Single Dad’s Waitress Read online

  Single Dad’s Waitress

  Amelia Wilde

  Contents

  Single Dad’s Waitress

  Mailing List

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Epilogue

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  Irresistible bad boys await…

  Books by Amelia Wilde

  Single Dad’s Waitress

  He’ll give her more than just the tip.

  Ryder

  I’m not looking for love.

  I’ve been screwed over before, and it was the mother of all disasters. The only silver lining? My cute-as-hell daughter, Minnie.

  So my only goal when I have to live in Lakewood for the summer is to get in, get back on my feet, and get out of this godforsaken small town with its cutesy cafés and too-nice charm.

  Until I meet Valentine, the waitress at the Short Stack diner.

  She’s over-the-top gorgeous, with a body that makes me want to have her for breakfast. And when she sprays me in the face with whipped cream, her pink cheeks start to melt my frigid heart.

  I can’t let her get to me. A scorching summer fling, sure...but that’s all my life can handle.

  Once fall comes, we’re over.

  Valentine

  Waitressing is my job of last resort. So here I am, right at rock bottom.

  Dumped by my ex? Check. Back in my hometown? Double check. Making a fool of myself in front of the sexiest stranger I’ve ever seen? Nailed it.

  Ryder is the kind of guy I can never have. He’s sinfully sexy...and a single dad. There’s no room for me in a life like his.

  Besides, come fall, I’m leaving this place behind forever.

  The tension between us has to stop. I just have to get it out of my system, because he’s too hot not to touch, and neither of us needs this.

  If only someone could remind me of that whenever he smiles at me…

  Single Dad’s Waitress is a steamy full-length single dad novel with adult language and an HEA that will melt on your tongue like fresh, warm pancakes.

  Mailing List

  It might get a little wild on my mailing list, but I promise you’ll love it. Join now and get a free copy of my full-length bad boy novel Hate Loving You! Click the link below or paste it into your browser and tell me where I should send it.

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  To my husband, who takes our daughters out on breakfast dates all by his lonesome so I can write these stories. You are the greatest dad.

  1

  Valentine

  I grin into the gleaming reflection of the glass lid perched on the stainless steel stockpot. I’ve got to force it this morning, and boy, is that a look. It’s lucky that I can’t actually see myself very clearly, what with the quartered potatoes bubbling under the lid, almost ready for the breakfast service.

  I look terrible.

  “What’s the point?” I mutter the words at my roiling reflection.

  “Tell me you’re not talking to the potatoes.” Gerald’s gruff voice cuts through the low-level hum of the kitchen, and I try my best not to look like I’ve been caught red-handed talking to a starch when I straighten up. He steps in from the kitchen’s side door, paper-wrapped packages filling his arms, and crosses to me, opening the walk-in fridge with his foot and disappearing inside.

  “Not really.”

  When Gerald reemerges a few moments later, he has a plastic tray in his hands that’s filled with sliced bacon. “It looked like you were talking to the potatoes.”

  “I was just trying to see if I look as shitty as I feel.”

  He shoots me a look. For a wizened chef, Gerald does not appreciate salty language, but it’s true. I feel like shit. I’d blame Conrad Ford, my recently new ex-boyfriend, but he’s only partly to blame. I was the idiot who thought he loved me.

  What a ridiculous assumption.

  At any rate, I’m still the idiot who’s feeling sorry for herself over having to move back home, over losing something I probably never had in the first place. I have to knock it off. I have to stop spending so much time watching sappy movies alone at the cottage.

  Gerald puts the tray on the counter next to the griddle and starts laying out strips of bacon. He does it the same way every single morning. He’s been doing it that way since I first got a job here in high school. I shouldn’t have been surprised when I came back two weeks ago to find everything just how I left it. The only difference is that Gerald is eight years older. Not that you can tell by looking.

  He flicks his eyes across the kitchen to me and lays out another row of bacon. “Is Sharon in yet?”

  I open my mouth to answer him at the same time the front door to the restaurant opens, the bell chiming merrily against the glass. Sharon sweeps into the kitchen with an early morning summer smell clinging to her clothes, her dark hair piled high on top of her head. “Good morning, loves,” she sings, breezing by to toss her purse into the tiny back office where she writes out our paychecks every Friday. “Everything good to go?” Her smile is so ungodly bright that I can’t help but smile back, but the expression fades a little from her face when she finally gets a good look at me. “Looks like it’s not good to go.” She crosses her arms, cocking one hip to the side. “Spill it.”

  “Don’t,” says Gerald.

  “It’s nothing,” I insist, pulling my apron off the hook on the wall next to Sharon’s office. “Allergies.”

  She narrows her eyes. “You don’t have allergies.”

  “Seasonal allergies.”

  “Valentine Carr, don’t bullshit me.”

  Gerald sighs heavily, not looking at either of us, and Sharon rolls her eyes. They’re not married, but they bicker like a couple that’s been together for years—mostly through eye rolls and sighs.

  I take my sweet time tying the apron around my waist. I can feel how puffy my eyes are every time I blink. Clearly, the concealer I applied so damn carefully this morning isn’t doing a thing.

  It’s not that I don’t want to tell Sharon what happened. It’s just that the whole thing is so...stupid, so mortifying, that I’m not sure I can make my mouth form the words.

  “Was it that asshole Conrad?”

  The look on her face makes me burst out laughing. When I showed up here two weeks ago, fresh off a failed start to my would-be career in marketing and recently kicked to the curb by my boyfriend, Sharon gave me my old waitressin
g job back, no questions asked. Those came later, during the slow hours, when we wrapped silverware into napkins and wiped down the plastic menus with cleaning solution meant to kill the germs. She never said a word against Conrad then, but she didn’t have to. She didn’t even have to meet him. All she had to do was purse her lips and say hmm in that same old Sharon way.

  “No,” I finally manage to say. “Well, yes. But that was my fault. I should have seen it coming.”

  She waves her hands in the air like she’s dispelling a bad cloud. “He wasn’t worth your time. And he’s not worth your tears.”

  Maybe not, but that doesn’t make me feel better now. And tomorrow morning, when I wake up with that same pit in my stomach, it still won’t help.

  “I’m not crying.”

  Sharon cocks her head to the side. “We can all see your face, Valentine.”

  “Maybe I was crying because...” I want to say because I’m back here working at a café when I was supposed to be starting a magnificent career, but that would be a dick move. I also don’t mention the fact that it doesn’t make me proud to be living in one of my parents’ cottages on their wide lakefront property. The Short Stack, after all, is Sharon’s career, and Gerald’s, too. It’s only me who became too good for the place when I left for college.

  Fine. I’ll admit it. It stings that I had to come running back here with my tail between my legs. College was not the experience I thought it would be. I imagined I’d come out the other side confident and sure of myself and in possession of at least an entry-level job at a marketing firm.

  I also imagined that Conrad wouldn’t react the way he did to what happened.

  Instead, I’m here, sliding my order pad into the pocket of my apron and getting ready to serve breakfast to a crowd of indeterminate size. It’s Friday, so you never know how many people will show.

  At least Sharon pays a decent wage, so I don’t have to rely on tips. If I did, I might never save up enough to make it back out of here.

  To where? The question thuds around in my brain.

  “Cat got your tongue?” Sharon says, laughing, and then sweeps out toward the front of the restaurant. It’s a tiny place, three rooms and a kitchen in what used to be a private house. A moment later, I hear her on the phone, talking to the guy who delivers the dairy products once a week. “—on your way?” There’s a pause. “The side door. As usual.” I’m still thinking of what to say when the door tinkles against the glass, and Sharon greets the first customer of the day.

  It’s time to get my shit together.

  I put a few pens into the pocket of my apron. The wood floor creaks under Sharon’s feet while she seats whoever it is—probably a couple of old men, ready to camp out at a table with coffee for the first few hours of the morning—smooth my hands over my hair, and wash them one more time in the sink.

  “Valentine will be right with you,” says Sharon, loud and clear. That’s my cue.

  I move out to the front room, but my apron is wrong, somehow, despite all the time I took to tie it. Doesn’t matter. I can do two things at once. “Good morning,” I chirp, my hands working behind my back. I look down to make sure it’s sitting just right. “Welcome to the Short Stack. I’m—”

  That’s when I look up and meet his eyes.

  That’s when everything changes.

  2

  Ryder

  “Pancakes!”

  My daughter’s voice rings out across the street and bounces back to us off the front wall of what seems to be the only place remotely like a diner in this entire godforsaken town. It doesn’t even look like a diner—it looks like a house that’s pressed up against the back side of the building that faces the main drag. It probably was a house, at one time or another, but all that matters to me right now is that they’re open.

  And that they serve pancakes.

  It’s been a long night, and not the fun kind. My eyes feel gritty, and there’s an ache stretching across both of my shoulders. I’d give anything to crawl back into bed.

  But Minnie’s hungry. She’s hungry for pancakes, and I don’t have it in me to go to the store, wrestle her into the cart, and buy Bisquick. I’d rather take her out on a breakfast date.

  “Look both ways,” I say, and she swivels her head in two directions, not long enough to actually see if there are cars coming but enough to mimic the way that I look slowly, a few seconds in each direction. “No cars. It’s safe. We can go.” I’m not even thinking about the words coming out of my mouth. I must have said them a thousand times in the last year. Maybe a million. It’s anyone’s guess whether it will sink in.

  It’s anyone’s guess whether any of this will turn out at all, but that’s not a question for this fucking early in the morning.

  It looks like a nice enough place, calm and warm in the early morning quiet.

  We’re definitely not in New York City. Not anymore. This is the kind of suburb where they’ve made a fetish out of nostalgia, and it grates on my nerves. It’s too damn quaint. I miss the rush of the city, the grime, the way there was always noise. But try affording an apartment there with one salary, even if it’s a decent one. And daycare on top of it.

  What a joke.

  This place is a joke, too. We’re staying here one summer—exactly one summer—before Minnie and I are headed back out. I’m only here because I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go after Angie fucked me over.

  I shift Minnie into one arm and pull open the door to the café. A bell—a real, honest-to-god bell, not one of those electronic doorbells—chimes against the glass. The name of the place is printed on a custom sticker against the glass. Short Stack.

  God.

  I try not to roll my eyes. It’s perfect for this town. I’m the misfit. But it’s not going to do me any good to come off as the asshole the moment I step in the door. Especially not with a toddler in tow.

  The first room in the café is a tiny one, with just enough room for a counter with a cash register and a case with what looks like fresh breads and scones. Minnie’s hand, still chubby with baby fat, shoots out, finger extended. “Cookies?”

  “Pancakes.” I say it in as firm a tone as you can say the word pancakes in and turn away from the case, even though her toothy smile twists at my heart. It’s damn difficult not to give her everything she asks for. She gives it one more chance, reaching for a flyer on a small notice board that hangs inside the doorway.

  A middle-aged woman wearing all black appears from a doorway into the back—kitchen, I’m assuming—and at the sight of Minnie her face lights up. “Well, hello there.” She somehow manages not to make it sound simpering, and I relax a little. Minnie is cute as hell, with blonde curls at the back of her neck, her hair fine and light, and big blue eyes. People can’t resist her, but I’m not in the mood for a lot of attention. “Just the two of you?”

  My hackles go up at the suggestion, even though I know it’s fucking innocent. The other thing people can’t resist? Asking me where my wife is. Whether she’s on her way. If it’s “just the two of us,” I’m probably babysitting.

  “Yes.” I try not to sound like a total dick. I mostly fail.

  It doesn’t faze this woman at all. She snaps two menus out of a holder on the counter and smiles at Minnie again. “You’ve got your pick—you’re the first ones here this morning. My name is Sharon, by the way.”

  I nod, and her words sink in a moment later, along with the quiet calm of the place.

  Oh, thank Christ. The last thing I want right now—honestly, the last thing—is to be surrounded by a clutch of old women who want to do shit like pinch Minnie’s cheeks and talk to her incessantly throughout the meal. My daughter is pretty good for a toddler. She knows how to eat in a restaurant. She knows how to charm the hell out of everyone she meets.

  I’m the one with frustration boiling under the surface, and it’s nobody’s fault except Angie’s.

  Maybe mine.

  But that’s beside the point. The point right now is bre
akfast. The point right now is to divide up last night from the rest of the day, hitting a reset on everything so we can just get through it.

  We follow Sharon into the second room. This place really is tiny—a small entryway with the counter, the front room, and a room in the back. The room in the back is painted a deep orange that somehow doesn’t look completely fucking hideous, and the room in front is bathed in light from a picture window.

  “Do you want to sit in the orange room or by the window?”

  Minnie doesn’t hesitate. She points to that big window, where we’ll be on display for this entire town to see. “Window!”

  “Okay.”

  Sharon reappears with a high chair, sweeping the second chair away from the window two-top before I can get to it. I don’t need her help, but she’s too damn efficient. I get Minnie into the seat and buckle her in while Sharon heads back toward the front counter. I’m just taking my seat when her voice cuts across the room, loud and clear. “Valentine will be right with you.”

  Valentine must be the waitress, and I can’t help but be relieved. Valentine sounds like a quiet, middle-aged woman who won’t drive me insane by the end of the meal or try to give me her number.