Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
F rank had been to four alarm fires that were calmer than Vito’s during the dinner crowd. Hell, he’d played in the legendary annual firefighters vs. police hockey game that had more penalty minutes called than there were minutes on the clock when the first period started, and it had felt less frenzied than the past hour and a half.
The orders were finally slowing down, though, and he actually had enough time between burger flips and dropping tenders to look through the order window and watch Katie with her latest table.
She was, without a doubt, the worst waitress he’d ever seen.
She‘d delivered a tray of drinks to table six that should have gone to ten, tipped over an entire basket of newly wrapped silverware, and had forgotten to take table thirteen’s order after dropping off their chocolate shakes. The customers should have been irate.
Instead, they were smiling and laughing with her.
He had no idea how she managed, through force of personality, to get everyone in the diner to follow her lead, but she did. He pitied the fool who crossed Katie Madigan.
His pulse picked up when she ripped the top page of her order pad, told the table she’d be right back with their drinks, then headed toward the kitchen.
“Order in, Red,” Susie said, snapping her gum and getting to the window a few steps before Katie.
Frank must have told the waitress his actual name twelve times. She’d looked at him like he had Corn Flakes for brains and told him she only learned the names of the fry cooks who were staying for longer than a single shift.
“I need three eggs wrecked and two Noah’s boys for one, and then flop two and a heart attack on a rack,” she said as she clipped the order to the turnstile. “Sweep the floor with both.”
He nodded, his gaze never leaving Katie. “Gotcha.”
Susie made a little harumph of acknowledgment and went to check on one of her tables.
Katie stepped up to the window, her dark eyes bigger than the white plates she’d be carrying out to her table. “What did all of that even mean?”
“Three scrambled eggs and two slices of ham on the first plate,” Frank translated for her. “Two fried eggs over easy with biscuits and gravy for the other. Side orders of hash browns for both.”
She planted a hand on her hip and cocked her head. “How do you know that?”
“My mom’s parents own a diner out on Severn’s Avenue,” he said, flipping the burgers that would be going out to the pair of guys sitting at the counter. “I was folding silverware at eight, serving coffee refills at eleven, and started the grill at fourteen.”
She rested her forearms on the window ledge and leaned in, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “What other secrets are you hiding?”
He fought the urge to confess how much he thought about her, how he’d planned a million ways to talk to her before Marinos, how he’d spent way too many nights afterwards going over every moment in his head, trying to figure out what he’d done to make her ignore his calls. He wanted to tell her about the miniature crystal elephant he’d seen that made him think of her, and how it was in the glove box of his Firebird right now because he hadn’t been able to not get it for her.
Saying any of that would be an utter fucking disaster, though, so he kept his big mouth shut and just shook his head.
“Come on,” she pleaded like a kid asking for an extra chocolate chip cookie before dinner. “Just one.”
His mouth overrode his brain. Again. “My mom’s romance books keep disappearing during mandatory family brunch on Saturdays. She thinks it’s my sister stealing them, but it’s me. I’m almost done with Skye O’Malley.”
Katie let out a gasp of surprise.
Fuck. Was it too late to claim he’d gotten hit on the head with the massive fire extinguisher hanging on the wall and didn’t know what he was saying?
“That book is totally excellent,” she said, excitement speeding up her words. “I mean, it’s mega-outrageous, but I couldn’t put it down. You’re really reading that?”
Frank admitted the one thing he’d told himself he’d take to his grave. “Every. Page.”
He should have regrets about his confession.
Katie could tell her brother Collin, who would tell everyone else at the firehouse, which would mean his brother and dad would find out and rat him out to his mom. At that point, he’d not only get a new nickname at the station, but he’d be on his sister’s shit list for letting their mom think she was the book thief. No one wanted to be on Jenny’s shit list. Not ever. The stakes were pretty damn high.
Still, laughing with Katie as she went through some of the outrageous things that happened to Skye O’Malley, he didn’t have a single, solitary regret. How could he, when she looked so happy while spoiling the last few chapters of the book, then apologizing for it while being unable to stop herself from doing it again?
There really wasn’t another woman in the world like Katie Madigan. Who could blame him for already being half in love with her?
The jolt of shock that went through him at that moment was covered by the arrival of Susie glaring at both of them for yacking it up.
“Table six wants refills, so hop to it,” she said as she shot Katie a pointed look, then plucked the order from her hand. “Two hockey pucks with frog legs, a Jack Benny murdered, and a T-bone on the hoof.” She stuck the ticket on the silver wheel by the takeout window. “I’ll take care of the houseboat when they’re done with all that.”
“Got it,” he said, watching Katie put the new drinks down in front of the folks at table six and then seeing them immediately switch them around so the right sodas went to the right people.
Susie blew a bubble with her pink Hubba Bubba and let it pop without getting any of it stuck to her nose.
“You gonna marry that girl?” she asked.
Frank slapped the two hamburgers and the steak onto the grill and tried to squash the mental images of coming home after a shift to Katie, of lying in bed and reading a book to her, of watching her with their kids, of growing old with her. But it was no use. And for once, his brain was working faster than his mouth, because how in the hell could he even begin to talk about all of that?
“I’m still trying to get her to say yes to a real date,” he grumbled, instead of spilling the truth.
Suzie cut a you’re-so-full-of-shit glare at him. “There is no try.”
“Thanks, Yoda,” he shot back.
The waitress shrugged and smacked her gum. “I’m more Darth Vader, but it’s still a great line—and the right one in your case.”
The bell over the diner’s door jingled as it flew open. A couple rushed in and headed straight for them.
“Oh. My. God. Susie. There was a wreck on the Crosstown Express, so the train was packed with tourists like it was New Year’s Eve, and I’m telling you, it was a total zoo,” the woman said, the words coming out in a rush. “I’m so sorry we’re just getting here now.” She looked around at everyone else, zeroing in on Katie, who was scooping ice cream for a milkshake. “Who in the hell are you?”
“The other you,” Katie said.
The woman huffed and turned to Susie. “That makes absolutely no sense, but do you need me or not? Because if Carlo and I did all of that to get here from uptown, and you didn’t even need us, I’m going to chew Brandi a new one.”
For a second, no one said anything. Then Susie threw back her head and laughed hard enough to shake some of the spiral curls loose from the twelve layers of AquaNet holding them in place.
Fifteen minutes and a lot of explaining later, they walked out of the diner with a handful of Vito’s gift certificates and a promise from Susie to be a reference if they ever wanted to get into the diner business. They spent most of the walk back to the museum in companionable silence while finishing the huge chocolate shakes Susie had given them on the house. With someone else, maybe it would have been awkward, but with Katie, it just felt right.
“You were really something in there,” Katie said as they entered the museum parking garage and headed for her Pinto, the lone car left. “You knew everything.”
“I know, it’s a shocker that I’m not a total airhead about everything,” he said in full self-deprecating mode like he usually went into whenever someone brought up anything about his brains—or lack of them.
He’d done it often enough that it came naturally. Usually, people laughed at him instead of with him. But there was nothing usual about Katie. He should have expected that. Instead of giggling knowingly, she stopped next to her car and planted her hands on her hips in a gesture that he was starting to know meant she was calling him on his shit.
“I don’t think you’re an airhead,” she said, her voice firm.
Hot embarrassment about his own failings rushed through him like a grease fire in a bacon factory. He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked down at the cracked concrete. “I graduated in the bottom third of our high school class, never went to college, and I run into burning buildings voluntarily.”
“None of which has anything to do with how smart you are,” she said, cupping his face and turning it so he had no choice but to look at her. “I see it all of the time. The brightest kids in my class aren’t always the ones who get the best grades. There are lots of reasons for that. Things are going on at home. A lack of interest in the subject. The need to go about things their own way. A million other things. And even if you were an airhead, which you aren’t, it wouldn’t change what a good person you are.”
Frank’s grandma had always said that he’d been born with the gift of gab. Bad day? He had the right joke to cheer a person up. Awkward moment? He’d smooth it out with a subject change. Nothing left him speechless—until now. All because Katie had seen in him the one thing no one else ever had.
Oblivious to how she’d just flattened him, Katie rooted around in her giant bag and pulled out a pair of keys. Her face fell. “Oh shit.”
Frank looked around, half expecting to see the debt collectors after Paul. “What?”
Katie didn’t answer. Mumbling “fuck me” under her breath, she turned around, cupped her hands around her eyes, and she pressed her face to the car’s window. “My keys are in there. They must have fallen out when everything spilled out of my bag.”
“What keys are those?” he asked, gesturing to the ones in her hands.
She turned around and started going through her purse again. “The ones for Connie’s car so she doesn’t do something stupid like drive by The Creep’s house when no one’s with her to stop her from going inside.”
“You don’t have an extra in the wheel well?” That’s where he kept a magnetized box with a slide-shut lid
She shook her head. “But I do have,” she pulled a deformed wire hanger out of her purse, “this.”
She pried the window out just enough to slide the hanger through the gap with the steady hands of a woman who’d done it a million times. It took her all of three seconds to hook the bent V of the straightened hanger around the bulbous head of the door lock and gently pull it up.
With a huge smile on her face, she did a triumphant ass wiggle and happy dance as she turned. Then she laid a victorious kiss on him.
For a second, neither of them moved. Her arms were around his neck, her body pressed against him, and her lips still parted.
“Frank, sorry,” she said, her voice breathy, “I shouldn’t have?—”
He cupped her ass and lifted her up, holding her right against his cock. “You sure should.” Then he bent his head and took her mouth, kissing her hard and leaving her with absolutely no doubt about how much she fucking should. She let out a little moan of pleasure, wrapped her long legs around him, and kissed him back with just as much conviction.