Fire & Brimstone (Neighbor from Hell #8) - R.L. Mathewson Page 0,18

soon as he found out that the insurance company wouldn’t cover all the expensive tests that he would want to run and that she was now unemployed, she had a feeling that this appointment would be over in record time.

“And what if the answer comes back different?” he shot back, like there was even a remote chance of that happening.

“It won’t. So, there’s no point in being here,” she said impatiently, wondering what the hell was taking the doctor so long.

“Then what if I said that I would give you your job back if you gave this a chance?” he said, instantly putting her on guard and making her wonder if he was screwing with her, but one look at his face told her everything that she needed to know.

He had something to prove.

She should say no, walk away and find a new job and hope that her past didn’t follow her, but Melanie had been right about one thing this morning. She did love the Fire & Brimstone. As much as she hated to admit it, he’d probably offered her the only thing in the world that would make her even consider going through with this hell again.

Knowing that he probably wouldn’t make this offer again, she nodded and graciously said, “Only if it comes with a raise.”

Chapter 9

Two soul-crushing weeks later…

“What if we put a couple of computers on the tables by the back corner?” his own personal version of hell asked distractedly as she continued to gaze around the large open dining area, looking for more changes to make.

“No,” he said evenly, taking a bite out of his cheeseburger as he looked over last night’s sales, hoping that she would take the hint and leave him alone.

“It might bring in a new customer base,” she said, using the three words that she seemed to have fallen in love with over the last two weeks.

“No, it wouldn’t,” he said, wondering why she couldn’t leave him alone for five minutes so that he could enjoy his after lunch snack in peace.

“But, it might if you gave away free internet and-” she started to explain in that excited tone of hers that she’d developed recently, the one that told him that she was about to try to explain her latest idea in under thirty seconds as though that would somehow make him say yes.

It wouldn’t.

What it did do was give him one hell of a headache.

“It’s not happening,” he said, hoping that she would let it go.

She really needed to stop before he lost his goddamn mind, he decided as he reached for his drink only to find it empty. Glaring at the bartender busy at the other end of the bar, he grabbed her Coke instead and finished it off. Not seeming bothered by the fact that he’d stolen her drink, she simply walked around the bar and refilled both their glasses while she continued to look for new ways to improve his restaurant.

Then again, over the past two weeks he’d been forced to steal her food since she was always bugging the shit out of him. At first she had simply stood there, shifting her gaze from him to the food he’d stolen and back again before she’d inform him that he’d stolen her food. When he pointedly kept his gaze locked with hers and helped himself to the rest of her food, she shrugged it off with a sigh and returned to her sale’s pitch.

“Have you given any more thought to the brunch buffet?” she asked as she placed his soda back in front of him.

Picking up his glass, he repressed a shiver of revulsion at the idea, and said, “No.”

“It’s a good idea,” she said as she returned to looking around the restaurant, once again determined to prove that he needed her.

He really didn’t and he would point that out, but that would probably only encourage her to try harder and he definitely didn’t want that. Today was the day that he was going to be proven right and she was trying to do everything in her power to show him that she was an essential part of the team so that he wouldn’t fire her ass.

The last part was a summarization of what she’d said when he’d asked her why she was driving him out of his fucking mind. She was worried that once they found out the test results that he would immediately fire her. Normally he would probably do that, because she did