Tempt Our Fate (Sutten Mountain, #2)(52)

I clear my throat, stepping up to the counter. “I was working late last night.”

“Same thing from this morning?”

Movement catches my attention from the corner of my eye. Looking over, I hope to find Pippa walking out of the swinging doors to the kitchen but instead find another face that isn’t her.

“Sir?” the barista pushes.

I focus back on her. “Yeah. That’d be perfect.” I scratch my chin, trying to think of a nonobvious way to ask where the hell Pippa is. “So.” I clear my throat, making things more awkward and obvious. “Where is the owner? Pippa?”

The girl smiles—Lexi from her name tag. She grasps the counter, leaning over it slightly. “Why are you asking?”

“I’m just used to seeing her every day.”

She nods her head, her eyes narrowing on me. “Right. No other reason at all you want to know?”

“Nope.” I cough, looking around to try and avoid her knowing stare. It’s hot against my skin, even as I pretend to look at a prepacked bag of coffee beans to avoid it as long as possible.

“She’s always complaining about you,” she states, humor in her voice.

My eyes snap to her. “Why do you say that like it’s a compliment?”

“Because I think she likes you.”

I bite the inside of my cheek, fighting the urge to say the first thing that popped into my head—she definitely seemed to like me when her fingernails were scraping my scalp, her moans echoing off the walls of this very shop as she screamed my name. I want to look back at the door, to close my eyes and remember having her pinned against the windows. What it felt like to spread her thighs open and have her completely bared to me.

“You good?” Lexi asks. Her eyes are lit with mischief as she beams at me. She’s clearly having too much fun pestering me about Pippa.

“Yeah.” I clear my throat again, looking over my shoulder to see if there’s anyone behind me in line. There isn’t, giving me time to aim more questions in her employee’s direction.

“Her complaining about me makes you think she likes me?” I feel like I’m in middle school again. I want to ask does she like me or like like me like a goddamn twelve-year-old. “That doesn’t make very much sense.”

“It does if you know Pippa. She gets bored easily, needing…” She pauses, her eyes traveling to the ceiling as she thinks for a moment. “Well, she needs fire, you could say. Something that keeps things interesting.”

“Complaining about me keeps things interesting?”

“Yesterday, I opened the cafe for Pippa. She’d texted me saying she’d been out late and needed help.”

My eyebrows draw in because this conversation has taken a turn I wasn’t expecting. “Okay?”

“The front door was unlocked. Which was unusual because Pippa always locks it when she closes. She sometimes forgets to do other things, but locking the door is never one of them.”

The girl points to a security camera in the corner. It looks down at me, a light flickering.

My cheeks heat. Shit. Am I about to blush? Prickling sensations run down the back of my neck as I pray that this conversation isn’t going where I think it’s going.

“I checked the camera, wanting to make sure no one had broken in. It didn’t look like anyone had, but I wanted to be sure.”

Holy fuck. Did this girl, who can’t be much older than eighteen, see me feasting on her boss’s pussy?

I’ve never blushed in my life, but I think I might actually be blushing from embarrassment. My entire face feels hot, the feeling running down my neck as well.

“Oh,” I mumble, having no idea what I’m supposed to say in this situation. I’m a grown-ass adult—I shouldn’t be fumbling over words right now—but I’m stuck visualizing all the dirty things this girl could’ve seen.

“Don’t worry. I figured out pretty early what was going to happen. I stopped it before I saw too much.”

I let out a sigh of relief. Thank god.

“So where is she?” I ask, changing the subject. Now that I know she hasn’t seen anything, I want to never speak of this moment again. It’ll haunt me wondering what she did see and at what point she stopped the replay.

Maybe I need to find a way to get that security footage. I don’t want anyone else getting a hold of it. It’d also be hot as hell to go back and rewatch.

“She’s sick today.”

“Sick?” I don’t like the thought of her being sick. Is she alone without anyone to take care of her?

“Yep. Which she must really be feeling like shit because she never calls out of work. Even when her mom passed, she showed up to work most days.”

My skin prickles with the need to show up at her house just so she’d have someone there for her. This girl has a point. Pippa doesn’t seem like the kind of person who’d miss work unless she really wasn’t feeling well. What if something bad has happened and no one is there to help?

It doesn’t take long for me to decide the right thing is to go check on her. I have no idea where she lives, but I bet Lexi knows.

“Where does she live?” I ask, pulling my phone out so I can plug the address into a maps app.

This makes Lexi smile. I’m tired of all her knowing smiles. It’s like she knows too much. Which maybe she does, depending on how far she got into the security footage.