35. Delilah
DELILAH
The car at the curb isn’t the Escalade. It’s the long, black sedan from New Year’s Eve, and Stepan is already out and around the hood by the time I get down my front steps.
“Ms. Dorsey.”
“Stepan. New piercing?”
He touches his brow. “Yes, ma’am. Gift from the girlfriend.”
“It looks nice on you.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
He opens the back door and I get in, and there’s Kane, in a black suit with no tie, one arm stretched along the back of the seat.
His eyes go over me once, slow, from my boots up.
“You chose that yourself,” he says.
“I did.”
“It suits you.”
“That’s it? No thoughts? No critiques? No storming out of any boutiques or berating of the saleswoman who sold it to me?”
“Well, I was thinking that I’d like to tear it off you with my teeth, but it felt a bit aggressive this early in the evening, so I was going to save it until after we’ve had appetizers.” He reaches over and adjusts my coat collar where it’s flipped under.
I blush. Starting up with that nonsense right off the bat this evening, I see. Curse these shallow capillaries of mine.
“Your restraint is duly noted,” I mumble. “Also, appetizers sound amazing. I’m famished. I don’t think I’ve eaten today.”
“Say less. Stepan, book it.”
Stepan pulls out, tires squealing. We go roaring over the bridge and up the FDR.
The restaurant is on the twelfth floor of a building on Central Park South, and there’s no sign on the street, just a doorman who says “Mr. Makov” and holds an elevator.
Upstairs, a ma?tre d’ in a white jacket walks us past the main dining floor and through a doorway into a private room. One table and two chairs, and a wall of window with the park below it, black in the middle and strung with lights around all four edges like somebody outlined it in gold.
I stop in the doorway.
“Is this whole thing just ours?”
Kane pauses. “Would you prefer to have a lot of strangers watch us eat and pretend they aren’t checking you out?”
Again with the blush. Dammit.
“It just feels like a lot for the two of us,” I explain. “That’s all.”
“You’ve been on your feet for sixteen hours,” Kane replies. “I thought you might want to sit someplace quiet where nobody can ask you for anything.”
When you put it like that, it does sound nice.
Kane smirks, because he knows he’s got me there.
He stops the ma?tre d’ from taking off my coat so he can do it himself. He hands it off, then lingers for another moment behind me so he can graze his palms down my arms.
“You look beautiful,” he murmurs in my ear.
Then, once he’s induced the goosebumps he was aiming to cause, he sweeps away and pulls out my chair for me.
I settle down, then a server approaches and hands me a menu. It’s a fourteen-course tasting menu and enough foie gras, wagyu, and caviar to make my cardiologist need a cardiologist of his own. There’s also not a dollar sign in sight.
In a better world, that would mean this was all free.
Alas, nothing in this world comes free, ever.
“Order whatever you’d like,” Kane says. “We don’t have to stick to the menu.”
“Are you ordering for me?”
“No.”
“Because a lot of men in movies do that.”
“Do you want me to?”
“God, no.”
“Then why would I?” He sets his own menu down without looking at it. “Tell me what you want and it happens. That’s how tonight works.”
I smile, then hide my face behind my menu so he can’t see just how humiliatingly red my cheeks are getting.
I decide to just do the tasting menu as is. The server comes to unfold my napkin and lay it in my lap for me, but I reach to do it so he doesn’t have to.
Kane catches my wrist.
“What?” I ask.
“Let him.”
I return my hand to my lap. “I was being polite.”
“You were trying to work at your own dinner.”
I grimace. “You… might be correct with that accusation.”
The waiter smiles and departs. I force myself to leave the candle alone, even though it remains off-center.
Once we have wine and sparkling water, Kane settles back in his seat and asks me about work. I immediately launch into my anxiety-driven thought process.
“—so if I move the sheet cakes to Thursday bake, that frees the deck oven Friday morning, and then Presidents’ Day weekend, we can do the pre-order thing again but capped, because eighteen a week is working pretty well, and I want to look at the compressor again, because if that walk-in dies in July, then I’m—”
“Lilah.”
“What?”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“But didn’t you ask…? Actually, now that I think about it, I’m not sure I heard the question.”
His mouth twists into a half-smile as he sips his wine. “I asked how you felt about work. Not what you were doing about it.”
I return his smile with a confused frown. “Is that not the same thing?”
“No, sladkaya, it’s not.” He laces his hands together and leans over the table. “Tell me something else instead. Out of today, what decision are you proudest of?”
“Uhh… I fail to see the relevance here.”
“Then just humor me. It can be anything. But it has to be something you did that made you proud of yourself.”
I think about it while the first course comes out, a strange but gorgeous little salad with beets and horseradish snow on top.
“Okay,” I say. “There is one thing. Like, one tiny, itsy-bitsy, probably inconsequential thing that nobody else cares about but me.”
“And me,” Kane says. He waves a hand. “Go on.”
“Around ten this morning, the second batch of raspberry buttercream split. The powder went in too fast and it broke. It still tasted fine, but it looked grainy.”
“What did you do?”
“I dumped it.” I push a beet around with my fork.
“Priya wanted to keep it. She said nobody would notice under the piping, and she wasn’t wrong.
Nobody would have. But I made her pull fresh butter and start over.
It cost us at least an hour and probably two hundred dollars in ingredients, and it’s why Cameron had a nervous breakdown in the middle of my kitchen. But…”
“And you’re proud of that.”
“I am, actually.” I look up. “We sure as hell could’ve used the lost time, and throwing away good money is never fun. Also, the customers weren’t standing there. They would have taken the box and said thank you and gone home. But I still dumped it.”
Kane sits back, that half-smile still simmering on his face. “That’s integrity,” he says at last.
“More like silliness.”
He picks up his wine and toasts me with it. “Anybody can hold a standard when they’re being observed. You stuck to your ethics even when it would have benefitted you to abandon them. Most men who work for me can’t do that, and they’re paid a great deal more than two hundred dollars.”
“Well, it’s like I’ve always said: When you compare me to violent criminals, I really shine.”
“Don’t do that,” he scolds. “You’re deflecting again. Sit with the compliment for a moment. It won’t kill you.”
I do as he says, even though it makes my skin crawl like I’m developing an emotional rash at speeds that humankind has never before seen.
But as the seconds tick past and Kane watches me with those perceptive green eyes, it starts to feel less and less uncomfortable.
Maybe he’s right.
Maybe I should be proud of myself.
As if he can hear my thoughts, his smile finally stretches the full distance.
“Confidence looks good on you, Lilah Dorsey,” he says.
“Is that, like, the mob boss version of how creepy guys on the street say, ‘You look prettier when you smile, sweet cheeks’?”
Kane chuckles. “Smile? Fuck that. I’d rather see you snarling while your fangs drip with the blood of your enemies. Much sexier, in my opinion.”
I blush like I can’t seem to stop doing in his presence. “I’m sure you would, you psycho. Anyway, can we talk about literally anything else? I’m getting hives from sitting in the spotlight for too long.”
He laughs again. “I liked today.”
“Washing dishes was fun for you?”
“I don’t mind the manual labor. But what I truly enjoyed was taking orders from you.” He twists the stem of his wine glass between his tattooed fingers. “Nobody gives me instructions anymore. Hasn’t happened in twenty years. It was a fun change of pace.”
I arch a brow, not sure whether to be impressed or wary. “I find this hard to believe.”
He shrugs. “I’m telling the truth. It was a good day.”
“What about the part where you threatened my nineteen-year-old delivery driver?”
“That was on your behalf,” he argues. “And he did what we needed, did he not?”
“I’m pretty sure he was crying in the alley during his ‘smoke break.’“
“But the roses were perfect, yes?”
I laugh. “‘Psycho’ might be understating things. I think you’re more unhinged than you’re letting on.”
“Oh, sladkaya, you don’t know the half of it.”
We eat and drink our way through a few courses. The food is otherworldly and the wine is fizzing pleasantly in my bloodstream, making all my limbs feel like they’re glowing and accompanied by a chorus of angels.
Little by little, I’m losing track of myself, but in the best way possible. For so long, I’ve kept an eye inward. How do I look? How can I deflect the attention from me?
But that inner critic is slowly getting its volume turned down.
I think I know exactly who to thank for that.
As the entrees are cleared, I set my glass down and hear myself say, “You promised me something in my office.”
Kane’s eyes burn bright green.
“I did.”
“So say it.”
“Say what?”
“You keep making me say what I want,” I remind him. “Now, it’s your turn. I’ve had enough wine and sleep deprivation to feel crazy, so that’s my crazy request. Tell me what you want.”
Kane sets his own glass down. He takes his time.
Then he leans in.
His elbows rest on the table, forearms flexing beneath the expensive silk of his shirt. The movement brings his face inches from mine.
“I want to rip that little apron off you and see those curves spill out,” he murmurs in a husky rasp. “I want to watch your big, soft tits bounce as I pull your dress down over your hips, exposing that sweet, round ass you hide beneath your flour-dusted skirts.”
I feel a wet heat bloom between my legs, hotter and hotter with every word that spills past his lips.