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“I’ll tally everything up at the end of the night and send an invoice along with the delivery.”
“Good.” He squinted at her left hand. But of course the bareness wouldn’t mean a whole helluva lot. He didn’t know a chef or a baker to wear rings while they were working. “What time do you get off?”
Her brows nearly disappeared into her hairline. “Excuse me?”
“Tonight. What time will you be free?”
Her head tilted slightly as if she still didn’t understand his question. “And you want to know this information because…”
He grinned at her. “Because I’d like to thank you properly.”
And because I’d like to find out if your mouth tastes as sweet as it looks.
“The words are enough.”
“You’re going to make me spell it out for you, aren’t you?”
“I know how to spell ‘thank-you.”’
Not the way he had in mind. “I’d like to see you again.”
“At midnight?” she said slowly.
“If that’s the time you finish up.”
“Oh.” She stared at him for a long moment, then what he was saying appeared to dawn on her. “Oh! You mean…”
“Yes, I mean.”
Her gaze, which had been plastered to his face, moved everywhere but to his face. “I, um, don’t think that’s such a good idea.” She used the corner of her apron that didn’t have dough on it to wipe down the counter around the boxes.
“Why not?”
“Why, because—” she furtively looked at him, then back at the counter “—because I finish up late tonight because of the order you gave me and another order I need to have ready by tomorrow morning, and…and…”
“And.”
“Well, I don’t have time.”
“Mmm. Okay, tomorrow night then.”
She stared at him as if he’d lost his marbles. “Tomorrow’s Saturday.”
“Yes, it is.”
“You don’t have plans?”
He chuckled. “Nothing that can’t be changed or cancelled.”
“So you can go out with me…”
He shrugged. “Or we could stay in…”
“Stay in where?” She quickly lifted her hand. “Don’t answer that.”
“Tell you what,” he said, sliding a business card out of his front pocket. “Do you have a pen?” She looked around the counter then slid one out of her apron pocket. “I’m going to give you my private cell phone number, my home phone number, and, of course, the card has the two numbers to the restaurant on it along with the fax.” He handed her the card. “Call me when you’ve made a decision.”
“Even if it’s no?”
“Especially if it’s no.”
She made a face that made her look all the more attractive.
“You know, so I have a chance to change your mind.”
She pursed her lips slightly as she stared down at the front of the card, then turned it over to look at the back.
The man who had been typing away on a laptop in the corner neared him. “Excuse me,” he mumbled under his breath.
Ben’s attention fully on Reilly, he moved to let the guy pass, but apparently picked the wrong direction because the guy plowed into him, spilling coffee all over the front of his shirt.
“Oh, sorry, man,” the guy said.
Ben looked at him, wondering why he didn’t look very sorry.
“No problem.”
Reilly couldn’t hide her smile as she handed him a handful of napkins. Ben began wiping at the mess, making sure his assailant had moved out of striking distance before continuing his conversation.
“Actually, if you don’t mind, I’d like to bring you dinner tonight,” he said to Reilly.
“Tonight?”
“Yes, you know, by way of that proper thank-you I mentioned.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“I think it is.” He squinted at her. “Did you say midnight?”
“Yes. I mean, no!” Her cheeks turned the most delicious shade of pink. “I mean, that’s really not necessary. Really, it isn’t.”
He hiked a brow. “Are you passing on a free dinner from one of the most popular restaurants in town?”
“Yes. I mean, no!” She ran her fingers through her bangs, then rested the heel of her hand against her forehead. “What I’m trying to say is that I don’t think it would be a very good idea. I’ll be exhausted and I probably won’t be very good company….”
“I meant I’d have one of my staff drop something off on their way home from work.”
“Oh.”
“Unless you’d like me to deliver the meal personally?”
“No!” Her shoulders slumped and she tucked her chin into her chest. Moments later he figured she was either laughing or crying. She looked up at him, her laughter filling his ears. “That didn’t sound very good, did it?”
“Good thing I have a pretty good ego.”
“Big, you mean.”
“Mmm.” He let the noncommital sound hang in the air between them.
“Well,” he said finally. “I’d better get going.”
“Yes, you probably should.”
He stared at her.
She gestured toward the boxes. “Some of this needs to be refrigerated pretty quick.”
“Of course.”
“Of course.”
He picked up the boxes. “Call me.”
“We’ll see.”
“Call me,” he repeated.
“Okay.”
He walked toward the door knowing she probably wouldn’t call. But that didn’t matter. Whatever reason she had for wanting to avoid him didn’t stem from lack of attraction. Because he swore, if he checked, he’d have contact burns from the awareness that had arced between them.
He fully intended to be the one to bring her the food tonight.
And he fully intended for both of them to have dessert….
“DID IT, LIKE, majorly suck to be fat when you were my age?”
Reilly snapped her head up from where she was squeezing sweet dough out of a plastic bag with a star tip into two-inch strips. It was eleven o’clock, she had sent Ben’s order to Benardo’s Hideaway over six hours ago, and still faced another hour or so of cooking for tomorrow’s order.
Add to that her fifteen-year-old niece, Efi, sitting on the clean stainless-steel counter against the wall, swinging her legs and banging the back of her platform shoes against the steel doors asking her bizarre questions, and she saw this as a bad end to a perfectly awful day.
She liked her niece. She really did. She just didn’t think she was up to answering her question right then.
“What?”
Efi shrugged, making her short, spiked hair move not at all. “I was just thinking about the picture Mom has of you on the Wall of Fame and was wondering what it felt like to be so fat.”
“More like Wall of Shame. I don’t know. How does it feel to have your hair match the walls in the front room?”
Efi made a face, lifting her hand to touch her dyed and gelled-within-an-inch-of-its-life pink hair.
Reilly squeezed three strips in quick succession. “And I wasn’t fat fat. I was…pleasantly plump.”
“You were fat.”
“I was a hundred and eighty pounds. That’s pleasantly plump.”
“Is that why they called you Chubby Chuddy?”
“I see my dear sister has been telling stories about me again.” She brushed her hair from her eyes with the back of her hand. “Chubby means pleasantly plump.”
“Chubby means fat.”
She eyed her pretty, usually tactful, too-thin niece. It would take a good five years and at least thirty pounds to grow into her tall frame. She had the physical characteristics of the rest of the Chudowski family. Well, aside from the dark Mediterranean eyes and hair she’d inherited from her father.
As for Reilly, she’d been born with the ultimate fat gene. Her mother told her there was one lucky duck in every Chudowski family. No matter how much she’d dieted, or how little she’d eaten, she’d been much heavier than other girls her age.
Until she’d turned eighteen, consulted a dietician and finally dropped the weight.
“It wasn’t fun,” she told her niece. “What time is your sister picking you up again?”
Efi looked at her watch, completely clueless as to what impact her questioning had. “She knocks off at the seafood restaurant at eleven so she should be here any minute now.”
“Couldn’t be soon enough for me,” Reilly murmured under her breath as she finished with the dough then shook the stiffness out of her hands.
Normally Efi was her favorite out of her seven nieces and nephews. You didn’t have to twist her arm to work. Say the word and she was there and ready, flinching away from nothing, and seeing to everything with a quick, cheery efficiency that made Reilly smile. You had to stop Efi from working, whereas Tina you needed to light a fire under every five minutes to scare her off the phone or get her to put her nail file away.
“I’m sorry, Aunt Rei,” Efi said, pushing from the counter and coming to stand next to her. “Did I hit a sore spot?”
The teen draped her skinny arm over Reilly’s shoulders and gave a squeeze. Reilly briefly leaned into her and smiled. “Not only did you hit it dead-on, you delivered a TKO.”
“So it sucked being…chubby, huh?”
“Yeah,” she said quietly. “It sucked being designated as the class fat girl. The occasional taunts I could handle. The pig noises I could have done without.”
“Pig noises? Oh, how rank.”
Reilly smiled. “Yeah.”
It had been a while since Reilly had thought about that time. Really thought about it. Sure, she’d constantly watched her calories lest she began to regain any of that hard-lost weight. But it had been a good, long while since she’d remembered what it was like to feel uncomfortable in your own skin.
Of course, she also realized that Efi’s question wasn’t all that had brought back the memories. For some reason her awkward exchange with Ben Kane that morning had made her feel like that fat girl all over again. She’d remembered with horror how the captain of the football team had asked her to the prom in her junior year, and she’d gushingly accepted…only to find out later that day that it had all been a cruel joke. On her.
And Ben Kane represented everything that was that football captain. He was tall and handsome and dated all the best girls in class…in the city. What could he possibly want with her? Her love life wasn’t just slow, it was nonexistent. Sure, when she’d first dropped the weight, she’d given her new body a trial run. But the men she’d dated weren’t really worth mentioning and made her rethink the casual sex thing since she wasn’t really getting anything out of it anyway. Especially once she’d explored her body while in the privacy of her own room and turned herself on more than any of the men she’d dated combined.
But Ben…
God, just looking at him made her want to buy new batteries for her vibrator.
