now stood several feet away, looking at her differently—harder, meaner almost.
Another flash of panic hit her—did he already know about Percy? Or was he just mad that she wasn’t falling at her feet in gratitude for being acknowledged?
“I need a designer,” he said quietly. He didn’t sound angry, which was at direct odds with the way he was looking at her. “I’m going to be opening up my own restaurant.”
“Here?”
“Here,” he agreed, sounding resigned to it. “It’s a massive job and I—” she saw him swallow “—I wanted to see if it was the kind of thing you were still interested it.”
“You’re going to stay in Denver?” The question came out with more of an edge than she meant it to, but that was the thing she needed to know. If he were going to stay in Denver, then...
Then he’d have to know about Percy. They’d have to figure something out, something involving child support and visitation and...
Well, not their relationship. There was no relationship. That part of her life was over now.
And if he were opening up his own restaurant—her mind spun around the facts. Her father, Leon Harper, would find out that Byron had come home.
Oh, God. Her father would get out his old axes and grind them all over again. Her father would shove his way back into her life, ignoring all the ways she had tried to extricate herself from her parents. Her father would do everything he could to destroy Byron—again.
Her father would do everything to punish her again.
“Yes,” Byron said, turning away from her and looking up at the old buildings. “I’ve come home.”
Byron walked into the darkened room that, somehow, would become a restaurant. Somehow. “Here we are. The dungeon.”
Behind him, he heard Leona cough lightly. “Is that the theme you’re working with?”
“No.”
What the hell was he doing? Touching her face? Kissing her hand? That was not part of his plan. His plan was to hire her, get his restaurant going and kick her right back out of his life—this time, on his terms. She hadn’t needed him. He didn’t need her. Except for design purposes.
But that’s not what had happened because something as simple as seeing Leona Harper again—and seeing that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring—had blown all to hell his simple plan to get simple answers.
There was nothing simple about Leona. A fact she’d made abundantly clear when she’d closed her eyes—when she’d refused to even look at him.
“Pity,” she sniffed. “You wouldn’t have to change a thing.”
He grinned in spite of himself. Leona had always been something of a contradiction. She was, in general, a quiet woman who avoided confrontation. But when she’d been alone with him, she’d let out the real her—snarky and sarcastic with a biting observation ready at all times. She’d made him laugh—him. He’d thought he was too jaded, too cynical to laugh anymore, to feel much of anything anymore. But he’d laughed with her. He’d had all these feelings with her. For her.
He’d loved her. Or thought he had. But maybe that’d all been part of the trick, a Harper trapping a Beaumont. She hadn’t told him who she was, after all, until it was too late.
“So if you’re not going with torture chamber,” she went on, “what do you want?”
“Whatever.”
“Be serious, Byron.” If he hadn’t been looking at her, he wouldn’t have seen the tiny stamp of her foot that set off eddies of dust.
He paused. “I am being serious. You can do whatever you want. I can cook what I want. The only caveat is that the beverage menu has to feature our beer. The restaurant can be whatever it wants.”
Clutching her tablet to her chest, she gave him a long look that he couldn’t quite make out in the dim light. “You have to have some idea of what you’re interested in,” she finally said in a soft voice.
“I do. I’ve always known what I wanted.” He turned away from her. This was a bad idea. But then again, it was Leona—she’d always been a bad idea. “But I’m used to not getting it.”
She gasped, but he kept walking back toward the soon-to-be-kitchen. He couldn’t let her get under his skin. He never should have asked her here. He was safer in Spain, where she was nothing but a memory—not a flesh and blood woman who would always push him past the point of reason.
The reasonable thing to do was to keep as much space between the Beaumonts and the Harpers as possible. That’s the way it’d always been, before he’d unwittingly crossed that line. That’s the way it should have stayed.
He dragged open the doors to the workroom and flipped on all the lights. “This needs to be upgraded considerably,” he said. He couldn’t fix the past, couldn’t undo his great mistake. But he could stop making it over again. He just had to focus on the job—it was the reason they were both here. He needed to find a way to be Byron Beaumont in a place where his last name permanently branded him, and he needed to make sure that Leona Harper knew she would never exert any power over him ever again.
She followed him into the cleaner space. “I see.” She took several pictures with her tablet. “Do you have a menu yet?”
“No. I only agreed to do this yesterday. I thought I’d be on my way back to Madrid by now.”
“Madrid? Is that where you went?”
Of course she wouldn’t know. She probably hadn’t bothered to look him up at all.
But there was something in the way she said it—as if she couldn’t believe that was the answer—that made him turn back to her. She stared at him with big eyes and this time, there was no hiding that look. She was stunned—confused? She was hurt.
Well, that made two of them “Yes. Well, I spent six months in France first. Then Spain.”
Her eyes cut down to his left hand—his ring finger. “Did you...”
He tensed. “No. I was working.”
She exhaled. “Ah.” But that was all she said. He was about to turn away when she added, “Where did you work?”
“George, you remember him?”
“Your father’s old chef?”
For some reason, the fact that she remembered who George was made Byron relax a little. It wasn’t like she’d forgotten him. Not entirely, anyway. “Yes. One of his old friends from Le Cordon Bleu gave me a job in Paris. Then I heard about an opening at El Gallio in Madrid and took the job.”
Her eyes widened again. “You were at El Gallio? That’s a three-star restaurant!”
He
