“The owner of this food truck is just fine with it. She thinks guys in suits who come and demand all the options are sort of rude,” I deadpanned and leaned through the window enough so they would both have to step back. Then, I hung the sign to the left and pointed theatrically. “Oh, look, a menu!”
“Pink Princess, Kiss of a Rainbow, and Black Suit Pricks?” Bastian hesitated on the last one. His smile after was swift, though, like he had a sense of humor after all.
That smile dimmed everything else on the beach that day. It was deadly, brilliant, and quite frankly, the most beautiful thing I’d seen besides the ocean water. His dark eyes sparkled just like it when he smiled, but the darkness hid something deep down that I knew I didn’t want to find.
“Pick your poison, boys.” I folded my hands over my chest and his eyes flicked up and down my body.
“Morina,” he said my name, and it sounded just like it had in that plane right after we’d slept together. He’d pushed my hair from my cheek and murmured it softly like I was the only woman in the world.
Maybe I had been for just that night.
This was reality though, far from sunrises and private jets. And he wasn’t supposed to be in my reality.
At all.
“How did you find me and why did you even look?” I glared at him.
His eyes widened, clearly shocked with my question. “I didn’t come looking for you. I’m looking for the owner of this truck.”
“That’s me,” I threw back.
“No. That’s impossible. Maribel owns this truck.”
My grandmother’s name rolled off his tongue with ease but it hit me like a bullet. “Maribel Bailey is my grandmother. She gave this to me.”
His gaze whipped to Dante who immediately started putting things into his phone.
“What’s going on?”
But Bastian was already shaking me off and dismissing me. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll handle it.” He growled.
“Oh, daddy can’t share anything with little old me now?” The question shot out before I had time to think about it.
His eyes widened, and his jaw flexed.
I stepped back, suddenly realizing that Bastian and I were not in the territory of playful taunts anymore. Our realities were mixing and they weren’t ones to be toyed with.
I turned to the blender, not giving them time to choose anymore. “Smoothies it is.”
“Tell me, is it sanitary for you to be making these in a bikini?” he asked softly.
I can’t help wanting to reply, “I’m not making them in a bikini; I’m making them in a blender.”
He couldn’t come to my place of business, throw around my grandmother’s name with no explanation, and then on top of everything else, comment on my attire. I wasn’t good at hiding my emotions. It was the Sagittarius in me.
I cleared my throat and my frustration away when he didn’t respond. “If you’re so concerned, go elsewhere.”
“See, that’s the interesting thing about this place.” Bastian leaned into the window of the food truck, put his elbows on it like he owned it, like he owned everything. Just with that movement, I knew he was important: someone my grandma probably knew and someone I didn’t want to know at all. “You’re the only food truck for three miles up and down this beach. We had on file that was your grandmother’s doing. Tell me, how did you and her manage that?”
I didn’t like to admit that I was naive. I didn’t really consider myself flighty either but his words were a kick to the stomach and reminder that I was. I never really thought much of it. I’d taken over the food truck at fifteen, when my parents had died. Ever since, I’d worked it nights and weekends and summers during high school. When I graduated, I’d taken it on fully.
Business was always good enough.
“Didn’t you ever consider that,piccola ragazza?”
“Stop with the little girl nickname.” I sounded just like that as I said it.
He chuckled and I spun back to make the smoothie. These two men had waited for the line to go before them. They wanted to be last, which meant they wanted more from me than just a smoothie.