Hot Sauce (Suncoast Society #26)(43)

And the one text from him that sent her bolting for the bathroom for the good kind of cry—

I’m so proud of you for hanging in there today. You can do this.

She’d never lacked for love or support from her parents, who were also still calling and texting to check up on her. They’d always expressed to her how proud they were of her and her achievements.

But so had Tony.

No one but herself had ever hung it over her head that she hadn’t pursued and earned a four-year college degree. She’d be lying if she said she didn’t feel a little less-than for it, however. That she hadn’t been able to scrape the time and money together, to focus a little less on her job and more on school, to get more than just a two-year degree.

But throughout the years, even when their parents moved when she was only twenty-one and already living on her own, Tony had made a point of telling her how proud he was of her. He’d sit and ask her about her day, listen to her stories of work, and be engaged. Even when they were kids and she was a pesky little sister.

Even her last “boyfriend,” to use the term loosely, had never seemed like he was interested in anything more than sex or whatever she could do for him, yet he’d wax on, boring the pants off her about his job at a dealership.

She was more than a little shocked when her boss walked in just as she was getting ready to head out to pick up some lunch.

Which she’d planned to bring back and eat at her desk in the back of the store while she worked.

“Stu? What are you doing here?” Stuart Wiselan was a corporate vice-president, in charge of Florida.

He pulled up a chair in front of her desk and sat. “I drove in late last night and spent the night here. I saw you were planning on coming back to work today and wanted to see you.”

She felt a chill building inside her. “Yeah?”

Apparently, he sensed it. He held up a hand. “No, nothing bad. You and I don’t get to talk alone very often anymore, and I wanted to take you out for lunch, if you haven’t eaten yet.”

“I was just going to go grab something and bring it back.”

“No, we’re going to go have a nice, long, sit-down meal, on me.”

“Okaaay.”

“No laptop, either.”

She’d leaned over to grab her laptop case. When he said that, followed by a smile, she sat up again. “Wow. What do you do for your next trick? Pull a rabbit out of your ass?”

That made him laugh. She could talk like that to Stu, who she’d known literally her entire time with the company. He’d had her current job before he got promoted and had recommended her for his old job.

“I want this to be a lunch between friends,” he said, “not between a boss and an employee.”

She sat back in her chair. “I’m okay.”

“You only took five days.”

“Yeah, and I have a lot of stuff backed up to deal with as a result of taking that much time off.”

“You have six weeks’ vacation accrued.”

She could see it was going to be one of those kinds of conversations. “I’m okay.”

He stood and motioned for her to follow. “No arguments. Grab your purse and let’s go. I’m driving.”

She watched him walk out of her open cubicle in the rear of the store’s back area, which held her desk, a shelving unit, and her locked file cabinets.

“Dammit,” she muttered as she grabbed her phone, purse, and headed after him.

He drove them over St. Armands Circle, to the Colombia. On a Monday, there weren’t a lot of lunch patrons there on that summer day, much to her relief. He asked for a quiet table in the back somewhere, and once they were seated, she decided to cut right through the bullshit.

“If you’re here to psychoanalyze me,” she said, “you wasted a trip. I’m good.”

“Reeeaally?” He arched an eyebrow at her. “You haven’t taken a sick day in nearly a year. In fact, except for a Friday and a Monday last July, you haven’t taken any days off. Not even the paid holidays you’re supposed to be taking off, like Memorial Day and Labor Day. As far as I can see, the only days off you’ve taken were Christmas and Thanksgiving, when the stores are closed. And yes, for the record, I was curious and checked and found where you’d been handling emails on those days, too.”

And those two days off she’d taken had been a long weekend Tony had wheedled and begged her into taking with him, where they’d driven down to Key West and spent the time playing tourist.

“The stores are open on those other holidays, meaning I should be working, too.”

“The stores are also open on Saturdays and Sundays, and you take those off. Or have you been sneaking in extra hours there, too?”

She glared at him. On Saturdays and Sundays, she usually did check her work e-mail, handle phone calls and voice mails, and deal with any problems that cropped up.

In fact, the past two weekends were the first two weekends in forever that she was in town and hadn’t seriously kept up with work matters.

He sat back in his chair, shaking his head. “I have three daughters around your age, kiddo, and trust me, I know every look there is. You can argue with me all you want, but the truth is, whatever game face you think you need to put on for everyone else? It’s not going to work with me. I took three weeks off when my sister died. I needed the decompression time. You can’t lie to me and say that all you need are five measly days, especially when it was so sudden. I had two years of cancer treatments to come to terms with my sister’s impending death before we actually lost her. I know how much you loved your brother. I was there from the beginning, remember?”