Second Chance at the Orchard Inn, page 27
“Good afternoon, ladies,” Zoe said, swinging her hair out of her face as she found the right key.
Sherry grinned. She was an older white woman who’d been cooking for Harvest Home since Arthur had founded it back in the late nineties. “Hey, Zoe.”
“Arthur finally take a day off?” Tania asked. Tania was newer, hired when the place had expanded a few years ago, but now it was hard to imagine how they’d gotten along without her. She was Black and maybe twenty years younger than Sherry, and the two were a powerhouse team.
“Fingers crossed.”
Tania threw her head back and laughed. “I give it an hour.”
“Swear I’m going to tie that man to his recliner.” Zoe shook her head and pushed open the door.
Uncle Arthur was tireless, and getting him to take an entire day off—much less a trip to Fiji—was a rare victory. She swallowed hard. The only person she’d ever known who worked harder was her dad, and everyone knew how that had ended. If he’d rested and relaxed more, would that have prevented him from dropping dead of a heart attack at forty-eight?
Who knew. Probably not.
But Uncle Arthur was sixty-five with high blood pressure. The guy deserved a break.
Heading inside, Zoe flicked on the lights and fired up the computer to check messages at the front desk. Sherry and Tania made their way to the kitchen. Absently, Zoe pulled up the volunteer schedule. It took its sweet time loading, so she called, “Any idea who’s serving tonight?”
As paid employees, Sherry and Tania were the backbone of the organization’s meal service, but they couldn’t pull off feeding fifty people a day without an equally dedicated crew of volunteers. Businesses, churches, and schools fielded teams that came out to make the magic happen every night.
Sherry and Tania must have been out of earshot. Frowning, she wiggled the computer mouse and reloaded the schedule. Before it could come up, the door swung open. Zoe darted her gaze toward the entryway.
Only to be met with a pair of gorgeous blue eyes, a broad set of shoulders, a trim, muscular frame, and a bright smile.
“Meyer Construction, reporting for duty,” Devin said.
Zoe’s heart did a little jump inside her chest as she straightened up. “Oh, hey!”
“Hey.” Just like he had the last time he strode through that door, he raked his gaze over her. She swallowed. She wasn’t dressed to get good tips at the Junebug today. A flannel shirt over a T-shirt and jeans was hardly what she’d call sexy, but it didn’t seem to matter, based on the way his eyes darkened.
“I didn’t know you all were serving today.”
Devin moved forward into the space, making room for a half dozen folks to file in after him. He shrugged, tucking his thumbs into the belt loops of his dark-rinse jeans. “Arthur talked me into it when I was here telling him about my promotion.” One corner of his mouth curled upward. “Said it’d be a good use for my new leadership skills.”
The last guy to come in groaned. “Are we ever going to hear the end of that?”
Devin stiffened and flexed his jaw. “I haven’t even started yet, Bryce.”
Ah, okay, now Zoe recognized the guy shouldering past Devin. The mayor’s son, Bryce Horton, had been a couple of years ahead of her in school, but Lian had complained about him plenty at the time. He’d been a royal jerk, and it didn’t seem like much had changed.
“Then why am I even here?” Bryce asked, pulling out his phone and plunking down in one of the chairs meant for patrons.
Devin’s whole frame radiated tension, but however angry he was, he kept it out of his tone. “Come on. Kitchen’s in the back.”
Bryce rolled his eyes, even as he kept his gaze glued to what sure looked like a dating app he was swiping through. Zoe resisted the urge to sneak a peek at his username—just so she could avoid it if she ever ended up on the same site.
Devin’s voice dropped. “Now.”
Grumbling, Bryce lurched out of the chair and followed Devin down the hall.
“Right behind you,” Zoe called. She just had a couple more quick things to take care of out here.
Bryce looked over his shoulder at her and made a super-gross kissy face. Glancing back, Devin caught him, and his eyes narrowed, his hands curling into fists at his sides.
Interesting. When her brother shot his death glare at guys who were hitting on her at the bar, it made her want to strangle him. But when Devin did it?
A warm little shiver ran up her spine.
She probably shouldn’t like it so much, but she did.
She swallowed, fighting to calm the flutters in her chest as she shot Bryce a glare of her own. No matter how much Devin’s protectiveness gave her the warm fuzzies, she could handle herself. “Wasn’t talking to you,” she informed Bryce.
“Sure.” He clicked his tongue and brought his hand to his ear like a phone and mouthed, Call me.
Devin bustled him along, thunderclouds in his eyes. The coiled strength in him gave her even more little flutters inside.
As soon as they disappeared around the corner, she put her head in her hands to muffle her groan. Getting the butterflies over this guy was pathetic. She was acting like a swooning schoolgirl with a crush again.
Sucking in a deep breath, she dropped her hands from her face. She was too old for this pining nonsense.
Resolve filled her. Devin showing up to volunteer tonight might have taken her by surprise, but it was a golden opportunity. Han was working at the restaurant tonight, so he couldn’t appear from out of nowhere, football in hand or no. Devin would have his guard down.
With so many people around, Zoe couldn’t exactly seduce Devin. But maybe this was her chance to show him that she was so much more than a kid with a crush now.
And that the spark between them was real.
“Need any help?”
Zoe sighed and cast her gaze skyward but didn’t stop busing dishes. “I thought you were taking the day off.”
Uncle Arthur smiled. “Was just in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop in.” He craned his neck to peer into the dining room. “Decent crowd tonight.”
“Fifty-seven.”
“Impressive.” He pursed his lips. “Terrible, but impressive.”
Nobody wanted to be put out of business more than Uncle Arthur. When his family had landed in this country nearly sixty years ago, they’d relied on soup kitchens. He’d come a long way since then, and he’d had some good luck with investments that had allowed him to found this place. He loved having a way to give back to the community here in Blue Cedar Falls that had taken him in. But if hunger and unemployment just disappeared, he’d be delighted to be out of a job.
Stir crazy and climbing the walls, looking for his next venture, but delighted.
“Late fall is always tough.”
The weather here was warm enough that construction and tourism carried on year-round, but whenever the weather turned chilly, the number of people showing up at Harvest Home climbed.
“True.” Uncle Arthur came over to squeeze her arm. “Knew you could handle it, though.”
Her chest contracted. With no one else in her life trusting her to handle anything more than her TikTok account, that was way too nice to hear. She chuckled to hide the tightness behind her ribs. “Which is why you felt no need to check up on me at all.”
“He’s not checking up on you,” Tania said, coming in from taking a load to the compost pile out back. “He just can’t stay away from me,” she teased.
“You know me,” Uncle Arthur agreed indulgently, dropping his hand.
Sherry was right behind Tania. She shook her head at Arthur. “Held out longer than I thought you would.”
Ignoring her, Uncle Arthur gestured toward the dining room. “I’m just going to quick make the rounds.”
Zoe waved him along. On his way out, Arthur nearly bumped right into Devin, who had a crate filled with dirty dishes in his arms.
Devin’s eyes lit up. “Thought you were taking the night off.”
“Don’t you start in on me, too.” Uncle Arthur waggled a finger at him.
“You’re working yourself to an early grave,” Zoe called after him.
Uncle Arthur’s finger shifted to point at her, but she just shrugged. She wasn’t going to apologize for trying to remind him to take a break once in a while. He continued out to the dining room to do his usual thing, thanking volunteers and checking in on the guests. Sherry and Tania followed him with more milk crates to help with cleanup.
Rolling her sleeves to her elbows, Zoe started running the water.
Devin brought his crate of dishes over to her. “He’s unstoppable, huh?”
“Seems it.” She frowned. Her uncle definitely gave that impression, but he was getting up there, and she did genuinely worry about him.
“He’s fine. There’s a reason he showed up at the last possible second.” Devin tipped his head toward the dining room. “He’s not going to do any work. He just likes talking to everybody.”
His voice was soft and full of affection.
“Right.” Sometimes Zoe forgot that Devin’s road to practically becoming a member of their extended family began right here at Harvest Home. Uncle Arthur didn’t like to talk about it, but Devin had started out as a guest, coming by with his dad every week. Then by himself even more often than that. Sure, he’d become best buddies with Han by then, but it went deeper than that. Devin knew better than anyone how dedicated Uncle Arthur was to making people feel welcome here.
As he started unloading the dirty dishes, Devin’s arm brushed hers, and a shiver of warmth ran through her skin.
Her throat went dry as she glanced up at him. They’d been working in close quarters all night, but any efforts to either seduce him or change his impression of her had taken a back seat to the task of getting dinner on the table for almost sixty people. In the end, this was the closest they’d really gotten, physically.
As if he could feel her gaze, he looked down. When their eyes met, heat flushed through her. How could a person’s eyes be so blue? She got lost for a second, just staring at the gold-brown scruff on his sharp jaw, the soft red fullness of his lips, when everything else about him was chiseled and hard.
“Do you—” The huskiness of his voice only distracted her more.
“Huh?”
He pushed a plate toward her more insistently.
A different, embarrassed flush rose to her cheeks as she grabbed it and ran it under the water. “Right, right. Sorry.”
He didn’t need to stand so close as he passed her the next one, but she didn’t tell him that. Wasn’t she the one who’d started the game of trying to make him break? With the way he’d been looking at her, she’d taken it as a personal challenge to get him to make a move or at least admit that there was something brewing between them.
Now here she was, right on the cusp of cracking herself.
What would he do if she did? If she made the real first move and turned to him. Reached up to graze her fingertips along his cheek.
If she leaned forward on her tiptoes and tugged him down so she could taste his mouth…
She shuddered inside, blushing furiously as she placed another plate on the rack inside the dishwasher. She’d been harboring these kinds of fantasies since she was a teenager. It was hard to tell how much was actually possible and how much was just the same nonsense she’d been imagining for years.
Unwilling to shatter the moment, she set it all aside and concentrated on cleaning up. He seemed content to do the same. Even if his presence was making her heart do weird flips behind her ribs, she tried not to let it show.
They fell into a rhythm, like they’d been working together like this forever. That made sense—they’d both been volunteering here for years, but it still felt unfairly kismet, somehow.
“Thanks,” she said after a couple of minutes. “By the way. For bringing in the folks from your company tonight.”
“Happy to do it.” He let out a rough sigh. “Well, for the most part.”
It was clear who he was talking about.
Chuckling quietly, she shook her head. “Yeah, Bryce is still a piece of work, huh?”
“You have no idea.”
The guy had barely lifted a finger the entire time he’d been here, and he’d eaten a solid dinner’s worth of food meant for the guests.
“How does he get away with it?”
“You know.” A dark undertone ran through Devin’s words.
She shivered, reminded again of how much strength Devin kept contained inside himself. He never used it, though, no matter how frustrated he got.
It made her feel…safe. It always had. Even when they’d been kids messing around in Uncle Arthur’s basement. Any time the other boys his age had gotten too rough around her, he’d stepped in and said something.
Which was probably part of how she’d ended up with this stupid crush on him in the first place.
“Yeah, I guess I do.”
People filed in and out of the kitchen, bringing new loads of dishes through. Zoe was indulging herself, spending this time rinsing plates when she should be out there directing traffic, but between Uncle Arthur, Sherry, and Tania, there were enough people running the show for her to dawdle a little longer. And the chance to stand so close to Devin was just too good to pass up.
“So you’ve really gotten involved here, huh?” he asked, moving to her other side to help her start loading the second washer.
She shrugged and passed him a stack of silverware. “I have the time right now. And I like helping out. Working with the guests. Getting to spend more time with Uncle Arthur.”
A smile stole across her face as she talked about it all. She’d missed everyone in her family while she’d been away at college, but her uncle was the only one who didn’t carry any baggage—or seem to have some sort of agenda for what she should do with her life.
Devin hummed in acknowledgment, giving her space to keep talking. It was refreshing.
“This place,” she continued, trying to sum it up. “The work we do here, the people we serve. It feels important.”
“I get it,” Devin said quietly.
He would.
But then one corner of his mouth tilted down. “You said you have the time ‘right now.’ You see that changing soon?”
“Ugh.” Zoe huffed out a breath as she scrubbed at a particularly stubborn spot on a plate. “I don’t know. Apparently, at some point I’m supposed to get a real job.”
He chuckled and passed her another dish. “What? Overrated.”
“Says the guy who just got the big promotion.”
“It’s not that big a deal,” he said, rolling his eyes, but his posture straightened slightly. It was definitely at least a medium-size deal. Humble as he might be, she hoped he was getting some satisfaction from his work.
She considered for a second before asking, “How did you know? That construction was what you wanted to do?”
It was the same basic question she’d asked Lian earlier—unhelpful as that conversation had been.
“I don’t know,” he answered slowly. “I didn’t exactly have a ton of options.”
“Smart guy like you?”
He laughed, only it didn’t entirely sound funny. “I like working with my hands. Got a decent eye for it. Pay’s good, relatively speaking. Arthur was able to help me get my foot in the door when I needed—when I decided it was time to find a place of my own.”
There was something he wasn’t saying, his voice dipping low and pulling at something in her chest. Before she could probe any deeper, though, he looked at her.
“So, how are things going with the whole real job thing, then?” he asked.
Well, that was certainly a way to kill the mood.
“Ugh. Terrible.” Her mom had laid into her just that afternoon, telling her she wasn’t sending out enough résumés or casting her net wide enough, prompting her to waste a good hour or two rage-scrolling Monster. “I’m putting in applications for jobs pretty much all over the state at this point. A few in Atlanta, too.”
His eyebrows pinched together. “You’d really go that far?”
“I don’t want to.” She liked it here. She always had. Things here were easy. Comfortable. Being close to her family—when they weren’t driving her up a wall or dictating her love life and her job search, anyway—was nice.
But she’d do what she had to do. She’d always wanted to get out on her own, and this extended period of being between things was making her itch to be independent again.
It wasn’t like it was with her brother. Han had come home when their father died and had taken over—well, everything. His sense of duty was giving him white hairs.
She’d choose to stay here, too, if it worked out. But she had to keep her options open. She couldn’t just be stuck here because she couldn’t make it on her own.
“We’ll see how things go.” She shrugged. It was such an annoying platitude, but that was her life now.
“Well, I hope you stay close.” The way he said it was so genuine, she jerked her gaze up to meet his, but he was pointedly studying the dishes. After a second, he smiled, his tone lightening as he darted a teasing glance her way. “I mean, how can Han kill anyone who dares to look at you if you live far away?”
That was it. She shoved him, and he laughed, plates clanking together as he bumped into them where they were so neatly stacked in the racks. He playfully pushed back, and then what choice did she have, with her wet hands and all, but to flick some water in his face?
He sputtered, the droplets clinging to his skin in interesting ways, and her breath sped up. She went to do it again, but she must have telegraphed her intentions too clearly, because he grabbed her wrist before she could. Her heart hammered in her chest.
She stared up into his eyes, and for a second, everything around them faded, because she had seen that look before.
About two seconds before he got hit in the head with a football.
“Someone wanna tell me why we’re out there doing all the work while these two are messing around in here?”
