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

intense and left me gasping for breath. The images still flickered across my eyes even when they were open. I struggled to make them disappear, to bring myself back into reality.

When I was finally able to push the thoughts aside enough to get up, I decided I was going to need more than just a run around town and gorging on breakfast food to get my mind clear again. I needed to really force these thoughts away and work off the nightmare.

Snapping up my phone as I made my way to the kitchen for coffee, I called my best friend, Luke.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “What’s up?”

“Want to meet up at the gym for a workout?”

“Absolutely. See you there in an hour?”

“Yep. See you then.”

I got off the phone and downed a couple of mugs of coffee to break through the fog of my late nights and relatively early mornings. It had been a couple of years since I got out of the military and started to adapt myself to the slower pace of life in Astoria, but there were still times when it caught up with me. It was like my body had been so trained and programmed to operate in military hours some of that compulsion was never really going to go away.

When the caffeine started to hit me, I got dressed and made my way to the gym. Luke was already there warming up, and I joined him for a few stretches before we moved on to the cardio machines to do a real warm-up before the weights.

“Tell me more about this new girl at work,” he said a while later when we were lifting weights.

“Hannah?” I asked.

“Yeah. The one you said they hired and you were showing the ropes.”

“She’s the new cocktail waitress, and I’ve been training her on the bar just to have someone extra. She said she has some experience at bars and restaurants, but I don’t really know what or how much. She’s good and the customers like her, but I don’t know. There’s just something about her that doesn’t seem like she has actually spent her life bouncing from waitress job to waitress job.”

Luke stared at me for a few seconds, then nodded. “Alright. Well, that was a good employee evaluation. Now, actually tell me about her.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You know exactly what I mean.”

“She’s a great girl,” I said. “Friendly, funny, smart. It’s easy to talk to her, and I like having her around.”

“Alright, since you’re going to beat around the bush, I’ll just come right out and ask you. Have you slept with her yet?” Luke asked.

I rolled my eyes. “Seriously?”

Luke shrugged and nodded. “Yeah.”

“No. I haven’t. And I’m not going to. Like I said, she’s a great girl, and I like talking to her. She’s nice to have around the bar. That’s it.”

“Is she pretty?”

“Yes,” I said, deciding not to elaborate on how gorgeous Hannah actually was. There was no need to fuel him.

“Pretty. Funny. Good to talk to. Sounds like prime hookup material to me. You should go for it. As an added bonus, since she works there, if you can keep it going, you’ll have something to do on the slow nights,” Luke said, laughing.

“Knock it off,” I snapped.

“What?” Luke asked, sounding like he had no idea what he’d said.

I got up from the bench press machine and grabbed my towel from where it was hanging.

“When are you going to grow up?” I asked, stalking toward the locker room.

I was still fuming when I left the gym and got in my car to go home. I would admit I used to not care about talking about girls that way with Luke. In fact, that used to make up a bulk of our conversations. But I was thirty-six years old now. I wasn’t some kid with too much libido and arrogance for my own good. I was over all that. Not to mention, hearing him talk about Hanna like she was just some potential hook up pissed me off more than it probably should have. But I decided not to dig too deep into that.

I’d had a lot of one-night stands over the last two years since I got back to Astoria, but I’d had my fill. I was just over that whole thing and ready to put racking up the numbers of hookups behind me. I was ready for something serious.

Later that day, I went into work. Ava was behind the bar, and two of the girls who occasionally came in to waitress were moving around getting the place ready for the late-lunch and early dinner crowd that would come in before we really shifted over to the bar atmosphere.

“Hannah isn’t in today?” I asked.

Ava gave me a brief look but didn’t acknowledge what was behind it. “No. She has tonight off. Before you get started on anything, Mason wants to talk to you. He’s in the office.”

“Everything okay?” I asked.

“Tom called earlier today, and I think he just wants to talk to you about that.”

I nodded and headed to the back of the bar where Mason set up the office. While all of us were technically equal in running the bar, we figured out early on that we would need some sort of hierarchy to make sure everything got done. Mason fell naturally into place as the manager, and when Ava came along with her business skills and impressive ideas, it just cemented their position.

But to keep up with the sense that we were all in this together, the new location of The Hollow had dispensed with the tiny, cramped office of the last one and replaced it with a room much closer to a conference room. Big enough to accommodate a table where we could all sit, it also featured a computer, files, and everything Mason and Ava needed to do the day-to-day administrative tasks.

Mason was sitting at the table with papers spread out in front of him. He was making