Page 38 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker)
Meanwhile, a meatball sandwich actually sounded kind of amazing.
I did take a moment to poke my head out the front door and look at the bushes there. “Hey Suz?”
“Mmm?” she asked around a mouthful of leaves.
“That guy and his coworker or coworkers are going to be bringing stuff in for a bit. They’re good.”
She gave a slow nod, and turned to look at the truck with watchful, if still sleepy, eyes.
Davin stared at her, then followed me back into the building, all the way into the office where Twist was still eating. “What would she do about it if you hadn’t warned her they were going to be coming and going? She’s asloth.”
I turned and lifted a brow at him, then smirked. “Aren’t they glad they don’t have to find out?”
CHAPTER 15
We left the delivery men working, checked on Twist one more time, and then suddenly it was time to deal with the potential renter.
Davin tried to slip back to the office with Twist, but I scowled at him. “Oh no, you’re coming to meet them. All of them.”
Finally, I’d found an area where he didn’t want to just let me have my way. His whole face scrunched up in something that looked like disgust. “It’s your building. I don’t have a say in this. And I don’t want to meet these people.”
I lifted a brow at that. “Were they that bad on the phone?”
He swung his head back and forth a moment, then shrugged. “Not all of them. I just...I don’t own the building.”
“No, but you’re going to have to work next door to whoever rents the place, indefinitely. You don’t want a say?”
His shoulders fell, and he gave a sigh almost as deep as my mother’s when I showed up on the bike. “Fine.”
Thank fuck. I did not want to be judging people all on my own. I didn’t think I was unintelligent, but also, sometimes bad people took me in. It was always easier to see someone was a jerk when I had someone else in the room for context.
The guy who showed up for the first appointment was...Okay, I tried not to judge people without knowing anything about them, but?—
Well, I failed. Constantly and entirely.
This guy showed up in a suit that probably cost more than my bike, an equally expensive haircut, and...there was just something off-putting about his casual attitude, like we were buddies and the deal was already settled. No, I didn’tknowthat he was a douchebag, but I was pretty sure. So sometimes I could figure it out for myself, at least.
“We’ll have to take out the wall between the kitchen and the shop and replace it with glass,” he said, while we were showing him through the place. “Transparency is very important to the company. We want everyone to see how their food is made.”
Davin lifted a brow at him. “Don’t they have a saying about sausages and politics?”
“Oh we don’t make the sausages here in the shop,” the guy denied. “We ship them in frozen.”
I was a little confused about whether people were “seeing their food made” if his company shipped in one of their main ingredients premade, but I honestly didn’t care enough to ask. If I was trying to go by my earlier thoughts and install a restaurant I would eat at regularly, Moran’s All Beef Dogs was not the one.
Bad enough my body wouldn’t give me the option to go vegetarian, but hot dogs? No thanks.
I told him we’d let him know.
Spoiler: I was probably not going to let him know, and I definitely wasn’t renting him the shop. Certainly not so that he could knock out the kitchen wall to force people to see his hot dog monstrosities. It sounded like being a woman on the internet, a sheet of glass being the only thing that protected you from a mass of unwanted wieners.
The next guy was immediately better, as he showed up in shorts and a T-shirt. And then he was immediately not an option when I looked at the logo on that shirt. “Surf shop?” I asked. “What kind of surf shop?”
“We’ve got a store down in Huntington Beach,” he said, smiling with the brightest, whitest teeth I’d ever seen in my life. “We sell stuff, but we also do rentals and lessons. We’re looking for a good spot for a second location.”
I scrunched up my nose and shook my head. “Avalon’s not it, I’m afraid. We’ve already got a guy who does all that, and we’re not nearly as busy a beach.”
We still went through the motions, but he seemed to accept my word.
