by Donna Alward
That’s not the way it still was. Not when it seemed like every other week that young cowboy came in with yet another girl. She shouldn’t be as invested in Tommy’s life as she was. She shouldn’t care what he did with his girlfriends, how many girlfriends he had—or how many threw their drinks in his face.
He was one of her regulars, that was all. She’d always been the kind of person who got involved with people—that’s why she was still in the restaurant business twenty years after she’d taken her first job as a waitress at the age of sixteen.
Besides, that young buck was far too young for her. That’s all there was to it.
Except he was still sitting there, nursing his beer and watching a Denver Nuggets game. And every so often, Carly would glance in his direction and catch his eyes on her.
She shook her head. Once, she’d let herself get infatuated with one of her patrons. She’d been twenty-one, putting herself through college by waitressing tables. Drake had been older, a distinguished professor who taught economics at her college, although she’d never taken one of his classes. He’d been lonely, sweet—or so she’d thought—and good-looking. Especially that.
The fact that he’d been picking up a waitress almost half his age should have been her first clue. But she’d ignored that warning sign and all the ones that came after that until it was too late. Instead, she’d tried to convince herself that if she could be the woman he wanted, he’d finally love her like he’d promised he would.
She’d married Drake Wilton before she was twenty-four. The marriage lasted less than three years before she’d gotten out.
Since then, Carly hadn’t gotten involved with the customers or co-workers—or anyone else, for that matter—at any of her jobs. Especially not here, where over the last nine years—since her divorce—she’d worked her way up to assistant manager.
She shuddered at the unbidden memories. She would never give up her hard-won security again. No man was worth the pain.
“Can I get you anything else?” she said, clearing the now-empty beer glass off Tommy’s table.
He didn’t say anything at first, and she braced herself for the cliché, “just your number!” But it didn’t come.
Instead, Tommy looked at her as if he was really seeing her, which always made Carly nervous. She had cultivated her work personality and she could play the part of the friendly waitress who cared about how you like your steaks cooked in her sleep. After the whole thing with Drake, she’d made sure to keep that waitress mask up and on at all times. The moment she arrived at work, she was Carlene, your friendly local restaurant manager. She loved cleaning up messes. She lived to refresh soft drinks. Nothing made her as happy as making sure that you had a good meal.
But that wasn’t who she was.
And for the first time in months, she wondered if someone could tell.
“Not tonight,” Tommy finally said, still staring at her as if she was a puzzle he could solve, if only he could find the right piece.
She shouldn’t. “You going to be okay on your own tonight?” It was the kind of offer that any reasonably red-blooded man would take exactly one way. She didn’t know why she said it. She didn’t even know how she wanted him to take it.
It wasn’t fair for this kid—and she was under no illusion that that’s what he was, a kid with one foot barely into adulthood—to look this good, even with the stains of his date’s drink marring his collar. His beautiful brown eyes widened and one corner of his mouth curved up into a lazy smile. He knew exactly what she had asked.
Dammit. She must be an idiot to even imply that she could take care of this boy. How could she get out of this without losing one of her best customers? Because Tommy was. He tipped generously and, aside from the occasional spilled drink, never left a mess.
He stood slowly, and Carly had the chance to take in all of him. Okay, so he was a boy playacting being a man. That didn’t mean he didn’t have a man’s body. He was at least six-feet tall—Carly knew that because she was five-eleven in her heels. But he wasn’t gangly. He might’ve been when he was younger, but he’d filled out. His shoulders were wide and his chest…
She shouldn’t be staring at his chest, no matter how broad and muscled it was. Nope. Not staring.
Not. Staring.
In a panic, she snapped her gaze back up to his face. Oh hell—busted. He was watching her watch him.
“Been thinking about what you said,” he said in a casual voice as he pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and fished out two fifties—more than enough to cover his tab, especially since that last beer had been on her. He didn’t hand her the money, though. Instead, he laid it out on the table.
Carly cringed on the inside. Okay, so she might’ve started this—what with the towel and caring about if he was going to be okay tonight. But the problem with being a waitress who worked for tips—or even an assistant manager who worked for tips—was that when men hit on you, it always carried the stink of a transaction. Leave a nice tip; get some flirting. Leave an even nicer tip; he gets your telephone number—or more. It was the men who expected the more that made her skin crawl.
She didn’t want Tommy to think she could be bought.
“Yeah?” She didn’t miss the way her voice wavered a little bit. $100 on a $50 bill was a huge tip.
“Yeah,” he said, picking up his hat and putting on his head. With the hat on, he looked at least ten years older. He looked like he almost might have been her age, or close enough that it wouldn’t have been weird for her to be caught gaping at his chest like a schoolgirl. “I think I might be ready to try something different.”
And then, giving her that sly smile that did things to her that it shouldn’t, he touched the tip of his fingers to the brim of his hat, turned around, and walked out of the restaurant.
Well.
That’d been different, all right.
Chapter Two
All of Tommy’s roommates were either partying or locked in their rooms, having sex with their girlfriends. To the outside eye, there might not seem like a lot of difference. Both involved loud, thumping music and a bunch of moaning.
He should probably count himself lucky that only two of his roommates were home. That meant he only had two competing bass backbeats to deal with.
Tommy slapped on his noise-canceling headphones—although there was only so much they could do in this situation—and plugged into his computer. He debated firing up the latest Call of Duty and taking out some of his frustration on some digital bad guys, but he didn’t.
Where had it all gone wrong tonight? He wasn’t supposed to tell Stacy he wanted an open relationship. He was supposed to tell her about his father’s wedding and test the waters to see if she’d come with him.
His dad, Mack Tucker, was marrying a florist named Karen Thompson. And really, Tommy couldn’t be happier for them. He took full credit—after all, he was the one who’d set them up. His father had spent six years mourning the loss of his wife, and while Tommy missed his mom, any idiot could see that it was time for Mack to get on with his life.
No one else had been willing to give his father that final shove, though. In the end, it’d been up to Tommy.
He’d signed his father up for new dating website called NotMy1stRodeo.com—without his father’s knowledge—and had screened through the list of available women who were interested in cowboys but weren’t put off by the fact that Mack still loved his late wife.
Tommy had been on the site for two months before he’d found Karen. She’d explicitly stated in her profile that she was divorced and did not want to get married again. She’d been looking for a little companionship, someone to go to dinner and movies with—and the fact that she was on a website called NotMy1stRodeo.com had made it pretty clear that she was okay with someone who worked ranch hours.
Sure, his father had been pissed off when Tommy had given him Karen’s number and told him to call her. But in the end, it worked out. Karen had been what Mack Tucker had needed
and, by all reasonable measures, Mack was good for Karen, too. Tommy was happy for them.
But there was more to it than that happy ending. For two months, Tommy had flirted and tipped his hat and winked online at all sorts of women under the guise of his father’s name and photo. Older women, divorced women, widowed women, women who were coming out of “complicated” relationships—or were still in them.
They’d all had one thing in common—they were not college girls. And some of those women…
Well, there’d been a few candidates that Tommy had not forwarded to his father. Not because he didn’t think they’d be good for Mack, but because it would be weird if his father dated a woman that Tommy had fantasized about when he stroked off at night.
Technically, Tommy was not allowed on NotMy1stRodeo.com. The name said it all—the website was for people who had been married before. And that was not him. He wasn’t even twenty-three yet and he had never been married. He was pretty sure that burning through a string of college girls was not the same thing.
Still…
For a blissful second, one of the two bass backbeats stopped and Tommy could almost hear himself think. Maybe Georgie was done pounding into his girlfriend? But no. A different beat—still off from the one coming from Troy’s room—picked up again. There was more moaning.
Tommy typed NotMy1stRodeo.com into the search bar and waited.
He thought back to what Carlene had said tonight—maybe it was time for something different. Different was the way she had run her fingernail under his chin after the amaretto sour incident. Different was the way she had looked down on him as he sat at her table and asked if he was going to be okay tonight. Different was the way her eyes had lit up when he’d stood.
He wasn’t stupid. Keeping Carlene happy with big tips meant great service and occasionally free beer. He wasn’t so foolish as to think her flirting with him had anything to do with anything.
But someone like Carlene…
That would be different.
This didn’t mean anything. He was expressly not looking for a woman to take to his father’s wedding. The only reason he had convinced himself he should ask Stacy was because both of his brothers were already married and he had no desire to deal with the ‘So, are you seeing anyone?’ questions that he knew would be coming. Tucker men married young and they married for life.
His father had married at nineteen. His oldest brother, Mark, had gotten married at twenty on a break from one of his deployments. His middle brother, Nicky, had graduated from college before getting hitched at the ripe old age of twenty-two.
Tommy was going to be twenty-three in three months but he wasn’t in a hell of a lot of rush. According to the rest of society, he had a good ten years before he had to start thinking of settling down. But within the Tucker family, there’d be pressure. It’d be subtle, but there’d still be questions about who he was seeing, whether or not they were serious, and the ever popular, “When are you going to move back home and take over the ranch?”
Stacy could have been the answer to all of those questions. But when it came time to ask her, he’d balked. His shirt and his pride had paid the price.
The NotMy1stRodeo.com page came up. He wasn’t so desperate that he would log into his father’s name—he’d deleted his father’s account a long, long time ago. But that meant he had to lie as he filled out his own profile. He skipped over the ‘divorced’ and ‘widowed’ sections and checked ‘it’s complicated.’ Okay, maybe it wasn’t such a lie. After tonight, complicated didn’t begin to describe his life.
Once he had his profile filled out with as little information as he could get away with, he was allowed to start looking through the site’s other users. He limited the search results to in and around Helena, Montana, because he didn’t want anyone in Billings, where Karen had lived, or in Butte—not far from the family ranch—to accidentally spot him online.
He had a good idea what to expect on the site. Two months of flirting with women through the computer screen had prepped him well. He narrowed the search against widows—not that he had anything against widows personally, but they had more baggage than he wanted to deal with.
No, what he was looking for was someone who was divorced, someone who was looking for some fun. That’s all he wanted—just a little fun. He didn’t want flowers on one-month anniversaries. He didn’t want clingy. And he didn’t want the feeling he was being led, slowly, to the hangman’s noose of marriage. This was his fantasy, after all. Some no-strings-attached sex with his own private Mrs. Robinson…
He adjusted his pants and scrolled through the listings. Helena was a large city by Montana standards, but this wasn’t match.com. By the time he had narrowed his search down, he really only had about twenty-five potential candidates. Which made it sound like he was interviewing them for a job and he wasn’t. Hell, he didn’t even know if he was going to do anything once he got done staring at photos of older women online. Nothing, probably. Just a weird…well, it wasn’t even a fantasy. Not a real one. Just a…thing. A quirk.
Like he’d told Carlene earlier, just another wild Saturday night.
He was halfway down the list—and had tipped his hat, as the site called liking someone, a few times—when he saw her. At least, he thought it was her. The name said Carly Hughes, not Carlene. But that photo?
It had to be Carlene—his Carlene, the waitress who’d taken care of him nearly every Saturday night for the last five and a half months.
In the photo, her blonde hair wasn’t pulled back into the tight twist that she almost always wore at the restaurant. It was loose and hung in big waves almost to her shoulders. Instead of the professional button-up shirt, she wore a tight T-shirt—long sleeved, but cut low in the front. The shirt was turquoise and it made her blue eyes pop in a way that the dim interior lighting of the restaurant never could. She was smiling at the camera. That was what convinced him it was the same woman. Because he’d been watching that smile for months now. He got that smile every time he asked how she was doing, if she’d had a good night, or if her team had won.
Carlene was Carly Hughes.
His fantasy just got a lot more specific.
And, according to her profile, she was available. She was divorced—was Hughes her maiden name or her married name? It said she was an assistant manager at a restaurant, which was news to him. He’d thought she was a waitress, not one of the managerial staff. But that would explain why she was always dressed like a businesswoman instead of a server.
Wait. She was an assistant manager, so why the hell did she always wait on his table? That didn’t make any sense.
Unless…
Tommy hadn’t put his picture on his profile—again, he didn’t really belong on the website, and he didn’t want to get called out for it. So he had no idea if she would know it was him or not. She knew his name—his first name, anyway. He assumed that she was passingly familiar with his last name, as he paid with his credit card at least half the time.
Did he want her to recognize him? There was no law that he had to keep going back to Peachtree’s, right?
He clicked the hat-tip button. The site gave him an option also sending a message. He sighed and stared at her face in the picture again. Well, hell. If he was going to do this, he was going to be all in. He clicked in the message box and began to type.
Does this count as something different?
He sat there for a long minute, his finger hovering over the mouse button that would click send. He had been raised with a certain code of conduct and ‘moral fiber,’ as his dad was fond of saying, and that code dictated that a gentleman did not creep on a woman. It was ungentlemanly and un-Christian. And right now, he honestly didn’t know if he was crossing the line.
Dammit. If this didn’t work, he’d have to start eating at Chili’s. The horrors.
He hit send. Then, feeling uncharacteristically nervous, he shut his computer down.
…
Sundays were rough days for
Carly. Peachtree’s always had a big after-church crowd. The difference between a big Saturday night crowd and a big Sunday afternoon crowd was that the Saturday night crowd was usually made up of groups of couples and the occasional small family desperate for a night out with their screaming children.
The Sunday afternoon crowd, however, was usually large groups of multigenerational families. Young couples trying to impress each other might leave servers good tips because their mammas had beaten it into their thick skulls that treating the staff right meant you would treat your date right. But when nine family members all piled around one table, there wasn’t the same care to make a good impression.
The after-church crowd crammed as many people as they could onto one ticket and rarely left more than the required 18 percent minimum for groups of six or larger.
Some day, when she made it past assistant manager, she wasn’t going to work Sundays anymore ever again.
The bright side was that, unless it was football season and there was a late night game, the dinner rush was anything but. All the good Christian folk went back to their homes and irritated each other over their own dinner tables and left her and her staff blissfully alone. If they could survive the ten-to-three rush, the rest of the day was cake.
This Sunday was no different. By four p.m., there were only three tables occupied with early-bird senior diners. The early birds also did not tip well—what with being on fixed incomes and all that—but at least they were quiet and polite. Carly loved the early birds. They were the ones who called you sweetie and showed you pictures of their grandchildren.
Her own grandparents had been dead for years. She had no idea where her father was and she hadn’t been exactly on speaking terms with her mother since she’d left Drake. So Sunday afternoons with the early birds were almost like hanging out with family.
By four-thirty, things were so quiet that she had a moment to check her phone. It was the usual stuff on Facebook—some people ranting about politics and religion, others sharing pictures of their babies and kids. She scrolled quickly. There were times when she looked at those family pictures that she wished things could have been different with Drake. That she had been different with Drake. Maybe if she’d stood up for herself or fought back—if she’d been able to be what he wanted—things might’ve been different. She might still be married. She might have kids.
