Officer Hawthorn stood in her restaurant.
Kiara wore her most practiced smile as she approached him, menu in hand. Riva couldn’t hear their conversation over her blood thrumming in her ears, but she could decipher it well enough based on the way he looked around, then the way Kiara extended her arm.
She’d seated him in Riva’s section. A two-top, in the corner. He always sat with his back to the wall. Riva remembered that well enough from six years earlier. The table gave him a view of all entrances and doors, and the parking lot.
“Blaze on table fourteen,” Kiara said to Riva, using the kitchen’s slang for a hot customer.
Riva stifled a hysterical laugh. Ian Hawthorn was a blaze in every sense of the word, hot, and so dangerous she should turn and run. She could ask someone else to take the table. It wasn’t a practice she encouraged, as it led to confusion in the restaurant, and there was no advantage to it for the kids. All tips were pooled and split among the kitchen staff and servers at the end of the night. They worked for each other, not just for themselves.
Worse, if she asked another server to take the table, the kids would wonder why. In milliseconds, they’d peg Hawthorn for a cop and start asking questions that would lead them to her past, to the mistakes she’d made, to the girl she’d left behind. Right now her goal was to serve him and get him out of the restaurant before anything happened to jeopardize the life she’d built.
Besides, it had to happen sometime, meeting him again. She’d been dreading this for the last six years. Might as well get it over with, so she could move on. He was her past; the Oasis was her future.
Shoulders squared, she took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then plucked her notebook from her apron as she walked to the table. “Welcome to the Oasis. My name’s Riva and I’ll be taking care of you tonight.”
The look on his face when she started talking was priceless, almost worth what it cost her to walk across the floor and talk to him. Eight years earlier, Officer Ian Hawthorn had been all cop, lacking a sense of humor or a personality. His robotlike personality scared her, the implacability of it, the way he assessed situations, events, people, summed them up, then discarded them or used them, however best suited him. But when he paused in the act of lifting open the flap on his laptop bag and looked at her face, his jaw literally dropped open.
Priceless.
Then his gaze skimmed her from her ponytail to the tips of her clogs. She knew how it looked, wearing the same uniform as the other servers, black pants and blouse buttoned to her collarbone, her makeup subdued to the point of pale and nondescript. In every way she was conscious of setting an example for the kids from the ESCC. His reaction time, always quick, hadn’t dulled. A split second to look her over, the sharp flick of his gaze striking sparks she felt from her earlobes to her nipples to deep in her belly. That’s what it had been like, his gaze flint against the tinder of her young, impetuous desire.
Then he shut his mouth, and the laptop bag. “Hi, Riva.”
She ignored that. “Can I get you something to drink while you look at the menu? We have craft beers from several of the local breweries.”
He looked at the menu, then back at her. “Water. Thanks.”
Her skin crawled as she spun on her heel and walked away. The look in his eyes before he adopted the all-too-familiar expressionless demeanor had been shock, then pity. When she’d met him she’d been a college student. Now, to his eyes, she was a waitress. She felt nineteen years old again, running through every single thing she said to Ian, every look, every shift of her body, frantically trying to reassure herself she hadn’t given anything away.
I’ll be taking care of you today. It sounded like an innuendo. God knew she’d thrown enough of them at him, desperate, angry, humiliated, pushing back the only way she could. He’d held all the cards, and she’d hated him for it.
“It was your fault,” she muttered as she poured ice water into a glass. “You were the stupid one. He just did his job.”
She snagged a warm bread basket from the kitchen. “We still have the salmon?”
“Got plenty,” Isaiah called from the stove.
When she came back out, Hawthorn was staring at his laptop screen. She set the bread basket on the table. “Are you waiting for someone?” He had to be waiting for someone.
“No. Just me.”