The next night, Aiden was wishing he could leave. The restaurant kitchen was shut down and cleaned up. The pub kitchen was moving somewhat slowly by the looks of it. But Brody had taken the night off and no one else was available, so he was staying to lock up the cash and receipts. He was thinking he’d grab everything at eleven, shut the pub kitchen down, and let the two bartenders lock up. There wouldn’t be much revenue at that hour, by the looks of it. How the hell did Brody do this every night?
Abby knocked on his door. She was working the plating station for the pub, but it looked as if there weren’t any orders for the moment. Bill was cleaning up. Abby should be doing the same and knew better.
“What can I help you with, Abby?” he asked.
“I just wanted to know if you had a few minutes to talk.”
He pushed back from his chair, always willing to make the time. It’s not like he had much going on. “About what?”
“New York. The Food Network? I’ve been toying with applying to be a contestant on a few of the different shows and was curious if you thought I could do it? If I’d be good enough? You saw it firsthand. What do you think?”
“I think you’d be fine. Just need to be confident.” She was a good cook, but always asking him simple questions that she should know the answers to.
“If you don’t mind, could you look at the recipe and picture I just emailed you? I have to submit it and wanted to know what your thoughts were.”
“Sure,” he said, turning back to his computer. He enjoyed mentoring the staff, giving ideas and helping them sharpen their skills. His family wasn’t lying to Nic when they said that to her yesterday at his parents’ house. Fierce was what it was because of its staff.
He was opening his email when she moved behind his desk and stood next to him. Extremely close, her leg brushing against his arm. “I’ll just point out on the picture what I wasn’t sure about. Maybe you can give me some pointers on the plating.”
He’d put her at the plating station recently hoping to help her there. She seemed to be doing well enough when she wasn’t stopping him to show her how to do things more than once.
“It doesn’t look like I got the email,” he said, scanning his inbox.
She leaned in closer, stretching across him, then lost her balance and ended up in his lap. What the hell? Rather than jump up and apologize, she giggled and made no attempt to move.
That annoying little giggle he’d heard too much in his life. The one that was part flirting, part “pay attention to me cuz I’m silly and sweet and want your eyes on me.” He didn’t give it. More like shrank away, feeling like he was being circled by vultures when it happened.
He pushed his chair back to give her room to get up, leaving his hands on the armrests. She wasn’t moving though. Instead she wrapped her arms around his neck and put her lips to his before he could figure out what the hell was going on.
His hands were up in the air like he was surrendering, his neck pushed back, his rage right at the surface and ready to erupt.
“What are you doing?” he asked Abby. Maybe it was a misunderstanding. Had he been sending signals he was clueless about? No, never. He was always careful about that.
He wanted to push her off, but didn’t know if he should touch her right now. What he really wanted to do was crawl into a hole and pretend this wasn’t happening, but that wasn’t going to solve this problem.
“I think it’s pretty obvious what I’m doing. Come on, Aiden. It can be our secret. You’re doing it now with Nic and not too many people have figured it out. I’m okay with not letting anyone know about us.”
He felt his face flush. Embarrassment and annoyance overridden by anger, but he kept his voice level, his tone sharp. “Get off my lap now.”
“Don’t be shy,” she said, running her hand over his thighs and inching up. “I finally figured it out. You want us to make the first move. That you don’t want to do it. I’m okay with it. I’m always good making the first move.”
That was it. He stood up, causing her to fall to the ground. Dumping her there was more like it. There was no remorse in that move either. And when she turned her head and eyed him hard, then grinned, he wasn’t going to even consider asking if she was okay. “You like to be chased? Hmm, I’m okay with that too. Do you like it a little rough?”
“Get out of here! Right now,” he said. “I’m thinking it’s best you take all of your belongings with you and don’t come back.”
Her eyes narrowed as rage leapt into them. “You’re firing me? You can’t do that.”
“I can do any damn thing I want. And I want you to leave.”
She laughed at him. A cruel scheming-like tone that told him things were only going to get worse. “You’re firing me because I wouldn’t sleep with you?” she said, crossing her arms. “How dare you? I believe that is called sexual harassment.”
“You’re smoking crack,” he said, losing the cool he always professed to have. “What are you up to? What are you trying to gain?”
“I guess it’s your word against mine now, isn’t it? The way I remember it, you called me in here to look at something on your computer that wasn’t there. Almost like a ploy, huh? Then I leaned in closer to see what you were talking about and you swiveled your chair, knocking me on your lap, trying to cop a feel. When I told you I wanted to get up, that I didn’t want to be another one of your little playthings on the side, you dumped me on the floor. I bet I’m going to have a nice bruise on my back to show for it too.”
This couldn’t be happening to him. Why did he always end up in situations with women at work that backfired on him? Things he never expected and that always put him in a bad situation. How the hell was he going to get out of this? It was her word against his, she was right about that.
“No one is going to believe you,” he said firmly.
“Oh, I’m sure your family will back you. But your family isn’t who I’d be talking to. There are a lot of lawyers out there just dying to take on a case like this. Just dying to get some type of cash settlement to make it all go away. Nice and easy payday. You wouldn’t want to put a smear on Fierce’s reputation, would you?”
“That’s what this is about?” he asked. “Money? You want to blackmail me right now?”
“That hadn’t been my intent. It’s not really what I want. I’d rather you took me to bed, but we don’t always get our wish. So if you fire me because I turned you down, then I don’t have much of a choice now, do I?”
She was twisting the words to suit herself. “You’re sick and insane.”
“No. Not sick. Maybe hurt though. I’m going to go home now. Maybe I should go to urgent care and have my hip checked out. Possibly my back too. It sure is starting to smart something nasty. Do I need to fill out workers’ comp paperwork? You should do that just to cover yourself. I’m going to go tell Bill I fell in the office now and need to go.”
What was he supposed to do? Tell her no? Don’t do it. She did fall out of his chair. And if he told her to keep quiet he’d be falling right into her trap. Instead he sat in his chair, and picked up his phone. “Do what you need to do,” he said. “I’ve got some of my own calls to make.”
She gave him a grin and then limped out of his office. He watched her make her way to Bill, say a few words, then saw Bill look up and frown.
“What the heck are you doing calling me this late?” he heard on the other end of his phone.
“Get your ass over here now, Cade.” Then he hung up.
***
First thing the next morning, Aiden sat at the conference room table with all his siblings and his parents. “I didn’t do anything,” he said.
“No one thinks otherwise,” his mother said calmly, looking around the table.
“We don’t believe any of it, Aiden,” Cade said. “We have to focus on the facts. And right now, the facts are she was on your lap, her lips were attached to yours, then you stood up and dumped her on the floor.”
He felt his face flush. When he looked around the room at everyone all he saw was sympathy. He wasn’t sure what was worse at the moment. He supposed he should be thrilled they weren’t against him. Not that he’d thought they would be. But it still felt like he was Houdini in a straitjacket dangling upside down over a roaring bonfire.
“I didn’t dump her on the floor. I didn’t want to put my hands on her at all,” he argued. “I didn’t know what else to do. How the hell was I supposed to get her off my lap? I asked her to get up.”
His mother snorted, but his father gave her a dirty look for that sound.
“I would have shoved her butt across the room,” Ella said. “Then I would have stood in front of her and done it again just for the fun of it.”
“You can say that because you’re a girl,” Mason said. “We can’t do that. We always have to be careful who or what or how we touch someone.”
“I get it,” Ella mumbled. “Still, I would have knocked her out on top of it.”
Ella had always been feisty. Of course, having four older brothers tended to make her stand up for herself more often than not.
“What did Bill say when you talked to him last night?” Brody asked Cade.
“He was confused by what was going on. Said that Abby came over to him earlier and said Aiden wanted to talk to her in his office and that she’d be right back.”
“So she was setting the whole thing up in case Aiden didn’t accept her advances?” his father said.
“I don’t even know if she wanted them,” Aiden argued.
Cade snorted. “Aiden, the women in the kitchen have been throwing themselves at you for years. You just can’t look past your pots and pans to see anything else.”
“Cade,” his mother said sharply. “Don’t make me take you on a car ride for another lecture. Aiden did nothing wrong.”
“He’s right, Mom,” Aiden said.
“See—”
“Shut up, Cade,” the rest of his siblings said at once.
“I don’t need you rubbing my face in this, Cade.”
“I’m not,” he argued. “Fine. I’m really not. It just slipped. Relax, I’ll take care of it.”
“How?” Mason asked.
“Cade knows what he’s doing. Let him do it,” Brody said.
“You’re defending him. The one that beats on him the most,” Ella said.
“Come on, guys. His mouth runs like diarrhea but he’s good at what he does.”
“Now what?” their father asked. “Do we just go about our days like this isn’t happening? Did Abby go to the hospital last night? Has anyone talked to her at all?”
“Not yet,” Cade said. “I’m going to call her after this meeting. I needed us all together to hear the facts.”
“No,” Ella said. “I deal with HR and workers’ comp. I think we just start there. She could have been blowing smoke last night on the sexual harassment part of it. Her pride was probably bent. No woman likes to be shot down like that. Not when they were crawling in a man’s lap. I’ll call her and follow up. Say I heard she got hurt and needed to complete her paperwork, ask for her medical release to return to work.”
Aiden listened to everyone talking at once. He was hearing their voices but not their words anymore. It was like another nightmare he’d lived and wondered why these things seemed to follow him around like the plague.