Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
There were jobs where getting distracted was just fine.
If you got distracted while filing documents for a desk job, for example, you could just check to make sure you’d put something in the wrong place.
Or if you worked in a grocery store, like Jared had in high school.
He’d gotten distracted there all the time, mostly because he was thinking about how he would use the different things he was shelving in recipes.
It had only slowed him down, which was, again, no big deal.
There were, however, jobs where you absolutely could not let yourself get distracted.
Like… if you were a surgeon. Or one of the people who worked on those super dangerous deep-sea fishing boats.
And Jared didn’t want to say that his job was anything on par with those, when it came to the risk of having his head elsewhere, but he was liable to lose a darn finger if he kept letting himself think about Hope when he was supposed to be chopping a literal mountain of onions.
But she had just looked so pretty, there on her porch.
The warm porch light had competed with the cool moonlight to reveal different highlights in her chestnut hair.
She had smiled so broadly when he’d complimented her quilting.
He could scarcely stop thinking about the way her eyes had shone with pride and excitement when he suggested that people would want to buy them.
He had been driving himself nuts thinking about how their hands had brushed. It had felt… really nice. Like the thing between them was special. He wondered if she had felt it too.
Except he was totally getting ahead of himself. There wasn’t something between them, at least not beyond the employer-employee relationship that he was ever so slightly kicking himself for suggesting, if only because it made a potential personal relationship more complicated.
But, no. He couldn’t regret it, not even the smallest bit. Because Hope was a natural. The customers loved her. The rest of the wait staff loved her. And why wouldn’t they? She was wonderful.
A small sound from the pick-up window grabbed his attention, making him realize both that he had been completely ignoring his customers and that he had been working on the same onion for the past five minutes.
Goodness, his teachers at culinary school would have made him do nothing but knife skills for weeks if they saw how slowly he was moving.
But that had to wait, because Eleanor Ridley was waving at him.
“Eleanor, hi,” he said, wiping his hands on the towel slung over his shoulder. He glanced up at his ticket queue. There weren’t any open orders. “Did you call something in?”
“Oh, I talked to Hope, and she said I could come grab a whole tiramisu?”
Jared felt his face flush. There was something about hearing Hope’s name right after he had been thinking about how cute she looked when she shimmied her shoulders, something she did when she was happy and teasing, that made him feel like he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “I have it in the walk-in. Let me just…” He looked around his kitchen, feeling uncharacteristically flustered. The kitchen felt like a strange location, even though it was probably the one place where he spent the most waking hours. “Let me just wash my hands.”
Eleanor was looking extremely amused. He tried very hard to ignore it. He was not having a whole lot of success. The chill of the walk-in refrigerator felt very good on his flaming cheeks.
He still felt a little bit frazzled when he came out of the walk-in, but he told himself that he was covering it well. That illusion was shattered when Eleanor said, “Uh, Jared?”
He blinked. “Yeah?”
The entertained smile was even bigger now. She pointed at what he was doing. “You are about to put what looks like pasta sauce on my tiramisu.”
He only stopped himself in the nick of time, because, yeah, that was exactly what he had been about to do.
“Shoot, sorry,” he said, hastily returning the ladle to the pot of sauce. “I guess I’m a little…” He waved his hand around his head to demonstrate his current mental state.
“Hey, it happens to the best of us,” she said, waving off his apology.
“Any chance there’s a specific reason for your…
” She copied his waving hand motion, but it didn’t feel like mockery.
There was something in her eye that made him think that she absolutely knew what, or rather, who, had taken up permanent residence in his thoughts.
“Nope,” he said. He’d never been a good liar.
“Really?” she asked, eyebrows high on her forehead.
“For sure,” he said. “Totally. Just regular stuff. You know. Totally normal. For sure.”
“Convincing!” she said brightly.
He was trying to convince himself that saying something more would make him sound even less believable, no matter how much he was tempted to keep talking. And talking.
Why did he suddenly feel like he was thirteen and trying to convince his parents that he’d totally already done his homework and should be allowed to play more video games before dinner?
The whole situation became even more challenging when Hope walked into the kitchen, already mid-sentence.
“Jared, hey, so I just wrapped up my last table for tonight, and I’ve got all my stuff put away, and—oh! Hi, Eleanor! Coming by to pick up that dessert?”
Jared couldn’t stop the smile that spread across his face as soon as he saw her. He didn’t even try to hide it. There was no point.
Eleanor looked at Hope. Then at Jared. Then she smiled.
Woof. He had totally been made. But fortunately, Hope didn’t seem to realize what was written all over his face.
“I sure am,” Eleanor said to Hope. “You guys are really saving my bacon. I guess you know how hard you can get hit by kitchen disasters, though, right?”
“You have no idea,” Hope said with a laugh, and Jared felt his smile go even wider. She had such a nice laugh. He was absolutely, completely underwater when it came to this crush of his.
“You can head out whenever you want, Hope,” he told her when she glanced back in his direction. “You did great work today. Thanks for all your help, just like always.”
“You got it, boss,” she said with a jaunty little salute that was perfectly adorable, but which still caused a sinking feeling in his stomach.
As if he needed any more proof that she only saw him in a friendly manner, or even just a professional one, rather than the romantic way that he would much prefer.
“Oh!” he said as she turned to go, calling out to stop her from leaving. “Before I forget, I did talk to Winnie. She said that she would love to have you sell your quilts at the bazaar.”
Hope’s smile was pure sunshine. “Oh my goodness, really?”
He shook his head at her, laughing. “Yeah, really. I told you!”
Eleanor was doing some more very observant looking. “You’re selling your quilts at Winnie’s event?” she asked.
Hope gave a helpless, happy shrug. “I guess so! Jared said he thought I should, and I guess Winnie agrees, so…”
“That’s amazing,” Eleanor congratulated.
“Yeah, but I’d better get home and get to stitching,” Hope said, although she didn’t sound terribly put out about it. “See you tomorrow, Jared! And, I’ll see you at book club, Eleanor!”
She shot them both a wave over her shoulder as she headed for the exit.
And then Jared was left alone with Eleanor.
“Wow,” she said.
He shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He had to close his eyes while he said it. He couldn’t even give a totally unbelievable lie otherwise.
“Oh, well, I’m talking about how you clearly went to bat for Hope,” she said. Darn, Eleanor was one tough customer. She was not letting him be cagey and evasive. This was why he should have installed a way for that window to close.
“It was no big deal.” He would have returned to chopping the onions, except he was even more distracted now. He stirred the sauce instead, even though it didn’t need it. He just needed something to do with his hands. “I just talked to Winnie. Winnie’s nice.”
“Winnie is nice,” Eleanor agreed. “And I’m glad that people know it, now that she’s let her shyness stop getting in her way.
But I digress. My point is that, while Winnie is a lovely person, her boss, Lyle, is one tough cookie.
I don’t think he would be so easy to sway when it comes to adding in another booth at this point in the planning process.
And especially to someone who isn’t actually a Magnolia Shore resident, at least not permanently.
Which means that you didn’t only convince Winnie, you convinced Winnie to go convince Lyle.
” She pointed an accusing finger at him.
“That is not the kind of favor you do for just anyone.”
“Goodness, woman!” he protested. “What are you, some kind of amateur sleuth? Why did you open a bookstore instead of a private eye’s office?”
“Funny,” she said. “Anyway, I think I’ve made my point.”
“You have not,” he protested weakly. “I was just being friendly. I’m a friendly guy.”
“You are,” she agreed. “That’s still not what this is.
” She paused, and her expression grew a little less teasing.
“You know, if you want to get to know her, you should try to find some incentive to get her to stick around here. Miriam is getting better, which is good, except for the fact that it means that Hope will probably head back to Boston.”
He tried to ignore the twist in his belly at the mere thought of not seeing Hope around anymore.
“Unless, of course,” Eleanor continued, “someone specific convinced her otherwise.” She tapped on the ledge of the pickup window, then picked up her tiramisu. “Just think about it, okay?”
He shook his head as she left, feeling more melancholy than he had in a while.
Of course he would be thrilled if Hope stayed around Magnolia Shore for longer than she’d originally planned. But there wasn’t any chance he could be the one to actually convince her to stay, right? No, it wasn’t possible. Was it?