Zen, Willa, and Cedar all stare at us from the doorway to the dining room.
I’m still standing too close. I’m still gripping her arm.
I’m so close, when she breathes, her chest brushes my abdomen.
I need to step back.
But I don’t want to.
I don’t want to let go. Not when my brain is still full of images of her sprawled on the floor bleeding out from a head wound and adrenaline is sending my heart into overdrive and putting me at risk of getting my blood pressure into that zone that my doctor told me to avoid.
And especially not when I’m touching her skin with my bare hand, and she’s radiating warmth and her breath is coming more rapidly and her eyes are going dark, and I know she feels this too.
I don’t want to be attracted to this woman. I don’t want to feel sympathy toward her. I don’t want to fantasize about the noises she makes when I’m buried up to my balls inside of her and I don’t want to remember how good it felt to make her laugh when she was so sad in Hawaii, or how many times I’ve thought of her since I left the islands.
I don’t.
But I can’t let go.
It feels too damn good to hold on to her no matter how much I logically know this is a bad, bad idea.
“Back, boss-man,” she says. “Like I told my dog, I’m fine.”
She delivers it with a smile, but there’s a bite in her narrowing gaze.
I drop her arm like it’s on fire and step back, nearly tripping over the dog again.
Zen’s amused, which I only know because I know them well enough to spot the subtle smirk barely tipping up their mouth on one side as they stand in the doorway watching me.
The two other crew members watching us look mildly horrified.
“Sabrina,” Willa says. “You should’ve asked for help.”
Sabrina turns a grin on her as if she’s completely immune to being near me.
She probably is.
This is a me problem.
“Wasn’t much time between falling and catching myself,” Sabrina says.
“To put the higher dishes away,” the woman chides.
“You shouldn’t be on kitchen duty at all,” Cedar says. He’s a tall, slender, younger man in a different Bean & Nugget apron, and I don’t miss the not-so-subtle side-eye aimed at me.
Like he thinks I’m the one who’s keeping her in here.
“I like kitchen duty,” she tells him. “Reminds me of when I was little and Grandma was running this place. Jitter. Sit.”
The dog leans sideways against me. He’s so big, his body rests against me mid-thigh, and he has no hesitation in pressing me away from Sabrina while he grins a happy doggy grin at me.
Being this near to a dog again is opening other old wounds.
I’m just off-balance enough now that being around another dog fucking hurts today.
This dog?
He belongs to Sabrina, and therefore, he’s as off-limits as she is.
Self-preservation says he has to be.
It’s not safe to like people who’ve already let you down, and it’s even less safe to like people who have made it clear they want the opposite of what you do.
“The dog has to go,” I tell Sabrina. “We can’t have it in the kitchen.”
It. That might be too far even for Super Vengeance Man.
But Sabrina doesn’t blink at my attitude or my order. “Great! You can tell Shirlene when she gets here. She’s the health inspector, by the way. You met her briefly yesterday, but you met so many people, I don’t know if you remember which one she was. She asked me to bring him in today because she misses him since she moved in with her boyfriend. You’re living in her old townhouse. First guest, actually, since she converted it into a vacation rental. I don’t think she mentioned that part.”
I’m momentarily speechless.
But only momentarily. “Don’t you all have work to do?”
Willa eyes me.
Cedar eyes me.
Zen mouths something that looks like they know.
Know what?
That Sabrina and I slept together? That I can’t convince myself to not like her? That I adore her damn dog?
While I’m still puzzling that out, all three of them head back to the dining room.
“Get your dog off me,” I tell Sabrina.
She grins.
She grins.
And it has that damn sparkle to it. “Sorry. He licked you. That means you’re his now. It’s the rules. If you don’t like it, I believe the mayor’s coming in for a late lunch with Shirlene. You can see if she can get that rule wiped off the city books.”