Page 82 of Desserts for Stressed People

Clearing his voice, he grabs the jar of fig jam. “Either way, I expected you to get worked up like the first time when I interrupted you. I didn’t expect you’d getthatangry.”

“Do you mean it?” I ask. After all, he could be trying to make up for his bad manners by pretending he knew. “Did you really remember me?”

He shrugs. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It does to me,” I protest.

He stops working on the dessert to stare at me. “You walked in with Marina. You were wearing a white dress, blue shoes, and a pair of silver earrings. Your hair was in that complicated side-braid you always have at work.” When I smile, he does too. “I was on the phone. When I turned around, you said my name. Shane. Then, you called me Mr. Asshole. Only then did you mutter my actual surname. Your eyes were bigger than usual, like you saw a ghost, and you stared at me until I spoke.”

He does remember. Every detail.

I open my mouth, but he beats me to it. “You were the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my life. As beautiful as today. Impossibly beautiful, yet there you are, so it is, somehow…” he inhales,“possible. Shall I continue?”

I mean, it’s the most entertaining story I’ve ever heard. But I shake my head, and he blows out a long breath.

“Good. I couldn’t forget you if I wanted to, Heaven. In fact, I’ve experienced the very opposite problem.”

Is he saying he liked me since the first moment he saw me, when I entered his office and accidentally called him an asshole? I want it to be true so badly. Surely, I must have made an impression for him to remember so much. Does he know I value him too? That, like in his RadaR bio, I see “most of what’s wrong with him,” but I’m still reading?

Our gazes lock as we’re both quiet. This floor of the hotel must be deserted, because there hasn’t been a noise since we entered the room, and now too, there’s an unnatural silence. We don’t often experience it in the city. Pair that with Shane’s irises glimmering, the tension growing between us until his eyes roam to my lips, and there you have it. Total and utter peace.

“We should eat while they’re warm,” he mumbles, and as the tension wears off, I grab a fork and a knife. I plan to eat exactly one of each, though I hate fig jam. He can’t know.

When we’re done stuffing our faces with desserts, I’ve actually eaten five, and three more dorayaki I planned to eat sit on my plate. My stomach is so full I might explode, but there’s nothing this man creates that isn’t worthy of the best bakeries.

He has to yank me up by my hands to convince me to take the short walk to the couch, and once I settle on the comfortable leather, he gives me the e-book reader he fetched from his car. I’m an old-fashioned paperback type, though, and show him the romance always lodged in my bag instead.

“Uh-uh,” he says. He grabs the book out of my hands, then he lies down on the other small couch, across a glass coffee table. “We’re switching.”

“You’re going to hate that book.”

He opens the first page with a pleased smirk. “Wait until you see what you’re reading.”

I tap on the screen of the device, and his library shows up. I scroll through the pages. There are dozens of them, and it takes a while. But it’s like with the music in his car, once again I’m seeing into his soul. There are a few sci-fi books—I recognize them because my dad loves them too. Asimov, a few noirs, thrillers.

“You’re snooping, aren’t you?”

With a shrug, I scroll back to the homepage and read out the title of the book he’s currently reading. “Events management. How to...” When I look up at him with a dull stare, he bursts out laughing, and I join his merriment. “Are you serious? Do you ever not think about work?”

He looks back at the pink book between his hands. “Yes. I often think about you.”

I grin at the e-book reader, my heart close to bursting. “Well, seeing as I work with you, that’s still troubling.”

Though I am not looking at him, I feel his gaze. I almost hear his thoughts. “I don’t think about you in a work way.” He doesn’t say it, but it hangs in the air between us.

I stretch my legs on the couch and focus on the book—it must be the most boring thing to ever be written. It’s the most boring one I’ve read. But I go through it, page after page, and I get distracted every time Shane moves, grunts, or huffs.

When he sighs and mumbles something, I turn to him. “What’s that?”

“This book is ridiculous.”

“How so?”

He sits up. “They met two minutes ago, and she told him she loves him. That’s not how life works.”

Peering at the couple depicted on the book cover, I shrug. “He saved her from public humiliation during her father’s wake. She’s obviously going through a tumult of emotions.”

He throws his hands up. “That’s another thing. Would you be flirting with some guy at your dad’s funeral?”