by Emilia Finn
“You’ll always be my common factor, sweet girl.” Jen follows me in and stops behind me when I press my hands to the lip of the sink. With feather-soft fingertips, she brushes hair off my shoulder. “Wanna talk about what’s really got you upset?”
“I’m frustrated.” I set my dirty spoon in the sink, and the tub on the counter to my left. “I’m a good vet, Jen. I’m really, really good. I willingly accepted this position, knowing it was administrative work, yes, so it’s not like he tricked me into it. But still, I was so hopeful he would recognize my brilliance and beg me to work with him in that examination room.”
“So, you had expectations,” she murmurs, “unrealistic expectations, considering the job that was advertised, and now that Doc McHotty isn’t picking up what you’re putting down, you’re mad at him. Accurate?”
“Yes,” I whimper. “I’m mad and sad and frustrated. Then, because I’m all of those things, I nagged at him today while he was busy and tired.”
“What did you nag at him about?”
“His waiting clients,” I admit. “And how I could help them.”
“You tried to impose on the guy’s business?”
I turn my head and snarl at my perfectly imperfect sister. “Why are you on his side?”
“I’m not!” she laughs. “I’m on yours. Always. But that doesn’t mean you get a free pass to be a dick. Whether you like it or not, Lakeside is his practice, not yours. And you expecting something that was never promised is your problem, not his.”
“Ugh!”
“Now, the incessant phone calls,” she says when my phone, again, vibrates against the table. “That’s a whole other discussion I would like to weigh in on. The dude calls you more often than Mark does, and he makes you smile and frown at the same time. How is that even possible?”
When I say nothing, she adds, “It’s annoying as hell, always listening to that bzzzzz. But,” she snickers. “Again. He never once said he wouldn’t stalk you after five o’clock. And since you continue to take the calls, you reinforce his poor behavior.”
“I’m not taking his calls right now.”
She scoffs. “Because you know if you do, you’re gonna call him a jerkwad, and then you’ll feel bad about it. This is your act of rebellion, putting him back in his place. But we both know, an hour from now, you’ll take that call, you’ll tell him you’re sorry for ignoring him, or you’ll tell him you’ve had the runs and couldn’t get to the phone.”
“Ew!”
“Then life will go back to normal,” she chuckles. “You’ll go back to harboring secret resentment. He’ll go back to being your sexy boss. And I’ll go back to eating my dinner.” She snags the tub and a fresh spoon from the drawer. “Are we all sorted now?”
“He shouted at me,” I confess as she turns away with her treats. “Not, like, ragey shouting,” I explain when she turns back. “He didn’t blow up at me, and it wasn’t in front of other people or anything. But he told me to do my damn job.”
“You were told off.” Sympathetic, my annoyingly beautiful, obnoxiously athletically built and ridiculously smart sister wraps her half-naked body around my back in a hug. “You don’t like being scolded.”
“It hurt my feelings,” I tell her in a whisper. “And stop calling my boss sexy. You’ve literally never met him. You have no clue what he looks like.”
“And yet,” she taunts. “Somehow, even without you saying so, I know he’s dazzling to the eye.”
I shoot straight and spin in her arms. “He is not!”
“Darling.” She watches me the way an adoring parent watches their child after the millionth ‘Look at this trick!’ “You continue to pretend, and I’ll continue to let you. But we both know he’s the reason you changed shampoos recently.”
“My hair was dry!”
“You wanted shinier hair,” she heckles. “We both know you wake up early and race around to make his life easier. You work your ass off during the day, all so he’ll notice. And even when you get home, even when we’re watching Josh Hartnett in Pearl Harbor, you still jump to take the guy’s calls.”
“Because he’s my boss. That’s my job.”
“Are you afraid of being fired?” she challenges. Giving up on the idea of sitting on the couch to finish her meal, Jen leans against the table, and spoons a glob into her mouth. “Are you genuinely in fear of unemployment?”
“No.” I draw in a deep breath, only to exhale when my phone vibrates again. “He’s not gonna fire me. He needs me.”
“Egggzactly!” she points her spoon in my direction, then turns away and heads back into the living room. “You don’t have to do the things you do for him. You do them because you want to please him.”
“Because I want him to notice how smart I am, and let me work with the animals!”
“Uh huh. Now get another spoon and come watch this with me. Dude swears he was out with his buddies the night his wife was murdered. But none of the friends can corroborate, since they were all stoned and/or unconscious.”
Feeling lighter and slightly less mean than when I walked in my door, I call at her back, “Stag party gone wrong. Half a dozen jerks smoke a doobie, sleep with the stripper, killer accidentally forgets a condom, because he was too busy not waiting for consent. Wife called him one too many times,” I glower at my phone when it vibrates once more.
“But no answer,” I continue. “She’s worried, so the little wifey comes looking for him. Walks in on an orgy, loses her shit. He kills her when no one is looking, dumps her body, goes back to the party, passes out, acts surprised the next day when she’s reported missing by her overly chatty mother.”
A knock at my apartment door brings my gaze up with curiosity.
Could be the takeout Jen has yet to order, unless she did it on the sly while I was ranting. Could be the neighbors, come to tell us off for the bass in their ceiling. Or hell, could be someone’s wife searching for her man.
“How’d I do?” I make my way to the door.
“Close,” she calls back. “Wife is dead, mother is overly chatty, wasn’t a bachelor party, but it was an orgy for sure.”
Distracted, I open the door without checking the peephole, only to startle when I find Beckett crowding my doorway.
His hands on the frame, exhaustion etched into the lines fanning his eyes, and his sleeves rolled up, his black-tie look long ago reduced to wrinkled shirts and horse placenta on his forearms.
My boss. At my home.
My boss is at my home!
“Beckett?”
“I heard ‘orgy’.” Chuckling, he peeks around me and searches for the one with the filthy mouth. “Room for one more?”
“No!” I shove him into the hall, but I follow and slam the door at my back. The hall isn’t heated, which means goosebumps break out on my arms and force me to fold them to keep warm. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I tried to call you.”
And I can’t even say I had the runs.
“I was ignoring you. I needed space for a minute.”
“Alright, well…” he nods thoughtfully. “Fair call.”
“You coming to my home after hours is wildly inappropriate, Beckett. If I wasn’t taking your calls, then what on earth made you think I would be receptive to an in-person visit? Surely you can survive without me for a damn hour!”
“I’m not here because I need you to work.” Dropping his hands in his pockets, he nods toward the stairs. “Come for a walk?”
I shake my head and whimper, “I’m starving. I’m tired. I’m mad at you, and deep below the mad is acknowledgment that I’m not mad at all, I’m just sulking. And there isn’t a single self-respecting woman on this planet who wants an audience to a pity party.”
“I always see women sulking.” He presses a hand to the small of my back despite my rejection and leads me toward the stairs. “It’s their favorite game to play.” He coughs. “In my experience, anyway.”
“I said self-respecting,” I g
rumble. “If you don’t need me to work, then what do you want? Oh, my phone is upstairs,” I remember as we turn at the next landing and continue on. “I left it on the table so I could ignore you.”
“You’re living with your sister, right? Will she worry she can’t contact you?”
“She’s watching true crime right now.” I wave a hand toward my apartment and accept the small grin forming on my lips. “If I’m gone for more than a few hours, she’ll enjoy solving my murder.”
“So we’ll keep this to a single hour.” He leads me outside when we reach the ground level. Cold breeze bites at my exposed skin, but Beckett walks in such a way that he blocks most of the wind as we walk. “I’m sorry I snapped at you today. It was beyond rude, and though I often delight in my reputation as unprofessional, this is not the way I want you to think of me.”
“Um… okay.” My heart races in my chest. “Apology accepted.”
“I was tired.” He leads me along the sidewalk toward Main Street with his hand on my back. “That doesn’t make it okay. In fact, it makes it worse. But I wanted to give you context for why I said what I said.”
“How is Spud?”
“Potato?” he asks with twitching lips. “Or Chip?”
I have no clue which is which, so I shake my head and hide my smile. “The foal.”
“I lost her.” He buries his hands in his pockets and studies the ground as we walk. “I couldn’t save her. I tried.”
“Shit.” An ache burrows deep in my heart and makes my tantrums this afternoon that much worse. I was the common denominator. The one picking fights with everyone. And all the while, a sweet baby lost her life. “I’m sorry, Dr. Rosa. I know that’s gotta be hard.”
“It’s hard as hell,” he sighs. “I spent all day with them, pissing people off, treating my assistant like shit, ignoring calls, and forcing you to reschedule angry clients. And in the end, it was all for nothing. She died anyway.”
“You tried.” I slow when we approach the curb and wait for a single car to pass. “It was a bad outcome. But that doesn’t mean you wasted your day.”
He shrugs. “Different perspectives, I guess. Come this way.” He grabs my arm when I verge right and he wants us to go left.
“Where are we going?”
“Food.”
He doesn’t release me when I stop mid-stride. “What?”
“You just said you were hungry.” He stops too and meets my eyes in the dark. “So we’re gonna get food to fix your sugar levels. After that, we can truly discuss your mad and work through it.”
“We can’t get food.” I try to spin back toward my apartment. “I left everything back there. My phone, my money, my—”
“My treat,” he forces a chuckle and drags me along.
Not five minutes after leaving my apartment, Beckett leads me into a brightly lit diner of tile and long, glass windows, and when he pulls me toward a red and white booth, he waits patiently with only a small smirk for me to slide in on one side.
When I’m settled, he slides in across from me and shakes his head when, two booths down, a man in a checkered shirt and one of those hats with an ear flap tips his chin.
I study the man, the ear flaps, and the coffee he sips, but when Beckett doesn’t make comment, I sit straight once more and grab the laminated menu.
I’m so hungry, there’s no chance I can feign nonchalance. I can’t even peruse the salads and soups section of the menu. I desperately need carbs, and if something comes deep-fried, all the better.
“Did you have lunch today?” Beckett rests his elbows on the table and reads his own menu. “Tabitha?”
“I don’t think so.” I nibble on my thumbnail and let my eyes scour the deep-fried offerings; steak, chicken, lamb. “I forgot.”
“Which is why you can’t calm the hell down and decide.” He glances up and catches the attention of a busty brunette in an apron. “Can we get some breadsticks or something, Kat? We need something to get us through.”
Smiling, the woman turns away without a word, slides into the kitchen for barely a minute, then she comes out again with a half-full coffeepot and a bowl filled to the brim with…
I scowl when she sets it down in front of me. “Salad? That’s not carbs.”
“It’s got heaping chunks of feta in it,” she counters. “Cherry tomatoes. Croutons. It’s a good choice to get you through until you order something else.” Standing tall, the woman turns to Beckett and flashes a flirty grin.
Surprise, surprise. I barely hold back my eyeroll.
“What can I getcha, Doc?”
“Soda?” He smiles at his interested server and sets his menu down. “Extra ice please.”
“Coke?”
“Pepsi,” I answer and pick at the feta. “For him. Not for me.”
She grins, wide and playful. “Pepsi. And you?”
“Coffee?” I look at the pot. “Please.”
“Sure thing.” Kat reaches between us and flips an empty coffee mug, then she pours. “Neither of you should be drinking so much caffeine this close to bedtime. You’ll be up all night.”
“I’m gonna fall on my face if I don’t.” I snag the coffee the moment she finishes pouring, then I bring it to my lips and inhale.
“You can’t be lecturing us, Kat, when Cap is sitting over there with coffee you poured.”
She glances across to the man with the ear-flap hat and smiles. “Maybe I want him up all night,” grinning, she looks back to us and bounces her brows. “I like his behavior when he’s over-caffeinated.”
“That sly dog,” Beckett chuckles. “Married life treating you all the right ways?”
“Uh huh. Especially when he has coffee at eleven at night.” She nods toward our discarded menus. “Made your choices, or do I have to recite the specials?”
“I’d like a burger.” I glance up and meet this woman’s cheerful eyes. Knowing she’s married has somehow made me less cranky, and the reasons for that make me uncomfortable. “Please. With extra zesty mayo and fries on the side.”
“Sure thing.” Kat doesn’t write down my order, she only looks to Beckett. “You?”
“Steak and fries please.”
“Medium?”
“Medium rare,” I answer before he can. “Gravy on the side. And if you’ve got it, a dinner roll, so he can mop up the gravy at the end.”
Grinning, Beckett points to me and sits taller. “What she said.”
“Alrighty.” The allegedly married—which means she’s not flirting with Beckett like I expected—Kat turns on her sneakers and heads back to the kitchen, leaving Beckett and I all alone but for our ear-flapped companion reading his newspaper a few booths away.
“She’s Katrina,” Beckett answers my unspoken question. “She’s generational. Lived here forever. She’s to Franky what you are to me.”
I lift a brow and look around. “Is Franky the guy over there?”
Beckett snorts. “We’re sitting inside a diner called Franky’s, silly. The guy over there is Eric. That’s her man. If you’ve got troubles, you can go to him, and if he can’t fix them, he’ll find someone who will.”
“Yeah?” I sip my coffee. “What kinda troubles?”
“Literally anything.” Beckett leans close and draws me in with that smile I noticed the day I met him. “Got safety concerns? Call Eric. Got a job you need help with? Call Eric. Got someone you wanna hurt,” he slides his thumb across his throat and makes a quirky face, “Eric’ll take care of it.”
“Interesting.”
I peek over my shoulder and smile for the man who knows we’re talking about him. His eyes are pretty, his lashes long, and the hat, I’m beginning to suspect is a diversion tactic to make people think he’s more innocent than he actually is.
Turning back to Beckett, I ask, “What are his fees if the person I wanna hurt is my boss? And do I get a discount, since you’re right here and he doesn’t have to go searching?”
“Har-har.” Beckett rolls his eyes and sits
back when Kat drops off his glass of Pepsi.
“Your man is giving us the beady eye,” he tells her. “Go do something about that.”
“I should probably get him more coffee.”
Turning to Ear Flaps, she saunters away with the coffeepot in hand. “Are you bothering these good folks, Cap?”
Eric grabs Katrina around the hips and pulls her in till she’s half laid out on his lap. Dropping a sweet kiss on her lips, he keeps an eye on the coffeepot to make sure neither of them gets burned. “How pissed do you think Romeo will be if I lop his baby brother’s head off?”
Stunned, I turn back to Beckett. “Wait. Who is Romeo?”
Snickering, Beckett uses his straw to move chunks of ice around in his glass. “That’s what they call Troy when they’re working.”
“Troy works with the guy who takes care of people we don’t like?”
Shrugging, he picks up the glass and takes a sip. “I’ve signed a non-disclosure agreement. How’s that salad?”
“The cheese is good.” Accepting his change of subject, I push the bowl to the center of the table and share. “It’s delicious.”
“Thanks.” Using his fingers, just like I do, Beckett fishes a tomato from the salad and tosses it into his mouth. “Alright. Let’s start talking about some shit.”
“Ugh.” And just like that, my blood sugar drops once more. “I’d rather not.”
“I’m sorry I was a dick to you today.” He stares across at me from beneath long lashes. “Truly. I was having a shit day, the foal was getting weak, and I forgot lunch, too. Seems we both only eat when you organize it for us.”
“You organized this.” I take another chunk of feta and place it between my lips.
Beckett’s eyes drop to the movement, and when I lick my fingers clean—a practicality, I swear, not a seduction—his eyes warm my stomach.
“We’re eating now,” I rasp. “And I didn’t organize it.”
“Seems I’m not completely useless.” He drags his eyes away from my mouth and back up to my gaze. “I’m sorry. I think that’s three times I’ve said it now. I won’t keep badgering you about it. But I just wanted you to know I was sincere.”