed, it turned out, to ease the tensions of rebuilding a family pizzeria chain.
Of course, he’d also done other things behind the scenes. Like pilfering her pizza-dough formula notebook and analyzing it. Tracking the pizzeria’s operational procedures. Evaluating its staffing models. Smuggling out what had turned out to be the Grimanis’ old hand-written recipe for pizza sauce, wedged like an afterthought into a gold-mine collection of customer lists.
In a series of old bound notebooks (only one of which Shane had) Robert Grimani had compiled years’ worth of data on his best and most loyal customers. He’d noted Portlanders’ birthdays and anniversaries, the births of their children, the deaths of their grandparents, and the ups and downs of their lives. With kindness and sensitivity, Gabby’s father had tracked all the details of his customers’—his friends’—lives. And although he hadn’t ever set out to leverage that information to create a demographically detailed database, any businessman with any sense would have seen he’d ignored his most valuable asset.
Never mind using that information to make customers happy. Shane knew that was thinking too small—no matter how much it brought a smile to a customer’s face to be surprised with one of Pinkie’s cupcakes on a special day. The Grimanis needed to think big. They needed to think about selling that information.
To the right company, it would be worth a fortune.
To Waltham Industries, it would prove invaluable. It would validate Gregory Waltham’s hunch that his test plan had merit.
If Shane secured all those notebooks—along with the pizzerias—his dad would have no choice but to respect him.
“We are a good team,” Gabby mused, cutting into Shane’s traitorous thoughts with a cheerful look. “A secret team.” She trailed her fingers down his chef’s coat, then smiled. “At first, I was irked that you told everyone we were only a one-night thing,” she confessed. “But after I thought about it a while, I realized I like the secrecy. It’s exciting.”
“It’s necessary,” Shane returned, “for good morale.”
“Mmm-hmm.” She didn’t seem interested in discussing employee-employer relations. “My morale’s better than ever.”
“Pinkie said you’ve been stressed lately.” Shane wanted to steer the conversation toward Gabby’s cousin. That family relationship hadn’t been disclosed in his dossier (like so many other critical details). He needed to know all the angles if he was going to succeed. “Have you two always been close?”
Gabby nodded. “Since we were selling lemonade as kids. I handled the recipe, the design of the stand, the employees—”
Shane boggled. “You had employees at your childhood lemonade stand?”
“It wasn’t cruel child labor, if that’s what you’re implying,” she said with a grin. “They were volunteers.”
“You had free employees,” Shane acknowledged. “That’s even better. I applaud your entrepreneurial spirit.”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t done your share of convincing people to do what you want. You’ve got charm all over you.”
Warning bells went off in Shane’s head, telling him he needed to change the subject. Gabby was getting too close.
Too close to the real him. Nobody ever did that.
“What did Pinkie do?” he asked. “Sell cupcakes?”
“Nah. She had a rival lemonade stand. Across the street.”
Interesting. Maybe Gabby’s cousin wasn’t as gung ho about the pizzerias succeeding as she seemed, Shane surmised. Maybe she was still more competitive than she let on. During his time hanging out with the gang, the pastry chef had often mentioned wanting her own bakeshop. If Campania went under and the Grimanis gave up their shuttered pizzerias, Pinkie would have the inside scoop on snagging those locations cheaply.
“But I won,” Gabby was saying blithely. “I sold more.”
“Of course you did.” Shane tossed her an admiring look. “You probably stayed out there from dawn till midnight.”
A guilty grin. “Only in summertime. People are thirstier.”
“Well, nobody can fault you for your work ethic.”
At that, Gabby turned away. “My father could. He did.”
Alerted by her melancholy tone, Shane touched her shoulder. It was safe. They were alone. “He did? What do you mean?”
“I mean, I worked really hard here at Campania. At the other pizzerias, too, before they closed.” She picked up Buster, then started going to town on a flat of onions. “I had ideas. I had experience. I had vision!” Thwack! Her razor-sharp chef’s knife bisected an onion. “But my dad didn’t want to hear it.”
Shane made a sympathetic sound. “That must have been hard.”
“It was!” Casting him a beleaguered look, Gabby went on chopping. On her, Buster was an extension of her hand. The knife flashed with impressive precision as she worked. “The worst part, though, was how unexpected it all was. I thought I was so close to convincing my dad. About the lights. About the floor.” She aimed a fiery look at the chipped linoleum. “About the menu and the décor and all the rest. Even about Seattle!”
“You wanted to open a pizzeria in Seattle?”
Gabby nodded. “Before the takeover attempt, we could have expanded. But my dad spent so much money fighting those bastards. They went after his recipes. His techniques. Even his crew!” She shook her head. “It was full-on corporate espionage.”
Shane didn’t want to think about that. He didn’t want to envision the beleaguered senior Grimani struggling to hold off a takeover—struggling to preserve his family’s heritage. He wanted to think about Gabby’s hopes to expand to Seattle … and the fact that Shane could help make that happen, if he succeeded.
If he got a bigger payout from Waltham Industries for her.
“Aren’t there already pizzerias in Seattle?” Shane asked.
“Yes. Sure. But they’re not like ours would be.”
Then, just as he’d predicted, Gabby was off and running, prompted by his skepticism to outline her entire vision for her family’s pizzerias. Lit from within by enthusiasm and grit, Gabby detailed all her training, all her ideas, all her disappointments so far. She described the showdown she’d had with Robert Grimani, the escape she’d made to Astoria, the difficulty she’d had coming back and trying to save Campania.
She chopped several dozen onions while she did so.
Shane had never loved her more. Not even when Gabby was naked had she ever affected him so much. Her drive and energy were intoxicating to him, making him want to help, to applaud, to be good. Disoriented by that feeling, he couldn’t even speak.
That didn’t matter, though. Because even as Shane defaulted on all his longtime experience as a fixer—experience that demanded he coax out more details, note everything that could be leveraged later, use that information to create discord or chaos or whatever best served his current “fix”—Gabby just went on talking. It was as though she’d never really gotten to unleash it all. Probably, it occurred to Shane, she hadn’t. She’d huffed off to coastal Oregon without a single confidant to support her.
“Wow.” Winding up with an expressive gesture, Gabby laughed. “You really know how to unleash a tidal wave. Sorry.” She blinked at the pile of onions. She pointed. “Did I do that?”
Shane nodded. He wanted to tell her how incredible she was. How beautiful and inimitable and desirable. But the words stuck in his throat and wouldn’t come loose. If only they were naked …
“Maybe I can help you,” he began, teetering on the edge of abandoning his fix altogether. “I know how to … do things.”
That was putting it mildly. Shane knew how to do almost everything—except maybe this. Except maybe be real. Or honest.
Gabby was practical. She might be upset at first, but she’d accept the necessity of a takeover. Shane could make her do that. He could make her accept Waltham Industries willingly.
He could win … everything. Gabby. And his dad’s respect.
Determinedly, Shane laid the groundwork. “I have … skills.”
“I’ll say you do.” Playfully, Gabby eyed him. She seemed invigorated by having unburdened herself to him. With a carefree air, she set down Buster and came nearer. “So do I. Remember?”
A wave of erotic memories washed over him. Heat. Wetness. Bareness. Touching and kissing and needing. He was hard already.
Shane swallowed. “I’m not sure,” he lied. “My memory’s a little hazy on your skill set.” With Gabby so close to him, smelling sweet and looking even sweeter, he couldn’t concentrate on the finer impulses he’d been entertaining a second ago. Goodness was subjective, wasn’t it? This was good. “Remind me.”
Gladly, Gabby did. “Close your eyes,” she whispered.
Shane did. Immediately, he became twice as aware of their surroundings. The pungent smell of the chopped onions. The steady tick of the time clock in the break room. The rising heat of the double-decker pizza ovens. The fragrance of fresh basil.
The feel of Gabby’s mouth, soft and warm against his.
Her lips touched his again. “Open up,” she whispered.
Obediently, Shane did. His reward was a deeper kiss, heady with held breath and the hot, liquid sweep of Gabby’s tongue. He reeled, hardly able to stand upright. He’d come near to undoing his entire fix a few minutes ago. Now, his knees still wobbled.
Insistent yet unseen, Gabby pressed herself against him. Shane grabbed for her, wanting more, but she stopped him.