“I can relate,” she said dryly, and when his gaze shot to hers, she offered him a wry smile, the best he was going to get.
“How’s the stove holding up?”
“It’s serving its purpose. It’s the rest of the house that’s a disaster. I feel like the neglect extends to before Grandpa’s stay in the home.”
“Well, you can imagine how hard it was to keep the house up at their age.”
“I would have thought they’d hire someone to come in and help.”
“I would have thought, too, but maybe they didn’t have the money, or couldn’t find anyone, because they didn’t.”
“So your mom said.” And the account was mostly empty now, so that could well be the issue. But she wasn’t going to admit as much to him.
“I can come take a look, see if there’s anything I can help with.”
She was already shaking her head before he finished the thought. “No. No thank you. I can take care of it.” At some point. When she had some disposable income. Even if it meant the roof caved in, she wouldn’t accept help from Samson.
After a few minutes of silence, like he expected her to come to her senses, he slid off the barstool and craned his head toward the tables. “You know how to play?”
“Not well enough to bet you, if that’s what you’re wanting.”
“No, just want to play. Move around a little. Come on.”
She glanced toward the door, willing someone to come through and save her, but no one did, so she followed him to the pool table.
Ten
“So what actually happened?How did you end up coming here with next to nothing?”
They had given up playing pool. Erielle wasn’t very good at it, though she looked cute as hell bending over the table, stretching out her long legs to get the right angle. But her frustration at being unable to grasp it instantly was just making her more agitated. So Sam bought her a beer and now he was sitting on the table, swinging his legs as she leaned against the wall, bottle cradled loosely in both hands.
For a minute, he didn’t think she’d answer him.
But then, “You don’t read the gossip columns?”
He took a swig from his bottle and just lifted his eyebrows at her.
She shifted her gaze away. “Well, as much as I hate admitting being stupid, I was stupid and put my trust in the wrong person. My trust and my cash.”
Sam let the silence stretch, waiting. “And, what? I mean, I know you had a falling out with your ex, but how did that affect your cash flow? I thought you had some successful restaurants.”
Her fingers tightened around the bottle’s neck. She rolled it against her thigh, wiping off some of the condensation before answering. “I had a successful restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen, but it wasn’t very big, and the waitlists were months long. It was expensive to run, you know, because I tried to source everything as local as I could get it, so that makes it more expensive than if you buy in bulk, but I had a vision I was determined to fulfill. Dylan convinced me to invest in a second location, so the wait times weren’t as terrible, and with the hopes that I’d be bringing in more money.”
“But you’d also have more expenses.”
That dragged her gaze to him. Absolute misery flattened her blue eyes.
“Especially rent, because the location was in an area on the Upper East Side. He convinced me to let him take over the second location, which was larger and had a more exclusive clientele. I mean, I had important people coming to the Hell’s Kitchen location, too, but more celebrities were on the Upper East Side.” She took a swallow of beer, then wandered back to the pool table. Her hand drifted over the rack of balls, fingertips brushing them as if she needed something solid under her touch. “Dylan’s a talented chef. He said he loved me, so it would seem he’d have my best interest at heart. My success was his success, so I trusted him. Well, to a point. I still managed the finances and the ordering, and I popped in at that location twice a week. He got mad and accused me of checking up on him, but my name was on the place, so I should be able to go when I wanted.”
“Damn right it was,” Sam muttered.
Her laugh was humorless. She rolled a ball forward, turned it so the number faced up, then another, until every one stared at her in neat rows.
“Then the reviews started tanking. Not terrible, but not glowing. My ego said, ‘Well, Dylan’s not me.’ He wanted to put his own spin on my recipes. And then—suppliers started asking why I’d cut them off for the new place.” Her hand stilled. She shoved the balls out of alignment with a rough flick, breaking her careful pattern. “Turns out he was buying cheap, pocketing the difference. Told me he was saving for a West Coast expansion. But there was no account. Nothing I could see. When I pushed, he pushed back harder.”
Sam clenched the neck of his bottle, temper heating.
“I hired PIs. Took him to court.” She set her beer down with a hollow clink on the felt, palms flattening beside it. Her shoulders sagged. “But I couldn’t prove he stole a thing. And he was well-loved. Media darling, charming as hell. I was the control freak, trying to stifle his genius.”
