The Billionaire's Email-Order Wife by Vivi Holt

Author:Vivi Holt [Holt, Vivi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Lab Press
Published: 2019-06-02T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

The pile of plates in the kitchen sink was growing by the minute. Where was Stan? Cassidy scanned the kitchen of the small diner where she worked most nights. She couldn’t see his tall, hulking figure anywhere.

He was so quiet, the way he walked, and he rarely said a word, only grunted in response to questions. He could sneak up behind her and scare the life out of her before she knew it. He never meant to, of course, he was as gentle as a lamb, but he just had that look—as though he might’ve been a criminal in his younger years.

And maybe he had been. Who could tell? He never talked about the past. The staff liked to guess at what his former life had been like, before he started work at the diner twenty years earlier. He’d been there the longest, other than Hank of course. Hank owned the Humble Corral, and he’d been there so long he’d begun to take on the pale, sickly hue of the paint that was cracking and peeling off the diner’s walls.

“Have you seen Stan?” she asked Macy as the waitress shuffled by her to lay another two plates on top of the growing pile.

Macy shrugged. “Nope.”

Cassidy’s brow furrowed. She wiped her still wet hands on the apron tied neatly about her waist and headed for the small office that sat snug against the far wall of the kitchen area.

If Hank was in there, he might know what’d happened to Stan, otherwise they were about to be taken out by an avalanche of china and silverware.

She knocked on the door. “Hank?”

There was no response, but she could hear raised voices inside. She’d found Stan—he was inside the office with Hank and it sounded like they were having it out over something. What it was, she couldn’t say. She leaned her ear against the door, in an attempt to decipher some of their words.

“… and I won’t have a thief workin’ in my diner!”

“A thief? Them’s big words, Hank,” she heard Stan say. “I’ve worked here over twenty years and ya gonna call me a thief now? I’ve heard it all. I guess we’re not such good friends after all. Huh?”

Cassidy’s eyebrows arched high in surprise. She’d never heard so many words fall from Stan’s mouth in such rapid succession before in the three years since she first stumbled, red-eyed and exhausted, through the front door looking for a job.

“We ain’t friends. I don’t know where you got that dang idea from. And I know a thief when I lay eyes on one!” Hank’s voice rose to a crescendo.

“I guess you don’t, since you’ve laid eyes on me about every day for over two decades.”

Cassidy smothered a laugh with one hand. Footsteps echoed across the office floor and she leapt out of the way, busying herself looking over a pile of freshly wiped menus that she’d worked on cleaning up earlier.

Stan burst through the office door, his face red. He pulled up short when he saw Cassidy.

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