Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 75337 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 301(@250wpm)___ 251(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75337 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 301(@250wpm)___ 251(@300wpm)
Danny was, perhaps, a bit generous in his description of me, or it was skewed because of his fondness for me.
I’d always been just very… average.
Average brown hair, average brown eyes, a body that was neither thin nor plus-sized, just perfectly—you guessed it—average.
I would make one small caveat, though.
My smile.
I really liked my smile.
It was my mother’s smile beaming out of my face, which was probably why I liked it so much.
But, yeah, when you were in your body for a solid thirty-seven years, you kind of came to accept yourself where you were.
And I was not like one of the other waitresses who had multiple marriage proposals in the same year because she was so drop-dead-gorgeous.
That was okay with me.
I was happily single.
Fine, maybe not happily. But contentedly single, at least. I learned long, long ago that relationships should only ever be the cherry on the pie, not the whole pie itself.
So I was content with my carefully crafted dessert. But I wasn’t going to exactly turn down the right cherry if it came along either. I just wasn’t outright looking for it.
I didn’t have the time.
“I am a busy woman, Danny. A man would only slow me down,” I told him as I reached past him to secure the lid on his sugar dispenser. The kids who’d had the table before him must have thought it would be funny for the next person to have the lid fall off and spill all over.
After teaching their age group for the past ten years, I knew all their tricks.
“But maybe slowing down would be good for you,” he said, shaking his head at me.
“What? Are you making me an offer?” I asked, smiling at the way his face flushed.
Danny was, and always would be, loyal to his beloved, but departed, wife. And at seventy-two he was, of course, a little old for me, even if I did tend to like a man with a little silver in his hair.
“Go on now. Get out of here,” he said, giving me a rare smile. “You tell that man in the back I want those eggs of mine burnt, you hear?”
“As always,” I agreed, walking away from his table to take the next order.
By the time my shift was coming to an end around three-thirty in the morning, I’d all but forgotten about how my boss ground himself against my ass.
Until, of course, the bastard came out of his office after a nice, long nap while we busted our ass thanks to a local club that had opened up nearby.
We could have used an extra set of hands to bus tables in between guests. But, apparently, that would have cut into his beauty rest.
“Is there a problem, Tommy?” I asked as he clucked his tongue while he looked over the totals for the night.
“Just thinking, with this many people in the door, there could have been much bigger bills. How many times I gotta tell you about up-selling?”
Up-selling what? It wasn’t like we served anything fancy at the place. We were typical American fare. The best I could do was offer appetizers and desserts, which I always did.
Besides, the bar across the street was geared toward young twenty-somethings. You know, the kids who could barely afford rent with five roommates, let alone buying three-course meals.
“What’d you make in tips?” he asked, even though I was reasonably sure that was not something he was allowed to ask.
Every instinct told me to lie. It was in the way my spine tingled and my hairs stood on end.
“Just seventy,” I said, shrugging. “Not a lot of deep pockets tonight, I guess,” I said, glad I’d carefully tucked away my cash in my bra after tipping out the busser and a little to the back of the house staff because things had gotten crazy and I’d messed up the POS system orders twice, and they’d been quick to fix my mistakes for me.
He didn’t need to know it was actually just over one-seventy that I had as take-home cash.
Not enough, that little voice in my head whispered. Not nearly enough.
But it was something.
It would help.
“Hm,” Tommy said as he looked around the diner that somehow managed to look spic and span despite the hordes of people who’d come through.
Dolin’s Diner never closed, but once the after-bar scene cleared out, there was usually a pretty good lull until the breakfast crowd shuffled in.
So there was almost no one around to see when Tommy moved closer to me and snagged a strand of my hair that had fallen out of my bun.
“This is a violation, you know,” he told me. Like I hadn’t attended all the food safety courses. Like I was the only woman who ever had a strand of hair escape her tie. “I might be willing to forget all about it if—“ he started, and I felt my stomach tightening, knowing where this was going.