Javier woke up to the warmth of the sun on his face. He blinked in the early morning light and remembered what had happened the night before. He’d been warm. So fucking warm. Jules had curled herself around him and he’d slept like a baby.
He took a deep breath, loving everything about her scent. She smelled like citrus and sex. Shampoo and…well, him. He’d pretty well marked her the night before and he wasn’t unhappy about that.
After he’d made love to her on the couch, he’d shifted them to the bedroom, candles and all because he’d been serious about being able to see her. He didn’t want to miss a single look on her face. He loved how expressive she was. She gave it all away. Her eyes widened when he sucked on her nipples or slid a finger over her clit. She gasped and shuddered when he curled his long finger up inside her. Jules didn’t hold back, and that was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen.
He rolled over and reached for her. This was how he wanted to start the morning. He would make love to her again and then they would plan the day. He had to meet with Chef, but other than that, he was hers all day long. He could meet with Chef and decide on the line assignments, and then maybe he would take his girl out for lunch and to the movies. Anything she wanted to see.
“Hey, baby,” he started.
“Do you need coffee before you go?”
He sat up because that hadn’t come from the other side of the bed. “What?”
Jules was standing at the end of the bed, a mug in her hand. It was obvious she’d been up for a while since it looked like she’d showered and dressed and done her hair. She wore gym clothes, but they somehow made her look all prim and proper, and that made him want to sex her up again.
Was she nervous? She hadn’t had a relationship since her divorce and it didn’t seem like her marriage had been hot in the sack. It was reasonable for her to be a little shy after a night of super-dirty sex. He needed to put her at ease, let her know it was okay to lounge around in bed with her lover. He gave her a smile. “You’re up early, sweetheart. Why don’t you come back to bed and when we’re through, I’ll make you some breakfast?”
“I already ate,” she said, her tone brisk. She set the coffee on the nightstand. “I wasn’t sure if you used cream and sugar, but they’re both in the kitchen. I folded your clothes and they’re ready for you on the dresser.”
Whoa. What was happening? He took the coffee. “I like my coffee plain. This smells wonderful, but I kind of thought we would spend the morning together.”
“I thought you spent Monday mornings with Chef.”
Ah, that was the problem. She was trying to make things easy on him. That was sweet of her, but he didn’t want easy. “He’ll come by for a few minutes, but he won’t stay for long. He’ll eat breakfast if I have some made, otherwise he’ll head home. He spends Mondays with Grace and the kids after he’s worked out. It’s no big deal.”
“Well, I spend Monday mornings with Lance,” she said with a nod. “And he gets cranky if I’m late.”
Lance? Who the hell was Lance? “You’ve got a date?”
She shrugged. “Sure. If you call PT a date, then I’ve been dating Lance for about six weeks. Then I’ve got a session with my shrink to make sure I’m handling life all right. It’s all part of the lose-a-limb, work-at-Top package. I gotta get going. Busy day. You’ll lock up on your way out?”
Lock up? He stood, going after her. “Jules, I thought we could spend some time together.”
She grabbed her gym bag as she opened the door. “Like I said, busy day. But thank you for last night. I needed it.” She glanced back inside, her eyes going wide. “Jeez, Leones. I told you where your pants were.”
“If I’d taken the time to put my pants on, you would already have been gone.” It wasn’t like she hadn’t seen everything anyway. He stood in the doorway because he was kind of worried if she left she might keep walking. He wasn’t sure what the hell was happening. “We need to talk.”
“Oh, dear.” Mrs. Gleeson was standing next to Jules, holding the leash to her little yappy dog. “Javier, you seem to have lost your clothes.”
Javier grabbed the raincoat Jules had hanging by the door. It managed to cover his junk.
She smiled up at him. “Or perhaps the whole place is going au naturel. I brought up the prospect at the last residents’ meeting but that damn old man on four shut me down. You know clothes really do hide our truest selves. There’s a beautiful community I go to sometimes in Colorado. You should come with me. You would love it there.”
“You should put on some clothes,” Jules insisted. “And there’s nothing to talk about. We’re cool. Now I have to walk Mrs. Gleeson down. Her daughter picks her up on Mondays and they go to lunch.”
“Perhaps Laura can come here this time,” Mrs. Gleeson offered. “After all, there’s a show up here. And you know my Laura is divorced. She needs to start dating.”
“Javier doesn’t date,” Jules explained, starting down the hall. She was really leaving.
What the hell had last night been? He thought about going after her. He could grab his pants. But he stood there staring as she walked down the hall.
“Morning, Chef,” Jules said as she walked past Sean Taggart to get to the elevator.
“Morning, Jules.”
Mrs. Gleeson lingered, watching Chef stride down the hall. He was pretty sure she was watching Taggart’s butt.
Taggart stopped in the middle of the hallway. “I like the look, Javi. But that’s not your apartment.” Chef looked down the hallway where the elevator doors had closed and then back to Javi, one brow raised. “You and Jules?”
Javier couldn’t remember the last time he felt so oddly exposed. Yes, he was standing there with a yellow latex rain slicker covering his willy, but the thing with him and Jules was new and apparently confusing. “The power went out.”
“It apparently didn’t go out of your dick,” Chef said. “Jules got some coffee in there?”
“Yeah.” She’d walked out on him. “She thanked me. What does that mean? She thanked me and told me to put on pants.”
Chef stared at him for a moment. “No woman ever asked you to put on pants before?”
“They usually demand that I take them off.”
“If you want me to talk to you about this, you’re going to have to put on pants.” Chef walked through and immediately found the coffee maker. “So this is seriously the first time you’ve ever had a woman walk out on you after you…you did spend the night, right?”
He grabbed his pants from the bedroom. He shouldn’t talk about this. Sean Taggart was his boss. Sean didn’t need to hear about his damn love life. “I came over because our power went out. I thought she might get scared.”
Taggart had a mug in his hand and he was glancing around Jules’s apartment with curious eyes. “You know she was in the Navy, right? You think a Navy vet gets scared of the dark.”
But she had been. He could remember how soft his whole soul had gotten when he realized she was starting at every clap of thunder. By the time he’d been done, she hadn’t noticed the weather at all. “She lost her hand during a storm, or rather she began the process of losing it. I think the thunder bugs her.”
“So you fucked her calm?”
“Hey, don’t talk about her like that.”
Chef stopped, looking him over. “I didn’t mean any disrespect to Jules, Javi. Trust me. After a day of running after an overactive kid, taking care of a baby, and waiting to find out if her oldest is being deployed, I had to fuck Grace calm.”
Yeah, and he would bet Grace hadn’t told her husband to put on his pants and lock up when he left. “Sorry about that. What’s on the menu for the week?”
Chef took a sip of coffee. “I emailed you the menu. I want to give Drake a shot at taking lead one night. I think Eric is going to lose his sous chef. Lodge is sniffing around. That club of his lost its executive chef. I want to start prepping Drake to move over to Fort Worth. The line chefs over there are good, but they’re too green to take the secondary role. Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?”
Julian Lodge was a rival of Big Tag’s, though Javier also thought they were somewhat friendly. When the two men got in the same room it was a little like two sharks circling, waiting to see if one would bite first or if they would both laugh and trade stories about their kills. It looked like Lodge was about to take a nibble.
The next softball game was going to be a ton of fun. Not that Lodge would play softball, but he would sit in the stands in his perfectly tailored suit and boo Big Tag.
“Of course I want to talk about the menus. It’s my job.” While Chef had been talking, he’d pulled up the menu. “Drake is great with duck. He can take the lead Thursday.”
Chef was grinning. “He should be great with duck with a name like that, but I wasn’t talking about the schedule and assignments. I was talking about what happened with you and Jules.”
He was starting to think the thing with Jules hadn’t gone as well as he’d thought it had, but he didn’t want to burden his boss.
“Javi, who you going to talk to about this?” Chef asked. “Who would you normally talk to? Because you probably should talk about it or you could screw it up. Do you want this woman? I’ll totally back off if this was one more hookup, but the look on your face as she walked away kind of told me it’s not.”
“I would talk to Rafe,” he said quietly, missing his brother more in that moment than he had since the day he realized the brother he’d known was gone and might not come back.
“Can you talk to him?”
Javier shook his head. “No. When he’s sober enough to listen, he’s too bitter to do anything but spout crap about how his wife left him. I have no idea how Sonja held out for as long as she did. The last thing he’s going to want to hear about is how I hooked up with a woman from work.”
“Was that all it was?”
All he had to do was shrug and say yes and Sean would believe him. He would get back to the task at hand. And Javier would still be confused about what had happened. “No. I like her.”
Sean shook his head approvingly. “She’s a likable lady. She’s only been in town for a few weeks and she’s already volunteering to help out her fellow wounded vets. I like a person who throws herself into the community. You know she recently divorced.”
“Not that recently.” He didn’t think she’d been mad in love with her ex.
“Still, I think it takes a while to get over something like that. Have you really honestly never had a woman turn you down?”
“Of course I have. Not lately. Though Kristy ran as fast as she possibly could.”
“I heard you went back to your previous dating style after that didn’t work out.” Sean sat down at the kitchen table.
“Yeah,” he admitted. “I went a little crazy for a week or two after Rafe showed up.”
“You think that Jules didn’t hear about it? Didn’t see the women parading in and out or see you doing the walk of shame?”
“I couldn’t leave Rafe. I had them over here.” He sat down across from Sean, some of the words penetrating his brain. “You think she knew those women were there for sex?”
“Did they look like they were cleaning your apartment?”
In miniskirts and high heels? “Shit. She doesn’t take me seriously. She thanked me.”
A grin split Sean’s face. “You’re lucky she didn’t slip you some cash and ask if you needed referrals.”
The thought made him shudder. “Are you saying she used me for sex?”
“Wow, you sound like a prude for once. This is fun. I don’t get to do this with my younger brothers anymore. They’re all married and settled. My stepsons aren’t even close to needing relationship advice. I didn’t realize how long it’s been since I had to walk some dipshit in my family through how to deal with a woman.”
Javier put a hand on his chest. “Well, I should be your Disneyland then because I don’t know what I did wrong. I showed up on her doorstep. I brought her wine. I was very careful with her. I even told her she wasn’t like the other women.”
“And she should believe you, why? That sounds like a great line to use.”
“But it was true.”
“How did you prepare her for this encounter?”
He wanted to go there? “Well, I gave her a starter orgasm first.”
Sean held out a hand. “Not physically. How did you soften her up? Take her to dinner? Bring her some flowers just to brighten her day? Help her out at work?”
“I told you. I brought wine.”
“You have never worked for a woman in your life, have you?”
“I work hard,” Javier argued. “Do you know how fit you have to be to spend all night pleasuring a woman?”
“Do you know what it means to bounce a sleeping infant in your arms for four hours straight because if you don’t keep the rhythm up he’ll wake up and your wife is utterly exhausted?”
“No, but I don’t have kids. I don’t have a wife.”
“And you never will if you think the only thing a woman needs from you is an orgasm. You have been playing around with party girls. Jules is an entirely different class of woman and no, she’s not taking you seriously, but you haven’t given her a reason to.”
“I make sure I sit by her when we eat.” Javier tried to defend himself, but he was starting to see Sean’s point. “I make sure she gets to pick before Declan and Linc eat everything in sight. They’re like locust.”
“If you want her to believe she’s different, treat her differently, and no, sleeping over doesn’t count,” Sean pointed out. “Getting your ass up before she wakes up and ensuring that she has coffee and a decent breakfast, well, that’s a good start.”
How had he gone so wrong? “I really like her.”
“Good. Show her. Words are too easy. She needs to see that she’s different.”
“She thinks I’m a himbo.”
“Almost certainly. And she’s just come out of a relationship. She doesn’t want to throw herself into another one that’s almost certainly doomed to fail. She picked you as a nice transition from loneliness to finding her way back out into the world. When you think about it, she chose well. You’re nice. You’re good in bed. No one will blink if she sleeps with you and goes right back to being perfectly polite because that’s what you do best.”
“But I don’t want that this time.” It wasn’t fair. Wow, he was thinking like a boy.
Sean patted his arm. “Then it’s time to man up. You want this woman, you’re going to have to work for her and you’re going to have to be sneaky about it because I think she might get nervous if you come at her head-on.”
Sneaky. He’d never had to be sneaky with a woman. “I need to find a way to spend time with her. And protect my virtue because I’m feeling a little used this morning. She tried to send me on my way with nothing but coffee. You would think she would have made me a muffin or something.”
“I think spending time with her is definitely the key, and practicing a little virtue might not hurt.” Sean put his hand on the small book that lay on the kitchen table. “But you also need to figure out what she needs that she won’t talk about. This might be a good start.”
“I think she was working on this when I showed up.” He pulled the book into his hand and opened it. “Recipes. Wow. I bet these were her grandmother’s. They’re not elevated enough to be her mom’s.”
He flipped through the pages. He was a snob when it came to food, but there was something undeniably powerful about reading recipes that had been written out in a careful hand. It reminded him that he’d started cooking in his mother’s kitchen, learning to make rice and beans because she’d gotten arthritis at an early age and when it flared up, he wanted to help her.
That was how he’d fallen in love with cooking. His mother’s love had been in every dish, and when she couldn’t cook anymore, he gave that love back to her.
Was this how Jules had gotten into cooking?
“So you know about her mom?” Sean asked.
“Yeah, Linc recognized her,” he admitted, glancing at the notes she’d made. There were sticky notes on several of the recipes. Some of the notes made changes in ingredients while others shifted instructions, as though trying to make the recipe easier to cook somehow. “Any idea why she doesn’t talk to her mom anymore? I asked her about her prosthetic. She’s got a low-end model. She said it was all she could afford. Why wouldn’t her mom help her out?”
“I get the feeling those are two stubborn women.” Sean moved over so he could see the recipes, too. “I think she’s trying to figure out how to make these dishes with one hand. The notes she’s making are all about simplifying the steps.”
“It’s fine to simplify the steps, but she doesn’t need to use pre-chopped onions. She can chop onions,” Javier said. “She just needs practice.”
“Says the man with two hands.”
His brain was already working. He wanted her. He needed to figure out how to get her to take him seriously. Maybe Chef was right and he was going about this all wrong. He’d been looking at their differences, but they had a lot in common, too.
He’d been in the military. She’d been in the military. They both loved to cook. She’d lost the ability when she’d lost her hand, but she seemed to be trying to get back into it.
“I don’t have to use them both.” His mind was working. “I might have a plan, but it’s going to require you to back me up.”
“I got you,” Sean promised. “If you really care about her, that is. If this is some kind of wounded masculine pride thing, reconsider. She’s been through a lot.”
“Which is precisely why she deserves the best.” Now that he thought about it, this was better. She deserved to be pursued. If she just fell into his hands, he would never learn how to properly handle her. She wanted to run and hide? He could chase and find.
And the book in his hand might be exactly what he needed.
“Now let’s go over the menu. I want to get home and spend the afternoon with my wife.”
“Sure thing. Let me print it out,” Javier said. “Come over to my place because I had some notes on the barbecue. And the special menu for the party coming up. How the hell did that happen anyway? I thought open mic night was a bust.”
“That was when we let amateurs sing.” Sean shook his head as he followed Javier out to the hall. “I thought it would be a good way to show off some of Dallas’s untapped talent. Instead I got Jake singing “Babe” by Styx to Serena after four beers. The only good thing to come out of it was Ian taped the whole thing and now he plays it as the opening to every monthly conference. After that I shut it down, but it turns out Wade knows someone who knows an actual up-and-coming singer. I offered up the restaurant as a place she can kind of ease into. I think they like singers at her level to work the kinks out in smaller venues before they go to the larger ones. She’s good. I listened to her album.”
Javier locked the door behind him.
“Shouldn’t you have put on your shirt?” Chef gave him his infamous judgey eye.
That’s what Javier called it. Sean Taggart was excellent at conveying his disdain with that one brow. But in this case, it was all part of the plan. “I’m leaving it behind. I want to see if she brings it back to me or if she keeps it and sleeps in it.”
Either way, he would have some information.
“See, now you’re getting sneaky.” There was approval in Sean’s voice.
He meant to get much sneakier. She thought she could steal one night from him? She would find out exactly how different she was.
He strode to his apartment, getting his keys out of his pocket. He would get the assignments done and then maybe start to think about how to get his plan rolling.
“Javi, back up,” Chef said suddenly.
That was when he realized he’d been reaching for the door, but it was already open, the handle slightly off from the frame.
“I locked it when I left.” He glanced at Sean and felt his jaw drop. “Where did that come from?”
Chef was carrying a semiautomatic in his hand. “You feel comfortable without pants. I don’t feel comfortable without a gun. Call Derek Brighton. Unless you left your phone behind, too.”
His cell was in his pocket. It was good to know if a bunch of bad guys ever invaded Top, the executive chef remembered how to defend himself. Sean kicked the door open and stepped inside, every movement predatory.
Luckily, he had Derek Brighton’s number programmed into his phone. Lieutenant Brighton was a friend of the Taggarts and the go-to guy on the DPD when they needed some law enforcement.
Sean stepped back out. “You must have pissed someone off mightily. It’s safe to go in but try not to touch anything. I’ll talk to Derek.”
He passed the phone to Sean and walked through the door. Someone had trashed the place. It looked like every piece of furniture he owned had been overturned and left there like a used and discarded toy.
What the hell? Who would want to hurt him like this?
“Brighton’s on his way. He’ll see what we can get from security cameras. You have insurance?” The gun seemed to have disappeared and Javier wondered where the holster was.
He felt sick to his stomach. Chaos. It was pure chaos.
“Yeah. I’ll find the policy. I’ve got it in a safe Dec installed for me.”
“You want me to call Ian? He can have someone out here in under an hour,” Sean promised.
“Nah. I would bet it was some punk kids who took advantage of the storm.” He winced. “Which likely knocked out the security cameras. Damn, I wonder how many of us got hit last night.”
He breathed a little easier because that made sense. This was the city. Things got stolen. People took advantage.
“Let’s try to knock this out while we’re waiting for Derek. You’ll still need a police report. How do you feel about ceviche?” Chef pulled the couch back into its proper position.
At least the assholes hadn’t taken a knife to it. It looked like they’d come in and turned everything over looking for cash or valuables.
It wasn’t personal.
But his ceviche was. “I feel good about it, boss.”
He would clean the place up and then start in on his plan.
Because he was getting the girl this time. He would make sure of it.
* * * *
“So you started an affair last night? With a coworker?” Kai Ferguson studied her, looking over his glasses, his notebook in hand. “How did that make you feel?”
How had she felt when Javier had kissed her? When he’d smiled that crazy sexy smile of his and touched her like he couldn’t stop? How had she felt when she’d put her head on his chest, utterly exhausted, and slept despite the ferocity of the storm outside?
“I feel good about it,” she replied. She wasn’t sure why she’d told her therapist about Javier. Kai had a way of getting people to open up around him. It was probably why he’d gone into shrinkdom. But she had to clear up a few misconceptions. “But it’s not an affair. It was just a one-night thing.”
“Ah,” Kai said. “So it just happened organically? Or you talked about it?”
“There wasn’t a lot of talking involved, Doc.” Just a lot of righteously amazing sex and then she’d slept like a baby. No bad dreams. No waking up and reaching out with her left hand for the bottle of water she kept on the side table because just for a second she forgot. She’d slept with her head on his chest and it had been hard to leave him there.
She’d thought about kissing him awake and seeing if he maybe wanted her to cook some breakfast for them.
Then she’d remembered that he was a chef. Not just any chef. He was the sous chef to a man who would likely have a Michelin star under his belt if he worked in New York. Javier Leones was going places. One day he’d open a third Top or he’d go off on his own. As gorgeous as he was, he might get his own TV show like her mom, and then she’d be right back where she’d started.
And all she could really offer him was some toast. Which he would have to butter himself.
She’d rolled out of bed as cautiously as she could, not wanting to wake him.
“How do you know what your partner wants if you don’t talk to him?” Kai asked. “I think it’s a mistake to go into any kind of a relationship without some sort of negotiation.”
“I’m pretty sure he wanted sex.” She’d opened the door. She might as well walk through it. In the months since she’d moved to Dallas, she’d come to find these sessions with Kai soothing. It was good to talk, and she didn’t have to worry about him blabbing to anyone else. She’d found herself opening up more and more to the good doc and using these sessions as a way to make decisions. Well, she definitely had a decision to make and it would be better with Kai’s input. “This is Javier we’re talking about.”
“Oh.” A knowing grin crossed Kai’s face. “I thought we were talking about someone else.”
“Who?” She was curious.
He shrugged a little. “I don’t know. One of the line chefs perhaps. Someone you have more in common with.”
“I have lots in common with Javier. He’s pretty chill and easy to talk to. We both come from military backgrounds. He’s dealing with a brother who’s going through the transition of losing a couple of limbs.”
“You both grew up working in kitchens,” Kai said quietly. “I happen to know that all of his teenage jobs were in kitchens. When his family got in trouble, he lied about his age and got a job washing dishes. He was fourteen. He managed school and working until almost midnight five nights a week. You worked for your mom in the beginning, didn’t you?”
It was always hard to think about her mom. Especially those early years when they’d only had each other. “I helped her can her jams and jellies. I would come home from school and she would be exhausted so I would do what I could to give her a break.”
“Yes, I can see you do have a lot in common with Javier.” It was said with a small note of satisfaction, as though she’d fallen into a well-planned trap and he’d known all along who they’d been talking about.
“Should you be talking about Javier to me? About his private stuff?” It made her nervous that Kai wasn’t as careful as she thought he would be.
“Javier isn’t a patient. He’s a friend and he’s not quiet about his past. I’m not telling you anything he wouldn’t tell you if you’d taken the time to talk to him.”
She didn’t like how that sounded. “I’ve talked to him. We work together. It’s not like I invited some random dude into bed with me.”
Kai held a hand up. “I’m not judging you, Jules. I’m happy you’ve taken a step to get back into life. You’ve told me how you feel like time stopped and you’re not moving forward.”
She felt like she was trapped, like she was stuck in a river and it rushed all around her, but she was immovable. Caught in one place while the world rushed by her. “Yeah. I still feel like that sometimes. I’m trying to adapt.”
“Are you?”
Was he high? “Yeah. I think getting back out in the world and getting a job and trying to move on is kind of the definition of adaptation.”
He was quiet for a moment. That was when she always felt the most awkward. “What was your dream? Before the accident?”
She went silent, wishing she hadn’t mentioned anything at all. He’d made her comfortable all these weeks and now she was paying the price. They’d talked about the past, a bit about her plans for the future, but this was starting to feel heavy.
Still, she’d promised herself when she started this that she would attempt to make a go of it. She wasn’t sure she believed that therapy could make her a better person, but so far it hadn’t hurt her either. “I don’t know.”
“What was your dream when you were a kid?” he asked.
“The usual. I went through a marine biology phase. I liked dolphins. I wanted to be an astronaut for a while.”
“There wasn’t any one thing you were truly interested in?”
She shrugged. “I liked to cook. I was kind of around it a lot.”
“Yes, I can imagine with your mother’s business. Did she teach you?”
“In the beginning,” Jules said cautiously. “When my dad was around, she was a housewife and I was the only kid. She taught me how to bake and I would hang out with her when she made dinner. She told me food was the way to a man’s heart. Guess my dad didn’t have a heart.”
“How old were you when he divorced your mom?”
“I was eight. And it wasn’t like other divorces I saw. There was no shuffling me around and fighting over who got what time with me. My dad full on left and didn’t look back. He got his divorce and didn’t want any custody. He moved to Montana with his secretary. I think they’ve got a couple of kids now, but I’ve never met them.”
“That kind of desertion can be hard on a kid.”
“You’re telling me.”
“Hard on your mom, too,” he said quietly. “Tell me something—did you plan on staying in the military? Were you going to make a career out of it? I would think given your mother’s success that you might have followed in her footsteps.”
Those footsteps had been big and impossible to fill. She hadn’t even wanted to try. That lifestyle wasn’t for her. She’d hated the cameras and the scrutiny and always having to look perfect. “I went into the Navy because I needed something different. Do you know what it’s like to go from working hard every day and having nothing to being mommy’s pampered princess?”
“Sounds like a First World problem to me.”
He had a point. “It wasn’t that I hated finally having money. I liked that my mom wasn’t worried about losing the house. But what I couldn’t make her understand was that it was her accomplishment. Not mine. I hated all the crap that went with her job. Producers, publicists. It was too much and it made me feel empty. Hell, she doesn’t even do her own cooking anymore. She’s got test kitchens.”
I don’t want you in there, baby girl. I want you with me. Running the business is where you make the money. We’re never going to be in a position again where we have to cook for a living.
But that had been exactly what Jules had wanted to do.
Kai sat up. “Yes, I’d heard that’s how some of those big machines work. I know your mother is a woman, but her business runs like a well-oiled machine. If you worked with her when you were a kid, why didn’t she give you a place in the business?”
Yes, her place in the business had been the problem. “She did. She told me I could go to college and get a business degree and she would eventually make me the CEO of the company.”
“That’s an impressive offer.”
“I hate the business side, Doc,” Jules admitted. “She made me go to business meetings as a teenager and I couldn’t keep my eyes open. The one job I wanted she told me was beneath me.”
“The test kitchens,” he surmised. “You wanted to run them.”
Well, no one said he was stupid. “Yeah. I thought one of us should. I didn’t ask to run them in the beginning. I just wanted to work there. Food is…it’s meaningful.”
“It certainly is to a chef. Your mother started out as a Southern cook?”
Jules nodded. “She was a home cook. My grandma taught her, but Mom wanted more. After she sold her jam recipe to a big conglomerate, they made her the face of that division. She was beautiful and charming and she kind of skyrocketed from there.”
“And left you behind?”
“Of course not. She took me with her. She wasn’t some monster.”
Kai’s lips quirked up. “I wasn’t speaking in a literal fashion. I mean she left the little girl who helped her mother make jam behind. She needed a princess for her palace and you weren’t that girl.”
Wow. That was hitting the nail on the head. How had he seen so much from the little she’d told him? “Yes. You get it. That’s why it was hard and that’s why I left. I met Kevin in my first year of college. I hated every class I went to. I wanted a job. I wanted to cook, but my mother insisted she knew best. She was very controlling. She used that money she made like a weapon. Kevin’s father was the same way. Wanted him to be a lawyer and nothing else would do. So we made the choice.”
“To tell your parents to go to hell?”
It had been about more than rebellion. “And to grab some freedom for ourselves. I know it sounds like I was some poor little rich girl, but I found that life oppressive. I honestly liked the Navy. I felt like I was doing something good. Like I was making a difference. My mom tells people what kind of pillows to buy. It felt empty to me. Do you know where I spent half my off-duty time on the ships I was assigned to?”
“I can bet,” Kai replied. “Did they let you in the kitchens?”
She smiled at the memory. “Yeah, it was the first time I’d been able to learn in forever. The cook was an older guy who’d been in the service for years. He’d been just about everywhere and he was happy to teach me. I miss that old man.”
“Do you keep in touch?”
Hank. How long had it been? He’d come to see her in the hospital after the accident, but once she’d come home she’d talked to almost no one. “Nah, he’s still on a boat. And all we talked about was food. I don’t cook anymore so…”
Kai nodded her way. “And that is why I question your use of the word adapting.”
“What do you mean?”
He adjusted his glasses. “Adaptation means you shift. You find new ways to make a thing suitable to a purpose. How have you adapted, Jules?”
She shifted in her chair, the turn of the conversation suddenly making her uncomfortable. “Well, I figured out how to type with one hand. I suck at it, but I can manage an email.”
“And your dream job is to be an admin?”
“Of course not.”
“Then how is typing going to help you achieve the goal?” His questions came quickly now, as though he’d found the right line of investigation and he wasn’t about to let up.
“Who said I have a goal?”
“You can sit here and tell me you didn’t have a particular dream, but I call bullshit on that. You wanted to cook. You wanted to be a chef.”
“I was a kid then,” she said. “I’m an adult now. And I don’t have a goal except to get through this day and move on to the next.”
He stopped for a moment and she could practically feel his disappointment. “Then you’re not adapting, Jules. You’re merely surviving.”
She felt her hand fist in her lap. “Why are you on my case?”
“Because I think you’ve gotten complacent.” His tone was back to soothing, but she couldn’t ignore the words. They didn’t soothe at all. “I think if no one pushes you, in a few years, you’ll still be exactly where you are right now. Maybe you’ll move on to another job, but it won’t be the one you want.”
He didn’t understand. She’d known when she’d gotten the news from the doctor that they were amputating her hand that she wasn’t going to work in a restaurant. Not the way she’d envisioned. “I can’t cook at the level I wanted to. Isn’t it better to accept that and move on with my life?”
“Or you could fight like hell to get what you want. There’s a reason you came here. To Dallas, to work at Top. You surrounded yourself with people who had to fight their way back. That can be motivating. Let them help you. There is very little in this life that you can’t do with some adaptation and a shitload of hard work, Jules. And maybe that includes understanding that you don’t know what other people are thinking.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means we don’t always understand other people’s motivations. We filter their reactions through our own experiences and that leads to misunderstandings,” he explained. “It means you have no idea why Javier slept with you last night. Did he say it was only for one night?”
She rolled her eyes because he was being naïve. “It’s implied because he’s Javier.”
“Who you’ve spent a lot of time with and you can read his mind.”
“I say that because I watch the women come in and out of his apartment, and I’m pretty sure they’re not housekeepers or nursing his brother. No man who goes through that many women is looking for some kind of relationship.”
“You’re not willing to give him a chance?”
Frustration welled inside her. “There’s no chance to be given. Look, Doc, I get that you think I’m in some kind of limbo, but I’m trying. I’m the kind of woman who doesn’t want to even attempt to do something if I can’t give it my all. I’m never going to cook at the level Chef is. I’m not suited to even be a line chef at Top. I can’t cut veg for salads. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have projects. I’m playing around with some of my grandmother’s old recipes, trying to see if I can adapt them for what I can do.”
“How do you know what you can do if you don’t try?”
She stood up, unable to stay still a second longer. “You think I haven’t? I don’t even have my dominant hand. Do you know how sharp a chef’s knife is?”
She had the scars from trying. She’d cut herself a couple of times and what she’d managed to do to those vegetables should be a crime. It had been terrible, worse than any amateur.
He held a hand up, signaling his willingness to end the discussion. “I’ll take your word on it. I’m sorry. It’s part of my job to try to make you see things from another point of view.”
“There’s not another point of view about this. There’s me and what I can do now that I’m here. If that’s not good enough for you, then I don’t know what else to do.” She didn’t want to lose her job, but she wasn’t sure what else to say. “I do rehab twice a week. I volunteer to help people in my position. Hell, I help out at PT with other patients.”
“Jules, don’t think I don’t understand how willing you are to help a friend, a stranger even. I wasn’t talking about that. You’re good at your job. You’re disciplined and kind. You would move mountains to help a friend, but you have to love yourself, too. You have to love yourself enough to give you a chance.”
She stared at him for a moment. “I don’t know what you want from me, Doc.”
He stood up and laid aside the notepad he’d been holding. “How about we make a deal? You try one thing that scares you this week. I don’t care what it is. It could be anything from bungee jumping to touching a spider. It doesn’t matter. Say yes to one thing that scares you and next week, we’ll talk about whatever you want to talk about. Hell, we’ll play Xbox if you want and that can count as therapy for the week.”
Because her job at Top required these sessions, required her PT. She understood it. Taggart hired broken things and needed to make sure they were willing to try to put themselves back together again. Committing to PT and sessions with Kai proved the employee was dedicated to getting better, being better.
One thing that scared her. She hated clowns. She could force herself to find a clown and not kill it. She’d already figured out how to handle thunderstorms. She wasn’t thrilled with heights. Maybe she could try taking a tour of one of the high-rises around Dallas.
Or she could do the thing that scared her and also intrigued her.
“I’ll go to the play party.”
She was kind of cheating. She’d made this decision shortly after waking up next to Javier. But she wasn’t lying. It did scare her. The idea of people looking at her, being so exposed… It scared her and made her wonder.
Kai’s smile lit up his handsome face. “Excellent. I think that’s a perfect thing to do. Does that decision have anything to do with last night?”
Well, she wasn’t fooling the doc. “Yes. I guess Javier showed me that I could move on in this area of my life, too. Maybe you’re right about that. I have been stuck when it comes to reaching out to other people. Maybe I’ve been stuck for longer than you would suspect. My marriage wasn’t great even before the accident. I fell into it because we seemed to want the same things.”
“Does the intimacy scare you?”
She thought about it for a moment. “What scares me the most is that I know if I think about it for too long, the glow from last night will wear off and all my insecurities will come back. Javier made me feel like I was beautiful. I thank him for that. But last night was a one-off. How long will it be before I go back to questioning every moment of the encounter and whether or not I really need physical touch and affection? If I let it go too long, I’ll decide I’m an intellectual creature who can survive without anyone or some shit. I liked being touched. It made me feel alive in a way I haven’t in a very long time.”
She needed to try again. She’d been in her hole for eighteen months and it was time to pull herself together and start life over.
Without her husband or the job she’d loved. Without her mother. Without her hand.
Kai touched her shoulder. “I’ll find a good mentor for you. You’ll be there to observe, but if you decide you want to try something, talk to your mentor and he or she will facilitate the encounter.”
“He or she?”
“Unless you have a preference.”
“You told me I should do what scares me, right? Get me a Dom, Doc. In for a penny and all.” A Dom. A man who would be there to protect her and teach her and help her decide if this was something she wanted to explore. It would bring her more fully into the world her coworkers lived in. She would be going to a party at her ex-husband’s friend’s house.
It was weird. She got butterflies thinking about it
Would Javier be there? Would he have a new gorgeous woman at his side?
If he did, she would smile and high-five him.
Well, maybe not high-five him, but she wouldn’t act like the world had ended. She wasn’t going to be some clinging vine, nor would she hold last night against him. When she saw him in the hallway or at Top, they would go on the way they had.
Like he’d never kissed her as if she was the only woman on the planet. Like she hadn’t wrapped herself around him and held on for dear life.
She would be his friend and always thank him for waking up this side of her.
“A Dom it is then. I’ll think about it and select someone you’ll match well with.” He reached out and took her hand in his. “This is good. I know you’re annoyed with me, but sometimes that’s the sign of the start of a breakthrough,” Kai explained. “I’ll let Kori know you’re going. You can ride out with us if you like. And she’ll be more than happy to help you find some fet wear.”
“Fet wear?” She hadn’t thought about fet wear.
“Yes, no street clothes allowed,” he said with a wink. “Kori can explain it all to you. She lives to shop. Well, for anything kinky or anything for our dogs. Otherwise she complains about shopping. You’ll be making my wife very happy. Sometimes I’m not sure if what she’s bought is for herself or the dogs until she tells me.”
Fet wear. Kinky stuff. She took a deep breath. “Sounds good. And I’ll take you up on the Xbox next week.”
“Absolutely.” He let her hand go and started to walk toward the door.
Somehow she had a feeling the doc would find a way to turn killing aliens into some kind of life lesson because even as he was joking with his wife about taking Jules shopping, her brain was working.
Was there another point of view? Was she giving up too fast, accepting what life offered her without fighting for what she wanted?
She stopped at Kori’s desk and told the other woman what she needed. The doctor’s wife was more than pleased to accommodate her.
Jules walked out of the building, letting the sun hit her face.
She couldn’t help but wonder if Javier was enjoying the day.
Would she cross paths with him in the hallway? She wasn’t sure how to act. She needed an etiquette book. Did she say thanks again? Did she praise him for his incredible prowess in the bedroom?
Jules took a deep breath. She would handle it when it came up. After all, how hard could it be?