Boss Daddy: A Secret Baby Romance by Black, L. (good books for high schoolers .TXT) 📕

He came in alone and only got one menu. He’s only been here for a few minutes. Just barely got his coffee.”

“Great,” I said. “I’m just going to join him.”

“Perfect,” she said, reaching down to the chair beside her to grab a menu from the stack sitting on the seat.

“Thanks.”

I took the menu and walked over to the table where Matt sat. He was staring at the mug in his hands like the coffee was going to give him the answers to all the questions of the Universe. The sound of me smacking my menu on the edge of the table made him jump, and his eyes snapped up at me.

“Hey,” I said, smiling.

“What the hell, Jordan?” Matt asked.

I laughed and sat down across from him. “Just waking you back up. Looks like last night got the most of you.”

“Not really. I’m alright. I was just craving some hash browns with onions and a couple of over-easy eggs, so I came up here. What are you doing here? You look like hell.”

“Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I just took a run. But I decided I didn’t have the energy to get all the way back because I didn’t eat anything before I left, so I’m here to get powered up for the run back home,” I said.

“Are you fellas ready to order?” the waitress asked as she set down my cup of coffee. “Or do you need a little more time?”

Each of us ordered our favorite breakfasts and a few extra dishes and handed the menus back to the woman. She smiled and headed off toward the kitchen. I reached for the tiny pitcher of cream near the edge of the table and swirled some into my coffee, then followed up with a couple of packets of sugar.

Matt grimaced. “How do you drink it like that?”

“Because I like it like that,” I responded.

“It’s supposed to be coffee, not dessert.”

“What happened to you? You used to be fun.” I looked down in my mug. “I had my fill of terrible instant black coffee when I was in the service. Maybe my taste for drinking it black will come back someday, but for now, I’ll have it as sweet and creamy as possible.”

Matt shrugged and drank another sip of his own coffee.

“What’s on your mind? Anything I can help with?”

Matt tended to be the most dramatic of us brothers, but I never wanted to discount him. There could actually be something bothering him, and I didn’t want him to feel like nobody cared. If there was one thing I carried with me out of that desert it was to never turn your back on someone or leave an opportunity to show that they matter to you.

“Not really,” he said. “I was just thinking about how everything’s changing. Do you realize three of our brothers are married with kids now? Three of them. The grandchildren are catching up with us.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s kind of hard to wrap my head around.”

Our food came while Matt and I talked about feeling a little bit left in the dust and bonding over the shared feeling of everything moving forward without us. I left the restaurant feeling better, but also thinking even more about the future and the family I wanted so much.

That night I was training Hannah behind the bar. She was a fantastic cocktail waitress, but it was good to have the people who worked for us be able to do as many things as possible so we could fill in as we needed to depending on how nights went and if there were gaps in the schedule on any given day.

“So, you were saying you just moved to Astoria,” I said, picking up a piece of the conversation we’d had on the first day I trained her a couple of weeks before.

“Yep,” she said, nodding. “I just moved from New York.”

“Wow,” I said. “You think you could have made a bigger move? Go a little bit further, maybe?”

Hannah laughed. “It was a little extreme, I guess. But I just can’t escape living on the coast. The whole idea of middle America has never appealed to me. Here and New York are about as different as I could possibly imagine, but at least I can still get to the ocean in both of them.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Why did you move? Just time for an adventure?”

“I guess you can say that. I wanted to start a new life.”

“Nothing left for you in New York?” I asked.

“Other than my best friend, no. And she has a family of her own. A husband and two children. It wasn’t like it used to be. I needed to get away and find out where I’m supposed to be and what I’m supposed to be doing.”

“I can definitely understand that,” I said. “That’s part of why I joined the military.”

We talked a little bit more, but I quickly found the conversation drifting away from the more personal details of our lives to things like her asking for recommendations for good restaurants around town and what we did for fun. She was trying to settle in and find her way, and I was happy to guide her along.

4 Hannah

A few weeks after arriving in Astoria, I felt like I had made one of the best decisions of my life. I didn’t know exactly what to expect when I’d decided to move to Oregon. As a matter of fact, the most important thing on my mind at the time was just getting out of New York and away from just about everybody who was there. Like I told Jordan, the only people who I really missed were Samantha and her family.

But now that I was here and really starting to settle in, I was enjoying it more than I even could have imagined. It was my night off from the bar, so I decided to walk around the town a bit and get more familiar with it.