The Italian Billionaire’s Shy Waitress (A Billionaire Breaks My Heart #10)
Chapter One
THIRTY-SIX.
That's how many days it's been since the man in the corner booth walked into my life and ruined my ability to carry a coffee pot without trembling.
Not that anyone noticed the trembling. Or me, for that matter. But that's a different problem for a different day, and right now I have a much bigger problem, and it's sitting six feet away from me, eating a mushroom and gruyère omelet like it personally offended him.
I've been watching him eat for thirty-six days.
I've been counting.
I always count. Steps from the kitchen to the front counter (fourteen).
Ceiling tiles in the café (forty-seven, and the one above the register has a crack shaped like Idaho).
Seconds between the moment Jolie says something inappropriate and the moment I can feel my face catch fire (average: one point five).
I count because counting makes things manageable, and also because I started doing it during my father's trial when I was twelve and everything in my life was the opposite of manageable, and I guess some habits just...stick.
Like the habit of staring at this man, apparently. Because that's definitely stuck, and no amount of self-discipline or prayer or Jolie kicking me under the counter has been enough to shake it loose.
Thirty-six, I find myself thinking again, and the number almost makes me cringe, more so when I realize just how vividly I recall the first day I saw him.
I was just working my usual morning shift at the café, the one that technically doesn't have a name but everyone local calls Gail's because that's the owner's name, and also because Jackson Hole has exactly three hidden spots that tourists haven't ruined yet, and this
is one of them.
I also remember it was a Tuesday then. Tuesdays are that day of the week when we get our bread delivered from the bakery over in Green Heights, and I remember it was when I was in the back counting loaves (twelve sourdough, eight whole wheat, six rye) when Jolie came through the swinging door with her perpetual cup of coffee in one hand and her worn
paperback of Wuthering Heights in the other.
She always has that particular book with her, but she’s never explained why. Its dust jacket is creased and faded but still intact, like she's protecting something precious underneath.
"New customer," she said, and there was something in her voice that made me look up from the bread count. "Corner booth. Yours."
"What's wrong with the corner booth?" I asked, because Jolie loves the corner booth. Best tips, she always says, because it's the table with the view of the elk refuge, and people pay extra for views.
"Nothing's wrong with it." She took a sip of coffee, and her eyes—dark and bright and always seeing too much—did that thing where they go all innocent, which means she's about to say something that will make me want to disappear into the walk-in freezer. "I just think
you should take this one."
"Jolie—"
"Trust me." She was already heading back through the door, her beloved Emily Bronté classic tucked under her arm. "You'll thank me later."
I didn't thank her later.
I'm still not sure I've forgiven her, actually, but that's beside the point.
The point is that I walked out of the kitchen with my apron strings tied too tight because I'd retied them three times trying to get them even, which is something I do when I'm nervous even though I have no idea why I was nervous about a corner booth customer, and I looked up.
And I saw him.
He was sitting with his back to the window, which meant the morning light was coming in behind him, turning everything around him into this soft gold haze that made absolutely no sense for February in Wyoming.
He had dark hair, dark eyes, and he was reading something on his phone with an expression that I can only describe as beautifully unhappy, which is
a contradiction, I know, but I don't have better words for it.
He looked up, our eyes met, and I swear it was just like how you see it in the movies.
Because right then and there...
I forgot the specials.
For real.
They were just gone.
Completely erased from my brain. I was standing there with my order pad and a pen and approximately zero thoughts in my head except for the fact that his eyes were the kind of dark that you can't read, like deep water, and I had this wild urge to keep looking until I could see the bottom, which was possibly the most ridiculous thought I'd ever had about a customer, and I've had some ridiculous thoughts.
"Hi," I managed. "Welcome to, um, Gail's. Can I—do you need a menu?"
Smooth, Thea, I remember thinking at that time with major cringe. Really stellar work.
He studied me for a second, and I couldn't tell if he was amused or annoyed or completely indifferent, but then he said, "Yes. Thank you."
His voice was low and unhurried and carried an accent that I thought might be Italian, and something in my chest did a thing that I absolutely refused to name because naming it would make it real, and I've had enough experience with real things being taken away from me to know better.
Our fingers didn't touch when I handed him the menu, but I was aware—painfully, specifically aware—of exactly how close they came.
"I'll give you a minute," I said, and I walked back to the counter, and Jolie was leaning against the espresso machine with her book open but her eyes very much not on the page.
"So?" she said.
"So what?"
"So, that."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Thea." She closed the book, and I noticed she was only on page forty-seven, which was the same page she'd been on last week. "You forgot the specials."
"I did not—"
"You absolutely did. I could see it from here. You looked like someone unplugged your brain."
I busied myself with wiping down the counter, which was already clean. "He's just a customer."
"Uh-huh."
"He is."
"Sure."
"Jolie—"
"I'm just saying," she said, and her smile was the kind that made me want to throw a dish towel at her, "you should probably go take his order before you wear a hole in that counter."
I went to take his order.
He asked for coffee (black, no sugar) and said he needed another minute with the menu.
I brought the coffee. I refilled the napkin dispenser at the table next to his even though it didn't need refilling.
I counted the tiles on the ceiling above the corner booth (six) and wondered if this was what losing my mind felt like, and if so, whether it was covered by the café's health insurance.
When I came back, he ordered the smoked trout hash.
"Good choice," I said, because apparently I'd decided to have opinions about his breakfast.
"Is it?" He wasn't quite smiling, but something played at the corner of his mouth that might have been amusement.
"Best thing on the menu.”
I remember wishing I could just disappear then and there (I was never the type to make small talk!), but it was like nervousness had turned me into a gabbering idiot, and so I even found myself adding, quite unnecessarily—
“Gail makes it herself."
"Then I look forward to it."
“I’ll let her know.”
“Please do.”
You know how some memories will always make you want to kill yourself? Well, that’s exactly how I feel every time I remember my first day of meeting him.
Anyway...I wish I could say it ended there, but I remember how it just got worse, with how I found myself increasingly infatuated with him as I walked back to the kitchen and put in his order.
I remember doing my best not to look at the corner booth. But failing so spectacularly that it had Jolie accidentally choking on her coffee when she caught me doing so for, like, the nth time.
I mean, I know Jolie notices everything.
It’s, like, a part of who she is, and it’s why she’s the only friend I’ve made in this town (Sarah doesn’t count, since she’s, like, part-guardian-angel, part-mob-boss).
I’m not sure if it has to do with what she’s studying in grad school (honestly, I still have a hard time remembering what exactly it is she’s studying; I just know it’s something obscure and psychological), but Jolie has always had a way of seeing a person with, well. ..
Most people won’t understand this, but Jolie sees people with the eyes of Jesus.
The first time we met, she didn’t even care to ask questions about what a 19-year-old Kansas girl was doing in Jackson Hole all alone, working full-time while taking online classes and with the most crippling sense of shyness.
Honestly, I’ve come a long way since then, and it’s mostly because of how patient Jolie and Sarah were in drawing me out of my shell.
But...I digress.
The thing is, as compassionately intuitive Jolie is when it comes to seeing people, I don’t think she even needed any kind of special talent that day to realize just how, well, hard I was crushing on our never-saw-him-until-now customer.
“28,” Jolie said as I refilled her coffee.
“Huh?”
“I caught you staring at him 28 times in the past hour.”
I couldn’t even make myself deny it since that would be a lie, and so I simply ended up sputtering. "W-Why are you counting?"
"Because you taught me to count things." She turned a page, even though I was reasonably sure she wasn't actually reading. "Also because it's deeply entertaining."
"I'm not—"
"Thea." She looked up, and her expression softened in that way it does when she's about to say something true that I don't want to hear. "It's okay, you know. To look at someone. To be interested. You're allowed to be a twenty-one-year-old human person with hormones and
feelings."
"I have to work," I said, and I grabbed a coffee pot that didn't need grabbing and went to refill cups that were already full, and I did not—absolutely did not—glance at the corner booth.
Except I did.
And he was looking at me.
Not in an aggressive way, or a creepy way, or any of the ways that sometimes happen when men look at women in diners. Just...looking. Like he was trying to figure something out and I was the equation.