by Lisa Plumley
“Not yet,” she whispered. “Wait for it.”
Shane thought he might die if he did. But all he could do was stand there, grabbing the stainless steel prep table for support, as Gabby slid her hands down his chest, down his belly, all the way down to … Ah. Her fingers deftly undid the drawstring of his work pants. A heartbeat later, fresh air cooled him.
That coolness didn’t last long. Gabby gave a long, low moan of approval as she freed his cock—then she dropped to her knees.
Her hair brushed his knuckles. Her lips touched his cock.
As she took him fully in her mouth, Shane did wobble. He couldn’t help it. Eyes still closed, he heard the smile in Gabby’s voice as she momentarily stopped sucking him.
“Don’t collapse yet,” she teased. “Wait till the end.”
The end was ridiculously fast in coming. Shane made the mistake of opening his eyes. He saw Gabby there before him and felt a wave of tenderness shake him. He’d never felt so hot, so wanted, so loved. She must have sensed his disobedience somehow, because she angled her head upward, caught his eye, and moaned with outright pleasure. That was all it took. Shane was done.
At the same instant, the pizzeria’s back door slammed.
Panicked, Gabby shot upward. She straightened her hair. Shielding her with his back to the hallway, Shane hastily fixed his pants. It felt as if he were working underwater, weak-limbed and languid. His ears still rang from a hard-core climax.
More clatter came from the employee break room. Then …
“Jesus! If it doesn’t rain, it pours.” Bowser strode in, something white fluttering in his hand. A scrap of paper. He slammed it down on the prep table, then faced them both with clear indignation. “I found that on the back door.” Bowser jabbed his chin toward it. “It’s a note from our supplier.”
“Our tomato supplier,” Gabby clarified, looking only a little bit rumpled and distracted as she snatched up the note to read it. Her stricken gaze lifted. “They’re dropping us.”
“Dropping us? Why?” Shane looked over her shoulder.
“According to this, we’re out of credit.” Gabby frowned. “We’re not out of credit. Not with them, at least.”
Looking troubled, she bit her lip as she stared at the note.
Shane felt equally worried. He knew how bad Campania’s finances were. They were operating on a very thin margin. If someone else knew about that and had spread the word … that meant big-time trouble. Once one supplier dropped them, others might follow suit.
“Hey, what’s going on?” Frosty wandered in casually, wearing a black bandanna and a matching T-shirt. “Who died?”
White-faced, Gabby looked at him. So did Shane.
Bowser didn’t. He hooked a thumb toward Gabby and Shane. “These two are still boning.” He gave Shane a rueful headshake. “Not to worry, my friend. I get why you said it was over.”
Frosty boggled at them. “You two are … really? You are?”
Gabby’s guilty gaze shifted to Shane. He could read the hesitation in her eyes—and her fondness for Frosty. The guy was friendly and excelled at stocking shelves, but he seemed as dumb as a rock. Apparently, Gabby had a soft spot for hard-luck cases.
What that said about him, Shane didn’t want to contemplate.
“Yes, Frosty,” Gabby said gently. “Shane and I … are.”
“Are what?” Pinkie came in, nonchalantly balancing a ten-pound wrapped block of Tanzania 70 percent dark chocolate on her bandanna-adorned head. “Are going at it like bunnies? So? What else is new?” She got down to work chopping her cacao. “If Gabriella hadn’t jumped Shane, I sure as heck would have.”
While Shane gawked at that, Emeril sauntered in.
“Hey! I learned a new technique on TV yesterday,” he said. “Chiffonade. It’s going to be awesome for chopping basil.”
“You already do that,” Hypo informed him. “We just never bothered to tell you the name of it. We also won’t ever call this”—he waved a bottle of imported Olivestri Siloro—“‘EVOO.’ Or pronounce Parmigiano-Reggiano as if we just got off the plane from Sicily. Or say ‘bam!’ Or instruct you to use unsalted butter so you can ‘control the salt.’ Or any of the rest of that Food Network bullshit you’re so crazy about.” A pause. “Penguins!”
At his outburst, no one even blinked. Scooter came in.
He eased into the kitchen tentatively, one wrinkled hand shading his eyes. “I’m going to want combat pay for that!”
“For what?” Gabby asked, still clutching the note.
“For waiting outside while you two”—Scooter gestured wildly—“got crazy all up in here. It took a million years.”
“What?” Gabby crumpled the note, looking shocked.
“We were all outside, in the alley,” Bowser informed her with burly insouciance. “We, uh, heard you from the get-go. All we could do was wait while the two of you screwed around with health and safety regulations.” He gave the prep table a deliberate dab with a disinfectant-soaked cleaning cloth. “But it is past shift-starting time now.”
Shane couldn’t help grinning. “That means time and a half.”
“For waiting?” Gabby stared at them all, her face as pink as Pinkie’s lucky kitchen clogs. “But you—but I—but we—”
Gently, Shane put his arm around her shoulders. “We’ve been found out. We’ll just have to accept that.” He looked down at himself, experienced a momentary sizzling sexual flashback, and commanded himself to settle down. “Maybe we’ll have to start hanging a sock on the pizzeria’s back door, dorm-room style.”
Hypo chuckled at that first. Then Pinkie. By the time all the laughter had swept the room, infecting even an indignant Emeril (who appeared to be spoiling for a fight to defend the integrity of his beloved Food Network), the entire pizzeria staff was grinning at Shane and Gabby. They almost felt like … a family.
Frosty beamed. “We’re happy for you, boss.”
“We’re scarred for life,” Scooter amended, “but happy.”
Shane had never experienced anything like it. Camaraderie practically doubled itself on the spot. He marveled, shaking his head—and then he realized that this was what it must have been like before Gabby had hustled off to Astoria to salvage her pride. This was what she’d been in mourning for, all this time.
Her lost friendships had affected her more than he’d known.
Now that he did know, Shane realized, he should have taken advantage of it. Yesterday. As a renowned, hard-as-nails fixer, he should have felt an impulse to set back that progress and make Gabby’s task of saving the pizzeria even more difficult.
He knew she’d been close to breaking. Now, with that note acting as the latest monkey wrench in Gabby’s rebuilding plan …
Well, a pizzeria couldn’t go far without a tomato supplier.
But Gabby didn’t seem to care. Especially as her crew of oddball friends put down their work supplies and came nearer.
They all smiled. Gabby did, too. It looked almost like …
It looked like trouble. Skittishly, Shane tried to step out of the way. The prep table blocked him. He was stuck.
Stuck for the freaking group hug that happened next.
Full of disbelief, Shane felt multiple arms wrap around him. He heard squeals of laughter, well-worn exclamations of love, and grumbly insistences of wanting time-and-a-half pay. He felt … well, he felt encompassed by caring. It was remarkable.
Catching his eye in the mêlée, Gabby grinned. She jostled sideways, then laughed. “See? It’s all going to be okay now.”
Even though he’d inadvertently helped this happen by getting everyone to mend fences at the brewpub, that should have been what Shane was afraid of. That things would be okay now.
Instead, he was afraid that he wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t worried about Gabby triumphing in the pizzeria wars, newly bolstered by her crew’s renewed faith and her own happiness.
Shane wanted her to win. That scared him most of all.
It scare
d him even more than the fact that—now that the oven had broken and the snafu with the tomato supplier had cropped up—Shane was doubly sure another fixer was on this job.
So far, unlike Shane, he’d been batting a thousand, too.
Because those incidents might have looked like accidents. Taken separately, they might have seemed incidental. But taken together, one after the other, they had the power to cripple Gabby’s operations. They had the ability to ruin her morale.
They had the capacity to make her give up. For good.
Exactly the way someone out there wanted her to do—and Shane, increasingly, didn’t. Even against himself, he wanted Gabby to win big. That was just how far gone he was for her.
If he didn’t take action soon, he might be lost forever. Because if he couldn’t “fix” anything, he wasn’t anybody.
Shane couldn’t risk that. Not even for Gabby.
“Yes. It’s all going to be okay now,” he parroted as he stroked Gabby’s pixie hair, doing everything he could to strengthen his resolve. “I promise it will.” He paused. “One way or another.”
Chapter Ten
They survived the surprise shutdown from their tomato supplier the hard way: by raiding the Portland farmers market, in the shady park blocks near PSU, for every tomato on offer.
Gabriella led the charge, feeling rejuvenated by her crew’s—her friends’—recovered faith in her. But even two days after that emergency had been dealt with, she still felt shaky.
They’d come very close to having to shut down Campania.
Between the tomato shortage and the oven malfunction, things were getting more stressful than ever. She knew she was strong enough to handle a lot, but this … well, this situation demanded five miles from her, at least. So, lacing up her favorite running shoes, Gabriella left her house early on Monday morning and did her best to sweat off the tensions of the week.
For the first mile, while weaving past just-opening neighborhood businesses and sidewalks filled with moms out with strollers and toddlers, she mulled over the incident with the double-decker pizza oven. Gabriella hadn’t told anyone else about it, but she’d met privately with the repairman while paying for his work. The news he’d given had been unsettling.
“Yeah. It’s the damnedest thing,” he’d said, rubbing the clean side of his oil-smudged hand on his forehead. “See this part here?” He’d shown her an unfamiliar piece. “It was broken. Snapped in half. That was your problem, right there.”
Gabriella hadn’t understood the significance at first.
The repairman had realized that. Awkwardly, he’d shoved the part in his tool kit, then wiped his hands on a rag. “The thing is, Miss Grimani, that part can’t just break. Not like that.”
“What are you saying? The oven’s always been defective?”
“I’m saying …” The repairman had stopped. “It’s fixed now.”
His cryptic look had been disconcerting, but Gabriella hadn’t been able to coax out more information. All she’d been able to glean, before the repairman finished packing up and headed out, was that something … unusual was up with her ovens.
They seemed as right as salt on caramel now, though, so Gabriella knew she shouldn’t have worried about it anymore. For the next two miles, she tried not to. She succeeded.
But only because new concerns about the tomato imbroglio edged aside everything else. Breathing hard, Gabriella rounded the next neighborhood corner, headed downtown on a gigantic loop. The aroma of fresh Stumptown coffee hit her from a nearby café, making her yearn to cut short her run and grab a cup. Later, she promised herself. Right now, she needed to think. That happened best while she was on her feet, logging miles.
Pushing onward, Gabriella recalled the awkward but edifying conversation she’d had with her tomato supplier. She’d cornered him at the PSU farmers market, where he operated a stand.
“What’s this?” she’d demanded, waving the note he’d left on Campania’s back door. Behind him, Bowser and Emeril had scooped up all his remaining flats of tomatoes and paid his assistant for them. “You’re breaking up with me with a note?”
To her confusion, her supplier had shaken his head. He’d seemed as bewildered as she was. “I didn’t write this.” He’d peered at the note, then at her. “You know me better than that.”
“I thought I did! But this is pretty unambiguous.” She pointed at the note. “Especially the part about how you’ll ‘spread the word’ about my credit problems if I confront you.”
“Yeah.” Surprisingly, her supplier had grinned. “Whoever wrote that—and again, it wasn’t me—doesn’t know you very well, do they? Because if anyone is going to bring down an O.K. Corral scenario over this, Gabriella, it’s going to be you.”
Struck by that, Gabriella had paused. Then … “You’re right.” Newly confounded, she’d gawked at the note. “Anyone who knows me would know that this practically begs me to confront you.”
Her supplier had nodded. “I’m saying, you’re not exactly a pushover. Everyone knows that.” His grin widened. “Besides, if I stopped supplying you, I’d stop getting free Grimani pizzas. There’s no way in hell I’m risking that.”
He’d been referring to one of her father’s most long-term perks for their suppliers—free pizzas for themselves and their families. In a larger operation, they never could have coordinated it successfully. But at Campania and its sister pizzerias, they could track things. Everyone pretty much knew everyone. They trusted one another. That’s why Gabriella trusted her supplier, even in contradiction with that mysterious note.
That … and the fact that he sent a replacement shipment of tomatoes promptly that afternoon. That went a long way toward restoring positive relations. So did the fact that Gabriella had apologized—encouraged by Shane’s meaningful look—to her supplier for believing he’d left that damning note in the first place.
Neither of those events had explained why the baker next door had found Gabriella’s original tomato shipment, smashed to pulpy pieces, in her Dumpster. But the problem had been solved. That’s what mattered, Gabriella told herself as she reached the waterfront park along the Willamette River and kept on running. Sunshine glimmered off the water; green grass and trees flashed by as she pounded along beside them. Soon she’d reach the old steel Hawthorne Bridge, cross over it to savor the far-reaching views, then double back home.
All the same, Gabriella felt only a little better as she continued sweating out her troubles, jogging past anchored boats and uphill to the bridge, where traffic and cyclists flowed past her. Because it seemed, in retrospect, that her oven malfunction may have been deliberately caused. It also seemed that someone, for reasons she couldn’t fathom, had tried to damage her relationship with her tomato supplier. Even more worryingly, they’d tried to scare her into not dealing with the issue.
Anyone who came up with that particular tactic would have needed two things: knowledge of her suppliers and an insider’s understanding of the cash-flow and credit problems facing the pizzerias. Sure, Gabriella acknowledged as she passed a few more runners and cyclists on the picturesque green-painted steel bridge, she joked sometimes about having money troubles. These days, who didn’t? But someone casually hearing those jokes wouldn’t have known exactly how threadbare her resources were. They wouldn’t have known how damaging it would have been if her tomato supplier had spread the word about her financial issues.
If her suppliers and creditors deserted her, she was done.
She might as well pack up her pizza peels and go back to Astoria if that happened. Because without raw materials, working equipment, and credit, a restaurant was as good as dead.
Spooked to realize exactly how precarious things were, Gabriella descended the hill near the bridge. She came up along the other side, headed back toward downtown, feeling scared and confused. She knew she had upset some people by leaving Portland. But she couldn’t possibly have driven anyone to sabotage.
Could she?
Assuring her
self that was preposterous, Gabriella kept on running. She focused on her breath, on her heartbeat, on her continuously moving feet. Those things grounded her in the moment. It was Monday. Campania was closed. All she had to do now was finish her miles, have a shower, and grab that coffee. All these problems could wait. When she returned to them, she would power through them somehow, Gabriella promised herself.
One step at a time. Just the way she ran.
It never felt as though she could do it—especially not in the final stretch—but she always got in her miles.
Reassured by that, she brightened. Yes. She could do this. She simply had to not get overwhelmed by it all. She had to concentrate on one thing at a time. She had to keep going.
Oh yeah. And she had to unearth a secret saboteur, too.
Easy-peasy. With a little caffeine and a cinnamon bun in her, she’d morph into the Rose City’s answer to Miss Marple. Nobody could hide from her. Especially not a coward who wouldn’t even fight fairly. Gabriella had no respect for that.
But she did respect the other hard-bodied runners, out on the same path as she was on. A pair of shirtless men blew past, offering her friendly hellos as they did. A guy wearing ass-hugging shorts ran just in front of her, his hair blowing in the springtime breeze. Farther down the bridge, at the waterfront park, another runner stood outfitted in similar gear, clearly having interrupted his run to take a phone call. He was hot.
Gabriella looked again. He was … Shane?
Shane was a runner, too? That was ideal! In a heartbeat, Gabriella constructed a daydreamy future for them both. She pictured them running along the meandering trails at Forest Park, hiking up the steeper trails near the waterfalls in the Columbia River Gorge, and getting their sweat on, side by side, at the hilly Hoyt Arboretum. They were so … perfect together.
Gabriella waved wildly at him. Shane didn’t see her.
Purposefully, she plotted a course straight toward him. She’d just come up with an even better day-off plan than postrun coffee and pastries. It involved him, her, and a whole lot of time alone together … without the complication of her unintentionally eavesdropping crew hovering nearby.