“No! I’m not going to—”
“I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to be here all day, and I’ll be in tomorrow and the day after that. Nobody’s running off, all right? Even if I decide to open another place, I’m not planning on breaking up the partnership.”
“You promise?” She eased back, swiping a sleeve over her face as she looked up at him. “I promise.”
She was still a mess when she left, but Jamie felt fine. A little too fine, actually. The calm was a welcome change, but letting all that anger out had left a hollow place inside him, like something important had been scooped out.
“It’s fine,” he murmured as he wound the cord around the vacuum. There was no time to finish sweeping the carpet. He hadn’t even taken the chairs off the tables yet.
Jamie raced through the rest of the cleaning, taking down chairs and wiping tables with such speed that sweat trickled down his neck. The thought of half the room being unvacuumed nagged at him. It nibbled at his calm.
There were few things in life he was good at, and the hollow place in his chest was like an echo chamber, reminding him that he’d left this job undone.
Jamie glanced at the doors one last time. If a customer walked in, they’d hardly find it welcoming to be hit by the roar of a vacuum, but there was a crushed pretzel in the far corner that he’d just noticed.
“Shit.” Jamie unwound the cord in record time and made a few frantic passes over the rest of the room. Just before he’d finished, a square of light burst across the floor as the front door open. Jamie flipped the switch and let silence fall over the room. Crap, he’d forgotten to turn on the music.
“Sorry, I’m running a little late today. If—” The rectangle shrunk as the door closed, and he could finally make out the customer as the glare subsided. The words died in Jamie’s throat. “You,” he breathed.
“Hello, Jamie,” Monica Kendall said. A million sparks sizzled through his brain at that moment. Shock. Shame. Anger. And worry. Worry blazed brighter than the others for a moment, and Jamie’s eyes fell to her stomach as he remembered the conversation he’d had with Olivia the other day. If I saw you looking like that a few months from now…
But, no. No, thank God, she was as slim and sleek as ever. The thought came and went with such suddenness that he felt dizzy. He hadn’
t even wanted the briefest connection with her, much less a lifetime. “What are you doing here?” he managed to get out on a rasp.
“I wanted to say hi, see how you’re doing.”
“You can’t be serious.”
The brittle smile slipped for a moment. “I saw your tweet and I was in the area….”
What the fuck was she talking about? He watched her as if she were a scorpion about to strike.
“I wanted to apologize for my brother.”
“For your brother?” he laughed. “Are you kidding me?”
Her eyes flashed with some hard emotion. She was as beautiful as ever, but she’d always had that icy edge. She practically glittered with it. “Jamie, I didn’t mean for that to happen. You have to believe me.”
“I don’t have to believe anything,” he scoffed, unplugging the vacuum and walking it to the small closet next to the bar. When he turned around, she was right there behind him.
“Jamie—”
The door opened again, and two bikers walked in, their clip shoes clicking against the tile. “Hey,” one of the guys said, raising a hand in greeting. “Two IPAs.”
“You got it,” Jamie said in relief, heading for the tap. But Monica didn’t leave. She started to step behind the bar with him, but when he shot her red high heel a look of warning, she moved back behind the line and waited impatiently.
He drew two pints and delivered them to the bikers, but when he tried to ease past Monica again, she grabbed his wrist. “Can we just talk for a minute?”
“The last time I gave you a minute, you took ten hours.” That wasn’t all she’d taken. He would’ve jerked his hand away, but he didn’t want Monica to know how much she affected him.
“I didn’t know—”
“Bullshit,” he said quietly. “You were the one to give him the code. While you were hanging on me, rubbing your tits against my arm, you were watching me enter the code. So don’t tell me you didn’t know.”
“Okay, I knew he wanted to get inside, but I swear, I thought he only wanted information. He said my father needed more data on—”
“Why are you here?”