Quite obviously catching the direction of his gaze, she drew on her usual poised, protective armour, looking between him and Lily with an expression that said, ‘Oh, Isaac. Really? A junior co-worker?’ before she turned, her long coat swinging, and flipped her way through the front door.

If she’d given him that look to annoy him then she’d succeeded, making him feel like asking Lily out just to annoy Hayley back.

OK, it wasn’t just to annoy Hayley …

Mentally, he rolled his eyes at himself and as the bar thinned went about his duties, reminding himself about the disadvantages of hitting on any co-worker. Relationships between team members fostered favouritism, causing resentment amongst the non-favoured. Awkward atmospheres resulted.

It had always been against his code. Or, he mentally corrected himself, against the code that had been in place at the casino and he’d taken with him when he set up Juno Lounge. A lot of the female staff at the Juno had been students, much younger than him and more vulnerable, even if they sometimes didn’t act it. He still broke into a sweat when he remembered the eighteen-year-old girl who’d offered him what she termed a ‘boss with benefits deal’. That definitely came under the heading of ‘wrong’ in his mind. All in all, it was better to be in the habit of not thinking of co-workers romantically.

But then Lily turned up in a dress that brought her curvaceous body sharply to his attention. Lily was a thirty-something like him and he was pretty sure she knew her own mind, though she was junior to him in the team, if you could call the bar staff at The Three Fishes anything so official-sounding as a team.

They still had to work together.

But not forever. Not for long, in fact.

Lily was leaning on the bar now, chattering with customers and bar staff alike. She’d taken off her high-heeled shoes and hooked them neatly over the brass foot rail. Wine glass in hand she was laughing at something one of the men from the garage had said, hair tumbling down her back. There was something a bit Kate Winslet about the direct way she looked at everyone. As Isaac watched, a couple of the blokey blokes from the darts game came over to join the conversation, then the whole group laughed. She caught Isaac watching and gave him a long look, one he couldn’t decipher.

Heaving an inner sigh, he took himself off into the back area and on into the kitchen to see how their clean-down was going and how Chef, a bear-like man with bushy brown hair and a shorn beard and whose real name of Brian no one ever used, had coped tonight. They’d been so busy that Isaac anticipated a request for an extra kitchen porter on Friday and Saturday nights until after Christmas and New Year.