by Cora Brent
“Melanie?” Dominic said my name gently, and even though I bowed my head as my eyes swam with tears, I could feel him beside me. The hand that landed on my shoulder was friendly and kind. It was just basic human contact from one person to another, just a small sign of compassion. My instinct was to lurch toward that sympathy, perhaps bury my face in his strong chest and cry for a little while.
But I didn’t. I took a deep breath, shook his hand off, and deliberately put all that sadness away.
“Would you like to go over the marketing plan now or wait for Gio?” I asked as if we hadn’t just been discussing dead parents. I sniffed once and pushed my hair behind my ears.
Dominic cocked his head, looking at me oddly. “We may as well wait for Gio,” he said slowly. “I’m no good when it comes to things like marketing plans.”
“All right. Well, I think I’ll get back to the grind.” I was halfway to the office when Dominic called me back.
“Here,” he said, tossing me a key. “I wasn’t sure if Gio had given you one already.”
“He hadn’t. Thank you.”
Dominic gestured to the door. “Don’t you want to go take lunch or something? I feel bad that you were stuck here.”
“No need. I had a sandwich delivered.”
He made a face. “Is that why it smells in here?”
I put my hands on my hips. “It’s ham and cheese, wise guy. It hardly smells like anything.”
Dominic snorted. “Just messing with you. Seriously though, if you want to get out of here for a while, or even head home for the day, I have no problem with that. You definitely earned an extended break.”
“I don’t want to get out of here. I’d rather just finish up the marketing plan and then tackle the quarterly payroll tax reports.”
Instead of offering some cursory response, he just stared at me. And stared some more.
“Is that okay?” I finally asked. I really wished he’d stop watching me with such intensity. There was nothing mean or critical in his expression, but when Dominic looked my way, I knew I had all of his attention. The idea made me a little dizzy.
Dominic raised an eyebrow. “Of course it’s okay. After all, like you said a few minutes ago, what do I pay you for?”
“Good,” I said, turning around and hurrying back to my desk so I could be free of his scrutiny. Dominic was one of those men who could make you feel effectively undressed with one sweep of his dark, penetrating eyes. And something told me he knew it.
“Hey, Melanie?” he called.
I stopped in my tracks.
“Just wanted to say thanks again,” he said. “For cleaning up around here and for being the next best thing to an on-call nurse.”
I turned and faced him. “You’re welcome once again. Although I do recognize it was probably a wise life choice for me to abandon the medical field.”
Dominic chuckled. “I don’t know about that. You did think of staunching the wound with toilet paper.”
I laughed lightly in return. Then I crossed my arms and bit my lip. “Look, I’m sorry I got all weepy on you there.”
“No,” Dominic said forcefully. He shook his head and looked at me in that way that made me feel like my insides were burning up. “You should never be sorry for that.”
I swallowed. When I’d walked in here this morning, I was somehow sure that working with Dominic every day would solve my troublesome fascination with him. Now I had no idea what to think.
“I’ll be working in the office,” I blurted and scurried back there before he could respond. I sat down behind the desk and tried to clear my mind by thinking of uncomplicated things like puppy dog memes and potato chip flavors. Nothing worked. The image of Dominic’s face kept swimming through my mind no matter what I tried to replace it with.
One thing was clear to me. Things could get complicated with this man. They could get complicated so easily.
CHAPTER EIGHT
DOMINIC
I hadn’t suffered a major injury since I was a kid. It was rotten timing for me to break that streak when I had a restaurant to open, but I only had myself to blame. My lack of sleep coupled with a stubborn insistence on doing everything my way had finally caught up to me.
Seventeen stitches in the hand made any kind of manual labor a little tricky, so Gio sent some help over in the form of Tim, an Espo 1 employee. Tim had been working for us in the kitchen for over a year—great instincts when it came to food, but in some ways he wasn’t the brightest star in the galaxy.
“Hey, Dominic,” called Tim from the kitchen, “where do you want me to put these dough racks?”
I looked up from the complex bureaucratic form I’d been immersed in as I sat at the lunch counter. “I thought I set them out of the way against the wall.”
“You did. But I figured you might want to put them somewhere.”
I had put them somewhere. I had put them out of the way against the wall.
“Ah thanks, Tim. But I think they’re fine where they are.”
“Oh.”
Fifteen minutes later . . .
“Hey, Dominic!”
“Yeah, Tim?”
“The upright freezer isn’t working.”
My head was starting to pound. I pinched the skin between my brows. “Why do you say that, Tim?”
“It’s not cold.”
“It’s not plugged in, Tim.”
A long pause.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. I unplugged it myself.”
“Oh.”
There was no reason to keep the freezer going if there wasn’t any food to freeze. There wasn’t any food to freeze because the opening was still a few weeks away, and I didn’t want to keep the freezer stocked right now just for shits and giggles. I could have sworn Tim and I had suffered through a similar exchange yesterday when he became alarmed that the under counter freezer was warm to the touch. It was probably a mistake to send Tim to the kitchen for organizational duties, but I needed him out of my hair while I looked over the liquor license application. I should have taken care of this already, but with one thing or another, it had somehow gotten sidelined.
“You ready to go over the check run?” asked Melanie as she suddenly materialized, looking as fresh as a blooming rose. Her black hair hung in soft waves halfway down her back, and her cheeks were charmingly flushed. The sight of her shouldn’t rattle me the way it did. From the way my heart jumped, you’d think I’d never laid eyes on a good-looking woman before. But there was no easy way to shove powerful physical attraction under the carpet and keep it there.
We’d been working together every day for the past week. Sometimes we clashed, and sometimes we got along great. And then sometimes the sexual tension between us was so fucking electric I had trouble remembering why I couldn’t put my hands all over her, but I was determined to stay focused. Sure, I was tempted to make a move on Melanie. I’d never felt more tempted by anyone. But in the end the restaurant was what mattered.
Melanie was good for the restaurant. Gio was right about that. She was unfailingly attentive in every task she tackled. I’d never had a more conscientious employee, and the fact that she seemed to care about every aspect of Esposito’s about as much as Gio and I did stirred my admiration.
Yet for some reason I had trouble telling Melanie just how much I appreciated her. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that as she stood next to me, I only pretended to look at numbers and invoices when I was really checking out the shape of her hips in a tight black skirt and the cute frown she wore when she was concentrating.
When she asked a question and suddenly glanced up at me, I could swear she’d heard my thoughts as plainly as if I’d shouted them. A blush colored her cheeks, and she licked her lips, but then all she did was crisply ask if I needed to borrow a pen to sign the checks. It wasn’t the first time we’d had a moment where we were clearly balancing on a tense edge, where the smallest breeze or gesture might send us colliding into each other.
At least today Tim’s presence helped serve as a buffer.
“Nothing but productivity all around,” I said mildly. “Right, Tim?”
There was a brief crash in the kitchen. “What did you say, Dom? I couldn’t hear you over the can opener.”
“Why are you using—oh hell, never mind,” I grumbled, trying to peel my eyes away as Melanie stretched her arms toward the ceiling and yawned. She’d been wearing more clothes when she got here this morning, but she must have lost something along the way. I would have remembered that black tank top. It would have been on my mind all morning.
“Aren’t you cold?” I asked. I’d been keeping the air at seventy degrees.
Melanie looked down and blushed. She crossed her arms suddenly, like she was embarrassed. “Sorry. I shed my cardigan back in the office. It’s about fifteen degrees warmer in that room.”
“Is it?”
“Yeah.” She was amused. “You’d know that if you ever sat at your desk.”
I looked down at the papers that were spread all over the counter and shifted my weight on the counter stool. “Somehow I can concentrate better out here.”
The comment seemed to bother her. She probably took it personally, thinking I was avoiding the office because I didn’t want to be around her. She was right. But she might not guess the real reason.
“Oh hey, Melanie,” Tim said cheerfully as he emerged from the kitchen. He held up a pair of pizza peels and pointed them at me. “What should I do with these?”
“I thought I hung them on the new hooks between the two big ovens.”
Tim nodded. “You did.”
“Okay. Well, how about returning them there, Tim?”
“You bet, Dom,” he said and whistled as he returned to the kitchen. He reappeared less than three seconds later. “You mind if I take lunch now?”
It was ten thirty. “Sure, Tim. That sounds fine.”
Tim waved and skipped out the front door.
I raised an eyebrow at Melanie. “Hard to believe,” I said.
She cocked her head. “What is?”
“When Tim isn’t misplacing things in my kitchen, he studies astrophysics.”
Melanie laughed. “You lie.”
I held up my bandaged hand in a mock oath. “I swear. He’s a junior at Arizona State.”
She laughed again, and then our eyes met. She stopped laughing, cleared her throat, and fussed with a strand of hair.
“I’ve looked over about eighty-five resumes so far today,” she said. “I have two interviews set up for tomorrow, and I’m just waiting for some return calls to make more appointments.”
I clicked my pen, feeling a little surprised. “Gio’s not handling any of the new hires?” Gio had always been the one to hire the staff.
“He’s dealing with the kitchen staff, interviewing them over at Espo 1. I’ve been given complete freedom to hire the rest of the servers. We discussed this yesterday when he came by for the meeting. Don’t you remember?”
I didn’t. “Oh yeah.”
Melanie stared at me and then pointed to my hand. “When do you get the stitches out?”
I flexed my fingers and looked down at the bandage covering the wound. “Tomorrow. Actually I was thinking about cutting them off myself.”
She wrinkled her nose. “No. Don’t do that.”
“Why not?”
She thought about it. “I don’t know. But you could get an infection or something.”
“Whatever you say, Nurse Melanie.” I turned back to my paperwork, aware that she was hovering.
“Is that the liquor license application Gio asked you about yesterday?”
“Yes. And I have to finish it.”
In other words, Please take your hot little ass out of my sight so I can think about something that’s not filthy.
Melanie didn’t disappear, though. She decided to lean against the counter, about eighteen inches from my work space.
“Dominic,” she said in a low, unwittingly sexy voice. “You know I can do things for you, right?”
Good god, was she trying to kill me?
“You can do things for me?” I repeated blankly, my mind running amok with possibilities of what Melanie could do and the positions she could do them in. And just like that I was so fucking hard my balls ached.
Melanie smiled sweetly, completely unaware of the X-rated movie playing inside my head.
“Of course,” she said. “Why don’t you turn that paperwork over to me? I’ll get it done right away, and all you’ll have to do is sign on the dotted line.”
“Thanks, Melanie, but I’ve got everything under control.” I turned away from her and stared intently at the liquor license application until she got the message.
“All right,” she said, mercifully backing away. “If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”
As soon as I was finished with the application, I stood in the hallway outside the office and called to Melanie that I was stepping out to drop off the liquor license application in person. I didn’t wait around to see if she heard me or not.
Outside the cool sanctuary of Espo 2, the heat was punishing. Summers in the desert tended to linger well into September. After a decade of living here, I ought to have been used to it, but there was never anything like that blast of fire on a Phoenix street.
I jumped in my pickup truck and navigated the short distance to the Department of Liquor Licenses and Control. I didn’t know what my problem was when it came to Melanie. She was beautiful and she was intelligent and I really wanted to see her dancing naked on the counter, but I should’ve been able to get over all that by now. Jason kept teasing me about the fact that I hadn’t gotten any action for more months than I cared to think about. Life had been nothing but work and dreams of work. That must be the reason why my brain and my libido were all scrambled these days.
If I was being honest, then I would have admitted that my reaction to Melanie wasn’t just physical. The day she’d told me about her parents as her eyes filled with painful tears, I wanted nothing so bad as to collect her against my chest and stroke her hair as she wept. The way I felt around her was not something I felt regularly. That made it more dangerous, and even tougher to resist. And that’s what I was afraid of. Somehow Melanie wasn’t just tempting my dick, she was inside my head. I knew if I ever got a taste of her, I might forget all kinds of good manners and family promises.
There were moments when I thought that if she wanted it, I’d fucking take her right where she stood and then carry her away with me. The problem was I’d always have to turn around and come back before I got very far. In the end the needs of the restaurant took precedence over anything else. Esposito’s was more than a business venture; it was my name and my family and every plan I had ever made. Melanie wouldn’t understand that, and I wouldn’t expect her to. If we got together, she’d wind up frustrated and unhappy and probably in search of a new job. What’s more, Gio would hit the goddamn roof when he found out.
Yet those cold realities never kept me from imagining several dozen creative ways to get down and dirty with Melanie Cruz. Thank god she wasn’t psychic.
By the time I returned to Espo 2, Tim was back to disorganizing the kitchen, and Tara had arrived for a visit with baby Leah.
“There’s my princess,” I said when I walked through the door and saw the baby tangling her chubby fingers in her mother’s hair.
“Well, hello, Dominic,” Tara laughed. “I’m happy to see you too.”
Melanie had emerged from the office. It appeared as if she and Tara were having a friendly chat. I thought I remembered Gio saying that the two of them had really hit it off, that they’d even known each other years ago. Right now I didn’t care. I only had eyes for my baby niece.
Tara handed Leah right over when I walked toward them with my arms out. Even though my brother’s family lived in a neighboring condo, I’d been keeping such weird hours I hadn’t seen the baby in over a week.
&n
bsp; Leah smelled like soap and innocence. She immediately drooled all over my shirt. I’d never had any interest in babies until Leah was born, but the first time I held her in my arms, I knew I would do anything for that little girl.
“She’s teething,” Tara explained. “Those first two bottom teeth just broke through yesterday. Watch your fingers because if she gets too close, she’ll try to chew them off.”
I looked into her angelic little face. “You wouldn’t do that to Uncle Dominic, would you?”
Leah blew spit bubbles in my direction and laughed.
“That’s right,” I told her. “Don’t forget that I’m your favorite uncle in the whole world.”
Tara and Melanie started chatting about art museums and other bullshit, so I carried the baby into the kitchen for a tour.
“Let’s see what you think of Daddy and Uncle Dominic’s restaurant,” I told her.
Tim was in the kitchen staring at a stack of gray food bins that we used to store the pizza dough while it was rising. He blinked at me.
“Is that a baby?” he asked.
“No, it’s a polar bear,” I joked.
Tim looked alarmed.
“Tim, this is Leah, Gio’s kid.”
He scratched his head. “Gio has a kid?”
“Yeah, you must have seen her before. Tara’s been bringing her around to the restaurant since she was a week old.”
“Who’s Tara?”
Was this guy bullshitting me? Maybe he was high. His pupils did look a little dilated now that I could see him up close.
“Tara is Gio’s wife,” I answered, bracing myself for the next question.
Recognition clicked in his face. “Oh, right,” he said. He pointed through the cutout window in the brick wall that separated the kitchen from the dining room. “There she is.”
“Yes,” I said, slightly relieved that Tim was at least partially present.
I decided to send Tim back to Espo 1 for the day. He seemed happy enough to leave his stack of mixing bowls right where they were.
