Page 39 of Rough Hard Fierce (Chicago Underground 1-3)
“Hell,” I said. “You’re supposed to boil these first?”
“Silly mommy,” Bailey said.
Chapter Fifteen
If I thought I’d made a mess in Colin’s kitchen, it was nothing compared to the bakery.
Cabinet doors were open, pans littered the countertops, and a fine layer of flour coated the entire room. It hadn’t even been this messy that time a hailstorm had knocked in the front windows.
I stepped inside, my mouth open. No one was in the back. The restroom was dark. I peeked into the storefront. Empty.
That left Rick’s office. The door was shut, and I was almost afraid to knock. The place looked like a crime scene. First-degree baking by an idiot, maybe. I couldn’t muster up the proper seriousness when the place looked like a supersized snow globe.
A deep breath. Knowing Rick, this was going to get strange. Well, stranger than usual.
I knocked. “Rick?”
Scuffling sounds from within. Then Rick poked his head out the door. “Allie. What are you doing here?”
“It’s my shift. What happened?”
“What happened?” he repeated.
I closed my eyes tight, prayed for patience, then opened them. “Here. In the kitchen. It’s like a flour bomb went off.”
“Oh, right.” He glanced past me as if just noticing the mess.
I narrowed my eyes. “Seriously, what happened?”
“Nothing. No work today. Bakery’s closed. Go home.” And he shut the door in my face.
Oh man, I would love nothing better than to go home, to pick up Bailey from Shelly’s and maybe even convince Shelly to spend the afternoon out with us. But even as I planned my afternoon off, I stomped my foot. A cloud of flour rose up, and I sneezed. I couldn’t leave. Rick was a friend. An annoying, clearly deranged friend, but there was no way I could walk away from this. Whatever this was.
I knocked again, harder. “Rick!”
A thud and then a curse. He opened the door. “Why did you yell?”
“Let me in.”
A pause. “No.”
“Then come out here.”
“Definitely no.”
“You have exactly three seconds to open this door, or I swear to God I will…”
Before I had to make up a false threat, he opened the door. Files and papers flooded the small office. The cheap wood furniture peeked out between crumpled pages. I shouldn’t have even been surprised.
Rick turned away and squatted to rifle through a bookcase. Rather halfheartedly, considering the magnitude of disarray.
“What the hell, Rick? Now.”
He stopped and bowed his head. Then he turned and stood, with so much raw emotion on his face that my breath caught. In the year and a half that I’d worked here, I’d never figured him out, but in this moment his eyes told the whole story.
Nothing so mundane as details. The broken, raw, painful part of me recognized the same thing in him. We stood there, connected by this nothing, and everything. It was uncomfortably intimate. More intimate than sex, but I’d learned long ago that the recognition of pain was so much more potent than the sharing of pleasure.
He leaned in, his intent clear. I didn’t want to kiss him. He was a friend to me. Maybe even a surrogate father, since mine never came around. And there was Colin.
