“Yeah. You know, you’re my husband, blah blah blah, but also you’re not, blah blah blah.” Sniffing, she gasped and suddenly tilted her head back. “I’m going to sneeze. Okay. Bye.” She slammed the door shut, leaving me staring after her, confused.
I crossed the room and opened the door, listening to her running up the stairs and then hearing another door slam shut.
I walked back to my desk with controlled steps and took my seat. The email was still open, waiting for me to send a response. I was feeling much better than I did just five minutes before. My mind consumed with Rose, it took me a while to gather myself enough to form one simple sentence and press send.
You even think of threatening me again, I’ll turn your sorry excuse of a life into a living hell, Joshua.
Chapter Sixteen
Rose
It was caramel week, and Owen had baked four different caramel treats while I had tackled our basics—sandwiches, brownies, and berry muffins. Even our basics tended to change day by day since we were such a new place, but in a month or so we’d have a more set menu after we got to know our customers and learned what they enjoyed more.
On Monday, I had taken my usual ride with Raymond at five and had joined Owen in the kitchen as soon as I got in. Sally had come in an hour after me, earlier than her usual time. The mystery was solved when she started trying her best to flirt with a straight-faced Owen.
“You think you could teach me how to make this salted caramel banana bread? It’s really good.”
Owen just grunted and kept working the dough in his hands. He was making cinnamon buns, my absolute favorite.
Sally gave me a wide-eyed look and rolled her eyes. She was relentless. Resting her elbows on the marble workspace that dominated the center of the kitchen, she pushed him some more.
“I’ll cook you something. What’s your favorite food? I can’t bake to save my life, but I can cook.”
“If you can’t bake, what makes you think you’ll be able to make banana bread?” Owen asked, his eyes and hands busy, busy, busy.
Sally just slid a little closer to him. “You can teach me. I’m sure if you teach me, I’ll get the hang of it, and from what I understand, banana bread isn’t that hard to make.”
“Can you back off a little? You’re gonna be covered in flour if you come any closer.”
Barely holding back my burst of laughter before I attracted Owen’s fierce frown, I turned away from the doorway and focused on stacking up the sandwiches under the glass dome. Owen didn’t like anyone messing with his routine. He barely tolerated me working alongside him for a few hours in the mornings, so even though he sounded rude, it was just his way, not to mention he was also a very private person.
“Would you like me to make you coffee?” I heard Sally push on, ignoring his rudeness.
As Owen grunted a nonverbal response that didn’t quite reach my ears, I couldn’t help but lean back to take a peek into the kitchen. Sally had been dismissed to her original starting point right across from him.
“How about cinnamon buns then?” Her voice was still upbeat and positive.
“What about them?”
“Can you teach me how to make cinnamon buns? It looks like a lot of fun, all the rolling and cinnamon stuff.”
“Stuff… Don’t you have work to do at the front? It’s almost opening time.”
I bit down on my lip and got back to my own work. Owen was somewhat like Jack— essentially, not a fan of using a lot of words. Speaking of Jack…I was still experiencing the effects of my dream and then everything that had happened after it. I wasn’t exactly sure what I’d been thinking when I’d decided to work on our kissing technique, but at the time, trying to see if what I had felt at the charity event was a one-time thing or not seemed like a good idea. Maybe my dream was the driving force behind me having the bravery to face him, but I couldn’t complain. The second kiss was just as good as the first one, maybe even better because we’d been all alone in his study, away from all the curious eyes. It was still temporary, this thing between us, but the dream had shifted something inside me, I felt it with every fiber of my being.
For a second there, I thought I had felt his erection against my stomach when he grasped the back of my shirt and pulled me in closer. I had encountered them in the wild before. I wasn’t imagining that. I might have imagined—because of the damn dream—that he was really into the kiss as well, but I hadn’t conjured up that erection in my mind.
He was a great kisser; there was no arguing with that. He was just a little rough and completely consuming, just as I had imagined he would be, and I thought I had a completely different stance about PDA after the weekend. I didn’t think he’d fall for the ‘practice kiss’ again, so I was going to have to make the kissing in public thing…well, a thing for us—only to make our marriage more believable, not for myself or anything.
Then again, who was I kidding? Everything about Jack was starting to become too appealing for me. I was starting look forward to seeing his stony and sometimes aloof expression at the end of the day…every day. I chatted more than him, but he was talking, too, much more than he had in the beginning. I hardly did the ‘talking to myself as Jack’ thing anymore, and when I did, it was for the fun of seeing his troubled expression as if he was considering his life choices of ending up in a fake marriage with me. I wasn’t making fun of him or anything even remotely close to that. I just enjoyed the way he glowered at me a little too much.
It was the highlight of my day.
And that smile…gosh, he had finally smiled, and it had absolutely been worth the wait to see his face transform. You could fall in love with that face, with that smile, even if the package came with the frown and the prickly personality. I just couldn’t decide which expression I preferred more on him, because I thought you could easily fall for that stony, grumpy expression just as hard. Then again, the way I was feeling after that dream, my unexpected attraction to Jack had tripled overnight. Clearly I couldn’t be trusted to be around him until the effects wore off.
“What are you smiling at? That was a complete disaster,” Sally mumbled as she sidled up next to me, licking her fingers, presumably after snacking on sticky banana bread.
I stopped daydreaming about Jack and tried to focus on Sally. She wasn’t exactly pouting, but she was getting there.
“I didn’t realize you were interested in him,” I replied, ignoring her question.
She reached for a mint from a small bowl next to the cash register, unfolded the wrapper, and popped it in her mouth.
“I can see how it might be a little too late to ask after what you just witnessed, but do you have a rule against employees dating?”
Stacking the last turkey sandwich, I put the glass dome back in its place and turned to Sally, thinking about my answer for a moment. “I mean…you two are my only employees, obviously, so I’ve never even thought about it. You’re into him that much? I thought maybe you were just messing with him.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because it’s fun to get him all riled up?”
Sometimes I thought it was fun to rile Jack up.