“Was anyone injured?” Shanna glanced from me to the bowl of minestrone I’d set aside.
“No. It smells horrendous. I doubt anyone would have put it in their mouths.” I couldn’t stop staring.
Why the fuck didn’t I call her? Because she scared the ever-loving-shit out of me. I’d never connected with a woman so deeply in such a short amount of time. I didn’t need a crystal ball to tell me it’d end with both of us in pain. She didn’t strike me as the kind of woman who’d settle for a fling, and I couldn’t give her more.
She smirked. “If no one was injured, there’s not really a problem.”
I panicked and babbled like an idiot to keep her with me a few more minutes. “The assistant manager slipped and fell. I sent her to the emergency room to get checked out. She’s fine. Probably a broken wrist, but fine. Unrelated to the soup, of course. She tripped over the salads.”
“Did someone poison the vinaigrette, too?” Shanna smiled and my world tilted.
“No.” I pressed my lips together to force myself into silence.
She sniffed the container of soup and jerked back. “It smells like nail polish remover, which makes zero sense.”
“How so?”
“If the culprit wanted to make people sick, they would have used something odorless. This seems more like sabotage. You have no idea who did this?”
“No. One of my bussers mentioned a woman stopped in to see me earlier. He let her in the kitchen, but she didn’t stick around to speak to me.”
“I see.” She glanced back to Gabe and Nico. “There’s nothing else I can do. You should file a police report.”
The last thing I needed was cops poking around. Scratch that. The last thing I needed was cops alerting the health department about my acetone soup. I shook my head and focused on the bigger problem—Shanna, and what she’d overheard. “Can we talk? Alone?”
“Did you lose my number?”
I tilted my head. “No.”
She patted my cheek. “You should.”