Confessions from the Quilting Circle - Maisey Yates Page 0,36
space was between them.
He dwarfed her. She barely came up to the bottom of his chin. It was weird that it surprised her.
She’d talked to Adam multiple times a week for the past couple of years, but she didn’t know much about him.
He was the grandson of Jack, the original owner. But she didn’t know what had brought him to Sunset Bay. She didn’t know why he’d chosen to take over the diner. She hadn’t asked. Because he did her the great mercy of not asking her about her life, and on some level maybe she felt like not asking him about his made it all safe.
“Why did you hire my daughter without talking to me?”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Was I supposed to talk to you?”
“You asked me if she was interested and I said no.”
“And then she came by this morning and told me that she was. You didn’t tell me not to hire her, Rachel. You told me that she wasn’t interested.”
“Did you think that might be the same thing?”
“No,” he said. “I didn’t. Because as far as I know you’re a pretty levelheaded woman.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I guess not.”
She made an exasperated sound. “I am her mother, and I just need to know what’s going on with her. And... I was counting on her to work at the bed-and-breakfast.”
“Were you?”
She took a breath and looked up and down the street. It was deserted, and it was dark, the streetlights casting an overly yellow glow onto the sidewalks. She hadn’t confided in her family. She hadn’t told them anything about what she was feeling because it didn’t feel fair to burden them. But Adam... She could tell Adam.
Things were always easier with him.
“No,” she said. “I wasn’t. Not in a practical way. Just an emotional one. She’s going to college in the fall. And... I am not handling that well.”
“You’re doing okay,” he said.
“I’m here, ready to yell at you for committing the great evil of giving her a job.”
“You didn’t actually yell at me, though,” he pointed out. “And you didn’t storm inside and yell at her.”
“I wanted to.”
He shoved his hands into his pockets. “But you didn’t.”
“You’re a pain. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“More times than I can count.”
She cleared her throat and looked behind him, into the diner window again. At Emma. “Will you take really good care of her?”
“She’s waiting tables in Sunset Bay, not taking work as a human pincushion in Vegas.”
“Can I come visit?”
“I was under the impression that you would be spending as much time in my restaurant as you ever have.”
“Okay. She can work for you.”
“I didn’t ask for or need your permission.”
Rachel sputtered. “You... You did, though.”
“I mean, you wanted me to need it. She needed your permission, but I didn’t need your permission.”
“I’m pretty sure you did, to hire my minor child.”
“I don’t have a form for you to sign. This isn’t a field trip.”
“Didn’t you care about my feelings at all?”
“Of course,” he said. “But caring about them and thinking they’re reasonable are two different things. And I figure, even if you needed a minute to sort your feelings out, you weren’t going to keep her from working here, not in the end.”
“You’re enraging.”
“Do you want a cheeseburger?”
She sighed. “Yes, I want a cheeseburger.” She picked her purse up off the sidewalk and followed Adam back into the diner. Emma looked up from the table she was waiting on and froze. Rachel waved her fingers, a small white flag. She sat down at the counter. “Do you want it to go?” Adam asked, putting himself back behind the counter, and happily restoring the order of things.
“I might eat here,” she said.
“Only if you promise not to harass my waitstaff. Or ground them.”
“I promise,” she said.
A few minutes later he put the cheeseburger in front of her. The intense...normalcy of the moment felt wrong when she’d left things with Anna like she had.
“What’s wrong?”
She looked up and met his eyes. “I thought you had a policy against asking me that.”
“Did I...ever say that I had a policy about anything?”
“No. But you’ve never asked me that. And it’s the only thing most other people have asked me for about two years.”
The corners of his mouth turned down. “Sure. You also never stormed up to the front of my restaurant before, stood frozen outside like you’d been hit across the face with a marlin and then stared at my cheeseburger like it had stolen your best friend from you.”