“Quickly!” the server says, and when I look up at Dr. Kincaid, he’s doing that lip twitch thing again.
“I’ll have a beer,” he says evenly.
“I’ll have the same thing,” I tell her quickly.
She turns before I’m done speaking, and as she verbally assaults the next table over, I look back at my boss in astonishment.
“What kind of beer did I just order?”
He shrugs. “It’s a surprise.”
“Do you come here often?”
“Whenever I’m in the city. I did my undergrad at UCSF, so she remembers me as a scrawny, broke student.”
“You speak Mandarin?”
Two opened beer bottles are plopped on our table roughly, and I barely get a glimpse of the server as she walks over to the food elevator, ignoring us with a scowl.
“Not really,” he answers. “Just enough to say hello.”
“You learned for them?” I ask, my voice soft.
He shrugs and his lips tug into a frown. “I try to memorize a few things in every language just in case. What if I’m ever stuck in Brazil or Thailand without knowing how to say please and thank you?”
I smile as I take a sip of my beer. “Are you often stuck in foreign countries without a phone translator?”
He shakes his head and looks genuinely annoyed. I can’t help but be captivated by his grumpy demeanor—I want to dig deeper. I want to knowwhyhe looks so unhappy so much of thetime, and I also want to know why he’s still single. For over a year I assumed he had a family, but on a Zoom call a few months ago, he mentioned living alone.
And right now, with his white button-up clinging to his chest, and the sleeves pushed up to his elbows showing off those tattoos…
I take another large sip of beer to quell the arousal coursing through me.
This is so wrong. He’s the actual Devil.
“You young people rely on your phone too much.”
I scoff. “I can’t be that much younger than you.”
He arches a brow and his eyes flick over my face. “Fifteen years.”
After another sip of beer, I’m suddenly feeling warm and possiblytoocomfortable, because I blurt out my next sentence without much thought.
“There’s no way you’re fifteen years older than me,” I say, completely aghast.
His lips quirk, but still no smile. “Are you sure? I happen to know how old you are.”
“How?”
He leans forward slightly, and my breath catches. The beer is starting to make me feel tingly and flushed, and those eyes pierce into mine.
“It was on your résumé,” he replies simply. I press my lips together.Duh.“And I know I’m fifteen years older than you.”
I shake my head as I quickly do the math. I’m twenty-eight, which means he’s… forty-three.
“You’re lying,” I blurt, checking his face for wrinkles. There’s not a single gray hair on his head—and I know that because I’d been admiring the artfully messy way it’s longer on the top. His scruff, too, is fully brown. No gray hairs in sight. “You have good genes,” I add, taking a swig from my beer. I realize I’m almostfinished with it, and I vow to go slower so that I don’t get too drunk.
“My grandparents are Italian,” he says quickly, and before I can ask about them, the server comes back over to take our orders. “Two chicken chow mein and two orders of the spring rolls, please,” he says, ordering for me. “And two more beers.”
