Page 15 of Cherry Picked
After almost burning my hand on the grill, dropping a knife on my thankfully steel-clad toes, and spilling an entire five-gallon bucket of fresh lemonade all over the kitchen, I had to put myself in time-out. Or, rather, Katey put me in one.
“Sit down, Jack,” my assistant manager said, pulling a stool from under the worktop. Her smile was kind, even though her blonde ponytail was looking decidedly less perky, thanks to a long shift and my repeated mishaps. “Crys, Hawk, and I will finish cleaning and prep. You’ve had… kind of a hard week, haven’t you?”
I sighed. Yes. Yes, I had.Hardin every single way.
I darted a glance across the kitchen at the cause of all thathardness, but Hawk was busy rolling silverware into paper napkins and avoiding my gaze.Again.
I rubbed my hands over my face, forgetting I’d just squeezed lemons. Some of the acidic juice got into my eye, and apparently, rubbing it frantically was the exact wrong reaction.
“Fuck!” I barked, jumping up from my seat so quickly that Katey jumped and dropped a stack of plastic cups she’d taken out of the dishwasher. “Sorry!” I dove for the cups, nearly butting heads with Crys as she bent down for the same purpose. “Sorry,” I repeated.
Hawk abandoned his task and darted across the room, pushing me back onto the stool. “Stay right there, and I’ll help Katey unload the dishwasher. If you come closer, someone’s going to wind up needing an ambulance. I don’t know where your mind is this week.”
I gave him a dark look.Didn’t he, though?
He leaned over to collect the cups with both knees straight—a maneuver that made his luscious ass pop in my direction like I’d donned a pair of 3D glasses. Had he always bent over that way? Had his jeans always been that tight? Had his ass always been that round and full and…
I closed my eyes and ground my teeth together. It had been just over a week since our hike. A week since he’d asked me to take his virginity. A week since the scales had fallen off my eyes and I’d noticed that Hawk wasn’t just good-looking; he was… he wassexy. A week since my gaze had begun tracking him whenever he was in the room, noticing the clean, sweet scent of him and wondering what it would be like to take him up on his offer. To touch him. Undress him. Kiss him full on the mouth. Hear his small noises of submission and pleasure, and—
Fuck. I was half-hard, sitting there in my own kitchen in front of my employees.
I stood quickly and turned toward the stove, where I was prepping caramelized onions for the next day, and grabbed a dish towel so I could give the pan a quick shake. This distraction had to stop. Panini Jack’s was my livelihood, for god’s sake. The way I supported not only myself but my mom.
I’d told Hawk “no” for a reason. For several very good reasons.
“Behind you,” Hawk warned before reaching up to place a small stack of clean pans on the metal shelf beside the stove.
There was nothing sexual about the motion. He’d done it a thousand times over the years, and so did everyone else. But today, I couldn’t help but notice that Hawk’s shirt rode up, exposing a line of skin at his hip where his jeans dipped as his lean arm muscles flexed beneath his T-shirt and—
“Christ on a Christmas cracker! Are you trying to set this place on fire?” Hawk nudged me out of the way as the edge of the kitchen towel I’d been using to grip the pan began smoking. He grabbed the safe end of the cloth, flung it into the steel sink behind him, and turned on the faucet. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he demanded, shooting me a glare over his shoulder.
You. You, you,you.
“Nothing,” I croaked. This was the first time he’d looked at me properly in days, and I drank him in—his big brown eyes snapping with emotion, his floppy hair, his sturdy shoulders and lean muscles, his adorably snubbed nose and delicate nose ring, the tiny scar under one eye that he’d gotten when he’d fallen asleep reading an old hardback copy ofMiddlemarchand the heavy book had dropped on his face. He was so familiar, yet I couldn’t help but look at him like a stranger in some ways. “I’m a little… out of it, I guess. I haven’t slept well. I’ve had stuff on my mind.”
Specifically, Hawk-related stuff.
Things between Hawk and I had been weird since our hike, and not only because the air seemed saturated with sex pheromones anytime he was around. After the town meeting, he’d avoided me—at least, as much as he could while still showing up every day for work during our busy summer season.
Oh, on the surface, he’d been a perfect employee—polite and agreeable as ever, twice as willing to work hard as anyone else I’d ever employed, with a smile for every person he encountered, always remembering that Norma Alvarez was allergic to pineapple and putting extra cherries in the kids’ Shirley Temples.
But the truth lay in everything hedidn’tsay. Ordinarily, Hawk and I talked daily about all kinds of things large and small. Though he could be shy and quiet with people he didn’t know well, he’d never hesitated to open up to me about whatever was on his mind—hilarious town gossip, worries about his family, concerns about the resort development, gushing praise for the pancakes he’d eaten for breakfast, rants about his latest read.
He was two hundred tons of passionate feeling packed into one small body—the most intenselyalivehuman I’d ever met—and like a comet, he left a trail of rainbow-hued emotions across my personal horizon whenever he came into my orbit. Our conversations were the soundtrack to my days, and my week had been much, much quieter without them.
Too quiet.
Dull.
I’d caught myself wanting to ask him questions or draw him out, but every topic seemed loaded with land mines. Talking about the Aerie development or the upcoming town decision was guaranteed to set him off. I couldn’t ask him if he’d made that date to go hiking with Simon Wentworth—which, seriously, was that not the prissiest name ever?—without seeming as overprotective as Webb or, worse, jealous, which I definitely wasnot.
And meanwhile, every moment I spent with him, and even the moments Ididn’t, were now electrically charged with Hawk-sex thoughts—two things that should never be uttered in the same sentence, let alone mentally hyphenated. I thought about him while cooking, while grocery shopping, while chatting with friends and neighbors in town, while shoving myself under the cramped bathroom vanity in my money pit of a house in an effort to restore running water to the sink.
I understood that he was embarrassed and maybe a little hurt. He’d made an offer and been shot down, which was never fun, even if there were no romantic feelings involved. If anyone else had done it to him, for any less compelling reason than my own, I’d have kicked their ass.
But the longer he remained licking his wounds, the more wildly off course our relationship veered. I wantedmyHawk back. I wanted our simple, easy friendship.
And in that moment, as I stood watching Hawk scowl at the now-soggy kitchen towel in the sink, I decided enough was enough.
