Chapter 6
LEE
To say that Chase Hooper was the pebble in my shoe was a disservice to pebbles everywhere.
He was way more fucking irritating than that.
Chase was the sagging elastic in my underwear—he crawled up my ass at every given opportunity.
I somehow managed to get through the next week without murdering him, but it was a near thing.
The guy was incapable of showing the tiniest bit of gratitude.
Not that I wanted gratitude, not as such, but he gave the exact opposite.
When he’d arrived at work the morning after I’d shown him how to operate the coffee machine and seen the cheat sheets I’d taped behind the counter for him, he acted like I’d personally insulted him instead of just trying to help him out.
And even though I saw him looking at the sheets every time he got an order, the glares he gave me whenever he came in the back were hotter than the ovens.
“Whoa,” Tyler said under his breath after Chase had stomped out front again. He waggled his eyebrows. “Get a room, you two!”
I almost dropped my tray. “That is not what this is! He’s not even my type!”
He was totally my type, but I wasn’t telling Tyler that.
“Sure, boss,” he agreed with a wink, “that’s why you made him exchange numbers with you yesterday.”
“That was in case he ever calls out sick,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” Tyler said and went back to shaping his sourdough.
It wasn’t even that Chase was unattractive. If anything, he was annoyingly cute. It was just that he was such a prickly asshole that the idea of him letting anyone get close enough to him to suggest getting a room was laughable.
Grindr, my ass. He wasn’t even on there.
Chase aside, I was loving the job. We were still pretty busy every day, even though we were no longer giving out free samples, and it wasn’t just residents of Goose Run who were coming to check the place out.
Word was spreading. Even some of my old regulars from South Hill had turned up to get their favorites, and I was happy to hear that Henry was struggling without Tyler and me.
I sure hoped the anniversary trip with his wife had been worth losing his two best bakers.
Henry had been a terrible boss in almost every way. Shockingly, Bobby wasn’t. He left Henry in the dust in lots of ways but especially when it came to looking out for his workers.
Bobby had turned up a few days after opening with a stack of khaki cargo pants and polo shirts with Gobble de Goose embroidered over the pocket and declared that he’d been reading about branding on the internet and he wanted us to look the same.
When I’d tried to tell him that we didn’t need uniforms, reminding him that Tyler and I already had our baker’s whites, he’d pulled me aside and said quietly, “You seen the state of Chase’s clothes, son?
Those jeans have more holes than Swiss cheese, but I’m not gonna ask him to spend money he don’t have. Just run with it, is what I’m saying.”
Oh.
I’d shut up, and I hadn’t missed the way Chase’s eyes had widened when Bobby handed him three sets of pants before his face had settled back into its customary scowl.
So we all had matching uniforms now—and I had to admit that Chase’s ass looked pretty great in those khakis. I’d checked more than once.
Things were going great, all in all, just as long as I could ignore the fact that Chase looked at me like he wanted to murder me. And honestly, it was pretty hard to ignore.
“Behind!” he snapped at me as I pulled a tray of cupcakes out of the rack.
I waited until he’d passed and then swung around and set the tray on the prep table. “What are you doing back here? Don’t you have customers?”
He raised his eyebrows at my cupcakes as though they’d personally offended him and then ignored me and said to Tyler, “I need to go on my lunch break. Can you take over the counter?”
Tyler shrugged. “Sure. Give me five, and I’ll come take over.”
Chase stalked out front again.
“What is his problem?” I muttered.
“Boss, you could cut the sexual tension with a knife!”
“That’s not what this is,” I reminded him. “Are you straights okay? You have a screw loose or a wire crossed somewhere in your brain if you think that’s what’s going on here.”
“Uh-huh,” he agreed. “And the way you can’t stop staring at his ass ever since your little Ghost moment at the coffee machine is just coincidence, is it?”
“What the hell is a ghost moment?”
“The pottery scene from the movie Ghost,” Tyler said. “Duh.”
“That’s not how that happened!”
Tyler cackled and headed out to take over from Chase.
A few moments later, Chase slunk back into the kitchen.
He kept his lunch and drinks on a shelf in the walk-in, so when he vanished into there, I didn’t take much notice.
It was only after I’d unloaded the rest of the trays from the oven that I realized he hadn’t come out again yet.
I glanced over at the door—it had swung closed.
A dull thump sounded from the other side of the door. Then another one, and then a sudden flurry of them, all barely audible.
I hurried over and wrenched the door open, and Chase barreled into my chest. I caught him before he sent us both stumbling.
His eyes were wide and his shoulders were heaving as he sucked in a series of rapid breaths.
It was instinct to wrap my arms around him.
I tried not to be aware of how he was pressed against me, his fingers gripping my shirt, and of how narrow the space between us was.
I could see flecks of gold in Chase’s brown eyes and feel the warmth of his breath against my cheek.
He was close enough that if I’d wanted to kiss him, all I’d have had to do was tilt my head forward.
My gaze dropped from his eyes to his mouth just in time to see it twist.
“Did you lock me in there?” he demanded, his fists clenching against my chest.
“What? No!” I stepped back, suddenly remembering where I was, and released him. “The door swings shut sometimes. And I can’t lock you in there. Nobody can. There’s a handle inside you can open the door with.”
His jaw trembled, and I didn’t think he’d been inside the walk-in for long enough that it had anything to do with the temperature. He was wigged out.
“I can show you,” I said. I probably should have shown him before now, since I was the boss and all.
I ducked around the door into the walk-in, and Chase followed warily.
“Look, you just turn this handle here and that opens it up. And the big arrow sticker glows in the dark if the lights go out. It’s, uh, it’s safe. You don’t have to be scared.”
It was the wrong thing to say because he sneered. “I wasn’t scared!”
“Okay,” I agreed, even though we both knew he was lying. “You want to try it?”
“So now you’re gonna lock me in for real?” he demanded.
“No!” I showed him my palms. “Look, pull the door closed. I’ll stay in here too. And if we can’t get out—which we can—then Tyler will come looking for us as soon as your break’s over anyway.”
Chase gave me a narrow look, but he pulled the door shut, closing us in the small space.
I’d always liked hanging out in walk-ins. That was weird probably. Maybe I’d just worked in a bunch of horrible places, and the walk-in was one of the few places you got to hide away both from demanding customers and shitty bosses.
“Okay,” I said, leaning up against a shelf stacked with flour bags. “Now turn the handle and push, and the door will open.”
Chase grasped the handle and turned it just a little too fast for it to be casual. The door opened, and I didn’t imagine the way his shoulders sagged as the tension left them. He let go of the handle.
“I told you. It’s a safety thing,” I said. “Some moron in the past probably thought it was funny to lock someone in and it ended in disaster, so now all walk-ins have a release handle inside.”
Chase grabbed a brown paper bag from the shelf and said, “My break’s not over yet.”
You’re welcome, asshole.
“What’d you bring?” I asked, and he looked at me like I was suddenly speaking a foreign language. I nodded at his bag. “For lunch.”
“Peanut butter sandwich.”
“Grab a spinach and feta roll too,” I said. “Tyler made them, not me, so it’s not like I’m trying to poison you or anything.”
“I don’t like spinach.”
“Okay then,” I said, fed up with how I could never do anything right with him.
“What-the-fuck-ever, Chase. Enjoy your peanut butter sandwich, I guess, or grab something else, or don’t.
I don’t give a fuck. I was trying to be nice, but forget it.
And next time you freak out because you get stuck somewhere, I won’t bother—”
“I wasn’t scared, you fuck!”
When he darted forward, I was pretty sure he was going to punch me.
It would have made sense, at least in the limited way that anything about Chase made sense.
It would have fit in with what I’d already learned about his personality, at least. So when he grabbed me by the shirt, I wasn’t surprised.
Also not that shocked when he slammed me up against the shelves.
But when he kissed me? Yeah, I wasn’t expecting that.
Holy shit, I thought, Tyler was right!
And then I thought, Priorities, idiot. Chase is kissing you!
Chase kissed like I imagined he fought—hard, heated, and dirty.
His fingers gripped the front of my shirt tightly and he had to push up on his toes to reach me with the angle he had me shoved back against the flour bags at, but somehow he was the one in charge here.
I mean, of course he was. I was still afraid that if I looked at him sideways he’d rip my jugular out.