Can't Stand the Heat - Louisa Edwards [47]
Maybe it did.
Her heartbeat slowed to something resembling a livable rhythm, although the warmth that had pooled in her belly had yet to dissipate. Miranda shook her head, utterly without a response.
“Come on,” Adam cajoled. “It was only a kiss. Chalk it up to my exuberant personality, or my total fucking joy at being offered an excuse to ditch the books for the morning. Whatever you want.”
Getting her feet under her again, Miranda twitched her soft jersey-knit wrap dress more perfectly into place and smoothed her free hand over her hair.
Then she fixed him with the sternest look she could muster, grateful that the poorly lit stairwell would hide the glow of pink she could still feel heating her cheeks.
“Fine. Just promise me it won’t happen again.”
The son of a bitch had the audacity to grin.
“Not on your life, sweetheart.”
By the time Jess hit the apartment stairs, it was already after nine. Thanking whatever gods looked out for penniless students that Miranda had brought his bike when she moved to Manhattan, he unlocked the chain and kicked off.
It was another pretty day, one more thing to be thankful for, and Jess pedaled fast for the entrance to Central Park. He liked to cut across the park in the mornings to get to work, weaving around joggers and people walking their dogs. The leaves were a canopy of vibrant green shading the path. Jess’s photographer’s eye tagged everything as he whizzed past, on the off chance he’d see something worth stopping for.
His beat-up old Nikon was in the messenger bag slung over one shoulder along with his Market server duds. Jess liked to take the camera everywhere he went, just in case. The city was full of amazing moments that were worthy of being captured on film for all time, if you knew how to watch for them.
Fifteen minutes later, he chained his bike in the alley behind the restaurant and let himself in the back door. His traitorous brain immediately zeroed in on Frankie’s presence toward the front of the kitchen, near the pass, and Jess studiously kept his head turned away. He couldn’t afford to get in any deeper. He had enough going on in his life already without complicating things with this childish crush.
Ignoring the quiet internal voice that insisted Frankie was more than a crush, Jess hurried through the kitchen toward the staff staircase. He didn’t notice there was music playing, the usual Market kitchen soundtrack of frenetic punk rock, until it switched off abruptly, to be replaced by the now-familiar opening beats of “Kimberly.”
Patti’s whiskey-on-the-rocks voice poured out of the speakers, trippy lyrics like abstract poetry set to music, and it froze Jess in place with one hand on the door leading down to the staff changing room.
Blood thrummed in his ears, nearly drowning out the music, but before he could turn and meet Frankie’s sly, knowing gaze—the gaze Jess could feel trained on the back of his neck like a hot photo studio spotlight—the staff door flew open, knocking him back several paces, and Adam burst in, dragging a shell-shocked Miranda along by the hand.
“Frankie,” Adam bellowed. “I’m out. Got to school Miss Miranda, here.”
“Go on and skive off, then, you bastard, we’ve prep covered,” Frankie replied, unruffled as always.
Jess watched the exchange still in the shutterbug zone, unconsciously noting everything from the exuberant gleam in Adam’s eye and Frankie’s wry responding twinkle to Miranda’s slightly mussed makeup and wide-blown pupils.
Which made him raise his brows and take a closer look. Miranda caught his eye and the blush mantling her cheeks intensified in color as she tried surreptitiously, and unsuccessfully, to disentangle her hand from Adam’s.
Interesting. She looked exactly the way Jess had felt when Frankie shook his hand that first day. Confused, overwrought, and disbelieving. She gave Jess a halfhearted wave as she followed Adam from the restaurant, still looking as though she didn’t quite know what had hit her.
Jess sympathized. In his experience, that feeling got worse before it got