Loverboy

by Bowen, Sarina

  “Ah,” I say, because at last we’ve arrived at my part of this bargain. “You want me to find The Plumber, so you and he can have a little chat.”

  “Bingo.” Max sips his scotch.

  “Okay. Sure. I’ll look for your informant. But I don’t know what you’re going to do if you find him.”

  “Just talk,” Max says. “So long as he’s willing.”

  Yikes. “Be careful, Max. Make sure you’re in the right frame of mind here. I know Aga is important to you. But you’re pretty important to the rest of us. So I need you to take care.”

  He tilts his head to the side and studies me. “Thank you, Gunn. I appreciate it. I know you think I’m tilting at windmills. But I need to explore this.”

  “Sure. Where should I start?”

  “You’ll begin tomorrow morning at about nine-thirty, after the morning coffee rush has passed.”

  “So I can get a table at one of the establishments your sloppy hacker likes?”

  “Not quite.” He slides a photo toward me on the coffee table. It’s a storefront called Posy’s Pie Shop.

  My spine tingles. “Interesting name.” There must be a lot of women in New York named Posy, though. Thousands, probably.

  “Isn’t it? Note the Help Wanted sign in the window. They pay fifteen bucks an hour. They’re desperate for a barista.”

  I let out a bark of laughter. “You can’t be serious! I don’t even drink coffee. They’ll never hire me.”

  “Think about how easy it will be to watch the customers from behind the counter, Gunn. You’ll have an excuse to stare at everyone who comes through the door. The hacker posts half his stuff from this one location.”

  “They’ll never hire me! And it’s shitty to take a job for two weeks and then bail.”

  He shrugs. “She’ll find someone else.”

  “She?” My spine tingles again. Posy’s. It’s probably just a coincidence.

  Max reaches into the folder and passes me another photograph of a beautiful woman. She’s handing a plate across the counter to a customer. And smiling. That smile always made me stupid. I wanted her so badly.

  But all I got was a single kiss. And then a whole lot of trouble.

  I let out a groan and toss the picture back to Max. “No. You can’t be serious.”

  He puts the photo away. Then he just sits back and watches me.

  “You really think I’m going to apply for a job at her bakery? That’s stupid.”

  Max waits.

  “I can’t do that. She hates me. And given the way things ended, the feeling is mutual.”

  Max sips his scotch.

  “She does not want to see my ugly mug every day. And she does not need an incompetent barista. I mean—I’m sure I could figure out how to make coffee. How hard could it be? But that’s not the point. I don’t need to stand around in a bakery for hours on end just to follow up on this stupid lead you’re getting from some dark web forum. Even if the perp knows too much about …” I swallow. “A string of murders.” Grizzly, horrible murders.

  A violent criminal is using Posy Paxton’s shop to boast about killing people? Shit. Posy isn’t equipped for that. She’s about as fierce as a kitten.

  I let out a sigh of resignation.

  Max watches me take all this in. “I knew you’d see it my way. You cared for this girl.”

  “Did not,” I lie. “Fine. What if I did? I was young and stupid.”

  It was fifteen years ago, for God’s sake. I worked at Paxton’s—her family’s swanky uptown restaurant—as a bartender. Posy turned up the summer before my senior year of college. It was the first time in my life I ever felt lightning-struck by a girl. She had bright, intelligent eyes. And her quick smile did unexpected things to my body. Every time she walked into the room, my heart rate sped up, and my skin felt too hot.

  It didn’t even matter to me that she was a horrible bartender. Every time she smiled at me, I forgave her incompetence. Hell, I think I liked it. Because Posy needed a lot of help from me to do the job. I taught her a lot, even though we were competing for the bar manager’s job.

  I wasn’t that worried, though, because I’d been working my way up the Paxton’s ladder since I was sixteen. I knew ten times more than she did. I used to tease her about it, too. But even as my mouth was saying, you call that a margarita? my heart was saying, will you please get into my bed?

  She felt it too. At the end of the summer we shared the most outrageous kiss. Afterward, I walked on air, feeling like a game show contestant who’d just won a new car.

  Until the next day, when she got me fired.

  Posy turned out to be the same kind of unforgiving rich kid I’d spent my teenage years avoiding. And I guess I’m still bitter, because I think I’d rather crawl through a sewage pipe than work for her shop.

  “Here’s an idea,” I say to Max. “I don’t have to work there. I can just loiter.”

  “At your former rival’s place of business. Because that’s not creepy at all.” Max smiles slowly.

  Fuck.

  2

  Posy

  “Did you set the oven timer?” I ask Ginny, who’s filling in as my kitchen assistant.

  My sister rolls her eyes. “Uh huh. Forty-two minutes. Just like you told me three times.”

  “Excellent,” I say calmly. I love my sister. I would do anything for Ginny and her five-year-old son. But neither of us is thrilled with this situation. My shop is desperate for labor, and Ginny is strapped for cash. So we need each other.

  Unfortunately, last week she burned two full racks of pastry. Margins are tight enough around here without throwing away sixty bucks worth of ingredients and two hours of my labor.

  Since it's two o'clock, I've been baking for ten hours already. I’ve made a hundred breakfast pastries, a hundred meat pies, and thirty full-sized pies for the shop. I’m dead on my feet, and closing time is still two hours away.

  Opening a cafe is a lot of hard work and risk-taking. I knew it would be. I've had a lifetime of watching how the restaurant industry operates. I opened Posy’s Pie Shop with eyes wide open. Newly divorced, and burnt out on my desk job, I needed a new challenge.

  And boy, did I find one. I’m already doing a booming business. The place is packed for most of our business hours. My lower-Manhattan clientele is willing to pay six dollars for a slice of my gourmet fruit pie, or nine bucks for a lunchtime meat pie. We sell out nearly every day.

  But my costs are high, too. Gourmet ingredients cost a fortune. And I have trouble hiring enough help. I had a terrific staff in place before Lily—my assistant baker—fell in love with Keisha—my barista. It was all well and good until they decided to ditch city life to work on a billionaire’s yacht. I lost two terrific employees in one day.

  That was a month ago, and I’ve been struggling ever since. In the first place, I think of Posy’s Pie Shop like a family. So losing Lily and Keisha hurt. Since then, I’ve already hired and fired three people. That hurt, too, since it felt like firing family members.

  But one of them was stealing from me and two were chronically late. That’s family for you.

  "Where's Jerry?" I ask Ginny, who’s measuring out flour for tomorrow's first batch of pastry.

  “Out back,” she says. “Vaping, probably.”

  “No, I'm not!” Jerry's voice pipes up from just outside the screen door. “I’m reading comics on my tablet!”

  Jerry never lies to me. “Jerry, honey, it's time to clean the kitchen. You can read comics after four, okay?”

  “Okay, Posy!” The backdoor bangs open and Jerry appears, all smiles. He has Down syndrome, and I employ him through a program that matches men and women with special challenges to businesses that can hire them. He comes in every day at one o’clock to restock things like napkins and cups, and to wash dishes.

  He is the nicest guy you will ever meet, and it was a lucky day when I agreed to give him a try in my shop. He is, however, prone to distraction. Not a single day goes by th
at he doesn’t wander away from a sink full of dishes just to catch up on comics.

  That's just the cost of doing business with Jerry. Everyone is flawed in his own way, right? Just like in a real family.

  "Posy!" calls Teagan from the counter out front.

  Crap. “Is it time for you to leave?” I call out.

  Teagan is a baker, too. She makes the world-class donuts I buy wholesale to supplement my early morning offerings. But because I’m in such dire need of help, and because Teagan has expensive taste in shoes, I've talked her into working the counter for me a few hours a day, too, on a temporary basis.

  “I’m leaving in fifteen,” Teagan calls. "But there's somebody here about your barista job."

  “Wait, really?” I drop the metal mixing bowl I’d been holding and grab the nearest towel to wipe off my hands. “Don't let her leave! I'll be right there! Ginny,” I bark. “Listen for the oven timer.”

  “Yes, master,” she says. Ignoring the sarcasm, I dash through the kitchen door, hope in my heart.

  I make it as far as the cash register, and then pull up short. There’s someone standing by the counter, all right. But it isn't a woman, like I expected. It's a man. His back is to me, because he’s reading the menu that’s chalked onto my gold-framed board at the front. So I don't quite have the whole picture yet.

  But some people make a big impression even from the back, and this gentleman is one of them. The first thing I notice is his confident posture. Straight spine. Shoulders back. Like he’s ready to take on the world.

  And, fine, there’s also his spectacular ass. I don’t usually look at asses, but this one is seriously muscular. The fabric of his slim-cut jeans is strained by sculpted thighs and that perfect butt.

  The top half of him is just as promising. His T-shirt clings in all the right places to a sturdy set of gym-sculpted back muscles and impressive biceps. His hair is blond, and lighter at the ends, as if he’s spent the last few months on a beach somewhere. And as he turns a rugged chin in my direction, I brace myself. It’s bad form to drool on job applicants, right?

  Then I finally get a look at this man’s face. Those piercing green eyes and two days’ worth of scruff are handsome enough to turn heads. As a matter of fact, he used to turn mine. Because I know this face, even if I haven’t seen it for fifteen years. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Gunnar Scott is still drop-dead gorgeous.

  Oh my goodness, cry my hormones. We were not prepared for this reunion!

  I look down at myself. Smudgy apron. Check. Flour on my T-shirt. Check. Old jeans and ragged sneakers. Check and check.

  That just figures, because Gunnar Scott is that guy—the one who taught me how forceful desire can feel. The first man who ever turned me into the human embodiment of a hormone rush just by entering a room.

  But we were rivals. We spent an entire summer trying to outdo each other at Paxton’s Bar and Bistro. We both wanted a job that was rightfully mine. But my asshole father made me compete for it anyway.

  Once upon a time, my dad inherited Paxton’s from his father, who inherited it from his father. I wanted so badly to prove that I could continue the family tradition. I busted my ass that summer, trying to impress my father and earn that promotion.

  But Gunnar Scott was a fierce competitor. He even used flattery as a distraction technique. It worked, too. I lost my head whenever he turned those cool green eyes on me. All he had to do was say, “Nice job with the lemon wedges,” and I’d melt like butter. I lived for watching him move around the bar with casual confidence, mixing drinks and chatting up the regulars. Or when he sliced limes, and the muscles bulged in his forearms …

  Yeah, it never took much to distract me. And maybe nothing has changed, because Gunnar’s startling presence has gummed up my brain. Instead of behaving like a confident business owner, I’m just staring at him like a stunned rabbit.

  “Posy,” he says in a rich voice that sounds way too familiar. “Nice to see you again.”

  I gulp. Nice is a strange choice of words. We were never very nice to each other. I covered up my raging crush with a chilly demeanor. Or I tried to, anyway. And he was the overconfident macho man who assumed he knew everything there was to know about bartending. Naturally, I argued with everything he said.

  And whenever he changed tactics—to flirting with me instead of defeating me—it always turned me into a blabbering idiot. “Are you here for pie?” I blurt suddenly.

  Oh dear! My hormones pipe up again. We’re thirty-four years old, and it’s still happening.

  “No, I’m not, although I hear the pie is excellent.” His smile is silky. It’s the smile that used to get the women sitting at the bar to throw down bigger tips. I used to think of it as his loverboy smile. “I’m here for the barista job.” He puts a folder on the counter. “I filled out your application.”

  Holy cannoli. “What? No way. You couldn’t possibly be a barista.” The man was a straight-A student at Columbia. And he was ruthless. I would have assumed he was running a company. Or a small country.

  “What are you saying?” His smile fades fast. “Are you questioning my career choice? Is there something wrong with working as a barista?”

  “No. No. Nope,” I say quickly, as self-preservation kicks in. There’s no need to offend the rest of my staff. But it just doesn’t add up. Gunnar had big plans for himself. He put himself through college, double majoring in political science and applied math.

  I don’t know why I remember his majors, damn it. It’s not like I care.

  “Do you have a job opening or not?” he asks, frowning.

  “She totally has an opening!” Teagan says loudly. She’s leaning against the counter, like a plant bending toward the sun. “She needs it bad.”

  Gunnar’s loverboy smile returns. Of course it does—now that he has an audience.

  And I have the unhelpful urge to smack Teagan. Women always lose their minds for Gunnar. At least until they get to know him. Then they can’t decide whether to kiss him or choke him.

  Or maybe that’s just me. “Do you have, uh, references?” I ask, still trying to get my head around this strange turn of events.

  “Sure. I’ve got one.” He flips the folder open to his application, where he’s listed Joe’s Cafe, which is apparently in Venice Beach, California. “Joe is waiting for your call,” Gunnar says. “I told him I was applying for jobs on the East Coast.”

  “You’ve moved back here?” I ask, stupidly. Because of course he is. I need to get a grip on the hormone rush that this maddening man always gives me. You’d think I’d have grown out of it. But nope! The hormones of a divorced, lonely woman are apparently easy prey. Is it hot in here?

  “I’ve been on the West Coast for several years. It’s been a while since I lived in New York,” Gunnar is saying. “Thought I’d give it another try. Are you going to consider my application?” Those pale green eyes bore into me.

  No, is my first reaction. And my second one, too. I do not need to turn into a quivering mass of uncertainty every day. I used to bicker with Gunnar as a way of keeping my game face on. We used to prank each other, too. But I don’t have the energy for any of that at this stage of my life.

  “Posy,” he says in that hunky voice of his. “I know we didn’t always get along, but I’m a hard worker. I won’t screw this up.”

  Get out of my brain. “Look,” I sigh. “How about you come in for a couple days on a trial basis? But you can’t get up to any of your old tricks. If you replace all the sugar dispensers with salt, I may not be responsible for my actions.”

  He snorts. “I wouldn’t have done that if you didn’t make all my drinks wrong for an entire shift. The Shirley Temple with olives was my personal favorite.”

  Teagan gasps, and then giggles. “Posy, really?”

  “It was a different lifetime,” I say quickly, as my neck begins to heat. “Just kids’ pranks.”

  “Totally,” he says, aiming one of those loverboy smiles at me.

&n
bsp; I look down at his application again, just to avoid that dangerous smile. “This work history is a little thin, Gunn. What have you been doing with the rest of your time?”

  “This and that.” He shrugs, and since I’m not looking him in the eye, I can only see his abs tighten.

  And, wow. That’s a seriously impressive body he has. I’ll bet he spent the last decade at the gym. But now here he is, in my shop of all places? The coincidence is just strange. “Are you applying to other coffee shops?”

  “Of course. I applied at Starbucks first, because they’re known for their excellent benefits. But it’s an online application. I might as well throw my resume down a well, right?” He sighs. “Besides, the coffee at Starbucks is not top quality. I’d rather work someplace that really cares about the product, you know?” He shrugs again, and I catalog the lift of his impressive shoulders. “And I’m right over on Sullivan Street. So it wasn’t hard to find this place—and there was a Help Wanted sign right in the window! Actually—”

  He turns and strides over to the window on those long, muscular legs. He plucks the sign off the glass and balls it up right in front of me. Like it’s a done deal. But I haven’t actually hired him yet! The balls on this man. I’m speechless.

  He isn’t, unfortunately. “Why don’t you show me around? I’m at your disposal.” Then he takes my wadded-up sign and tosses it right into the recycling bin. It lands dead center like a perfect three-pointer at Madison Square Garden.

  Teagan sighs happily. “Welcome aboard, Gunnar,” she says.

  “Teagan!” I squeak at my employee. “That’s my decision, don’t you think?”

  “Of course it is,” Gunnar says, leaning that rocking body against my counter. “But she won’t be wrong. I’m here to impress you. Just like old times.”

  I let out a growl of displeasure. Gunnar Scott is too confident for his own good. And suddenly it’s easy to remember how you can lust after someone and also fight with them all the time. His confidence always annoyed me because I didn’t have enough of my own. And it irks me that women melt like butter at everything he says.