Free Seduction and Surrender (The Billionaire's Temptation Series) by Cali MacKay Page A

with a scowl on his face, his knife-work getting quicker the more annoyed he became. “Do I need to pay Ryker a visit?”
    “No. It’s fine. Besides, I don’t want to talk about my stupid date—I want to know how things went here last night with Chef Scott. How was it? Was he amazing?” She’d probably have gotten more out of last night if she’d stayed at work. Not that Quinn hadn’t given her a mind-blowing orgasm. She had to give him credit, even if begrudgingly so. The man was damn good with his hands.
    “Em…” Jake shook his head with a smile, his scowl long gone at the first mention of Finn Scott’s name. “Chef Scott was amazing. I mean, to have him here for dinner service? I wish you’d been here. You’d have really liked him.”
    “I’m sure I would have. He may end up having to cover for me again—if Quinn has any other events he needs me to attend.” After the way things had gone down, she had no doubt Quinn would want to see her again, if only to gloat. He’d said he’d have her screaming out his name as she came in his arms, and she’d done just that. Damn him.
    Normally she could get a pretty good read on people, but Quinn left her baffled. He just didn’t make any sense. He’d flirted, touched, and teased; made her come, even. Yet when she’d tried to reciprocate, he’d put a stop to it.
    What she couldn’t figure out was why .
    “You’re going out with him again? You can’t be serious, Em.” With an angry huff, Jake got back to his prep work.
    “What am I supposed to do? If you like your job here, then I have no choice but to keep this up until he gets bored of me. And frankly, he’s not exactly what you’d expect.” Though why the hell she was defending Quinn, she hadn’t a clue.
    He pinned her with those deep brown eyes of his, so that the flecks of gold stood out, making her want to analyze the color closely. “Then why the hell do you look so miserable?”
    She shook her head with a shrug, not quite sure how to answer him.
    “Chef?” Emma turned to find Bobby, one of her prep cooks, standing there, his gaze not quite reaching hers as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “It’s the walk-in fridge—the big one in the basement. Something’s wrong with it.”
    Crap…this was not a complication she needed. She quickly washed her hands and her knife, and followed Bobby down the steps into the well-lit basement. She opened the door to the walk-in to find it cool but definitely not as cold as it should be. A quick glance at the thermometer verified her suspicions, and a look at the easy fixes, like the plug and the fuse box, didn’t help matters any. “We’ll need to transfer all the vegetables to the other walk-in, but the meat…” She cursed under her breath. “We can’t take that sort of a chance.”
    Having been gone yesterday, she didn’t know how long the temperature had been off, and couldn’t risk anyone getting sick. Luckily, most of the meat was kept in a different walk-in by the kitchen, since it was the most convenient for service, with the basement walk-in housing just the meats that were getting marinated or treated with a dry rub. It was a big loss, but it could have been a hell of a lot worse if it had been her main unit.
    With everyone’s help, they got the food moved from one fridge to the other, but the repair technician was still several days out. With frustration gnawing at her insides and stress knotting her muscles, she got back to work by Jake’s side, trying to make up for lost time.
    “Is it just me, or does it feel like we’ve had shit luck as of late?” It wasn’t just the lease, and the walk-in, but all sorts of other issues. Her accounting files had gotten fried, a shelving unit where they kept their bottles of wine had given way, and her fryer completely died. She’d been lucky that she kept a backup of her files online on a secure cloud server, and most of the wine bottles had still been in crates, so they