CHAPTER TWO
Keely
The next evening, I was wiping down the same section of counter I’d wiped twenty minutes ago.
I knew I was doing it, but I couldn’t stop.
My head was somewhere else entirely. I stopped and touched my wrist. There wasn’t a visible mark on it today, but I could still feel the pressure of Griffin’s thumb moving across it—slow and deliberate, like he was erasing another man’s touch and replacing it with his own.
That was the thing about being touched carefully by someone who looked like Griffin.
Closed off and out of reach. It stayed with you.
I’d deny it under oath, but I’d spent my entire shift wondering if Griffin would come by tonight. The anticipation was a low hum under my skin, distracting me from every refill and side of ranch.
Which was ridiculous. Men like Griffin didn’t come back for women like me. They came back for the coffee, for the habit, for the quiet corner booth. I was the waitress. Convenient. Familiar. I wasn’t sleek. I was soft, carrying a heavy thickness in my thighs and a flare to my hips.
Not the kind of woman a thirty-five-year-old ex-military man with a jaw like that lost sleep over.
I’d told myself that approximately forty times since last night and I almost believed it.
The man was a walking contradiction. He looked like he could dismantle a tank with his bare hands, yet he’d stood between me and a table of frat boys like he was my own personal secret service detail.
And he was—God, he was built. I’d noticed that the first night he’d walked in and spent every shift since trying not to notice it again.
The width of his shoulders. The way his hands looked wrapped around a coffee mug—large and scarred.
They looked like they could break something or hold something together with equal ease.
I’d had more than one moment where I’d looked at those hands and felt a pull so strong, I’d had to turn around and pretend I needed something from the back.
The man made me feel like I’d never wanted anything in my life until right now.
Maggie, the other waitress working with me tonight was closing down the coffee station. She glanced at me, a frown on her face. She was in her early forties, happily married and had lived in Lone Mountain her whole life. Just like me.
“You sure you’re okay?” she asked, a frown tugging at her mouth. “You’ve been scrubbing that same spot since nine.”
I nodded, though I wasn’t entirely sure I believed it myself. “Yeah. Just thinking about last night.”
“Mm-hum.” She folded a dish towel, unconvinced.
“I had it handled.”
“I know you did.” Maggie glanced toward the door, as if she too was expecting Griffin to walk in any minute. “But he didn’t want you to have to.”
I didn’t have a response to that.
I didn’t need protecting. I paid my own bills and hadn’t depended on anyone but myself since my father passed away and I’d stepped up to help my mother with my brothers. I didn’t do damsel in distress. I did extra shifts and double-knotted my own bootstraps.
“Last night was your lucky night. Your Prince Charming seems to have shown up.”
I snorted. “Prince Charming? Griffin? The man comes in scouting the building for snipers, not looking for a glass slipper.”
Maggie nudged me, chuckling. “Honey, that man looked ready to put the guy through the wall for touching you.”
The thing was, she wasn’t wrong. I’d watched it happen. Griffin hadn’t moved like a man doing a good deed. He’d moved like a man protecting what was his. “What? No. He’s just, uh, intense.”
He was like a lot of men in Lone Mountain. Broody loners who kept to themselves. So much so, some of us had started calling it Broody Mountain as a joke.
“Kettle, let me introduce you to pot.” Maggie smiled at me.
I wasn’t sure if intense was the best way to describe me.
More like exhausted. But then so was my mother.
My father had died a few years ago, when I was a senior in high school.
My younger, twin brothers had been a surprise baby that had turned into two.
Now they were mischief making first graders that I absolutely adored.
“I’m helping my mom raise my younger brothers.
She works two jobs, but it’s still not enough.
And I’m trying to finish my classes for nursing school on top of it all. ”
“You’re carrying the weight of the world.” Her voice and face were filled with sympathy.
“It’s not that bad,” I said, forcing a smile. “Just a lot of late nights and early mornings.”
“And no time for dating?” Maggie voice was serious.
I laughed, shaking my head. “Absolutely no time for dating. And even if I did, what kind of guy wants to take on all that?”
Maggie’s smile widened. “Maybe one who thinks the prize is worth the price.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Because the idea of him wanting someone like me was too ridiculous to even entertain.
He was thirty-five. I was twenty-three. Twelve years older than me.
He’d lived a whole life I knew nothing about—war, loss, things that left marks you could see and probably a hundred more you couldn’t.
He wasn’t a boy trying to figure himself out. He was already forged. Already decided. There was something about that I couldn’t quite talk myself out of finding devastatingly attractive. The only thing we had in common was that we both liked the battery acid tasting coffee at the diner.
But she wasn’t wrong. There had been something different about the way he’d reacted, the way he stepped in without hesitation. And the way he looked for me every time he came in.
When we were almost done, Maggie grabbed her coat and keys. “I’m heading out. Ed’s waiting up. You sure you’re okay finishing the floors?”
“Go. I’ve got this.”
She smiled at me. “We both know you’re stalling. Just in case.”
I knew what she meant. Just in case he as he coming.
Once Maggie left, the diner felt too big and too quiet. I locked the door and started mopping. I remembered his words from yesterday. Had he been trying to crack a joke, or had he really not wanted me to have to mop the floor.
I mopped the same section of floor twice without noticing.
I was thinking about his hands. About the way he’d held my wrist. Rubbing his thumb across my pulse.
I was thinking about what those hands would feel like with intent behind them instead of restraint.
The thought settled low in my belly and stayed there, warm and inconvenient, and I told myself it was the late hour and the long shift and the fact that I hadn’t slept enough.
I was lying.
I smiled as I finished closing up. As I was about to grab my keys and head home, there was a knock at the door.
I swung around, startled, expecting to see the group of guys, wanting in for something at the last minute.
Instead, it was him. Griffin.
He wasn’t in the black dress pants he’d worn last night.
He was dressed in his regular clothing. A black t-shirt that hugged the massive breadth of his shoulders and the hard planes of his frame.
A pair of jeans that fit his body so well, I had a sudden, wicked urge to yank them off with my teeth and see what was underneath.
I’d been having a lot of those fantasies staring the broody mountain man. And while it should have scared me, it didn’t.
I might be a virgin, but I had a very active imagination.
I walked over to the door and flipped the lock, opening it. “We’re closed.”
“I am well aware of when you close, Keely.”
He didn’t say anything else, just crossed his arms and stared at me, his gaze dipping lower as if he was taking me all in.
I wanted to suck in my stomach, straighten my spine, make myself the kind of woman he’d be attracted to.
That Barbie-doll type all made up and pretty. Skinny. That was what men wanted.
Men his age especially. Men who’d had time to figure out exactly what they wanted and had probably had it a few times over.
He’d been with experienced women. Older women.
Women who knew what they were doing and looked good doing it.
I was twenty-three with flour on my apron and nursing textbooks in my bag.
I had no business wanting him to want me back.
I’d spent years shrinking myself in other ways — taking up less space, asking for less, needing less. But my body had never cooperated with that particular instinct. It was just there, all of it, all the time, refusing to be minimized.
“So what do you want?”
I heard the word you echoing through my mind. What would it be like to be wanted by this mountain of a man? To have all that strength focused entirely on me—to be held by someone who could actually carry the weight I spent every day balancing.
“You finished closing up?”
I gave a heavy sigh. “Yes.”
“Then go get your stuff. I’ll wait by your car.”
I watched him cross the parking lot and tried to come up with one good reason not to go after him.
I couldn’t find one that held water. The man had shown up at closing, uninvited.
Not to flirt, not to make a move, just to make sure I got to my car, safe and unharmed.
That was either very sweet or very strange, and I hadn’t decided which yet, and the fact that I was still thinking about it probably told me something I wasn’t ready to hear.
I’d been taking care of myself and my family by myself for what seemed like forever.
I knew how to change a tire, negotiate a bill down, stretch fifty dollars of groceries across two weeks.
I’d sat in doctor’s waiting rooms and school offices alone and got through every hard thing because that was what you did when you were the one other people leaned on. You didn’t get to lean back.
I wasn’t sure what to do with a man who showed up anyway.
And, there was the other thing—the impulse to offer myself up like a piece of apple pie.