14. Vivienne
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Vivienne
The investors leave around eight-thirty, full of Callum’s food and significantly more optimistic than when they arrived.
I watch their Mercedes pull out of the parking lot, taillights disappearing down the coastal road, and slump forward in my chair, my forehead hitting the table.
“That bad?” Frannie appears beside me, already clearing the empty wine glasses and dessert plates from the table.
The investors’ table.
The table I sat at for two and a half hours, eating dinner and making small talk and pretending like I wasn’t dying inside.
“That was —” I lift my head, looking at her. “I have no words for what that was.”
“An ambush?” Frannie offers, stacking plates efficiently. “Because that’s what it looked like from where I was standing. They just showed up?”
“With less than two hours’ notice.”
“Jesus.” She balances the plates on one arm, a skill I never mastered even when I was working in restaurants. “Well, for what it’s worth, you handled it like a pro. Very calm and collected.”
“I spent the entire time picking at my thumb nail under the table.” I hold up my hand as evidence. The skin around my nail is raw and torn. One spot is bleeding slightly.
“Couldn’t tell from here.” She grins. “Though Callum definitely could. He came out like four times during your dinner to ‘check on things.’”
I sit up straighter at his name. “He did?”
“Oh yeah. And every single time, he’d look over at your table with this —” She makes a face, scrunching up her features into an exaggerated glare. “Especially when that younger guy was talking to you.”
“Cameron?”
“Is that his name? The one who kept laughing at everything you said and leaning in too close?”
Heat creeps up my neck. I’d noticed Cameron being friendly, overly friendly, maybe, but I’d chalked it up to him being the most human of the three finance bros. “He was just being nice.”
“He was flirting.”
“He was not!”
“Viv. He asked for your number.”
“For work purposes!”
“He asked if you were on Instagram.” Frannie raises her eyebrows. “That’s not work purposes.”
I groan and let my head drop back to the table. “I gave him the restaurant’s Instagram.”
“Perfect. Another follower!” Frannie laughs. “Callum came out right after that and pretended to check on table seven. He stood there glaring at the back of Cameron’s head for like thirty seconds and table seven just sat there awkwardly until he left. It was kind of funny.”
A warm, complicated feeling spreads through my chest. “He did not.”
“He absolutely did. Roman noticed too. We had a whole conversation about it in the kitchen.”
“Oh God, please don’t —”
“Relax. I didn’t say anything to Callum. But Roman definitely did.” She shifts the plates to her other arm. “Anyway. The food was incredible, and the investors seemed happy by the end. And you survived. I’d call that a win.”
The restaurant isn’t empty yet. There are still a few tables finishing up. A couple splitting dessert in the corner. A group of four lingering over wine by the window. The dinner rush is mostly over, but we’re still an hour from closing.
“Yeah,” I reply, looking at my laptop and the scattered papers that represent two hours of frantic preparation. “Except now we have ten days to put together a comprehensive business plan.”
Frannie whistles low. “Ten days?”
“Ten days.”
“That’s —”
“Insane? Impossible? A completely unreasonable demand?”
“I was going to say tight, but yeah, all of those.” She gives me a sympathetic smile. “You need anything? More coffee? Something stronger?”
“Sleep. A time machine. Maybe a miracle.”
“Fresh out of those, but I can get you coffee.” She’s already backing toward the kitchen. “Decaf or regular?”
“Regular. I’m going to be up all night anyway.”
“Coming up.”
She disappears through the kitchen doors, and I’m alone again with the wreckage of the evening.
I pull my laptop closer, staring at the presentation we threw together under duress. It’s good. Better than it has any right to be considering the timeline. But it’s not enough. Not for what they’re asking.
Ten days.
We have to put together a whole plan with detailed financial projections and implementation timelines in a week.
“Are they gone?”
I look up and see Callum standing in the kitchen doorway, his chef’s whites splattered now with various sauces and oils. His hair is sticking up like he’s been running his hands through it, and he looks so exhausted.
“They’re gone,” I confirm.
He walks over and drops into the chair next to me. The same chair he sat in during the meeting.
“Thanks for checking on me during dinner, by the way,” I say, a smirk dancing across my face. “I saw you come out.”
His ears go slightly pink. “I was just making sure everything was running smoothly.”
“Four times?”
“It was a busy service.”
“Uh huh.” I’m smiling now despite everything. “Frannie said you were glaring at Cameron.”
“I was not glaring.” He clears his throat and looks out the windows. “He was leaning in too close,” he mumbles more to himself.
“He was just being friendly.”
“He was flirting.”
“So I’ve been told.” I lean back in my chair, watching his face with a smirk. “Does it matter?”
Callum looks at me, his face carefully blank. Then he shakes his head. “No. It’s none of my business.”
But the way he says it makes it sound like maybe he wishes it was.
For a long moment, neither of us says anything.
Then Callum starts laughing, a quiet chuckle that builds slowly until his shoulders are shaking with it.
“What?” I ask, but I’m starting to laugh too.
“This is insane,” he says, gesturing at the papers spread across the table. “All of this. Them showing up with no warning. You putting together a presentation in ninety minutes. Me inviting them to stay for dinner like that was going to solve anything.”
“It kind of did though,” I point out. “They loved the food.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Brad literally said it was the best thing he’d eaten all year.”
“Brad probably strictly eats at airport restaurants.”
I laugh harder. “Okay, but Cameron took a picture of his dessert. And he posted it on Instagram!”
“Cameron’s probably eighteen years old. He posts everything on Instagram.”
“It still counts!”
Callum is still smiling, and God, it’s good to see.
When was the last time I saw him smile like this?
This smile takes over his whole face. His eyes crinkle at the corners.
White teeth flash against the dark of his mustache.
The mustache itself seems different when he smiles like this.
It’s less serious and more roguish. Almost playful in a way that makes my knees forget how to work properly.
I wonder what it would feel like against my mouth. Against my skin. Against my —
No. Absolutely not. I shake my head slightly, trying to clear the thought.
I have to grip the edge of the table to stay upright.
“Vivienne,” he says, and the smile fades slightly. “We have ten days to put together something that would normally take months.”
“We can do it.”
“Can we?”
“We have to.” I start gathering papers and organizing them into piles. “We already have most of the pieces. We just need to put them together in a way that looks professional and comprehensive and —”
“Convincing.”
“Yeah. Convincing.”
Callum leans back in his chair, tilting his head up to stare at the ceiling. “You know what the crazy part is?”
“There are literally so many crazy parts to our situation right now.”
“A month ago, I thought I’d never see you again.” His voice is quiet but steady. “I’d made peace with it. I told myself you were just … gone. Just part of my past. Someone I used to know.”
My hands still on the papers.
“And now you’re here,” he continues, still looking at the ceiling. “Sitting at this table. Saving my restaurant. Making presentations to investors. Putting your hand on my thigh under the table to keep me from losing my shit.”
Heat floods my face and pools in my belly. “You noticed that.”
“Vivienne.” He looks at me now, a knowing gleam in his eyes. “I noticed all of it.”
My mouth goes dry. I reach for my water glass and take a drink just so he doesn’t see the blush creeping up my neck.
“Thank you,” he says, before I can say anything. “For all of this, really.”
“You don’t have to thank me. It’s literally my job.”
“I don’t think it’s your job to care this much.”
He’s right. It’s not my job to care this much. My job is to analyze, to strategize, and to present options, then let the client decide. My job is to be objective, professional, and detached.
But there’s nothing detached about the way I’ve been working these past weeks. Nothing objective about the hours I’ve spent thinking about this restaurant and about Callum, and how to fix what’s broken without breaking what’s beautiful.
And there was nothing professional about what just happened under that table, and we both know it.
“Well,” I say finally, “maybe I’m just bad at my job then.”
“You’re not bad at your job.” He’s looking at me with a dangerous look.
“You’re incredible at your job. You just — you care.
You’ve always cared. Even in school, when we were competing for top of the class, you cared about everyone around you.
Made sure people ate, made sure they slept, called them out when they were pushing too hard. ”
“Someone had to.”
“It didn’t have to be you.”
“Yes it did.” The words come out more intense than I intended. “Because if it wasn’t me, it wouldn’t have happened. And people would have — people would have broken.”
Callum studies my face, and I can see him processing.
“What happened, Vivi?” he asks quietly. “What happened that made you stop cooking?”
My throat closes up.
We were doing so well. We were laughing and finally working together. We were finding our way back to something that feels almost like friendship.
“I can’t,” I whisper.
“Why not?”
“Because —” I swallow loudly before trying again. “Because I don’t know how to tell you without falling apart. And I can’t fall apart. Not now. Not when we have ten days and the investors breathing down our necks and —”
“Okay.” Callum holds up both hands. “Okay. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have —”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you.”
“I know.”
“It’s that I don’t trust myself to say it out loud and still be functional.”
Understanding crosses his face.
He slides his chair closer to mine, closing the distance between us until our shoulders are touching.
We’re so close now. Close enough that I can smell the kitchen on him: garlic and butter and that herb I couldn’t identify earlier.
Thyme, maybe? Close enough that I’m aware of his hands resting on the table in front of us.
I am very aware of what those hands were doing mere hours ago, and even more aware that my body has not forgotten any of it.
“You have something —” He gestures vaguely at my face.
“I have something on my face?” I reach up and wipe at my cheek.
“Here.” His hand comes up slowly, like he’s giving me time to move away. His fingers are gentle at my temple, pushing a strand of hair back, his thumb grazing my cheekbone.
The touch is feather-light and careful. His fingertips barely graze my skin, but I feel it everywhere.
My breath shortens, and warmth flows through me.
My brain is still very much thinking about his hand on my thigh, slipping beneath my skirt like we weren’t in the middle of fighting for his restaurant.
I’ve gone completely still as his hand lingers, tucking the hair behind my ear, his thumb brushing against my cheekbone slowly.
And then he pulls back, clears his throat, and looks away.
“Sorry. You had — it was in your face.”
“Thanks,” I squeak out. My voice sounds strange even to me.
The air between us feels different now. Heavier and charged. Like we’ve been circling something all night and we both just got a little too close to the edge of it.
Callum stands up abruptly. “I should — I need to finish closing the kitchen.”
“Right. Yeah. Of course.”
“And you probably want to get back to —” He gestures at my laptop.
“Yeah. I should work on this.”
He nods, then starts to walk away. But he pauses at the kitchen door.
“Vivienne?”
I look up slowly, still dazed.
“We’re going to figure this out,” he says. “All of it. The plan, the restaurant, the — everything.”
“I know.”
He holds my gaze for another second, and I wonder what he sees when he looks at me.
If he can see how scared I am and how much I want this to work.
Not just for professional reasons, but because it’s his restaurant.
His dream. And the thought of it failing makes my chest hurt so bad in a way that has nothing to do with my contract.
Then he’s gone, back into the kitchen, and I’m alone with my laptop and the ghost of his touch on my face.
I raise my hand to my cheek, pressing my fingers where his had been.
Ten days.
We have ten days to save this restaurant.
And I have no idea how many days until I completely lose my ability to keep pretending that this is just a job.