Stirring Up Trouble(14)
He led her past his baffled staff to his office, ushered her inside and closed the door behind him. Lola plopped in his chair and kicked her feet up. “What happened earlier in the dining room? Did someone spike the food with drugs? I thought that one couple was going to have sex right there on the dance floor! I’ve never been to a sex club before. Is that even legal here in Michigan? They’re hard to find unless you know where to look. The guy in Florida who did my star tattoo, the one on my . . .” She paused and smiled, before continuing. “. . . well, anyway, he said they were all over down South and all you had to do was . . .”
She was babbling. He tried to keep up, but she went from one subject to the next and all he could do was watch as her skirt rode higher and higher up her leg. He pictured himself kneeling before her as she propped those feet on his desk and spread her legs wide open for his delight. To start, he’d push aside her panties and use his thumb to——
“Are you listening to me? Gee, usually I’m the one spacing out on people. Now I can see how annoying it is.”
“Sorry, my mind did wander. What did I miss?”
“What happened with the footloose and fancy feet crowd?”
Fancy feet? Oh, right. “If I had to take a guess, I’d say they reacted to something in the baklava.”
“See? I told you I’m not a good cook. One time and I give everyone food poisoning, only instead of vomiting they got horny.” Her feet dropped to the floor and she sat tall in his chair. “Hey, we could totally package it and rake in the dough. Get it?” She laughed and Braden couldn’t help but do the same.
He relaxed into the chair thinking of the possibilities. It wasn’t a bad idea to package the baklava and sell it to the local markets. He’d have to play around with the recipe at home and see if he could recreate the results. Next batch he’d test on the two of them.
“Before we do anymore baking, I want to teach you how I keep the books. Do you know anything about accounting?”
Her face screwed up tight as if she’d eaten a sour lemon. “No.”
“Computers?”
“Sure. I’m addicted to Twitter. That’s the only way to get the news.”
“I keep all the day’s receipts and everything you need on that computer in front of you.” He pointed to his laptop. “Go on and power it up.”
She opened it and pressed the ‘on’ button then twirled her chair in a circle. “I love this chair.”
Lola really got pleasure out of anything. To him that chair represented responsibility and success. He spent hours sitting in it while on the phone with suppliers, entering in the daily receipts, and doing countless and endless mundane tasks, and never once did he ever spin his chair around. It wasn’t his nature.
He rose from his chair and dragged it to the other side of the desk to sit next to her. After a few minutes of lecturing on the ins and outs of accounting, she exhaled. Loudly.
He looked up at her. “What?”
“Do you have a book?” She shifted in her chair, moving it back and forth as if she were nervous.
“A book?”
“Yes. On accounting.”
He kept his books above the credenza. He stood and opened the small cabinet door, finding the book on basic accounting he’d bought for his sister, hoping she might someday join him in running the restaurant. She’d handed back the book right before she informed him she was moving to attend film school in New York.
Braden offered Lola the book and took the seat on the other side of the desk. “Would this do?”
She flipped through the pages. “Is this what I’d need to know for the auditors?”
“It’s a good start. I’d still need to show you how to apply the information specifically to the restaurant and our system. But we don’t have a lot of time for you to read though it and try to teach yourself.”
She worried her lip and her fingers played an invisible piano on his desk. “There’s something I should tell you, something nobody else knows. Not even Portia.”
A twinge of guilt had him shifting in the uncomfortable chair. “Go on.”
“I have a photographic memory. Not only that, I’m really good with numbers. I mean, not Rain Man good, I can’t count cards, though I haven’t tried, and if you dropped a box of toothpicks I couldn’t tell you how many were on the ground unless the box was empty and I knew how many were in there to start, but that’s cheating and I don’t cheat.”
“So you’re not an autistic savant. Good to know. When you say you’re good at numbers, what do you mean?”