Though he sensed that she was awake, Landon stayed still. He was curious to see what she would do. He’d seen the gamut. Women who turned to him for another round, women who wrote their numbers on cocktail napkins and slipped out. Women who went through his wallet. As Kait gingerly disentangled herself from his grip, he thought with disappointment that she was going to be a runner. Through slotted eyes, he watched her hastily pull on her jeans and tank, then pause by the mirror to finger comb her wild red hair. Without even a glance back at him, she slipped out of the bedroom.
Landon opened his eyes fully, irritation thrumming in his chest. He’d told her he wasn’t going to let her forget who she was with, and he wasn’t going to let her run from him either. Rising from bed, he pulled on his pair of jeans and walked bare-chested into the common room. He expected to find her gathering her purse, jamming on her shoes, halfway out the door. For a brief moment, he thought she’d already gone when he didn’t see her doing any of those things.
Then he heard, “Come on! Stop being a piece of crap.” And spotted her in the kitchen, leaning over the coffee maker, frowning at it.
“It only responds to please and thank you,” he said, the tension in his chest beginning to loosen.
Kaitlyn glanced back at him. “Get back in bed. I was going to make you coffee.”
He raised his eyebrows suggestively. “Should I find the blindfolds?”
“No, I think it’s best if we can see for this part.” Kait jabbed at a button, and to her surprise, a steaming stream of espresso began ejecting. Unfortunately, she’d put the cup in the wrong place. She hastily moved it, but by the time she got it under the stream, it was mostly foam.
“Honestly, Landon,” she said as she rinsed the cup out irritably, “couldn’t you just have put Nespressos in the kitchens? Does it always have to be the best?”
“Yes, it does.” He edged her aside and fixed the machine. While it poured a foaming latte, he took her face in his hands and kissed her deeply. “Good morning. I thought you were leaving.”
“I thought about it,” Kait admitted. “But—”
“We had sex?”
“Right.” She blew out her breath, flushing.
Landon kissed her again, harder this time. “I told you I wouldn’t let you forget who you were with.”
Her eyes were hazy as she looked up at him. “Impossible.”
“Good.” He let her go to make another cup, then began to pull her back toward the bedroom.
“No.” She laughed, pulling back. “I have to go home before the restaurant. I don’t have my clothes here, and it’s our opening day.”
“I’ll have my assistant bring them.” He traced his hand up her ribcage to her breast. “I’m very rich, you know.”
Kaitlyn huffed out another laugh, but it was getting hard to breathe. “You’re not being fair.”
“Fairness isn’t one of my redeeming qualities,” he agreed, pushing her hair back to kiss her neck. “Let me show you what is.”
“Arrogance?” she guessed, but her voice gave her away. He straightened up, smirked, and pulled her the rest of the way into the bedroom.
Kait hadn’t been nervous about the opening until they were driving over. There had been too many other nerve-wracking things about getting a restaurant up and running to think about. Now, as they turned down the street the restaurant was on, her stomach began to churn. The town had turned its back on LeClarks once. What if Gray had been wrong about enough time having passed? What if nothing had changed in the past fifteen years?
“Relax,” Landon ordered, noticing how tense and quiet she’d become. “We have nothing to worry about.”
“That’s funny,” Kait said thickly. “Because I’m somehow managing to worry about everything.”
Landon pulled into the parking lot and turned to face her before he got out. Her face was pale, her eyes glazed. He reached over and unbuckled her seatbelt, then pulled her toward him over the middle console and met her halfway with a long kiss.
When he let her go, she said, “That doesn’t solve everything, Landon,” but there was some color back in her cheeks.
“Sure, it does.”
When they walked in, the restaurant smelled like freshly baked croissants. They joined the others gathered around the pastry case, but Ana was guarding it hawkishly. “I didn’t get here three hours ago to bake these for you,” she warned the crowd.
“She’s a little paranoid,” Landon muttered as they walked back to the kitchen.
“Like you wouldn’t have eaten one the second her back was turned,” Gray said. Kaitlyn noticed that he looked a little pale, too. No wonder, he’d put more on the line that she had. He’d left a great position in San Francisco, and more importantly, left an affordable living situation. If LeClarks didn’t take off, he’d be in debt to multiple people.
“Hey,” she said with the enthusiasm she hadn’t been able to rally earlier. “It’s going to be great.”
He smiled crookedly at her. “It’s just a lunch shift, right?”
“Right.”
They opened at 10, and it was a dismal fifteen minutes before the first couple walked through the doors. For a while, the staff outnumbered the customers by a ratio of 1:10, and they all had to hold themselves back from being too attentive. By 11, though, the main dining room was comfortably filled.
“It sounds like a real restaurant,” Kaitlyn breathed, grabbing Gray’s arm in the back.
“I know,” he said enthusiastically, and for a minute, they both basked in the sounds of conversation and clinking, the piping notes of the classic French music Gray had selected.
“It’s starting to look like a real restaurant, too,” Landon said, his eye on the monitor that tracked the finances.
After that, it got too busy to watch monitors or bask in the moment. They filled up the covered verandah and went on a short wait.
Kait was pitching in
