One More Taste (One and Only Texas #2)(30)

Over the phone, Shayla gasped. “Did someone bring you breakfast? Is that—”

Knox snatched his phone up and took the call off speaker. “Yep, looks like breakfast.” He offered Emily an awkward smile. She didn’t return it; she was so busy bustling around the tray table.

“Your new girlfriend brought you breakfast,” Shayla said in a singsong voice.

“Stop with that,” he muttered.

“How late does she stay at your house after dinner? Does she linger over dessert? Or does she leave at all?”

“You’re being ridiculous.” To Emily, he added, “Not you. Though I am sorry you wasted your time again this morning. Like I tell you every morning, I don’t eat breakfast.”

“And as I told you yesterday and the day before and the day before that, I have the right to keep trying.”

“Ambitious,” Shayla mused.

His eyes tracked Emily as she plated a slice of thick, fluffy pastry oozing with baked apples. Yes, she is.

Shayla made a clicking noise, the same sound of disapproval their mom had made when they got in trouble as children.

“What does that mean?” Knox asked, though he regretted it immediately. He really didn’t want to open himself up to any more of Shayla’s teasing.

“I should be asking the same to you,” Shayla said.

What he should have said was I’ll call you back later, but what came out of his mouth was, “What the hell are you talking about?”

Emily walked to the back of the desk and unceremoniously stacked his paperwork off to the side in preparation to lay out a linen placemat. He waved her away. “I don’t want breakfast. I swear.”

“You have to eat in the morning,” Emily said. “I know you get up early and work out. Even if you only think of food as fuel, you still need that fuel. And don’t tell me you had a protein shake.”

Too bad for her, that was the God’s honest answer. “I had a protein shake.”

Emily planted her fists on her hips and glared at him. “You and I have a deal. At the very least, you need to give me the chance to entice you.”

In his ear, Shayla made that clicking sound again.

A deep pink color rose on Emily’s cheeks. “To eat breakfast,” she added with an exaggerated tone. With a shake of her head and a roll of her eyes, she unceremoniously set a plate piled high with sliced, cooked apples floating in a cinnamon sauce amid layers of dough and thick, oozing cream, and bracketed by a pair of succulent-looking sausages. With a mumbled excuse, she turned on her heel and marched with the tray from the room, closing the door behind her.

The apple pancake looked as decadent as it smelled. It also looked like the kind of meal he’d have to run a half-marathon after, to work off all the calories. He turned his attention back to Shayla.

“Okay, she’s gone now. So what’s with the clicking? What are you getting at?” he asked.

“What I’m getting at is that I saw the way you two watched each other the other night. And then she freakin’ went on an evening stroll with you and Granny June. And she’s at your house every night, just the two of you.”

Guess he wouldn’t mention that boat ride. “So?”

“So, you can’t have it both ways,” Shayla said. “You can’t dangle this job opportunity over her head while you’re also angling to sleep with her. It’s one or the other, bro. That’s called ethics.”

Sleep with her? That was jumping to an awfully absurd conclusion. “I’m not planning to sleep with her. Or anyone at the resort, for that matter. The situation at the resort is complicated enough already. What I’m doing, apparently, is working Emily to death. God only knows how early she had to get up to make me this pancake breakfast. When she and I agreed to this arrangement, I challenged her to prove herself as a chef. So that’s what she’s doing. I’ve never seen such a hard worker. I admire her a lot. And that’s the end of the story.”

“She’s seducing you.”

Not even close. He was the one who’d crossed the ethical line. “She’s not that kind of person, Shay.”

“Everybody is that kind of person when they want something bad enough.”

For a happy-go-lucky person, Shayla sure could get cynical. Though she had a point. With a pang of unease, Knox thought about the compromises to his professional integrity he was justifying to himself in the name of vengeance.

“You’ll just have to trust me about Emily,” he said.

Shayla made that clicking sound again. “I know you’re a big believer in professional ethics, which is why you can’t see it in other people. But trust me on this. She’s ambitious and she’ll do whatever it takes to get the restaurant. That line about enticing you may have been a Freudian slip, but I bet she did it on purpose. Part of her grand seduction plan.”

“You’ve met Emily. Name one thing about her that’s seductive?”

In answer to his own prompt, a hundred images of Emily raced through his mind. The flush of her skin when he’d caught her in his bedroom, the way her tank top had clung to her body in the rowboat, the way she bent over his arm every time she presented him with a plate of food, her unruly hair defying the bindings she tried to trap it in. The spark in her eye when she rattled off the ingredients of the dish she’d created. Everything she did was passion, perfection, and confidence. It was beautiful. It was everything.