Happily Ever After: A Romance Collection

by Amelia Wilde

  “Got it.” I flash my most winning smile and turn away. Skim milk—she’ll want skim, I can tell. Stainless steel frothing pitcher. Pour it in up to the bottom of the pour spout. Assume the position behind the espresso machine, hand on the knob, and—

  I can’t help one last glance. He’s so sexy, standing there in the morning glow, his gorgeous baby daughter in his arms, watching every move.

  My hand slips on the knob for the steam wand.

  It’s too much, too soon. The wand isn’t even fully in the milk yet, so the steam screams along the surface with a high-pitched whine.

  “Oh, shit—” I try to salvage the situation and overcorrect. Milk shoots out of the pitcher and hits me everywhere. The face. The front of the shirt.

  There’s an empty sucking sound, like a straw draining the dregs of a soda from a glass. Everyone else is staring at me, including mystery man, but Morris—good old Morris—is pumping furiously at the other carafe, which is apparently broken. Coffee sputters out of the spout ineffectually. My entire face turns beet red.

  “Everything is fine,” I announce. What the hell else am I supposed to do, other than give notice to the six—no, eight—people standing in here watching my entire life spiral down the drain of embarrassment?

  “You okay?” calls mystery man. Why didn’t I ask for his name? I could have. Oh, that’s right—he caught me trying to twerk in the middle of this very shop.

  I keep my eyes on my own paper this time around. I’m extra careful with the espresso machine. It’s taken way too long—way—to make this woman her drink, but finally, I hand it to her. She looks at the cup, then back at me. “Two pumps?”

  I don’t roll my eyes, and yes, I would like a pat on the back for that. But I inhale deeply and put forth my best self. “Two pumps,” I say, and I say it with a smile.

  Behind that woman comes Morris, who after all this leaves two dollar bills on the counter and shuffles out without saying anything else, and a couple who decides on regular coffee spiced up with some flavor shots.

  At last, the mystery man approaches.

  I hold up a hand. “Name first.”

  His half-smile is so smoldering it could brew another carafe all by itself. “Then what?”

  “Name first.”

  “Dash Huxley. Short for Dashiell. Which my parents have never used, by the way.”

  I nod sagely. “Mine always called me Ellie.” The memory of my dance yesterday flashes up like some kind of nightmare projection, and my face goes hot. “Are you in town for the summer? I thought you might be kidding, yesterday.”

  “I wasn’t kidding.”

  “I see that now.”

  “I’m not here visiting.”

  My heart speeds up. His gorgeous body is going to be walking around Lakewood permanently? Well, not permanently. Nobody stays here forever. I don’t want to be here forever. Unless he’s here.

  Stop.

  “You moved to town?” There’s a movement over his shoulder through the glass of the corner window, and my body is instantly on alert.

  “I did,” he says, his gaze flickering down the rest of my body and then rising to linger on my face. “I—”

  “Wait.” It comes out a little sharply, but this is important.

  “What?”

  More movement. Oh, shit. It’s a group. It looks like a tour bus group. Really? Right when I have a moment to flirt with Dash, Lakewood’s newest eligible bachelor?

  Is he an eligible bachelor?

  “Order,” I tell him, dragging my eyes back to his chiseled face. “Quick. And remember, I don’t—”

  “—have any espresso,” he finishes for me. “A black coffee would be great. Medium.”

  I reach for the cup with military precision and put it on the table. Adrenaline surges. They’re coming. Any moment now. Any moment—

  “Go now,” I tell him as the first person shuffles into view.

  He laughs out loud. “I haven’t paid—”

  “Come back tomorrow,” I say, heat flushing through every inch of me. Every inch.

  Dash smiles, and it is all I can do not to leap over the counter and run away with him into the sunset. “It’s a date.”

  8

  Dash

  I’m not obsessed with Ellie.

  I’m not.

  This is something else entirely. Something else is waking me up in the middle of the night when Rosie is finally sleeping and there’s a long, silent stretch where I can relax for the first time all day.

  I never made it to the new building yesterday, and I can’t quite explain it. I’ve been getting regular updates from the contractors, but I’ve been anxious to see it with my own eyes since we pulled away from the apartment I used to share with Serena.

  She was something else yesterday. Ellie, not Serena. For all I know, Serena is still gallivanting around Southwest Asia with Pine Deep. The name makes me snarl into my pillow, and yet...

  It’s hard to concentrate on hating him when Ellie is so intriguing.

  I can’t tell if she’s happy or devastated. That’s what it is. Catching her dancing like that, totally unguarded, makes me think she’s comfortable there. Content. But the way she snapped into another mode entirely when that big crowd came reminds me of bracing for the next wave in one of those amusement park wave pools. Impressive, in a way. Weird in another way. Being a barista strikes me as the kind of job where one could be a little more laid back. Chatty.

  It’s piggish and shallow, but my mind keeps wandering to that body of hers underneath those t-shirts, the little shorts hugging her perky ass. She’s no wide-eyed innocent—at least I don’t get that vibe—but the sight of her is always so fresh. And the dancing? Sure, it was a little bit awkward, skewing more toward nightclub shenanigans than pro backup dancer, but I liked it. I liked the hell out of it. I liked it so much that I can’t stop thinking about it.

  I think about it for so long that dawn comes. It’s only then, with sunlight falling across my pillow from the crack in the curtains, that I can fall asleep.

  “Da-dee.” Rosie’s sweet little voice splits the air in the cottage. Have I been sleeping? It’s impossible to tell, but either way, I leap out of bed like a superhero and rush to her room. She picks up on the excitement and squeals when she sees me. Damn right—it’s a big day.

  When I called my father about coming back to Lakewood, his first question was a resounding “Why?” I don’t know what he’d do without his corporate meeting rooms.

  “You don’t know why I’d want to move back to your own hometown?”

  “Oh, right, the shop.” Then he’d covered the phone and said something about a quarterly report that hadn’t been quite muffled. “Well, you’ve got to go back for that.”

  “I know. That’s why I’m going. I’m calling about daycare for Rosie.”

  He sighed heavily. He didn’t have to say what he was thinking about Serena. I didn’t, either. “You’ll want Norma,” he said.

  “Anything else I should know?”

  “Huxley men—”

  “—finish what they start. I’ve got it.”

  So Norma is going to be with Rosie during the days, and today is their first chance to get to know each other.

  I dress Rosie in her finest short-alls—they’re so damn cute that I can’t resist them—feed her her bottle and breakfast, and get her into the car. The lake is calm this morning. Peaceful. It’s almost a shame to drive away from it, but I have things to do. Namely, get my own coffee. Without that, how am I supposed to look at the renovations with a clear eye?

  First stop, Norma’s house. I knew her vaguely from my summers here as a kid, but she opens the door and throws her arms open like we’re long lost friends. “Good morning,” she sings. Rosie buries her head in my shoulder and refuses to say hello until I’ve stood with her inside the house for a solid ten minutes. My anxiety ratchets up. She never had a problem with her daycare in the city, but shit has happened since then. What if she has a bad reaction?r />
  Norma keeps up a constant patter about moving to the city, having a house renovated, all sorts of things, but gradually she shifts her attention to Rosie.

  “How are you, sweetheart?”

  Rosie grins.

  More chatting.

  “It’s nice to spend time with friends, isn’t it?”

  Rosie chirps a shy yeah.

  Chatting.

  It’s time to go, but I don’t want to leave her. That’s the thing I’ll never understand about Serena. Impatience is bubbling under my skin, heating to a steady boil...yet I still don’t want to hand Rosie over. I want her to know I’ll always be here for her.

  That’s the point of all this. That’s why we moved to Lakewood. That’s why I’m going to open the shop. It was my grandmother’s dream, but it’s going to be Rosie’s anchor. She’ll know that I always follow through.

  Unlike her selfish, flighty mother.

  “Come see me,” says Norma, holding out her hands. “Daddy has work to do.”

  “Wok?”

  “Work to do,” she repeats with a nod. “I have toys and treats. Say goodbye to Daddy!”

  Just like that, Rosie’s leaning out from my arms, toward Norma. “Daddy!” she says, by way of goodbye, and suddenly I’m the one having to stop myself from making a scene. I kiss her head, rub a hand over her hair, and turn my back before she can see that I have a lump in my throat.

  It’s the first day. It’ll only be a few hours. Get a grip, Dash.

  Is it terrible that my mood is instantly perked by the thought of seeing Ellery?

  I park on one of the back streets downtown so I can enjoy the sun a little bit before I go inside and drown in construction dust and fresh paint. Despite all the bullshit, it’s still relaxing to be heading to the shop. It’ll probably be slightly busy, like yesterday, but it’s not so early that I’ll be battling the first rush.

  I’m lulled into complacency by the warmth of the sun on my shoulders and the thought of Ellery’s ass rocking in time to the beat in her head.

  I pick my head up at the last moment, just in time to keep from running into a guy standing right in the middle of the sidewalk. What an asshole. I open my mouth to tell him to move out of the way, to stop blocking everybody’s path, when I see it.

  There’s a line out the door to Medium Roast.

  The place has gone bananas.

  9

  Ellery

  One minute, the streets were empty. The next, they were swarming with people. And all of them were headed straight toward Medium Roast.

  I had no way of knowing the tourist season would get off to such an intense start.

  I wish I’d gotten off that intensely this morning. Or any time in the past few months. Or ever. The memory of it might shield my brain from the pressure of having fifty people waiting in line all at once, all of them wanting shit that we may not have in short order. I’m also feeling rather blue-balled by the fact that I can’t text my best friend, Honey Carlisle. She’s a supermodel who has disguised herself as a painter. Right now, she’s gallivanting around Europe. For inspiration. I have some inspiration right here.

  If he shows up again.

  “Hello there,” booms a broad-chested man wearing a visor. I brace myself for his order. I’m doing sixteen other things at once. I’m shoving two blender pitchers into the sanitizer and hitting the “on” switch, saying a silent prayer that it somehow goes twice as fast so that I can keep making the ridiculous smoothies people keep ordering. Nobody orders those things. Or, nobody did order those things until this morning. I haven’t the slightest clue how many boxes of the mix we have. Yes—the mix. It’s not even particularly special or fancy smoothie mix, it’s just mix, but these people are bonkers for it. I hit the switch on the brewer. It’ll be a few minutes until the carafes are full but I have to keep going. Two tiny-ass bags of roasted beans were delivered at some point this morning. I did spend an extra thirty seconds demanding more, but who can count on anything these days?

  “Hi!” I say. The shop has been open for three hours, and yes, I am starting to lose it a little. This crowd has been non-stop. The store looks like a latte exploded all over everything, but there’s not much I can do. I can’t make people wait while I clean, and there’s nobody else to help me. “What can I get for you?” I wipe down the counter by the register—all three feet of it—while I wait, trying to keep at least that part of the store presentable.

  The man tilts his head up to the menu. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Let’s see? I stare at him, keeping the smile frozen on my face. He has to have been standing in line for half an hour. Fifteen minutes of that was spent inside the Medium Roast. The menu sign is up high. High enough for anyone to see. What has he been doing? Under normal circumstances, I’d chime in with a couple of suggestions, but no words come to mind that aren’t obscenities and that’s not going to get me any tips.

  The tips—that’s the silver lining to this situation. The tip jar is stuffed with dollar bills. I can see an errant five and ten in there, too, from some generous souls who recognize the battle I’m fighting. And, of course, making it up to Aunt Lisa and Uncle Fred.

  “What’s a latte?” he says, and my soul hisses like an angry cat and crawls away into a dark corner of my heart.

  I explain what a latte is, my own voice unrecognizable. Wow. I sound pretty good for a person who’s a hundred customers away from tears.

  Maybe not a hundred.

  “So you steam the milk, and then…” he mimes pouring it into a to-go cup. There are hidden cameras, right? They’ve been here all along. I bet it’s a skit to see if I’ll ever say anything about the miming.

  “Yes.” I nod as definitively as I can. “It’s…pretty good.” Am I convincing? Sure I am.

  “Too fancy,” he decides. “I’ll have a large coffee, black.”

  I ring him up and hand him the cup. One more down.

  “Hi!” I say to the couple sidling up to the counter. The man leans down with his elbow on the surface, which is the universal sign of a person who is about to speak to me as if we’re co-conspirators. It’s not us against the world, buddy. Not today.

  “Is it always like this?” he says, glancing back at the line behind him.

  “Sometimes we’re closed,” I say with a cute little shrug. “What can I get for you?”

  “A black coffee,” he says with a wink. “Do you want anything, babe?”

  “No, babe,” his girlfriend says, twisting her ponytail around her finger. “This town is so cute. Where’s a good place to eat lunch?”

  “The Short Stack is pretty good,” I say and lunge for the cups.

  A wet sucking sound rings out over the crowd. Shit. One carafe empty. What’s A Latte guy stands over it, chuckling. “This one’s out,” he calls to me, raising it in his hand and then putting it back down on the counter in front of him. He moves to the second carafe. I hold my breath. A few more minutes. I only need this to last a few more minutes. If I can get a few people out of here, the pressure will ease a little bit, and—

  Another wet sucking sound, like the last of the ocean getting sucked up by a karma vacuum. There’s an audible groan from somewhere near the side door.

  “More’s on the way, people,” I call out. It’s true. For the next two carafes, anyway.

  Co-conspirator Guy gives me a sage nod. “It’s okay. Waiting is part of life.”

  I move on.

  But the next woman in line doesn’t look nearly as indulgent. She looks pissed off.

  “Hi! What can I get for you?” I glance back at the brewer. It’s not nearly close enough to being done.

  “You listen to me,” she says, red-faced. “I don’t know what kind of shop you’re running here—”

  Coffee, I want to say. Kind of.

  “—but this is absolutely unacceptable, and I demand to—”

  “Ellery! You look like you could use some help.”

  My heart leaps at that voice. It’s l
iterally the voice of my dreams, only in my dreams, he’s not saying anything nearly as appropriate as this. I would give all the money in my tip jar to fold myself into one of those dreams right now, but this is the next best thing.

  All around me heads swivel toward him. Someone toward the middle of the line gasps. Right? I want to shout, but I don’t.

  Dash is here.

  10

  Dash

  Ellery is a hot mess, and I don’t think she’s had a moment to breathe, much less check how she looks in the mirror.

  It’s the cutest hot mess I’ve ever seen. Don’t get me started on this pair of jean shorts, a black half-apron tied around her waist, the bow practically a neon sign lighting the way to her unbelievable behind. Her ponytail is somehow off center, tendrils falling around her face. Her expression is how I’d picture it if she were rescued from rough seas after surviving a shipwreck. Pure, unadulterated joy.

  For a second, and then she pulls it back. “Dash!” she says, her hands going to her hair. She stops herself inches before she touches it. “Oh, no, I’m good.”

  Ellery has clearly entered a state of denial. “I don’t think so.”

  “Who are you to say?” she says flippantly, and then remembers the customer at the front of the line, who is scarlet with anger.

  “I demand to speak to your—”

  “I’m the manager,” I say, and Ellery snorts. “I’m so sorry about the wait, ma’am. It’s been an extremely busy day. What can we get for you?”

  Her face changes when she looks at me. Thank God I wore my very best t-shirt this morning. I had no idea I’d have to use it to distract irate women from the disaster that is this coffee shop.

  “A latte,” she says meekly.

  Ellery whirls around, darting over to the handwashing sink while I stab at the cash register. “How do you—”

  “Put in the price first,” she calls, scrubbing up. The price is in big numbers on the menu board.