Page 3 of Always Be My Baby

The fact that my best friend and my boyfriend liked each other so much made me feel all kinds of grateful—except he still stood there, no impetus to head for the kitchen. And I fully admitted to how petty I sounded even thinking this, but it wasn’t like he stuck around to spend more time with me, but because he continued to chat up Lena.

Frustrated, I tugged on his Henley. The man owned a closet full of them in various colors and thicknesses. This one, a rich maroon one, looked particularly drool-worthy set against his skin tone and dark hair and eyes.

Get it together, Lee. Right. “Uh… the inventory?” I asked, sort of, a little bit snippy, though when he turned that smile on me, melting my heart the way that particular smile always did, I lost the mental capacity to speak for a moment.

“I’ll get to it,” he answered. “Sawyer’s got the kitchen right now. We’re all good.”

Sawyer had the kitchen? Well…okay. I pinched the bridge of my nose to keep the sigh at bay. Where had I lost control? More importantly, how did I get it back? Did I need to get it back? Ugh!

Serena finally made her appearance, walking up to us at the service station. “Hi, guys. Let me clock in and I’ll be right back.” Then, while slipping her coat off, she looked over at Girard. “Are you joining me for my training?”

“No. But I will walk with you back to the kitchen,” he replied. I stood there dumbfounded as he moved with her back toward the kitchen. No ‘See you later, Lee’or anything.

It was all too obvious that he’d been waiting for her.Okay, Lee. He has the right to have female friends, even if those friends happen to be straight, younger, sweet, and unbelievably beautiful with shiny, thick hair and twenty-three-year-old curves.

So I kind of felt like I wanted to puke. I must’ve looked it too, considering the way Lena’s assessing gaze traveled from me to follow Girard’s retreating back. Turning back to me, she patted my arm. “You all right, Lee?” she asked. “You look like you just witnessed someone kicking your puppy.”

“No.” I shook my head in an attempt to shake that scene out of it. “I’m fine. Let’s get to work. We’ve got a lot to cover.”

We headed back to my office to officially kick off her training by diving headfirst into one of the most important tasks. I had her take my chair behind the desk and bring up the ordering program from each of our distributors. Then for the next fifteen minutes we rudimentarily went through the ins and outs of each program. Where to find our previously purchased items, the pantry staples that we added to the cart pretty much every time we ordered. The rest of her training would have to wait until Serena got a handle on Lena’s duties.

Now Lena needed to go over doling out table sections to get Serena going. While she went back to the service station, I sat in my chair to make some phone calls. We’d had a couple of key items go up in price over the past couple of months and I either needed to be assured that increases were increasing across the board and make adjustments accordingly or I needed to find a new supplier.

That hour lasted fifteen, I swear. The new GM with our distributor apparently decided that the company required a higher markup on all their products in order to pad his salary. That was the gossip according to Jean, my contact at the distributor’s office, who on most days held more of a mind for gossip rather than job security. But we’d been friendly for so many years now, maybe she thought of us as friends?

We’d never actually met in person, still, I could get behind that. Sometimes it was good to have friends. With her tidbit of information tucked safely under my arm, I asked to speak with the new GM. Condescending asshole. It was no wonder that Jean talked about him. He actually asked if there wasn’t a man he could speak with, rather than me. Excuse me? I could’ve sworn we lived in the twenty-first century. Women held jobs of importance and prominence. We owned businesses and everything.

Needless to say, the man spent the entire conversation being an ass. We haggled back and forth trying to come to a price that would benefit us both, but when he told me that as a woman, I couldn’t understand matters of money, I told him to go to hell and ultimately decided to part ways. The rest of the hour was me frantically going over my options and arranging a trial period for another distributor. It occurred to me that I’d have to bring Lena in to discuss the situation. As I walked through the kitchen to seek her out, I saw our sous chef Sawyer shadowing Girard in his pre-meeting tasks. He never said anything about training Sawyer. The man kept his dark hair clipped short and he held a keen gaze in his dark eyes as if always trying to remain one step ahead of something. At nearly the same height as Girard, who was 6’2, and being a man who loved his workouts, I couldn’t deny when my eyes couldn’t find Girard, it was hardly a consolation to watch Sawyer move around the kitchen. I loved Girard. But I had eyes, didn’t I? And, oh man… something about a chef’s uniform turned me on in a major way. Seeing the two of them together, I seriously had to stifle a sigh.

Plus, it wasn’t a bad idea to train Sawyer in his duties. What if Girard got sick and needed to take a week off—or more? That had yet to happen, so Sawyer had only been needed to fill in occasionally, but anything was possible. Having him learn the ropes for a longer stint was simply good business. What I couldn’t understand was why Girard never said anything—god, was he planning on leaving us? Because we were seeing each other? Maybe it had been too much for him, too much of me.

Searching out a new job appeared to be the easier choice, rather than breaking up with me while still working here. But it wasn’t like we saw each other all that often during the day.

With my luck, this was the first part of his plan to break up with me after finding a different position first. Where would he go? He’d have to sell his house. We were the only fine dining establishment in Lake Shores, unless he wanted to work at one of the resorts, but the bigger the kitchen, the less personable the work environment and Girard was a people person. He liked the personable aspects of a smaller kitchen. Hmm… Maybe he’d sell it to me, his house—no.What a horrible idea. Living in that house without Girard or Floyd. Torture. Absolute torture.

My head was a mess. The man’s culinary abilities blew away the competition, hands down. Would it hurt if he broke things off? Yes. I’d somehow fallen in love with the guy. But I promised him I wouldn’t be weird about it. If being with me proved to be too much for him, sharing a bed proved too much, I still wanted his food in my restaurant.

What it came down to was that I needed to have an adult conversation with Girard. If he no longer wished to keep this going the way we’d been going, then it was probably best that we call off our intimate relationship rather than our working one. After all, there was more than me whose income was at stake if he left us. But I was a coward and didn’t want to face that ugly conversation now. I’d wait until we were back at his house tonight so that if there were tears, I hoped I could get through a conversation like that without tears, that no one else would be around to witness them.

Instead, I scurried back to my office before either of them saw me. Just as I said, coward. I’d fill Lena in later. After losing myself in work for a while, I sat back stretching and looked at the time. The next task with Lena on the docket for today: Show her my organizing system and ordering process.

When I passed through the kitchen again, Girard stood next to the stove with his arms crossed over his chest, plumping up his gorgeous pectorals to the point of straining against his chef’s jacket as he engaged Serena and Sawyer in conversation.

My heart sank when I realized that he never noticed me—and I realized that he wouldn’t, not with that cute, young thing taking up his attention. Relatively attractive twenty-eight-year-olds (me) never garnered the same attention as cute, young twenty-three-year-olds (her). I wasn’t jealous. I didn’t get jealous. And besides, his friendships were his own.

What did it matter that his newest friend wore stylish black work slacks that looked incredible on her, as compared to how mine fit me? Even though we both wore work shoes, comfortable with enough support to get us through the long hours of constantly being on our feet, mine appeared positively orthopedic compared to hers.

I was far from an old lady, but somehow my work wardrobe had morphed into that of a sixty-five-year-old on her way to play bridge. My non-work attire—totally cute, but how often did I get to wear it? We lived in Michigan. In the winter, with the cold blasting our little part of the world keeping us from very many outdoor activities, most of the time Girard and I spent naked or in our pajamas.Ugh!My pajamas didn’t scream early bird dinners and bedtime by nine, but they also weren’t ‘I’ve got a hot guy in my bed,’ either.

Well, that sucked.

“Hey, Lee,” Lena greeted me. “What’s with the sour face?”

“I just realized I’m frumpy.”

“Girl, you arenotfrumpy,” she said laughing.

“I am. My pants have pleats in the front. Old ladies wear pleats. Yours don’t. Serena’s definitely don’t.”

---