Page 29 of Never Kiss the Bad Boy

“Oh,” she utters, sounding surprised, though I don’t understand why. “Sure, I guess that’s fine. Here.”

She sets her steel wool scrubber down, takes off her gloves, and hands them to me. I squeeze them on—she’s got a lot smaller set of hands than me—before popping the cuff like a surgeon in the operating room and taking up my position in front of the sink. It’s full of spoons of various sizes and a few spatulas, but I start with the pot she was working on, scrubbing it in long strokes the same way she was. I might not be a chef, but I know people are particular about their cookware, so I’m not gonna do anything that could destroy the tools of Dani’s trade.

Dani stares at me like I’m an alien for a moment, but then she moves to a drawer. I can’t see what she’s doing at first, but she turns around with a large meat cleaver in her hand.

“Fuck, just tell me to get out,” I balk, holding my glove-covered hands up in surrender. But I’m grinning because I’m mostly sure she’s not about to dice me into chunks for tomorrow’s lunches.

“Har-har,” she deadpans before explaining, “I need to sharpen my knives.”

“Scaring the shit outta me is a solid bonus, though, right?” I joke with a big grin. She tries to hide her answering smile unsuccessfully, and I know I’m right.

I go back to scrubbing while she sets up at the kitchen table, soaking a well-used whetstone in a bowl of water and lining up the cleaver as well as a handful of thankfully smaller knives.

“What’s your brother sell?” I ask, starting easy. I want to know everything about Daniela Becerra, but like me, she doesn’t share readily, so dancing around the questions I really want to ask is the best way to learn anything about the short-tempered, sexy spitfire.

Dani looks at me in surprise. “How’d you know he’s in sales?”

“I can smell ’em a mile away.” I take a sniff of the air, scrunching up my nose like something smells rank. When she doesn’t laugh, I answer honestly. “His pants were designer, he was wearing a flashy watch to grab attention and communicate success, and his shoes had a fresh polish. All that, but his shirt was straight outta Tar-jay. Most customers wouldn’t notice. They’d be too wowed by the Rolex to question the shirt’s thread count. I’m guessing life insurance or cars. Am I right?”

Dani blinks rapidly, her jaw dropped open. “How did you…?” she mutters. I raise my brows expectantly. “Cars,” she answers with a shake of her head.

I meant to learn about her, but my spot-on assessment of Xavier has definitely revealed more about myself than I intended. Truthfully, I could name the designer of his pants, the style of his Rolex, and the year of his BMW, but Dani doesn’t need to know that. My knowledge of expensive displays of success isn’t something I want to explain. Not because I think she’ll care, but because I don’t want to talk about my family. I want to talk about Dani’s.

“You sound like you don’t approve.”

“My family’s complicated,” Dani says as she watches the little bubbles rise from the soaking stone.

“Most peoples’ are.”

Fuck, if only she knew the mess my family is, starting with yours truly. I’m the black sheep of my siblings, a role I take seriously and enjoy thoroughly, constantly striving to find new ways to piss off my Dad. In my defense, he totally deserves it and I take extraordinary delight when I can make the vein in his forehead bulge dangerously.

“I guess,” she says, not sounding like she truly agrees. “For a really long time, we had a restaurant. Papa was the head chef, Mama ran the counter, and I did whatever was needed. I learned how to cook from them. Nothing fancy, but it was sort of the first incarnation of my business.” She looks around her kitchen like she’s not seeing it, but rather the restaurant’s. “It was mostly lunch take-out too, with a grand total of six ‘booths’ for the guys to sit at while they waited for their food, or for the few who couldn’t eat at work. Our customers were the same people I serve now.”

I hold up the pot I’ve been scrubbing for approval, and she nods. I set it aside to dry and continue with the sinkful of spoons as she takes the sharpening stone from the water and lines it up in a wooden tray. Picking up her long, almost machete-like cleaver, she starts running it along the stone, the raspy whisper filling the room.

“What about your brother? Can’t help but notice he wasn’t on that list of employees and responsibilities.”

“Xavier always hated the restaurant,” Dani says, making another stroke of the steel on the stone. “Probably because Papa had him doing the shit work. Dishes,” she says, looking at me like I’m an alien again. “Mopping the floors, taking out the garbage, cleaning the bathroom, stuff like that. I mean, I did my share too, but Papa always kept the real nasty stuff for Xavier. One day, he had enough. The toilet was clogged, which happened way too often, and Papa sent Xavier in with a plunger. I don’t know what he did, but there’s was a big whoosh sound and when he came out, there was actual shit all over his apron. He said he was done, right then and there. Threw his apron on the floor, walked out the back door, and never came back. He got a job at a car dealership, first as a porter, and then working his way up through the sales department. He’s really good at it—one of their top salesmen now.”

She sounds proud of her brother, but there’s obviously something deeper going on because she talks about the restaurant in past tense.

“What happened to your parents’ place? How’d you end up cooking in your kitchen?”

She shrugs. “After Xavier left, I thought Papa would finally see me. Maybe even realize that I’d been the one running the place at his side all along. I mean, Xavier could never make barbacoa for shit.” Dani smiles a little as she insults her brother’s skills, and I like that little flash of her fire. “And fucking up barbacoa is a criminal offense in my book.”

“But?” I prompt, and she sighs.

“But Papa got sick. Lung cancer, even though he never smoked a single cigarette.” She laughs a bitter laugh. “But he grew up dirt-dirt poor, in the sort of house where they had to burn whatever they could get their hands on to keep warm in the winter, sometimes to cook too. God knows what he inhaled.” She swallows as if she’s the one who can’t catch her breath. “He was able to get treatment, but it wasn’t cheap. Thankfully, Xavier was able to help with that, but Papa couldn’t run the restaurant any more. I wanted to keep it going, keep money coming in for them, but Papa wouldn’t hear of it.” I look at her in surprise, and she explains, “He’s old school. Thinks that in the house, cooking and cleaning are women’s work. But if you slap a sign out front and start charging people money for the same damn recipes that get served to the family? Oh, that’s clearly a man’s job.”

I say nothing, because it sounds like Dani’s venting a pain that’s been weighing on her for a long time. So I keep washing, letting her continue, though I kinda want to tell her that her dad’s an idiot, a sentiment I don’t think she’d appreciate despite her own feelings on the matter.

“I argued my ass off,” Dani finally says, setting the cleaver aside and picking up a chef’s knife.

Atta girl, I think. I bet she argued loud and long and with everything she has.

“And if Mama had been on my side, maybe he would’ve listened. Even if was just temporary, you know? But they were united. Only Xavier could take over the restaurant. But he was never going to do that. He already had a wife, a baby, and a job that paid enough to support them and help Mama and Papa with the medical bills.” She pauses for a long time, so long that I think that’s the end of her story. But finally, she says, “They closed it down rather than let me do it.”

“Dayum,” I hiss.

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