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He smiles at me as I fix a plate and hand it to him.
“Ya’ll can dive in if you want to,” I say, motioning to the unfamiliar faces working on the alarms. “Or I can fix you a plate if you’d like.”
To my surprise, a chorus of ‘we’d like you to fix us a plate’ rings out.
At once, I feel a presence at my back and a touch on my elbow. Clay’s clean, seductive smell fills my nose.
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” he says low in my ear.
I shift away from him to hide the way his soft, intimate words make my body react. Lifting my eyes to his, I force a bright smile. “It’s okay. I don’t mind.” I reach for a plate. “My gran was always throwing parties at the trailer parks where we went camping. A lot of times, people lose their sense of home when they live in a vehicle that can go anywhere. Gran didn’t want to lose that feeling of community so there was always a lot of homecooked meals and neighbors over.”
“Let me guess.” Clay leans against the wall nearby and studies me. “It was your responsibility to share out the food?”
I laugh at his pinched expression. “Yes, it was. We had a lot of love to share, but food is finite. And we learned the hard way that some folks aren’t very considerate. Besides, sharing out food is a nice way to serve others.”
“Hm.” He mulls it over in his brooding, dark-clouds-overhead way.
I make a plate for Mr. P and bring it over.
“Why didn’t you line up to get some food?” I ask the burly bodyguard.
“It’s my shift now,” he says, staring straight ahead. “I try not to eat while on duty.”
I turn around and find Clay watching us.
Well, I arch an eyebrow.
He purses his lips and sighs. “Go ahead, Palinsky. Don’t torture yourself.”
“In that case, I will have a bite,” Mr. P says, flashing me a big grin and taking the plate from me.
One look around shows everyone eating and smiling. Except for Clay. I debate if I should offer food to him, but before I can decide, he glances at his phone and frowns.
In three, giant footsteps, he’s beside me. Whatever the call was about, it was serious. There’s something different about his eyes. Something harder. Fiercer. The face of a man who looks death in the eyes and challenges it to a staring contest.
“I have to leave now, but Palinsky will escort you to Regan’s school as usual.”
“What do you mean as usual?” My eyebrows knot and I whirl around. “You’ve been tailing me?”
Mr. P shrugs with a mouth full of mashed potatoes.
My temper ignites and incinerates all the slightly positive feelings I’d had toward him. “Bolton!”
He lifts a finger to shush me and places his phone against his ear.
Arrogant, pushy, clunk face!I watch as he tears out of the shop and jumps into his fancy truck. A moment later, it backs out of the lot and disappears down the street.
I jut a hand at the sidewalk. “Does he really have to go do a work thing or did he exaggerate just to get away from me?”
“He’s probably got an important client on the line,” Mr. P says, licking his fingers as if he wants his veins to taste like barbecue sauce.
I grunt and put Bolton out of my mind until it’s time to pick up Regan from school.
I take her to the main salon as usual, and watch over her while I do admin work. Sometimes, when I’m doing hair, I’ll have her around the other technicians, but I’m trying to cut back on that. Some of the words and conversations in the hair salon are not for innocent ears.
Regan’s got her own tiny desk in the corner of my office. Her space is filled with crayons, coloring books, stuffed giraffes and a herd of wigs and mannequins to practice her technique on.
Today, she’s got her head bent over a sketch pad and her tongue out.