by Sabrina Sol
Dante reached out to hold her face. “We could’ve made it work, Alexa. But you didn’t trust in me. You didn’t trust us.”
She closed her eyes, fighting back the tears that threatened to expose her crumbling resolve. Her throat tightened and she couldn’t respond, even if she knew what to say.
“Trust us now,” he whispered just before his mouth covered hers. Her palms flattened against his chest in an earnest attempt to push him off. Instead, all she could do was shudder as his tongue broke through the seam between her lips. Her thoughts jumbled. Her knees weakened. One of his hands slipped between them and cupped her breast through her chef’s coat. In that moment she hated her coat, hated that its thick fabric was getting in the way of feeling his touch on her bare skin. The kiss became more fervent, and she forgot that she wasn’t supposed to let him know how much she enjoyed being claimed by him.
Because that’s exactly what he was doing.
His lips trailed down to the side of her neck, and he drew slow, small circles with his tongue over her skin. Then he sucked hard on the spot where her neck met her shoulder, eliciting delicious pleasure. Finally, he bit down. An exquisite pain sent flames of heat straight to her core. Her fingers curled, and she tugged at his shirt, desperate for him to devour her even deeper. So when his knee nudged her legs apart, she didn’t question it. She opened to him.
With a groan, he pressed himself between her thighs. “Do you feel that? That’s how much I fucking want you. How much I’ve always wanted you,” he whispered between their openmouthed kisses. “Give in to this, Alexa. Tell me you’re ready for us to happen.”
Lust pooled in her belly. His words were as scathing as his touch. Every nerve in her body buzzed with anticipation and wanton ache. Although she’d always been attracted to Dante, what she felt now was so beyond that. And that worried her.
Slow this down. Think.
Even if she’d been wrong to end things so quickly when they were younger, it didn’t mean that they should be together now. This attraction—this lust—could go away tomorrow. He’d said he didn’t want a one-night stand, yet he wasn’t asking her out to a movie, either.
She needed to know exactly what he wanted. She pulled her head back and focused on his chin, afraid of what she’d see if she looked into his eyes.
The ringing of her office phone saved her from having to think about that possibility. “I better get that,” she said but didn’t move.
He sighed. “Go ahead and answer your phone. But don’t think you’re going to get out of giving me an answer next time.”
She slid out from the tight space between him and the bookcase and walked around her desk to reach the phone before it stopped ringing. When she picked up the handset, she glanced up to see Dante’s back as he left her office.
His words, however, clung to her as tightly as his hands had minutes before.
Two hours later Alexa still couldn’t shake what Dante had said. And what he’d done with that mouth of his.
A knock at her door interrupted her thoughts before they turned X-rated. It was her new sous chef, Gabriel.
“I’m ready to get started on the prep work. You have your list ready?”
“Just about. Let me take one more look before I head out to the farmers’ market,” she answered and started reviewing her checklist.
Peel and devein shrimp for ceviche.
Boil the yucca.
Shred chicken for the empanadas.
Sleep with Dante.
Oh, Lord, had she really written that? She blinked a few times and scanned her list again. Alexa let out a breath when she realized she hadn’t—it was just her mind drifting again to Dante’s proposition. She wanted to kick herself for allowing him to invade her thoughts while she was trying to work.
She glanced one last time at her list to make sure Dante’s name wasn’t anywhere on it and then handed it to Gabriel. “That should be everything. Thanks for taking care of things while I’m gone.”
Gabriel told her he was happy to help and then headed back to the kitchen.
Two hours later, while shopping for fresh fruits and vegetables at her favorite organics stand, Alexa was still trying to push thoughts of Dante far from her mind.
“Ms. Alexa, how are you?”
She turned to see the stand’s owner, Mr. Owen, smiling at her from behind a crate of bananas.
“I’m super. How’s business today?”
He shrugged. “Can’t complain. Hey, did you smell the mangoes yet? They’re as sweet as honey. Let me cut one open for you.”
Alexa nodded and smiled. She’d been buying produce from Mr. Owen’s farm stand since she’d moved to L.A. Back then, she could barely afford a couple of oranges and a stalk of broccoli. These days she bought by the truckload. And that earned her a free mango now and then.
As she waited for Mr. Owen to return with her treat, she noticed a man at the next stand over talking loudly with the young woman who seemed to be working it. He was saying something about her overcharging him for some nuts. Just when she thought he was acting ridiculous over something that could have been an honest mistake, she noticed a second man on the other side of the stand shoveling packages of dried fruit and chocolates into a backpack.
“Hey!” she yelled. “Hey, he’s stealing from her!”
Without thinking, Alexa dropped her canvas bags and ran toward the thief. His panicked eyes met hers, and he took off running in the opposite direction. But not before throwing the backpack straight into her chest and knocking her on her ass.
Mr. Owen and a security guard helped her to her feet.
“Did he get away?” she asked after dusting herself off.
The guard said the man with the backpack had disappeared but they’d caught his accomplice—the one who’d been trying to distract the stand worker.
“I can’t believe you went after him,” Mr. Owen said.
“Yeah, you’re lucky he didn’t have a knife or a gun. Be glad he just threw a backpack at you,” the security guard said.
What was with his tone? She thought she’d get a pat on the back from the guy, not a scolding.
“I guess I wasn’t thinking,” she admitted.
The guard shook his head. “Well, next time, make sure that you do. Okay?”
As Mr. Owen helped her load the rest of her purchases into the restaurant’s delivery truck, he couldn’t stop talking about how lucky she’d been.
“I don’t even want to think of how things could have ended up differently,” he told her.
And he was right. She wanted to kick herself for going after the thief. What if he hadn’t run? Would she have tackled him to the ground?
But the big question, the one that nagged at her the rest of the night, was why she kept doing things without thinking them through first.
The other day she’d nearly fired a vendor because he’d arrived two hours late with his delivery. Luckily, Gabriel had stepped in and found out that the man’s wife had been in an accident. Her impulsiveness had nearly cost her hundreds of dollars and a good vendor.
This time it could’ve cost her much more.
Her staff and her customers deserved better. She knew she needed to be more responsible. More thoughtful. Brandon once told her that he worked so hard because he wanted his restaurants to be sustainable. He wanted the people working for him to always count on having a job to come to every day. She knew now what he’d meant. The restaurant business was not for the fainthearted. She recently read in some article that more than half of new restaurants in Los Angeles failed within their first five years. Theirs had been open for almost three. She and Brandon owed that to their team.
Now Nick’s lawsuit threatened to make L.A. Cuchara just another statistic. How could she have let things with him get so out of hand?
She remembered his text.
Didn’t she owe it to Brandon, to the L.A. Cuchara staff, to at least try to make the lawsuit go away? Guilt rushed through her again. She should’ve convinced
her friends to pick another restaurant. Then that horrible night would have never happened.
Images of Dante pressing her body into her couch as he kissed her all over flashed before her eyes. Wishing away that night would also mean she’d regretted what had happened between them.
Did she?
Almost immediately she decided that she didn’t. But it wasn’t that easy.
And if she took things farther with him, there was a good chance he’d drop L.A. Cuchara as a client if it all went south. His friendship with Brandon could also suffer. She couldn’t risk that—no matter how good his lips had felt on her body.
She had to be a responsible adult who made responsible decisions from now on.
In her mind, Alexa started a new checklist of things she needed to do tomorrow. First, she was going to call Nick and try to convince him to drop the lawsuit.
Second, she was going to tell Dante that she was never going to sleep with him.
Chapter Five
The blare of a horn startled Dante into the realization that the signal had turned from red to green.
“Are you driving?” asked the voice through his car’s Bluetooth system.
“Yes, but apparently not fast enough for the jerk behind me,” he answered as he turned off the freeway off-ramp. He glanced in his rearview mirror and saw a large black truck take off in the lane beside his.
“I can call you back later. We don’t need to hash this out now.” He heard the concern in Lydia’s voice and smiled. Lydia Fuentes was the executive director of the L.A. Defense Foundation and his unofficial boss. She could be a hard-ass when she needed to be, but mostly, the woman was a softy at heart. That’s why he’d hated having to make the call in the first place.
“It’s fine, Lydia. Besides, whether we talk now or later, it isn’t going to change the fact that I lost.” He gripped the steering wheel instead of swearing. Lydia was in her sixties and hated when people used foul language around her.
“Dante, you can’t beat yourself up about this. We knew going in it was going to be a long shot to keep them in the country. They knew it, too.” He caught the break in her voice, and it gutted him.
His mind was still racing with things he should’ve done differently to keep Santiago and Maria Reyes from being deported. The couple from El Salvador had been picked up in an ICE raid on a downtown Los Angeles clothing manufacturer. The factory’s owner had asked the L.A. Defense Foundation to take on the Reyeses’ case in the hopes that special circumstances could sway a judge into letting them stay. The couple had a thirteen-year-old daughter and a fifteen-year-old son who had both been born in the United States, and Mr. and Mrs. Reyes had insisted, from day one, that taking their children back to El Salvador with them was not an option.
This afternoon’s hearing had been Dante’s last shot at keeping the family together, and he’d failed. He gritted his teeth at the memory of the Reyeses’ daughter sobbing into her brother’s chest as their parents were taken back into custody.
“Are you still there?” Lydia asked.
He cleared his throat. “Yeah, I’m here. So what do we do now?”
She sighed. “Well, tonight the kids are going back to stay with the neighbor who’s been taking care of them. Tomorrow, I’m going to meet with Nancy from our social services team to determine what’s the best long-term option.”
“Those kids can’t go into the system, Lydia. They could get separated. Or worse.” His throat tightened at the thought. Dante knew firsthand how hard growing up in the system could be. He didn’t want that for the Reyeses’ kids, not when they had two parents who were still alive and loved them. It all was just so damn frustrating. And it hit way too close to home. Lydia knew that. She was the only one left in the world who did. He never willingly shared the details of his childhood. Brandon didn’t even know. Dante had spent his entire adult life trying to leave his past buried, only because he didn’t want others to feel sorry for him or expect anything less because of where he’d come from.
It was a heavy burden to bear at times.
“I don’t want them in the system, either,” Lydia said. “But the neighbor is too old and frail to provide a permanent home. And unless someone else steps up, I just don’t know what else we can do for them.”
Dante slammed his fist on the wheel. “Fuck!” He spat out the curse word, not caring what Lydia would say.
The line was quiet for a few seconds, and he wondered if she’d hung up on him.
“Feel better now?” she finally asked.
“Yes. No.”
“We can’t win them all, Dante. All we can do is give them the best chance possible.”
They were the same words she’d told him when he’d first showed up in her office six months ago, asking to volunteer. Lydia already knew his reputation for winning cases and wanted to make sure he understood what he was getting himself into. He’d actually lost his first two cases off the bat and had been close to quitting. He’d never felt so inadequate. He hated it. The cases he took on at his own firm were usually about money or property or contracts. Nobody’s lives were depending on him, nobody’s families. And so he had worked on the foundation cases like he worked on all of his cases—he focused on the law and not on his clients’ lives outside the courtroom. Lydia always encouraged him to change his approach and to become more invested in the people he was trying to help. But that also put him at risk of caring too much.
“I know,” he finally told Lydia. “I know.”
They talked about another case she wanted to give him, and he agreed to review the documents the next day. Then she promised to keep him updated on the custody situation with the Reyes kids.
After they hung up, Dante swore one more time.
Maybe if he hadn’t been so distracted with Alexa and her lawsuit, he could’ve found a loophole that could’ve won the case.
More like if you hadn’t been so determined to lure Alexa into your bed…
This thing with her had definitely been on his mind lately. If he didn’t know better, he’d say he was actually obsessed. It was like once he kissed her that night, the cork popped on all his pent-up frustration from the past few months. And there was no putting that frustration back in the bottle. It was flowing freely, especially when she was giving him signs that she wanted him, too.
He still couldn’t believe that she’d ended things all those years ago because she’d thought he’d only wanted a summer fling. He’d respected her too much for that. He’d respected his friendship with Brandon too much to use his sister like that. Had she given him the chance, he might have been able to convince her that he actually had feelings for her.
And the more he was around her, the more he was beginning to realize that those feelings hadn’t gone away.
But what if she said no to everything?
As if the weather took its cue from his darkening mood, sprinkles dotted his windshield. And by the time he pulled into his driveway a few minutes later, full raindrops pelted the car like pebbles.
Of course, his umbrella was in the trunk.
Dante grabbed his briefcase from the passenger seat, jumped out of the car, and sprinted to his front door. His covered porch gave him shelter as he located his house key. A light tapping noise distracted him before he went inside, and he turned just in time to see Alexa darting up the few stairs to his porch.
“I thought it never rained in California,” she said as she shook out her black-and-white polka-dot umbrella.
“What are you doing here?” The sudden thought that she’d shown up so they could finish what they’d started in her office improved his mood drastically.
“I wanted to talk to you about the lawsuit.”
Oh.
“Oh. You could’ve called.” The thought returned.
“I did call…earlier. But you never picked up, so I figured I’d stop by on my way to have drinks with some friends. Is that okay?”
The thought evaporated. “Yes, it’s okay. My phone must stil
l be set on silent. I was in court most of the day, and after that I’ve had back-to-back phone calls.”
“If you’re too tired to deal with this now, I can call you in the morning. It’s no biggie.” He heard the disappointment in her voice. So what if she hadn’t come over for the reasons he’d hoped. She was still his client and needed his help.
Focus on doing your job and forget about all the other stuff.
“No, it’s fine. You came all this way. Please, come in.”
As soon as he opened the door, they were accosted by heavy breathing and sloppy tongue licks.
“Hey there, buddy!” Dante dropped his briefcase and knelt to give their greeter a good rubdown. Gomez, his English bulldog, showed his appreciation with more sloppy licks. “Did you have a good day, buddy?”
He heard a snicker and looked up to see Alexa grinning. “I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying seeing this.”
Dante had a pretty good idea. “Alexa, meet Gomez. Gomez, meet Alexa.”
“Well, aren’t you the cutest thing ever.”
Did she mean him or the dog? She answered her question by proceeding to rub Gomez behind one of his ears. The dog closed his eyes, jostled his leg, and a little drop of slobber slid out of the corner of his mouth. He was in heaven. Dante had never been so jealous of an animal.
“That’s his sweet spot. He’s going to love you forever now,” a voice said. They both looked up to see Jack, his neighbor’s sixteen-year-old son, coming out the kitchen.
“Hey, Jack,” he said and stood up to dust off the mini carpet of hair Gomez had left behind on his damp pants and jacket. “This is Alexa, one of my clients. Alexa, this is Jack. He helps me out with Gomez when I work late.”
“Nice to meet you,” she told him. The poor kid could only nod.
“Hopefully you guys got your walk in already. It’s pouring outside.”
Jack took a few seconds before answering. Alexa had also stood up, and he figured the teen was a little distracted by what he saw—black heels and black fishnet stockings. It didn’t matter that a gray raincoat covered everything else from her knees up. A teenager—hell, even a grown-ass man—would have no problems fantasizing about what was underneath that coat.