We had to separate as the busboy came and took our spent dishes and we did this with Mickey studying me and not speaking.

“Sorry,” I mumbled after the busboy left, thinking I read his silence. “I don’t know anything about this kind of thing.”

“It’s a good idea, Amy,” he surprised me by saying. “Don’t have a compete clause with Ralph in my contract. Could get the word out, do patch work, open a line in case of emergencies, talk to some of the boys who want to take side work, start forming a crew. Build it from there while I still got a full salary.”

“Will Ralph get angry?” I asked.

“He does, he does,” Mickey answered on a slight shrug. “He’s got no call with the work I’m hired to do for him to fire me and he’s not stupid. He knows I eat shit a lot and talk fast for him; he won’t want that buffer taken away. But he gets rid of me, then I just go for it.”

I smiled big.

Mickey smiled big back to me.

That also settled inside me in another way that felt good.

I lost that feeling too fast for my liking when our waitress came with our lobster.

I stared at mine, the whole thing, and I did this trying to hide my horror.

I’d had lobster. I loved lobster.

But I’d never had to take one apart to eat it.

I was still staring at it when Mickey’s hand curled around it.

I looked up at him to see him looking down at my lobster, shaking his head and grinning, then twisting my lobster apart expertly, doing this muttering, “My dainty heiress, doesn’t wanna get her hands dirty.”

He was teasing. He was his normal handsome (and then some) teasing.

But he was also annoying.

“I’ve never torn apart a lobster, Mickey. If you’d just explain how to do it, I could do it myself,” I declared as he put the tail on my plate.

I declared this even though I very much wanted to eat my lobster but I very much did not want to twist it apart.

His eyes came to me, dipped to my cleavage and came back, “And have lobster juice squirt on that dress? No way, baby.”

I liked that he liked the dress.

I liked that he was taking care of me by tearing apart my meal.

I did not like that he called me a “dainty heiress.”

Though, truth be told, I did like that he called me his “dainty heiress.”

“I’m not a dainty heiress, Mickey,” I snapped.

He dumped the claws on my plate and then he dumped the gross part on another plate the waitress had given us for that purpose, doing that as his gaze came to me.