And that’s what I did. By the time I put the last few dishes in the industrial dishwasher sometime near two in the morning, I was practically sleeping on my feet. Tomorrow was going to be hell. But today was so worth it.
I was even in a good enough mood to text Wyatt when I got home. Today was a good day. Thanks for letting me have it off.
His reply came two minutes later. It would have been better had you brought me tacos.
Better for me or for you? I asked, curling up under my heavy blankets as a shiver spiraled through my sleepy body.
For both of us. When we’re together it’s always better for both of us.
There’s always tomorrow, I told him.
Good. I missed you today, Kaya.
My response was quick and familiar. Good.
I found the heart flutter and soft smile that had been missing with Will English. They had been waiting for Wyatt.
Chapter Thirteen
My phone buzzed in my pocket, a reminder that I still had it. I was in the middle of Monday afternoon prep, and already hot and irritated.
Hot in the literal sense of the word.
Not hot and bothered because of the way Wyatt kept staring at me across the kitchen. That was more irritating than sexy.
Okay, lie. It was sexy. Super sexy. And only vaguely irritating.
But he was acting like we weren’t surrounded by my coworkers and his staff and that he could do whatever he wanted without repercussion.
I supposed that was how he did everything. That was how I’d always known him. But now that all that bad boy rebellion was directed at me, I didn’t know what to do with it.
The paranoid part of me wondered if he knew about Sarita and this was his way of sabotaging me. I wouldn’t put it past him.
The smitten girl inside me couldn’t get enough of him and the way his eyes darkened every time he looked my way.
The buzzing stopped, but started again almost immediately. I pulled my phone from my pocket, worrying that maybe it was something important.
The phone call was my parents.
I was on the fence if the reason they were trying to reach me was important or not. We hadn’t spoken in a week. The last time I’d answered, my mom had tried to convince me to take the freshly opened cook position at their local diner. She’d tried to sell me on it by dangling how close I’d be to home, how nice the hours were because even though I’d have to start work at five in the morning, I could be off by one. But the kicker was that Nolan stopped by there every morning for his cup of coffee on his way to work. She’d been unfairly disappointed when I turned her down on the grounds that I was a night owl.
“You could change who you are for an opportunity like this,” she’d snapped. “Something like this doesn’t come around too often, Kaya Camille. You need to get your priorities in order.”
I’d chosen not to remind her that positions like that didn’t come around often because there was only one diner cook position in all of Hamilton and the last guy had worked the shift until he’d died of a heart attack two weeks ago. I also carefully danced around the priorities comment.
I had mine in order. And mine didn’t include Hamilton or giving up on my executive chef dream. It most certainly didn’t include moving home to marry the high school football coach and have all his babies in an attempt to keep the town’s population from dipping.
I wanted babies, don’t get me wrong. I also wanted a career that set my soul on fire and a husband that made my toes curl. I dreamed of a legacy. A balance of both work and family that screamed into this great big world that Kaya Swift had tried her absolute hardest to make the very best of her one, little life.
I wanted the entire package. And maybe that wasn’t possible. But moving back to Hamilton was about ten thousand steps in the wrong direction. More importantly, it wasn’t going to happen. I wished my parents would figure that out, so we could stop fighting over it.
Given how things ended last week though, I decided I better take the call. I answered and shouted a quick, “Hold on!” into the speaker before slipping outdoors. The days were getting hotter and hotter as summer approached. I squinted into the blinding light, enjoying the way the sun immediately began to bake my exposed arms and face. The fragrant breeze chased the sensation, washing over me with the scent of flowering trees.
It wasn’t exactly quiet outside. The bustle of downtown Durham buzzed and zoomed and occasionally honked. Traffic and pedestrians and the busy life of businesses booming in the plaza sang all around me. But the space was larger, more stretched out unlike the deafening cacophony of inside the kitchen.
Not that I minded the sound. It was like the soundtrack to my life. The clanging of metal together as pots and pans were moved around. The thwacking of knives chopping, julienning, mincing. Water boiling. Sauces simmering. Music playing somewhere. Voices shouting and laughing, ordering things to be moved or stirred. It was our own brand of symphony. This was the warm up, the sound of a hundred instruments preparing for the performance.
“Mom?” I asked the quiet on the other end of the phone. “Sorry, I’m at work.”
“Kaya,” she sighed. “You’re at work already? Don’t you have to work late?”
“Yes,” I replied patiently. “These are my hours.”
She sighed again. “That job is going to turn your hair gray.”
I tugged on a faded pink curl. My hair might already be gray. It was impossible to tell after years of dying it whatever fun color of the rainbow I was in the mood for. And my hairstylist was a genius, a true color artist. Unless I specifically asked for gray, she’d never let my hair be anything but the color we decided on.
“I’ve got a girl, Mom.” I dodged her. “She won’t let that happen.”
She mumbled something that sounded like, “Thank God.” I smiled at my shoes. My mom was meticulous about her looks and public persona. Growing up, she’d always say to my sisters and me, “Girls, there are only three women in the world you should trust enough not to let you down. Your mama, your stylist, and your manicurist.”
Her advice had stuck. I might dye my hair the craziest shades I could think of, but my hairstylist, Veronica, was a super star.
And don’t even get me started on Tina, my nail tech. She could work legit miracles on the fingernails I destroyed on a nightly basis.
My mama, however, was a different story.
“What’s up?” I asked when she’d been quiet for what I felt was long enough.
“How are you?”
I licked dry lips and talked myself into relaxing. It was kind of her to ask, but the truth was harrowing. I was exhausted to my bones. My feet hurt. My back hurt. I wanted a four-hour nap. But I wanted Sarita more. As a consequence, this was my life for the foreseeable future and I was okay with that. “I’m good,” I lied. “Work is busy.”
“You’re always busy.” This was always her complaint. “Work is always like that for you.”
“It is,” I answered. “How are you? How’s Daddy?”
“Oh, you know us,” she tittered. “We can’t complain.”
“Did you plant your garden?”
“I haven’t yet. Your daddy is going to get me what I need this weekend. Although, you know I’m not any good at it. I’d love it if you came home and did it for me. We’re going to start it on Friday.”
I dropped my head back and blinked up at the bright sky. She knew I couldn’t get away this weekend—exactly why she’d asked. She wanted me to feel guilty.
“Work is tough right now, Mom. I can’t get away anytime soon.”
She made a sound in the back of her throat. “Do you think it would be possible for you to take a break from it for at least a few days?”
My body immediately bristled, readying for a fight. I was afraid to ask her why. With my luck, she’d probably arranged my wedding to Nolan and was giving me a courtesy call to inform me of where to show up and what to do.
Keeping my tone neutral, I asked, “Why? What’s
going on?”
“Nothing life changing,” she said quickly, helping me relax a teeny bit. “Your dad and I want to come visit you. It’s been too long since we’ve spent time together. And since we can’t get you to visit us for some silly reason, we thought we’d come to you.”
“Oh.”
“But we don’t want to get out there only for you to ignore us and work the whole time. Do you have vacation days or something? Can we get time with our eldest daughter before we die? Or should we say goodbye now? I can leave funeral instructions with the preacher if you’d rather. You won’t have to be bothered with the details. I know how much you hate to be inconvenienced.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at my mom’s sharp tongue. I’d stopped wondering where I got my short-temper a long time ago. But with her it was impossible to tell if she was joking or not. Her voice never sounded sarcastic or teasing. And her expression never ever gave anything away. But surely that was a joke, right?
She couldn’t be serious about wanting to spend time with me before she died… right? Or quite possibly this was a new low. Even for her. She was probably trying to lure me back home with death threats.
It was kind of working. I didn’t want my parents to feel like I didn’t love them or want to spend time with them. I did. Of course I did.
But I also had a demanding job. And there was always that off chance of the zombie apocalypse starting while I was visiting them at home…making it impossible to leave…so I’d be stuck fighting zombies for the rest of my life in the same town I swore I would never live in again. Legit reasons for never going back there.
“Mom, I’d love it if you and Dad came to visit me.” I was also kind of dreading it. But this was always how it was with my parents. There was always equal shares of love and trepidation. “When are you thinking?”
“Next weekend,” she said quickly, the tone of her voice changing just slightly. She sounded happier… softer. “Is that enough time for you to get one or two days off?”
“I already have Sunday off,” I assured her, even though I wanted to kick myself for offering her one of Sarita’s days. I knew Vera would understand, but I didn’t know if I would. I wanted to work at Sarita again, couldn’t wait for it. No matter what job Vera had waiting for me, and let’s get real, it could get worse before it ever got better. She could make me fill in the exterminator position, for example, to catch cockroaches by hand. She could send me rat hunting and tell me not to bother coming back until I’d skewered them all.
Just kidding, from what I understood the rodent and bug problem was mostly under control by now. Thank God. Still, there were plenty of jobs that I dreaded.
And for some reason, I trusted Vera to know that whatever she had waiting for me was part of this growing and maturing business. In the long run, it would benefit me. And hopefully, Sarita. That was all I needed.
Bring on the proverbial cockroaches.
Kind of.
If I absolutely had no other choice and my future depended on it.
“Your dad has a doctor’s appointment on Monday afternoon, so we’ll leave that morning. We’d like to see you while we’re there.”
“Mom, I told you I have Sunday off.” She didn’t say anything, but I could feel her judgment through the phone. “And I’ll see what I can do about Saturday.”
“That’s all we ask, darlin’.”
I glanced at the door and knew Wyatt would have something to say about it. He struggled to give me Sundays off on a regular basis and that was my actual day off.
“When can I expect you?”
“We’ll come up Friday night and entertain ourselves. That way we have all day Saturday together.”
It wouldn’t be the worst thing to entertain my parents for the weekend, right? I did love them. And I enjoyed spending time with them when they weren’t harping on me to move back home.
Even if I wasn’t their favorite, they were as devoted as possible to me. My family had always been close, maybe too close. We were always in each other’s business. Always overstepping boundaries and butting in when we shouldn’t. That was why they could never let me go completely. They were used to being in the middle of my life. They were used to knowing and caring about every single little thing that went on with me. And they wanted to keep it that way.
It was sweet. But also suffocating. And the reason I’d fled Hamilton to begin with. At least one of the reasons.
Mom and I said goodbye and I clicked off my phone. Stepping back into the building, I braced myself against the humid air that enveloped me immediately. It was a different kind of stifling. It somehow wrapped around my body, clenched my lungs with two fists, pulled sweat from my pores and infused every inch of me with its heaviness. And still, it felt like freedom.
This was the familiar feel of the kitchen.
This was the siren call that would not let me go.
My parents’ brand of smothering was not like this at all. Their hold on me was like a wet pillow over my face sometimes. Cooking was the opposite—it gave me breath.
My parents were codependent. Lilou and I were happily independent side by side.
I tucked my phone away in my purse and prepared myself for dinner service.
“Hey, are you going to work or stand outside all afternoon?”
I whirled around to find Wyatt standing behind me, hands planted on his hips, growly expression on his stupidly handsome face. I thought back to Will and had to smile. He was cute, but he wasn’t my type. If I had a type, one that I was willing to seek out and try to date, it was Wyatt. From edgy haircut to tattoos running the length of his body to his scuffed black motorcycle boots, he was the man I would design for myself.
“Stalk much?” I asked him, raising an eyebrow so he knew I wasn’t impressed with his bullish behavior. “I swear every time I step outside you get in my business.”
He swayed into me, his hand landing on the wall beside my head. “You were in the middle of prep,” he reminded me. “It’s my job to make sure we’re service ready.”
I desperately tried to suppress a smile. “You don’t have to worry about a thing, chef. I’m definitely service ready.”
His eyes flared with heat and his expression softened. Even still he leaned closer. “Seriously, everything okay?”
I should have pushed him away. He was crowding me, covering my body with his heat and scent, forcing a frustrating desire to touch him. But I didn’t. I was used to fire. I worked with it. I used it to create, to cook, to show off my skills. I knew how to handle it.
Instead of backing away from him, I let my finger run down his sternum, enjoying the way his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “It was my mom. My parents are coming to visit next weekend.” Lifting my gaze, I met his and pretended to have more courage than I felt. “I need next Saturday off.”
Half his mouth kicked into a smile. “Is that why you’re playing nice? You want something from me?”
“Need something,” I whispered. “I need it from you.”
He didn’t say anything for a few moments. His eyes searched mine, looking for something I didn’t know how to give him. Or hide from him. He struggled to swallow again, and my breathing picked up in response.
Who was playing with who now?
“Saturday’s a big night. I don’t think I can spare you.”
“My parents don’t visit that often,” I returned, settling my hand against his breastbone so I could feel the hammering of his heart. I was mesmerized by the whole thing. My eyes were glued to my hand as it rested against his black t-shirt.
It looked tiny against his broad chest—delicate, dainty. He wasn’t a bulky man, but his entire body seemed corded with long, slender muscles. He was a force of nature. A priceless marble statue. And yet the racing of his heart told me that he was also, somehow, breakable.
“Please,” I whispered, hoping that was all he was waiting on.
“Have coffee with me.”
I tore my eyes from his body and glued
them to his face. “What?” In my head the word was a screech, a surprised yelp. But in reality, it left my mouth on a whisper.
“Have coffee with me,” he repeated. “And you can have Saturday off.”
“Are you blackmailing me to go on a date with you?”
“Who said anything about a date? It’s coffee.”
“I haven’t gone on a d—” I cleared my throat and started that sentence over. “I haven’t gone out for coffee in a long time.”
The other half of his mouth joined the first in an amused smile. “Does that make it a policy for you now? You’re anti-coffee?”
“I’m not anti-coffee. I’m definitely pro-coffee. I just usually drink it alone.”
“That’s cool,” he laughed. “I usually drink it alone too.”
I blinked at him.
He shuffled back a few steps to put some distance between us. “One time we can do it together. It’s not a big deal.”
My eyebrows scrunched together of their own volition. “It’s kind of a big deal.”
He shook his head. “How about tomorrow?”
“You’re asking for payment way in advance.”
He shrugged. “I’m making sure you don’t have any opportunity to renege on your part of the deal.”
I rubbed my temples with my forefingers. “Tomorrow’s Tuesday.”
“And?” His smile was still in place. He knew exactly what day it was.
“Don’t you go to the Morning Market on Tuesday?”
“Oh, right,” he said. “We can meet there. The coffee’s good.”
“You’ve lost your damn mind.”
His smile brightened. “Maybe.” Then he turned around and called over his shoulder, “Now get back to work before I fire you.”
Even after all that flirty banter… even after a scheduled date… I still believed he would fire me.
That made me the dumbest person in the world for being secretly excited about having coffee with him at the farmer’s market tomorrow morning.
Chapter Fourteen
He’d texted last night and told me to meet him at seven this morning. My eyes were barely open this early. The sun was barely awake. It felt like neither of us wanted to be here, yet… here we were. Doing our part to give Wyatt what he wanted.