Arriving in record time—a whopping eight minutes from the time I hung up with him—I headed to our usual booth, smiling when I saw my dad’s face.
That smile dropped off the moment I saw the other man in the booth across from him.
“Nice to see you cleaned up,” Zee muttered, eyeing my attire.
I looked down at my black leggings with skulls on them, and at the black shirt that I’d stolen from him the night that I wouldn’t be talking about ever again.
I immediately felt a blush rise over my face.
I hadn’t realized he was going to be there, or I might’ve changed.
At least the shirt, anyway.
“Nice to see that you managed to peel yourself away from all your duties to have breakfast with your father who drives eight hours to come see you,” I shot right back.
Zee narrowed his eyes. “It’s not my fault they go on runs that take them through my neck of the woods at random and expect me to show up when I’m at goddamn work.”
“Children,” Gordon groaned. “Why do we always have to do this?”
I sneered at Zee before scooting into the booth beside my dad.
Dad threw his arm around me and pulled me in tight to his chest.
Having always been a daddy’s girl, I laid my head down on the leather of his vest and closed my eyes, at peace despite the demon of a man sitting directly across from me.
“How’s work going, baby?” Dad asked.
I opened my eyes and my gaze caught on Zee’s. Zee’s father chuckled, having seen the glare.
I curled my lip up at him, too, but answered my father anyway.
“It’s going well. I might have to hire more staff soon if it keeps doing as well as it has been,” I told him. “Turner already threatens to quit once every few days because I have her doing so much.”
“Turner is a pain in the ass,” Zee said. “You need to find someone that doesn’t cause more trouble than she fixes.”
I could see why he’d think that.
Turner was a pain in the ass sometimes.
But, that was because she was misunderstood. People hated her because she came off as a bitch.
Well, she was a bitch. Hell, I was a bitch at times, too.
But Turner had that RBF—resting bitch face—mastered to a fine art. She also didn’t talk to people unless she felt like it, and there were times that I definitely reconsidered having her in the front of the funeral home to work the desk and phones on those rare occasions that she was up there.
Luckily that happened seldom, and I’d never gotten too bad of a complaint about her.
“I like Turner,” I told him. “And she is good at her job. I just need to find someone with more responsibility.”
“I have a suggestion,” Gordon muttered. “Got a buddy that lives in Kilgore. His daughter is in Hostel, Texas right now working at the police station. However, she wants to move back up here to further her degree and get away from her ex.”
“Who is it?” I asked, reaching for the glass of water that’d been placed on the table.
“That’s mine,” Zee said.
I ignored him and took a hefty swallow, causing him to narrow his eyes.
He gritted his teeth and held himself immobile, even though I knew that he’d rather reach forward and smack the glass straight out of my hand.
“Her name is Katy Roberts,” Gordon continued as if his son wasn’t pissed off that I was drinking his water. “She was dating a game warden down there, and things went south. She’s ready to get gone, and she’s looking for a job. She’s overqualified as fuck, though, seeing as she’s almost got her doctorate degree in science or some shit.”
“And she’s moving?” I asked. “Wouldn’t you think she’d like to finish that shit before she moved?”
“The majority of it, from what I understand, is online. She’s got like a single year left of clinical rotations to receive her certifications,” he said. “But, when Luke was talking about it, he made it sound like she had a shit ton on her plate. Might be nice just to have something simple like working phones.”
I thought about that and realized that he was probably right.
“Tell him to give her my number,” I suggested. “Tell her she can call me whenever, unless it’s like three in the morning. I don’t do three in the morning well.”
Zee scoffed.
I narrowed my eyes.
Okay, so I could do three in the morning just fine when Zee was fucking me, but that was seriously the only time I could.
Not that I’d ever bring that up.
Even though Zee didn’t seem to be under the same moral code as I was.
“But you can do four o’clock in the morning just fine?” Zee asked.
I frowned, feeling stupid all of a sudden for thinking that his train of thought strayed toward our one night of whatever the hell it was.