Zen leans between us with a steaming mug of what is definitely Earl Grey tea. My nose doesn’t lie. “Drink, Uncle Grey. There are eggs in the fridge. I’ll make you an omelet.”
Uncle Grey. I’m off gossip, but I need to know their relationship, so this is good.
“Not hungry,” he says.
“Okay, grumpy pants. Did you see this pup—oh. Oh. Well. You’re seeing him now, aren’t you?”
“Jitter.” I lunge for my dog, who’s currently attempting to climb into my new boss’s lap instead of staying in the kitchen where I left him locked up. Because Zen let him out? Or because he pulled a Houdini? Not that it matters. The point is, he’s not a lap dog, but he’s still trying to climb into the boss’s seat. “Down. He’s a puppy. I mean, he’s not a puppy, but he still has a lot of puppy in him and some growing to do. Doggy daycare opens soon, and I—”
I cut myself off with a grunt before the words I was hoping you were a dog person and Jitter would break the ice come out of my mouth.
It clearly worked with Zen.
Jitter pants happily at me as he settles on his haunches in front of the fire.
“Down,” I tell him.
He flops to the floor with an enthusiasm that you can sometimes feel in the floorboards, rolls over so he’s lying across Mr. Cartwright’s feet, and shows us his belly and his manhood.
“He doesn’t do that with customers,” I stammer. “He goes to doggy daycare—”
“So you’ve said,” Mr. Cartwright interrupts.
Something inside my brain hiccups like I’m having déjà vu.
And not because I keep repeating doggy daycare.
There’s something about Mr. Cartwright that feels familiar and wrong.
I swallow the he’s going through a phase where if I’d left him at home, he’d have eaten my dirty laundry excuse that my new boss does not want to hear, and instead, dive back into the script I’ve rehearsed in my head ten thousand times since I found out my cousin sold our family café. “Mr. Cartwright, can I ask why you bought Bean & Nugget? My family is grateful for the problems you’ve solved for my cousin, but we were surprised since we’d never heard of you before.”
He doesn’t answer me right away.
Instead, he stares at me like I’m the world’s largest idiot, which I can see more and more clearly as the lights in the dining room come up.
And as my eyes register what my brain’s been trying to tell me, heat starts at my nape and travels up and over my scalp, down my forehead and nose, and leaves me sweating in my cheeks while my jaw unhinges itself.
Yay, playtime! my vagina cheers.
She’s a little primitive. Definitely not picking up on the vibes he’s throwing down. She’s only remembering what he did in that bed. And against that wall. And in that bathroom.
“Duke?” I choke out.
Oh, no.
Oh, no no no no no.
My brain tries to tell me what’s going on here while simultaneously telling me that this isn’t possible.
It’s him.
His hands.
Large hands.
Long fingers.
The voice.
The déjà vu.
I know him.
I know him.
But unlike the man I knew briefly in Hawaii, this man has no warmth.
Not like he had in Hawaii.
And his eyes—he stares at me with flat, unamused blue eyes and a grumpy scowl lingering on his lips. No dimple. No fun. Not even the slightest hint at that occasional awkward.
I try to shut my mouth and I can’t.
My Hawaiian one-night stand is sitting in the chair where my new boss is supposed to be.
“How do you know about Duke?” Zen asks somewhere behind me.
Wait.
Wait. “Oh my god, you’re not Duke. You’re his twin! Are you the good twin? You can’t be the good twin. He was the good twin. He didn’t tell me he had a twin. But how—why—”
Zen chokes on air.
Duke—or not Duke?—narrows his eyes at me. “Stop talking.”
“You’re…not…Duke’s twin.”
“Not unless he’s twins with a—” Zen starts, but cuts themself off when Mr. Cartwright sends a blistering glare their way.
“Fine, fine, I’ll go make your breakfast,” they say, and they slip into the kitchen.
“What are you doing here?” I blurt, even knowing that if I were Zen, I’d be absolutely listening in to all of this from just out of sight in the kitchen. I should watch what I say.
“I’m investigating my new café.” Duke—Greyson—or Grey?—hunches forward, elbows on his knees, hands dangling between them, while Jitter attempts to roll up his legs.
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.