Free The Bouquet List by Barbara Deleo Page B

to keep her at a distance?
    Lane took a piece of warm flatbread and spread a little of the dip on it before passing it to her. “We need to confirm a relaunch date. It’s important that we don’t take too much time on the renovation. We don’t want your parents coming back to a mess, and we want to be able to build anticipation, so we’ll need to let all the media know when it’s going to be. Sooner rather than later.”
    Yasmin took a bite of the pita and dip, and for the next minute there was silence as her eyes closed and she started chewing. His skin heated as he watched, and in that moment he wanted nothing more than to be the one who put that expression on her face.
    …
    When she’d finished the bread, Yasmin took a bite of the ground beef pie, the fine, buttery phyllo pastry falling like snowflakes onto her chin and top. There was a creamy but tangy filling of ricotta cheese, pine nuts, and herbed ground beef and it all worked beautifully. Leo had outdone himself. She looked at Lane, so calm and together, and her heart squeezed as she remembered his rejection of her last night.
    She smiled. “So, what sort of thing did you have in mind for the relaunch? I’m not sure that Mom and Dad will be back as soon as Dad had hoped.”
    He rubbed his fingers across his mouth and paused before he spoke. “Hopefully, they’ll be here well before. Obviously it’ll be held in the restaurant. We’ll need to do a Sunday or Monday night when weddings aren’t booked and the restaurant is closed. We’ll have all the furnishings complete, the new tables and chairs, and we’ll serve a selection of the new menu. I need to talk to Grace, but we could also have new flower designers represented, a dramatic-looking cake or two, something that’s going to really make the media sit up and take notice of the huge changes here.”
    “And a time frame?”
    “Two weeks.”
    Yasmin nearly blew a mouthful of phyllo over him. “But you said you had a month!”
    “I did, but if we leave it too much later we’ll be getting toward the end of summer. We want to be able to maximize covers in the restaurant every night, and have the place looking great for all the potential new clientele who’ll be scoping out places for their summer weddings next year and beyond.”
    “How are we going to get things done in that time with the restaurant still open until eleven p.m. most nights?”
    He reached over and speared a green vegetable. “We’ll book the tradespeople to work early morning until midafternoon, then they’ll need to tidy everything away. And you and I will work nights after the dinner crowd have left to do the more straightforward jobs like painting and staging.”
    She stuck her lip out and gave him a mock pout. “I’ll never survive those hours.” Her doctor’s insistence that she get plenty of rest echoed in her head.
    “It’s only fourteen nights, and you’ll be able to sleep in the early part of the day as Grace will have everything under control. We’ll have the whole of next Monday as well.”
    Yasmin picked up a fork and reached for a piece of chicken. Having Lane keep an eye on her shouldn’t be something to encourage now that he’d made his feelings for her clear. But she smiled secretly to herself. Who was she to stop him from doing his duty? That the eye-keeping would be happening during late evenings when no one else was around wasn’t something she was going to argue with, either. She could quite happily look at him 24-7.
    And since he was in a fairly open mood, she wanted to understand him a little more. “Tell me, honestly, why are you so committed to doing all this? From what Grace was telling me, you’re pretty successful.”
    He was looking directly in her eyes and her heart did its familiar pitter-pat. “Because your Dad asked me to. Here, do you want to try the yogurt sauce with that?”
    She nodded and he spooned some of the creamy mixture onto her plate.
    “I know, but taking time out from