CHAPTER FIVE
MELANIE
Since I was a little rattled by my latest encounter with the gruff, sexy Dominic Esposito, I decided to brighten my day with a quick stop at Dairy Queen. Yet even ice cream didn’t stop the latest confrontation with my boss from running through my mind.
“Give me two more days,” he’d said in a tone I could best describe as begrudging.
All because I was asking for a place where I could actually work. Why couldn’t he be more like his brother? Gio was a polite and accommodating model of a boss. Gio was awesome.
As for Dominic, I had no idea what went on behind those dark, inscrutable eyes. He was obviously a workaholic, but Gio had hinted that one of Dominic’s flaws was an inability to delegate. I’d already seen his need for control, or rather, to ensure that everything was done the right way—his way. I remembered the way he’d looked at me at our first meeting, like I was an irksome intruder.
Come to think of it, he still looked at me that way sometimes.
And yet my knees still threaten to give out every time he turns in my direction.
Of course our interactions hadn’t been all bad. That was what made him such a mystery. That was why I couldn’t seem to abandon this stubborn crush. Every time I thought I was ready to roll my eyes and move on to thinking about someone more suitable, Dominic had to say something sincere and charming. Like today, when he told me he was glad I’d been fired because it had made me a member of the Esposito’s family. If he was at all perceptive, he had to have noticed me blushing over that comment.
“Quit being a glutton for punishment,” I scolded myself out loud as I finished off my Oreo Blizzard. Too bad I couldn’t follow my own directions. Try as I might, I couldn’t quite quash my fixation on a man who was equal parts inappropriate and cryptic. But I needed to find a different fantasy, preferably one that didn’t involve the man who signed my paychecks. I comforted myself with the idea that Dominic had no idea what was going on inside my head. And in the end, even though he had still chased me away, our latest conversation had felt like something of a breakthrough.
As I peeled myself off the leather car seat and stepped into the oppressive September heat, I wished I’d chosen more comfortable work clothes. Everyone else at Esposito’s dressed casually, and even Dominic had been not-so-subtle about his disapproval over my wardrobe. Maybe it was time to retire the prim and proper look and opt for practicality.
“Shit,” I cursed as I noticed a huge blob of runny ice cream on my black pencil skirt. It looked like I’d been puked on. I tried to rub it out with the palm of my hand, but that only spread it around.
I crept into the restaurant, grateful for the blast of air-conditioning that battled back the extreme heat. Luckily there were customers at the front counter, so I was able to duck into the bathroom before anyone noticed me and my messy skirt.
“Melanie!” cried a delighted voice as I blinked into the bright lights of the ladies’ room.
Tara Esposito was standing at the changing station. She finished fastening a diaper onto her infant daughter and scooped the baby into her arms. Tara gave me a warm smile as baby Leah began chewing on her own hand.
“Please don’t look at me,” I grumbled, switching the faucet on and grabbing a handful of brown paper towels. “I’m a victim of my own repulsive eating habits.”
Tara laughed. “If anyone asks, just say that you were holding Leah and she spit up on you.”
“Thanks for the alibi,” I said, scrubbing vigorously. Unfortunately the paper towels were rather brittle, and pieces of them flaked off on my skirt. I sighed and gave up.
Tara slung a pink diaper bag over her shoulder and walked over to check out the damage. “It doesn’t look that bad,” she said. “But if you want to change, I have a pair of jeans out in the car.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but I think I’ll just endure the aftermath and call it a life lesson.”
Her offer was very sweet, but she was five foot ten and skinny as a catwalk model. In other words, barring a magic trick, there was no way we’d fit into the same pair of pants.
Tara nudged me. “Did you have lunch already?”
“Does an Oreo Blizzard from Dairy Queen count?”
“Not unless you chased it with a cheeseburger.”
“Then no, I haven’t. I took a ride down to Espo 2 to have a chat with Dominic.”
Tara looked amused. “And how did that go?”
“Unproductively.”
She laughed. “Come on, let’s grab a table. If Gio asks, we’re having a crucial strategy session.”
Gio was up front, fiddling with the cash register. He looked up when we emerged from the bathroom, but his wife blew him a kiss and sweetly asked him to please send over a pizza and a few sodas.
“Melanie didn’t get to have lunch yet,” she explained as she prodded me into a chair at a nearby table.
A minute later Gio himself brought a pair of sodas over. The baby smiled and cooed at her father, and as soon as he set the glasses down, he plucked her right out of Tara’s arms.
“Thanks, love,” Tara said as she unwrapped her straw.
Gio smiled at his wife and gave his baby daughter a kiss on her chubby little cheek before turning his attention to me. “Surprised to see you back here already.”
“You are?”
He laughed. “No. But I thought there was a chance you could light a fire under that brother of mine. How are things looking? Dom promised me he’d get those boxes moved out of the office.”
“He lied,” I blurted out before I could stop myself. Gio looked startled, so I tried to be more diplomatic. “I mean, Dominic indicated that he understands the challenges ahead, and while he is committed to getting the office in order, he’s been swamped with the renovation work.”
“Ah,” Gio nodded. “Kicked you out of there, did he?”
“So fast I wondered if I smelled bad.”
“You don’t smell bad,” Tara assured me with a sympathetic pat on the hand. She exchanged a look with her husband.
“Dom is . . . ,” Gio started to say, then trailed off.
“Stubborn and territorial,” Tara finished with a sweet smile.
“Tara,” her husband warned, but I could see he was trying not to laugh.
“Sorry,” she said. “I swear I’m not trying to scare Melanie off.”
Gio checked the time and announced that he had to get going to a meeting with a local organic farmer who was looking to supply the restaurant’s produce for salads and toppings.
Tara held her arms out to take baby Leah. Gio kissed them each on the forehead and asked me to do the daily bank deposit, which I’d already gotten used to.
“I’ll be back in time for the dinner rush,” he said. “In the meantime Aimee and Carl are serving, and Tim, Juan, and Dmitri are in the kitchen. They’ll help you figure out anything that comes up.”
“Sounds good,” I said.
As soon as he stepped out the door, Aimee, a college student who was rather flighty but seemed all right mostly, approached the table holding a pizza.
“Hot out of the oven,” she said, and I grabbed a piece as soon as she set it down. I’d never been a huge pizza fan, but I had to admit I’d changed my mind since I started working at Esposito’s. These guys knew how to do pizza right.
Tara had covered herself with a pretty blue scarf so she could breastfeed Leah discreetly. At our first lunch she’d told me the story of how she met her husband. Back when Esposito’s first opened, Tara had been working at a nearby coffee shop, and one day she wandered down here at lunchtime to see this pizza that everyone was raving about. She said that the moment she laid eyes on Gio she just knew she would fall hopelessly in love with him. I supposed it really did happen that way for certain people. Gio and Tara were so obviously in love they fascinated me. It sounded corny, but I could swear that even the air got happier when the two of them were together in the same room. They were a true love story, like my parents. Knowing that such couples were possible made the rest of us onlookers feel as if we might have a chance to find that kind of love for ourselves.
I was really glad to have Tara in my life, and not just because she’d given me the tip about the job. She stopped by several times a week to see Gio and always took the time to chat with me. We’d had several lunches together, and I even met her downtown at the art museum for a few hours last weekend because there was an exhibit on hoopskirts that she was dying to see.
“So,” said Tara, giving me a rather mischievous grin. “Now that Gio’s gone, you can freely state what you really think of my brother-in-law.”
I nearly choked on my pizza. I didn’t want to bad-mouth my boss, but maybe Tara had some insight to offer. Maybe then I could stop feeling paranoid that Dominic Esposito was searching for a reason to get rid of me. I already liked working here, and my ego was still bruised from one fall from grace this year. I didn’t want to think about getting fired again.
I leaned in and kept my voice low so none of the other staff would hear. “He seems rather, um, intense.”
“You mean like he’d rather cut his pinkie finger off than accept help from anyone?”
“Something like that.”
“Yeah.” Tara sighed and frowned. “Now, I love Dom like he’s my own brother. He’s devoted to Gio, and he would move the moon for our baby girl, but sometimes it’s like he doesn’t quite get that a wide collection of people inhabit his orbit. I mean, I understand why he’s wary on some level. You know the history, right? What happened with the original family restaurant?”
Gio had mentioned that Esposito’s was modeled after the New York original. The first Esposito’s had long been out of business, and the brothers were looking to recreate their legacy here on the other side of the country. Tara filled in the rest of the details about how Gio and Dom’s grandmother, Donna, moved to the other side of the country.
Tara paused in her story and shifted the nursing wrap, settling a sleepy Leah on her shoulder. “So you see,” she said, “these two men believe they are trying to restore their family’s good name, and they’re awful serious about it, especially Dom. Gio tells me you’re doing a great job. Dominic will come around and see that, once he gives you a chance. And he will. Just don’t get chased off before that happens. Promise me.”
I winked at her. “Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere unless forced.”
Tara stuck around until Leah started getting irritable and then she took the baby home for a nap. Before disappearing into the tiny office down the hall, I walked around to talk briefly with each employee. They were a friendly bunch for the most part. My favorite was Carl, the ex-cop, who would happily drone on about his crime-fighting days as he refilled the shakers of parmesan cheese.
“This one night we received a call from a department store, one of those mega stores where they sell everything from motor oil to fresh lobsters. Just before they closed the door for the evening, this guy busts in on a dirt bike and starts riding through the aisles. He wore a blue cape, white underwear, and a cowboy hat.”
“Sounds fetching,” I giggled.
“Oh yeah, it was a sight. We chased him around and finally had him cornered in the cereal aisle. He screamed, ‘Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!’ and then crashed into an oatmeal display. Dislocated his shoulder.”
I laughed again. “You working until closing tonight, Carl?”
“God, I hope so,” he said, making a face. “The missus has a new hobby. She spends about eight hours a day staring at these cards with weird pictures on them, claiming they tell her the future.”
“You mean Tarot cards?”
“Whatever. She keeps insisting that the cards warned that her I’m going to fall into the Grand Canyon.”
“That seems easy enough to avoid,” I said.
Carl shrugged. “You’d think. But Janet’s decided that the Grand Canyon is just a metaphor and that my fate is unavoidable unless I stay home with her. Melanie, I really do love my wife but, my god, I’ve got to breathe in my own space at least a few hours a day.”
“Well, you go ahead and breathe away,” I said, giving Carl’s arm a pat before moving on.
Even if there was work to do back in the office, the space was so small and cluttered, it made me feel like I was living in an old nightmare from childhood where I was trapped in my mother’s closet while the walls closed in. Every time I had that nightmare, I’d cry in my sleep. Somehow my mother always heard. She would sit on the side of my bed, stroke my hair, and sing “You Are My Sunshine” until I felt safe enough to fall asleep again. It was just one of a thousand memories that was sweet and painful at the same time.
Even though the noise from the kitchen filtered in, I left the door open because it made the place bearable. I thought about the big, airy office down at Espo 2, which would fit all the filing cabinets and several large desks, one exclusively mine. Esposito’s would never match the posh ambience of Desert Princess Resort and Spa, but I was glad to have this job.
For a while I dove into the work in front of me, going over the step-by-step instructions I’d typed out and collected in a binder. I had already documented every aspect of my job and anything else that might come up, from the payroll process to kitchen procedures, in the event I wasn’t available and someone needed something. Once I moved over to Espo 2, I didn’t want to be calling Gio every five minutes with a question, and I sure as hell didn’t want to be tugging on Dominic’s shirt all day long.
But after my conversation with Tara, I thought I understood things a little better. The Esposito brothers were rather young to have achieved this level of success. The two of them had started early. They’d had something to prove. And judging from the hardened look of intensity on Dominic’s face, he was still trying to prove something—to himself or to the world—every day.
A flush of heat rose to my cheeks as I remembered this afternoon and how I’d bit the inside of my lip to distract myself from the sight of Dominic’s muscles busting the seams of his old T-shirt. The best-dressed man on earth wouldn’t be able to compete with the raw sexiness of Dominic in his faded cotton tees. And I couldn’t ignore the way my breath caught as those strangely penetrating dark eyes settled on me. I swallowed and balled my left hand into a fist as an unbidden bolt of desire shot through my belly.
No. Nope. HELL NO with sixty cherries and three pounds of butterscotch on top.
I kept thinking that the strong, evidently one-sided physical attraction I felt toward Dominic would go away. He was abrupt and distant. He was standoffish and irritable. Most importantly, he was my boss.
Maybe I ought to listen to Lucy and go find some random male attention to loosen me up. It didn’t have to be anything permanent. Honestly, I didn’t even want permanent right now. But it would be nice to be looked at, to be touched, to be kissed . . .
An image of Dominic Esposito’s full lips flashed through my mind, and I accidentally stabbed my pen through an innocent pink Post-it Note.
That was the last straw, I swore to myself. No longer would I indulge in guilt-ridden masturbation with my favorite battery-operated toy as fantasies of a certain brooding pizzeria owner besieged my mind. Anyway I was bound to get over this weird infatuation, especially once I was actually working with Dominic every day. He probably picked his nose and chewed with his mouth open and screwed anything with legs. He wasn’t my type. He never would be.
Actually, I didn’t even have a type, but if I did, then he wasn’t allowed to be a member of it. Dominic Esposito could never ever find out I’d ever had a single sexy thought about him. Nope. I’d pull my own left thumbnail out before I admitted the truth.