Chapter 18

18

JODI

I ’d broken my rules about getting involved with people I worked with. And I had broken them big-time. I hadn’t just gotten too cozy with a coworker at work or started getting used to having dinner together at the same restaurant every week. Those were the kinds of things I told myself I wasn’t allowed to do. It would get me too comfortable with a location and distract me so I wasn’t as aware of my surroundings. It would make me vulnerable. So, I avoided them.

That would have been a bit of a hiccup. But no. I’d gone for the big time. I slept with my boss. At work.

Apparently when I did things, I did them big.

I would have thought something like that would have thrown everything off, and the next morning would have been a cloud of awkwardness and discomfort. It might have even included attempting to sneak out of the house to get the vineyard with as little contact with Derek as possible.

It turned out not to be necessary. In fact, the next day started out perfectly normal. It was like nothing had changed when the alarm on my phone opened my eyes. Except, of course, that I’d gotten a really good night’s sleep for the first time in as long as I could remember.

In those first few moments after waking up, I let my mind drift back to what happened the night before, waiting for the bad feelings to come. They didn’t. Even as I got up and headed for the shower so I could start getting ready for the day, I only had a little bit of guilt about having sex with Derek.

It had been fun and a fantastic stress relief. When it was all done, there was some awkwardness to be sure. We both seemed to have that moment of realization of what just happened, that it wasn’t just fantasies or daydreams, but we actually had just gone at it with no self-control in the kitchen of his restaurant.

Humor managed to break that, and over the rest of the day, we managed to get comfortable with each other again. Spending time together at the house let us get to know each other more, and it felt like there had been a shift between us. By the time the day was over, we’d gotten past the initial weird phase and headed to bed separately without any awkwardness.

That welcome reaction continued when I got out of the shower and went to the kitchen for a cup of coffee to get the day really underway. Derek was already sitting at the table with his mug of coffee. It seemed his taste for actual physical reading materials didn’t extend past books because he had the morning news pulled up on a tablet sitting on the table in front of him.

He glanced up at me and smiled when I walked in.

“Am I ever going to beat you into the kitchen in the morning?” I asked.

He took a gulp of his coffee and shook his head. “Nope.”

“I’ll just have to set my alarm earlier, then,” I teased.

“Wouldn’t help. I sleep right here in this chair. Somebody has to guard Gandalf and make the coffee.”

I took a mug from the cabinet and filled it with hot coffee from the carafe. It was another unexpected little detail about Derek I found myself really liking. Rather than having one of the trendy single-cup coffee makers and a sprawling assortment of individual pods gathered around, he had a traditional machine that offered up an entire pot of dark, steaming deliciousness. It was perfect for the moments in the morning when I just didn’t have the patience to fiddle with the process of the single-cup makers.

We sat at the table, drank our coffee, and munched our way through croissants before heading to our respective rooms to get ready to head back to work. It was like nothing ever happened, and I was perfectly fine keeping it that way.

We’d had a good time, but it wasn’t like it could happen again. I’d rather just put it behind us and move forward.

Since going into work at the same time as Derek just made sense even if I didn’t technically have to be there that early, I offered to help the kitchen staff get things prepared for the first service of the day. As we were working our way through the prep list, I had a question for Derek but realized he wasn’t in the kitchen.

“Has anyone seen Derek?” I asked.

Most of the heads in the kitchen stayed ducked down over their work and shook, but one lifted up to meet my eyes.

“Try the tasting room,” one of the prep cooks said. “Most of the time if he’s not here in the kitchen, he’s down there with his brothers.”

I nodded and made my way the short distance to the tasting room. This was the space where guests could come and try samples of the wine being offered at the vineyard. Sometimes the tastings even included new wines that hadn’t been released yet or that were just being experimented with so the King brothers could get opinions about them.

Ally told me the tasting room was also one of the venues on the vineyard offered for private events. They were still very much in the process of building up attention for the vineyard and getting public attention for it, but they hoped in the coming months and years it would become even more of a destination.

As I was approaching the tasting room, I heard voices and knew I’d found him. The heavy wooden door to the room was propped open, so I took one step through the doorway and waited until Derek noticed I was standing there.

“Hey,” he said, gesturing to me. “Come on in. Meet the guys.”

It was the first time I’d seen all five of the brothers in the same space together at one time. In fact, it was the first time I’d met two of them. At that point, I’d been around long enough it struck me as odd I still hadn’t met two of the five, Cameron or Alex. I’d heard about them, and now that I saw them standing there, I knew I’d seen them walking by in the distance or having dinner in the back corner of the restaurant after they finished up work for the day.

“I just had a quick question for you,” I said, walking toward him. “I don’t mean to interrupt.”

Derek shook his head. “Don’t worry about it.” He gestured at me. “This is Jodi. She came into the restaurant and saved my ass. Jodi, these are my brothers. You’ve already met Kane and Noah. This is Cameron, and this is Alex.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said.

Derek looked at Cameron. “Jodi here is also a twin.”

As soon as he said it, a flicker of regret went across his expression. I could tell he wished he hadn’t brought that up. After our conversation about my past and what I had run from, invoking thoughts of my brother wasn’t exactly the most comfortable move, but I pushed past it. He was just trying to bring up common ground and offer bits of information about me so the other men could get to know me.

“My twin is a brother too,” I pointed out.

Cameron nodded, a serious look on his face. “So, the two of you are super identical.”

“No one can ever tell us apart,” I said without missing a beat. “Especially when I go a few days without shaving.”

That made a smile stretch across his face, and the others laughed. When I glanced over at Derek, he gave me an apologetic look, but I quickly shook my head to dismiss it. The truth was, I’d worried that not meeting these two brothers meant there was something terrible about them. But the banter put me at ease, and I realized I really liked them. The King brothers were proving to be great guys all around. It was a surprise there were any of them left on the market, especially two of them.

As we continued to chat a little, I couldn’t help but check them all out. Derek was certainly the oddball. His light hair and piercing blue eyes stood out against the much darker coloration of his brothers. But as a group, the five of them were all extremely attractive. Most families with multiple attractive children also had that one who didn’t seem to fully get the memo.

Not an issue with the King brothers. There wasn’t a single ugly duckling in sight.

After a few minutes of batting around stories about the vineyard and my first couple of weeks on the job, Noah’s head lifted like he’d noticed someone at the door. I looked over and saw Ally coming in. She hadn’t been in the kitchen that morning, so I was glad to see her.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Hey. I was wondering where you were,” I said.

“Just doing a million errands. That glamorous chef life. How’s everything going in the kitchen so far?” she asked.

“I’ve been in here with the guys most of it,” Derek admitted. “But Jodi’s been helping out. Turns out she isn’t just the server to end all servers. She also knows her way around a prep station.”

Alex gave him a strange look. “The server to end all servers? Did you hire an assassin to help you in the restaurant so she can just pick off underperforming employees? I don’t think that’s a very good motivation tactic.”

I tried not to laugh as Derek glared at his brother.

“I realized how weird it sounded when I said it,” Derek said. “You could have had the decency not to point it out.”

Alex grinned and shook his head. “Where’s the fun in that?”

“Alright, come on,” Cameron said. “We need to get going with this. I have some of the paperwork over at the counter.”

The guys headed across the room, but Ally hung back with me.

“How are you doing?” she asked. “Is everything okay?”

There was genuine concern in her eyes and in her voice, and it made me feel good to hear it. I’d kept to my rules for the past year, sticking mainly to myself when I went from place to place. I wasn’t cold or standoffish with the people I met, but I also didn’t develop any true friendships either. It felt like that had changed. It was the first time in that year I felt like people were getting to know me and cared.

We chatted for a bit before I stepped out of the conversation so I could head back to the kitchen. It was obvious the brothers were deep in some sort of work meeting and that was why Ally had shown up. I didn’t want to get in the middle of it or seem like I was overstepping my place.

I said goodbye to Ally, and she told me she’d see me later at the restaurant before I turned to leave. I was just making my way past one of the tables scattered around the tasting room when I heard Noah say two words I didn’t want anywhere near me or the place where I was working.

Prince Industries.

My knees went weak under me, and I sat down hard in one of the wooden chairs at the table. As I dropped my head to try to suck in a few deep breaths, I was vaguely aware of Derek calling my name and heading across the room toward me.