Four Letter Word (Dirty Deeds 1)

I rolled onto my side and stared at the wall, the phone trapped between my ear and the pillow and a smirk on my face.

I pictured her, red hair and glasses.

“I fucking love popsicles,” I confessed.

It wasn’t much, but I knew she wouldn’t think that.

She was silent and smiling, I was sure.

And I was right.

I heard it in her voice.

“Good night, Trouble.”

Chapter Six

SYDNEY

Day three, post-Marcus.

I was excited and nervous and strangely okay.

As long as I didn’t think about the conversations I wasn’t having.

And I didn’t have a lot of time to think about those conversations. My day was jam-packed with information I needed to process, new faces and names, daily specials, menu items that were still listed but weren’t technically offered anymore, since we were waiting on new updated menus to arrive, and table numbers, which for some reason seemed to be really tripping me up, due to the randomness and inconsistency of their layout.

Table 23 was next to Table 4. Booth 7 butted up against Booth 13.

I questioned this madness, earning myself a giggle and nothing more from Tori and the other two waitresses I had met when I first arrived.

Shay, short for Shayla, a cute little brunette with a brilliant smile and killer taste in hair accessories—she wore pins with jeweled crossbones on them. They were right up my alley. And Kali, a single mom whose baby daddy ditched her to pursue an affair with his boss’s wife, one that was still going on and apparently not a secret in Dogwood Beach, the baby daddy being in politics and his boss running for governor, making the scandal newsworthy in a big way.

She was bitter when she spoke of her ex, but her face lit up when she mentioned her son, Cameron.

He sounded adorable.

I also met Sean, or Stitch, as everyone called him. He was the cook at Whitecaps and attractive in an entirely new way to me.

I had never before found rough men good-looking. Men with long hair, thick shapeless beards, and tattoos decorating practically every visible inch of skin. Men who had a pack of smokes poking out of their front pockets and who wore chains on their jeans and jewelry around their necks. I’d never looked at them twice. They were hard and intimidating.

But Sean was hot in a big way. A new way. And the fact that he had let the girls nickname him Stitch for accidentally cutting himself so many times and didn’t seem to mind them poking a little fun, that, for some reason, made him hotter.

I was getting the hang of things, learning the absurd seating layout and making new friends, and I was doing all of this with my mind the farthest from Marcus it had ever been.

It was a great first day.

No worries. No drama. No monumental mess-ups. Nothing particularly interesting going on.

Until I heard Shay make a noise at my back that sounded an awful lot like a mix between a gasp and a squeal.

It was worthy of a head turn.

“What’s up?” I asked her, watching her big brown eyes move with something behind me, her lips pulled between her teeth and her cheeks flushing red.

I was facing the kitchen now, and the back of the restaurant.

She was tuned to something at the front by the doors and looked like she wanted to climb on the bar and do backflips off of it.

Tori walked up beside me and noticed Shay’s big eyes, held smile, and flushing cheeks immediately.

“You look like Tom Hardy just stepped in here, Shay. What gives?”

She turned her head at the same time as me, then muttered a soft yet unquestionably irritated, “Shit,” under her breath.

I wasn’t sure what she was seeing. I knew what I was seeing.

Two men sauntering through the restaurant toward a booth by the window, the one closer with short tan-colored hair and blue eyes that smiled, a shaved jaw, and sharp, muscled shoulders. He wore a white tee under an opened button-up with khaki shorts and boat shoes, and the skin on his face and neck and arms was kissed a deep golden brown.

He was all boy-next-door charm and good clean fun. Very easy on the eyes. While the man behind him screamed secret sex in your parents’ bed and stolen touches under the dinner table.

Standing a head taller with limbs that stretched for days, lean but solid, this stunner had wave-tussled sandy blond hair that tickled his neck and curled at his ears, and a day-old beard you knew was rough on soft skin. He wore a loose Hurley tee that looked wrinkled from being kept in a backseat, tattered board shorts and sandals, didn’t look like he cared in the least what you thought about it, and had a cigarette tucked behind his ear.

His eyes were a penetrating shade of blue, deeper in tone than his friend’s and definitely not smiling.

And that penetrating shade turned even more intensely sexual when he slid them to my knockout of a best friend and moved his gaze from tits to toes.

“Whoa,” I mumbled, shifting my weight and giving life to my legs again.

My limbs tingled.

I knew fifteen minutes into my shift this morning exactly why Tori worked here, the screaming hot locals, and why she had that mischievous shift in her eyes when she suggested I would love it here, again, the screaming hot locals, but now I was seeing the full effect of committing to waiting tables the rest of your life when you didn’t even need a job in the first place.

Exhibit A, and his cousin with a dirty little secret, Exhibit B. B for bad-boy.

“This is so awesome,” Shay whispered excitedly, rounding the bar and stepping beside us. “I love it when he stops in here. And he’s in your section, T. As usual.”