3. Karissa
Chapter three
Karissa
The lobby of Easton Capital is the kind of place designed to make you feel small.
It works.
I don't let it show. I keep my chin level and my folder tight against my chest and walk like I belong here. But the ceilings are twenty feet high, the floors are marble so pale they look like something you're not supposed to walk on, and every surface is either glass or steel or both.
There are no menus on the walls. No handwritten chalkboards. No smell of anything warm.
The woman at the front desk looks at my name on her screen and gives me a smile that doesn't reach her eyes. "Ms. Linford. Sylvia will be right down."
I nod like I do this every day.
I do not do this every day.
Sylvia turns out to be sharp-eyed and efficient and the kind of woman who makes you feel immediately assessed and filed. She walks me to a conference room on the thirty-second floor with floor-to-ceiling windows and a view of Manhattan that makes my stomach flip.
There are four people already seated around the table.
Noah is not one of them.
The four people are event coordinators, apparently. They have clipboards and branded water bottles and they look at my folder the way people look at a used car they've already decided not to buy.
I sit. I open my proposal. I start talking.
I'm three minutes in when the door opens.
Noah walks in like the room rearranged itself to accommodate him.
He doesn't apologize for being late. Doesn't explain. He pulls out the chair at the head of the table and sits, and suddenly the four coordinators stop looking at me and start looking at him.
He opens my proposal.
He doesn't look up.
"Your per-unit cost on the savory tarts is high," he says.
Not hello. Not thank you for coming. Just that.
"The ingredients are sourced locally," I say. "Berkshire pork. Whole milk ricotta from a dairy forty minutes from my kitchen. You can buy cheaper. You won't get the same product."
He turns a page. "Your staffing model puts three people on dessert service. That's inefficient for a four-hundred-person event."
"Three people means no guest waits more than ninety seconds. At a gala where your donors are writing six-figure checks, ninety seconds is the difference between a good experience and a forgettable one."
One of the coordinators shifts in her seat.
Noah still doesn't look up. "Your timeline has setup beginning at 4:00 p.m. The venue opens at 7:00 p.m."
"Three hours is standard for my team. I've done events where the caterer tried to compress that window. The result is corners cut and stress visible on the staff. Guests notice stressed staff."
He turns another page.
"You budgeted for two tasting rounds during development. Most vendors do one."
"Most vendors also serve you something safe the first time and something good the second time. I skip that part."
Now he looks up.
It's the first time since he walked in. His eyes are darker in here, something about the light, and he's watching me the way he watched me across the counter two days ago. Like he's deciding whether I'm worth his continued attention.
I hold it.
I'm not going to be the one who looks away first.
"You're already booked for the gala," he says. "Two Saturdays out. This isn't a pitch meeting. It's a final walkthrough before I sign off on the menu."
That lands differently than I expected. Not a maybe. A done deal, waiting on his approval of the details.
"Then let's get the details right," I say.
"The tasting is downstairs," he says.
***
The kitchen is not what I expected.
It's commercial-grade and immaculate, the kind of setup that costs more than my entire build-out, and for a moment I just stand in the middle of it and breathe it in, the smell of clean stainless steel and possibility.
The coordinators stayed upstairs. It's just Noah and Sylvia, and then Sylvia gets a phone call and steps out, and then it's just Noah.
I unpack my carrier bags without looking at him.
"You can sit," I say. "This takes a few minutes to plate."
He doesn't sit. He stands at the edge of the prep counter with his arms crossed and watches me work.
I ignore him as effectively as I can, which is not very effectively, because he's not making noise or moving around. He's just there, still and watchful, and it does something aggravating to my concentration.
I plate the savory tarts first. Then the lavender honey crostini with whipped goat cheese. Then the dark chocolate ganache cups with sea salt and espresso.
I slide the first plate toward him.
He picks up the tart and takes a bite without ceremony.
I watch his face. I always watch faces during tastings. It's the only honest moment in any negotiation.
Nothing changes in his expression.
Then: "What's in this?"
"Caramelized shallot, ricotta, thyme. The pastry has a little white pepper in it."
He takes another bite. Sets the rest down. Moves to the crostini.
I'm reaching across to adjust the ganache cup when it happens. His hand is already there, reaching for the same plate, and my fingers land directly on top of his.
We both go still.
His hand is bigger than mine. Warm in a way I wasn't braced for. Neither of us moves, and the not-moving is the problem, because two seconds of contact is an accident and four is a decision.
I don't pull back.
I register the weight of him under my palm. The roughness at one knuckle that doesn't belong on a man who's never worked with his hands. The tendon that shifts when his fingers flex, half an inch, like he thought about turning his hand over.
Then I pull my hand back like I touched a burner and look at the counter instead of at him. My pulse hasn't caught up with the rest of me. There's heat climbing my neck and nothing to be done about it in a room this bright.
"Sorry," I say.
"Don't be."
His voice is different. Lower. It lands somewhere south of where a voice should be able to reach me over a plate of appetizers, and I hate how much I notice it.
His phone buzzes against the steel.
He looks at the screen and something in his face closes back up. "I have to take this."
"Take it."
He crosses to the far end of the kitchen, stops near the walk-in, turns his back to me. Starts talking about a position I don't understand in a register I understand completely. Flat. Certain. Not raising his voice, because he has never once had to.
And with the whole room between us and his back turned, my brain goes somewhere it has no business going, and I let it, because no one can see where I go.
It puts that hand on my hip. Not gently. It puts it there the way he does everything, deliberate and without asking, thumb finding bone through my coat and pressing until I have to widen my stance to stay upright.
It takes its time with the buttons, because he would take his time with the buttons, one and then the next, unhurried, watching my breathing change with each one.
He wouldn't say a word the whole while. He'd just watch my face the way he watched it upstairs, patient, waiting to see what I'd do about it, and the terrible truth is I wouldn't do anything except let him find out.
He'd get the coat off my shoulders and let it fall.
Then his hands would be on the hem of my shirt, lifting, and I'd raise my arms for him like I'd already agreed to this somewhere I don't admit to.
His palms would be warm flat against my ribs.
That rough knuckle would catch on the lace of my bra and he'd notice, and he'd file it away the way he files everything, and use it later.
He walks me backward into the prep counter.
Steel at the base of my spine, cold through cotton, then colder against bare skin when he lifts me onto it like I weigh nothing, like it's already decided.
His hands push my knees apart to make room for himself and I let them, and the wanting of it is so sharp it's almost anger.
Across the kitchen he says something about exposure and a number with too many zeros in it.
I know exactly how that voice would sound six inches from my ear.
Same flatness. Same certainty. He'd tell me to stay still and I would.
He'd tell me he'd been thinking about this since the counter two days ago, and I'd believe him, because I've been thinking about it too, and I've been pretending I haven't since the second he walked into my bakery like he owned the air in it.
His mouth would find my throat first. Then lower.
He'd take his time there too, because a man that controlled doesn't rush anything he actually wants, and he'd want to hear the exact sound I made when he stopped being careful.
His hand would slide up the inside of my thigh, slow, giving me every chance to close my legs, and I wouldn't take a single one of them.
When he finally touched me where I'm already aching for it, he'd watch my face while he did it.
That's the part that ruins me. Not his hands, not his mouth.
His eyes on me, steady and unhurried, learning exactly what undoes me and filing that away too, the way he learned the ninety seconds and the white pepper.
He'd work me open with the same patience he brought to every line of my proposal, and he would not stop, and he would not look away, until I came apart around his fingers with my hand fisted in his shirt and his name somewhere in my mouth.
And he'd still have that flat, certain expression.
Barely a crack in it. That's the thing I'd chase.
I'd want to be the one who finally broke it.
I'd want him inside me just to find out if that's what it took, if that's the thing that would make a man like Noah Easton lose the thread of a sentence at last.
That's the part that undoes me. Not the fantasy.
The wanting underneath it, the low, humiliating ache of it, sitting behind my ribs where I can't reach in and shut it off.
I don't want men like this. I don't want anyone.
I built a whole life around not wanting, around needing no one, and here I am coming apart at a stainless-steel counter over a man who hasn't so much as raised his voice.
I'd let him. God help me, I'd let him, and I'd like it, and I'd want it again after.
I make myself pick up my own ganache cup. I take a bite I don't taste.
I want him with an intensity that has no business existing over a plate of appetizers, in a kitchen that isn't mine, for a client I met two days ago and did not like.
That's the honest version, the one I'd never say out loud.
I want him badly enough that my hands have gone still on the counter and my whole body has tipped, without my permission, toward the far end of the room where he's standing with his back to me, not thinking about me at all.
The call lasts four minutes. I am not present for a single one of them.
"Sorry," he says, coming back to the counter. He sets the phone face down.
I set my cup down harder than necessary and straighten my spine.
"Don't be," I say.
Business. This is business.
I have never been a worse liar in my life.
He finishes the plate in silence.
"The crostini is the strongest piece," he says finally. "The ganache is too rich for late-evening service. People stop eating sweet after ten."
"I have a citrus alternative. Blood orange curd, dark chocolate, candied zest. Lighter finish."
"Bring that to the next tasting."
I look at him. "There's a next tasting?"
"If I'm commissioning this for four hundred people, yes."
I start repacking my bags. My hands are steady. I'm proud of that.
"I'll have Sylvia schedule it," he says. Then, quieter: "You were right about the ninety seconds."
I zip the carrier bag closed. "I know."
The corner of his mouth moves. Not quite a smile. Something smaller.
Sylvia reappears in the doorway. "Mr. Easton, your four o'clock is—"
"Tell them five minutes."
She disappears again.
I pick up my bags. "I'll get out of your way."
"The coordinators are gone." He's still watching me. Still doing that thing where he doesn't move and takes up all the available space anyway. "There's nothing else on my calendar after four."
I stop.
"I have questions about the full menu build," he says. "If you have time."
It's not phrased like a question. But it's also not an order. It's something in between, something I don't have a clean category for, and that bothers me more than if he'd just told me to stay.
I look at him.
He looks back.
"I have time," I say.
He nods once, like that was never in question, and walks to the door to deal with his four o'clock.
I stay in the kitchen and tell myself this is just business.
I'm almost convinced.