I should tell my dog to go back to the kitchen, but my tongue isn’t working right.
And then the full impact of what’s going on here hits me.
My hot Hawaiian one-night stand is my new boss.
Whom I ghosted.
Hardcore.
I am so fucked.
“Am I fired?” I whisper as a giant black hole opens in my chest and sucks at my hammering heart and my topsy-turvy stomach.
His eyes flick toward me, still flat, still unamused.
“And how would that look?” he says sardonically.
Oh, god.
It would look like he fired a woman he slept with for his first official action as the new boss.
I should quit.
But those three little words make me want to throw up. Cold sweat trickles between my shoulder blades. My heart cramps. And heat gathers behind my eyeballs.
I don’t cry.
I know the theory that it’s okay to cry, but I don’t do it. It’s not in my nature to let people see me upset.
I’ve seen too many people put their guard down and get hurt worse by letting someone in when they’re vulnerable. Overall, I think people are good. We’re all doing our best.
But that doesn’t mean it’s safe to just cry in front of anyone.
“I wouldn’t hold it against you,” I force out. “But you should know I was born here. My mom’s water broke and she delivered me in the kitchen because I came so fast, there wasn’t time to get us to the hospital. I’ve basically lived in this café my entire life, and it means the absolute world to me. I’m a good employee. I swear.”
“I’m sure you get ice very well.”
I wince. The world is spinning with the wrongness of all of this. Why was he in Hawaii? How is he here now? How did Chandler know him? How was he so kind and funny and sexy in Hawaii while he’s so—so—so cranky here?
Yep.
There’s spinning.
Spinning in the room, spinning in my head, and no amount of gripping the armrests and pressing my feet into the floor can stop it.
Jitter flops his head while he stays splayed on his back, looking between me and Mr. Cartwright—Duke—like this is a casual tennis match instead of something making my head pound and my stomach sink and my pulse skitter erratically.
“I didn’t think—” I start, but he cuts me off.
“That I’d worry when you didn’t come back?”
“I left a note.”
“With the staff member you sent in thirty minutes later who got a full-frontal view and an inappropriate proposition when I thought you were finally back and pretending to be housekeeping?” he deadpans.
Oh, fuck me. “I had to leave. And I thought you’d follow me.”
“Yes, ghosting instead of saying I have to go and I need you to not be a creeper is quite the good deed.”
“You were not supposed to be my new boss.” This is not the argument I should be making, but I left a note.
“And you weren’t supposed to be Chandler Sullivan’s cousin.”
There’s a chill in his voice when he says Chandler’s name that I need to pay attention to, but that’s for later. “I was going viral. As a minor secondary character, but I was still going viral. I can’t believe you didn’t know who I was.”
“I bought your family’s café. How do I know you didn’t know who I was?”
Jitter whimpers.
I want to whimper too, but everything is backward and upside down and all of the dread I’ve been ignoring and suppressing for the past nine days is roaring back like a boulder falling off a cliff on a trajectory to steamroll my life. “If I’d known Chandler was in talks to sell the café, I would’ve found a way to buy it myself.”
He stares at me.
I stare back, and if he thinks he can win a staring contest with me, he can think again.
“This isn’t exactly a hair salon, is it, though?” he says.
And that boulder steamrolling my life turns to ice.
I think he just called me a liar and reminded me that I told him all of the secrets about everyone I knew in one breath.
This isn’t the man I slept with in Hawaii who’s lingered in my thoughts way more often than I’m comfortable with any man lingering.
He’s far more terrifying.
And I am absolutely fucked.
5
Grey
It’s remarkable how quickly your opinion of someone can change.
In Hawaii, it was thirty minutes from thinking I’d found someone worth knowing better to realizing she’d ghosted me—lesson learned, again—and only a few hours after that when I discovered my Duchess had been a bridesmaid in Chandler Sullivan’s wedding. Once I turned my phone back on to a message from Zen—isn’t this the dude whose café you just bought?—and I saw that viral video, everything changed.