What now, genius?
Well, she could apply down the street at Java Nectar, the coffeehouse. She could look into online tutoring and make use of her English Lit knowledge, but that wouldn’t get her out of the house. She could—
“You’ll do no such thing, dear,” Mrs. Harper called after her. “Take the rest of the night off. You’ve earned it. And I’ll see you back here for tomorrow’s shift.”
Alyssa spun back around and returned to the table on a wave of utter astonishment, afraid to breathe. Afraid to hope.
“Really?”
“Absolutely.” Mrs. Harper beamed at her, regarding Alyssa as though she’d just awarded Harper Rose Bistro a handful of Michelin Stars. “Isaiah still needs to get schooled sometimes. Even if he does have those mathematics with computer science degrees from MIT.”
Isaiah, who was now dabbing his crotch with his napkin, a useless exercise that did nothing to mitigate the illusion that he’d had a huge pee in his pants, scowled.
“Thanks, Mrs. Harper.” Alyssa gratefully took Ada’s hand between both of hers. “It won’t happen again. I usually never lose my temper.”
“No worries, dear.”
Alyssa headed for the kitchen again with a song in her heart and a bounce in her step, categorically unable to believe her good fortune. She’d knocked the bully down to size and she got to keep her job? She’d always know that Mrs. Harper was a sweetheart, but—
“What’s your name?” a male voice called behind her.
She stiffened and turned back.
It was Isaiah Harper.
He cleared his throat. “I want to make sure I get it right when I leave a scathing online review.”
Alyssa stared at the devil’s brother, her shoulders automatically squaring up and her facial features involuntarily resuming frown position. Her strong inclination was to test his mother’s goodwill by telling him to kiss her ass, but it turned out that her newfound hotheadedness only went so far.
And then a memory shook loose from her brain.
Just a little while ago, she’d overheard Isaiah saying that he planned to start some sort of a foundation with the multimillion-dollar proceeds from the sale of his second software company, the deal that had landed him on the cover of Time.
A foundation.
An image of her recently deceased mother crept into her thoughts. Mama had been so decimated with her disease that there’d been precious little left to embalm and place into her pitifully small urn.
“If you’re looking for ideas for your foundation, you might want to consider something for lung cancer,” she told Isaiah. “It’s the leading cancer killer for men and women. By far.”
Then she went into the kitchen to grab some dinner, letting the door flap shut on Isaiah’s inscrutable gaze as it followed her.
Chapter 2
The fun continued a few minutes later, when Alyssa emerged from the kitchen and discovered Isaiah standing by the bar retrieving his martini and holding a glass of wine in his other hand. A quick glance around revealed no sign of the bartender. Only Isaiah’s penetrating stare, his eyes moody over the rim of his glass as he took a sip.
Though she felt she’d done an admirable job of cooling down since Water Pitcher-Gate, the sight of him again so soon rubbed her the wrong way. She mentally weaponed up, noting that Daniel, another gentleman she didn’t know and Journey’s End’s favorite real estate agent, Raymond Martin, were the only other diners present and they were too far away to do her any good if something else popped off with Isaiah.
Isaiah opened his mouth, gearing up to say something.
“I know, I know,” she said without breaking stride, determined to head him off at the pass. “You’ve decided not to leave me any tip at all since you had to get up and walk all the way over here to get your own drink. Darn. There goes that yacht down payment. No worries, though. I will soldier on through the heartbreak somehow.”
A strange sound erupted behind her, an odd little noise of disbelief from Isaiah. But it might also have been a distant cousin of a laugh. The bewildering idea that this guy could produce anything related to fun or joy made her stop and turn back around.
She should have known better.
His stern face, all sharp angles and edges topped by forbidding brows and a lush black Afro that could use some fluffing on one side, slid into incredulity but did not produce a smile. He seemed wary, the way a vacationer on safari in Kenya might regard a pride of lionesses that emerged from the tall grass and ambled across the road in front of his vehicle:
He wanted to see all the action, but he damn sure didn’t want to get too close.
“You’ll say anything, won’t you?”
She thought of her long and pathetic history of ducking her head and trying to keep the peace when she dared to open her mouth at all.
“Not usually, no,” she admitted.
One of his heavy brows rose. “So I bring out this aggressive side of you.”
No point to denying the obvious. “Evidently.”
“Interesting.” He sipped again. Gave her a narrowed look. “I thought you were leaving. Wasn’t that your reward for assaulting me?”
“Nope,” she said crisply, eyeballing the wet spot on the front of his pants with relish. “My reward for that was the gleeful looks on the faces of your mother and your brother. And the personal satisfaction of a job well done. Excuse me.”
She started to walk off for the second time, but there was that sound again. Something between a choked cough and a laugh coming from the general direction of Isaiah’s still unsmiling (but now dimpled) mouth.
She hesitated a second time, unwillingly intrigued by the possibility that she might somehow get a positive reaction out of him.
He glanced at her plate. “I see that you’re stealing food from the kitchen. I’ll have to add that to the water incident when I leave the scathing online review and try to get you fired.”
He actually had a nice voice, she noticed for the first time, deep but mellow. That and the unmistakable glimmer of amusement in his eyes really threw her for a loop.
Really made her blood simmer, although whether it was from lingering anger or something else entirely, she couldn’t quite tell.
Worse, these interactions with him, even if they ultimately culminated in one of them throttling the other, made her feel alive in a way she hadn’t in a long time. Certainly since well before she came back to town to nurse her dying mother about a year ago.
“This will come as a huge shock to you since you seem to think you know everything about everything,” she said crisply, “but your mother is a great boss who lets her employees eat a meal when they’re here. And I’m meeting someone.”
Those dimples disappeared. “Boyfriend?”
The B-word hit her hard. As someone who’d been a longtime slave to her schooling and then a slave to her mother’s declining health, Alyssa had precious little experience with boyfriends and didn’t even want to think about how long it’d been since she’d had anything other than solo sex.
“Wow,” she said, incredulous. “You’re nosy on top of everything else. You’re like a royal flush of negativity, aren’t you?”
That did it.
To her utter astonishment, he let out a single sharp bark of laughter that fully activated those dimples, flashed straight white teeth and made his eyes sparkle as they turned up at the corners.
He was, suddenly, an entirely different person.
Just a guy in a restaurant. Not a forbidding tech millionaire. Not a bully.
Matter of fact, he was a handsome guy.
She took a closer look, feeling a bit off-kilter.
He was broad-shouldered and lean in his skull T-shirt, jeans and motorcycle boots. He had great brown eyes, the chiseled bone structure of someone you’d want modeling in your art class, gleaming brown skin and lush lips surrounded by facial hair that couldn’t quite decide whether it wanted to organize into a goatee or not. Matter of fact, his smile wa
s so wide and disarming that it was as though it took a sledgehammer to that glowering Isaiah, demolishing those features and leaving behind someone potentially interesting.
This Isaiah had a sexy and mischievous Lenny Kravitz vibe going on. He made her skin tighten and something flutter to life in her belly.
Arrested, she stared at him and tried to decide which was a bigger threat to her equilibrium:
Hateful Isaiah or laughing Isaiah.
“What’s all this?” said a bemused new female voice.
Startled and grateful for the interruption, Alyssa looked around in time to see the final approach of her former sister-in-law, Reeve Banks, one of Alyssa’s close high-school friends and the widow of her brother Adam, who’d been killed in action four years ago in Afghanistan.
The timely arrival stopped Alyssa from regarding Isaiah in this troublesome new light. She breathed a quick sigh of relief to be freed from the spell cast by that dazzling smile, but her reprieve was short-lived.
Isaiah, to her further astonishment, quickly put down his drinks, turned to Reeve, smiled even more broadly and pulled her in for a bear hug and kiss on the cheek.
Alyssa’s lower jaw clanged to the floor and stayed there while she came to terms with what she’d just witnessed:
Isaiah. Harper. Displayed. Human. Warmth.
“How’re you doing, Little Doc?” he asked Reeve, who was a pediatric resident at the medical center.
“Can’t complain.” Reeve beamed up at him. “You haven’t hooked up with any new poker partners, have you?”
“Wouldn’t do that to you,” Isaiah said, pressing a hand to his heart in a solemn vow.
“We played the other night after the football game,” Reeve told Alyssa when she turned to hug her and saw the look on Alyssa’s face. “I pretty much hid his laptop to get him to partner up with me, but I wanted him because I’d heard so much about his competitive streak. And I was right, wasn’t I, Isaiah? What does everyone owe us at this point? Three mil?”
“Sounds about right,” Isaiah said, fist-bumping her.
Alyssa resisted the urge to check her ears and blink and rub her eyes to make sure she wasn’t hearing and seeing things. But of course it made sense that Reeve, who’d fallen for Isaiah’s younger brother Edward, would spend time at the Harper homestead and get to know his brothers.
Alyssa gave Mr. Full of Surprises a dubious sidelong look, held her plate aside and returned Reeve’s hug. “So good to see you.”
“You, too,” Reeve said, kissing her cheek and pulling back to look at Isaiah again. “I’m starving. Isaiah, what’s going on in your crotch area? Don’t mean to get too personal, but…”
“Your girl here dumped a pitcher of water in my lap,” he said, reverting to his glower. “On purpose.”
Now it was Reeve’s turn to look astonished. “Alyssa?”
“Alyssa,” he said with a poorly concealed glimmer of triumph in Alyssa’s direction. “I’m just about to call the police and report her for assault.”
“You do that,” Alyssa said, linking her free arm through Reeve’s and steering her toward a table in the back. “Don’t let us keep you. Buh-bye.”
Reeve locked her knees in place and regarded Alyssa as though she’d put a bare foot up on one of the tables and begun clipping her toenails.
“I was going to ask Isaiah if he wanted to join us,” she said, gesturing over her shoulder at him.
“He doesn’t,” Alyssa said quickly.
“Actually, I’d love to,” he said with a pointed look in Alyssa’s direction as he picked up his drinks again, “but I’m meeting with Raymond Martin to see if I can find a house.”
“Isaiah’s moving back to Journey’s End,” Reeve told Alyssa brightly, blithely unaware of how this unwanted information made Alyssa’s heart thump. “Actually, you’re probably selling your house and Isaiah wants to buy. Maybe you two are a match.”
“I seriously doubt that,” Alyssa said.
“You never know,” Isaiah said, a silky note in his voice. “I’d love to check it out.”
“Not in this lifetime,” Alyssa muttered, dropping Reeve’s arm and walking off without her because she showed every sign of lingering and Alyssa had had more than enough of Isaiah Harper for one night. She felt the weight of their nonplussed gazes following her, but she didn’t let that slow her down.
By the time Reeve joined her in a back booth, Alyssa’s pulse rate had slowed down into the non-heart attack range and she’d even managed a bite or two of her pasta.
Reeve dropped into the seat across from Alyssa, looking scandalized. “What was all that about?”
Alyssa tried to look innocent and bewildered. “What are you talking about?”
“That whole thing with you and Isaiah, obviously,” Reeve said. “Since when do you dump water on people’s laps?”
“Since people show up my table and act like they’re the king of the universe when I’m trying to serve them.” Alyssa’s blood began another slow boil as she remembered the way Isaiah had spoken to her. “I’m surprised someone as lovely as Ada Harper could produce such an SOB as a son. Seems like her body would have rejected him in the womb or something. And when did you become such a big fan of the devil’s brother? I thought you were a better judge of character than that.”
Reeve laughed. “Since I spent time with him on Sunday. He’s actually a great guy. Very funny. Crazy smart. You just have to pry his laptop out of his hands and get him to engage. And look past his crazy Afro.” She frowned and adopted a conspiratorial tone. “And Edward told me that Isaiah came down to breakfast the other day with only his boxers on, so you have to ignore his partial nudity, too. And the fact that he evidently brought home a woman from the wedding and hooked up with her in his childhood bedroom at his parents’ house. That went over well at breakfast, especially when he and the woman didn’t even know each other’s names.”
Alyssa rolled her eyes and tried not to feel a nasty twinge of something unwelcome in the vicinity of her chest at the thought of Isaiah having sex with some faceless woman.
“Unbelievable. And yet I’m not surprised at all. That’s exactly the kind of behavior I would expect from the devil’s brother.”
More laughter from Reeve. “Stop calling him that.”
“No.” Alyssa’s stubborn streak kicked in, demanding that she keep Isaiah in the box into which she’d thrown him. Isaiah Harper was a jerk and no more needed to be said about it. The end. “It’s appropriate. And you do realize that what you just said makes zero sense, right? That’s like saying what a great rattlesnake it is as long as you take away the scales, the rattle, the fangs and the poison.”
Reeve’s gaze turned narrowed and speculative, much to Alyssa’s dismay.
“This is a lot of discussion about Isaiah Harper,” Reeve said. “I thought I detected a little chemistry between the two of you when I walked up.”
Alyssa froze, locking down her muscles to make sure she didn’t fidget under all this unwelcome scrutiny. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Methinks she doth protest too much. Or something like that.” Reeve all but levitated with delight over her sad attempt at humor. “See what I did there? You’re a Shakespeare scholar and I threw a little Shakespeare at you.”
“Yeah, I saw,” Alyssa said, folding her arms and trying not to smile. “Don’t hurt yourself. A few months with Edward and now you’re seeing hearts and rainbows in every direction. Why don’t you go work for the Lifetime Channel if you’re so determined to spin all these love stories?”
“Oh, whatever,” Reeve said, flapping a hand in a transparent attempt to distract from her tinkling laughter and vivid blush. “I decided to enjoy myself a little bit. You can’t blame me for that.”
“No, I cannot,” Alyssa said fondly, recalling the way Reeve had confided about her battle with depression and guilt following Adam’s death. If anyone deserved incandescent romantic happiness, it was Reeve. “Which is why I’ve decided to ignore all the girlis
h giggling and blushing.”
“Appreciate that.”
They grinned at each other.
“So things are going well on that front?” Alyssa asked.
“Things are going great on that front. I’ve been spending more time with Ella,” Reeve said, referencing Edward’s toddler daughter. “I can’t wait for you to meet her.”
“Speaking of meeting, have you met Edward’s baby mama yet?”
Reeve grimaced. “I haven’t. I’m a little nervous about that.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Alyssa said with a breezy flap of her hand. “I’m sure it’ll be just like Modern Family.”
They laughed. Then Reeve had to go and ruin it by giving Alyssa that penetrating look of concern that Alyssa had grown to dread since her mother’s death.
Alyssa braced herself and held up a hand to ward her off. “Don’t start.”
“Don’t get mad at me, honey. Your mother died a few months ago and I have to ask how you’re doing. It’s in my job contract.”
“I’m fine.”
Reeve waited, one brow slowly creeping higher.
Alyssa scowled, thinking of the huge and creaky old house she now owned courtesy of her mother’s will. Thought about how she was the sole surviving member of her nuclear family. Thought about how the ghosts of her mother, father and brother crept up on her from every room, corner and picture in the house. Hell, even the plates in the kitchen and the towels in the linen cabinet sparked memories of someone who was no longer there. Another few months rattling around by herself in that lonely house and she would implode into nothingness.
Which was why she was so determined to sell the house and equally determined to spend as little time there as possible in the meantime.
Hence her part-time job here at Harper Rose Bistro while she figured out what to do with her life.
“I’m working on being fine,” she conceded. “Some days it’s easier than others.”
“Yeah, I get that.” Reeve’s voice turned husky, causing her to clear her throat. “I had a lot of ups and downs when Adam died. You’re allowed. Is there anything in particular on your mind?”
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