Billionaires, Bad Boys, and Alpha Males (44 page)

“Okay,” he told Chuck.
 
“Call Marcela, ask her if she can come
in.”

“And if she can’t?”

“Then looks like I’m their waiter for the
day.”
 
He’d worked summers here when
he was a teenager. How hard could it be?

***

An hour later, the Boston Ladies for the
Preservation of the Cape were dangerously close to holding a permanent place on
Chace’s shit list.
 

“Excuse me, young man,” one of them was
saying.
 
She was a large woman in a
white silk blouse, with big, ash blonde hair.
 
“But is there butter on this asparagus?”
 
She held up her plate, like she wanted
him to inspect it.

“No, ma’am,” Chace lied.

“Because I’m on a very special diet, one in
which I’m not supposed to be having any butter.
 
It’s very bad for my weight.”
 
She smoothed her blouse.
 
“I’ve lost two pounds so far.”

“That’s amazing,” Chace said with a big fat
fake grin on his face.

Jesus Christ, these women were crazy.
 
Every other second it was something
else.
 
More water.
 
A question about ingredients.
 
Someone complaining they couldn’t eat
tomatoes because they were too squishy.

He’d been running his ass off.

He heard someone calling his name from the
back, and he turned.
 
Shit.
 
Lindsay and her mom.
 
He’d forgotten all about them.
 

“Sorry,” he apologized, rushing over to the
table. “Can I get you guys anything else?”

“No, thanks,” the mother said, giving him a
smile.
 
“Busy, huh?”

“Yeah,” Chace said.
 
He started clearing their plates,
loading the dirty dishes into a nearby bucket to be brought back to the
kitchen.
 
Chuck wasn’t going to be
too pleased when he realized how many dishes there were to do.
 
Chace would have to stay late and help
him.

“Listen,” he said, “I’m sorry for making you
wait.
 
The meal’s on the house.”

“Really?” The mother’s eyes brightened.
 
“That’s so sweet of you.
 
Isn’t that sweet of him, Lindsay?”

“No,” Lindsay said, shaking her head.
 
“No, I want to pay.”

“Why?” Chace asked.
 
“Someone offers you a free meal, you
take it.”

She shook her head again, then reached into her
purse and pulled out a credit card.

Chace narrowed his eyes.
 
What did she think?
 
That if he gave her a free meal, she’d
owe him something?
 
His cock
twitched at the thought, thinking of all the other ways she could work off her
meal.
 
Her hair was down, and he
remembered this morning, how the dark locks had looked glinting in the
sunlight.

“That’s very rude, Lindsay,” her mom
admonished.
 
“The man wants to do
something nice for us.”

“It wouldn’t be fair,” Lindsay said.
 
She slid the credit card toward
him.
 
“Just because we had to wait a
little bit doesn’t mean we deserve to get our whole meal for free.”

“Huh,” Chace said, not able to help
himself.
 
“Well, that’s true.”
 
He pretended to think about it.
 
“But I don’t want your money.
 
So maybe we’ll have to work out some other
kind of payment.”
 
He kept his eyes
on hers, enjoying the way her face flushed as she realized he was teasing
her.
 
It really was too bad he was
so fucked up.
 
He wanted her so bad
it hurt.

“A barter system!” The mom, who was obviously
crazy and didn’t get that it was a joke, was delighted.
 
“You mean like for Lindsay to work
here?
 
That would be wonderful.
 
She’s a writer, which means she gets
paid very…
sporadically.”
 
She lowered her voice on this last part
and gave Chace a knowing look, like “sporadically” was code for “not at all.”

“Oh, yeah, that would be great,” Chace said,
playing along.
 
“I would love for
Lindsay to work here.
 
Do you have
any waitressing experience?”

One of the ladies from the preservation society
was calling his name from the other side of the restaurant, but he ignored
it.
 
He was having too much
fun.
 

“She does!” Lindsay’s mom said.
 
“She waitressed at Bob’s Big Boy when
she was in high school.”

“Bob’s Big Boy!” Chace exclaimed.
 
“Oh, then you’ll be great here.
 
I’m sure that was a high traffic kind of
restaurant, we don’t do nearly that much business.”

Lindsay looked at him, hatred in her eyes.
 
Good, he thought.
 
He wanted her to hate him.
 
Needed her to hate him.
 
Because he couldn’t trust himself to
stay away from her, and she was better off without him.

But then, all of a sudden, she stood up, her
long dark hair swinging behind her, determination on her face.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay what?” he asked, frowning.

“Okay, I’ll work here.”
 
She took the dishtowel out of his
hand.
 
“What do you want me to do
first?”

“Yoo hoo!” one of the women on the other side
of the restaurant was yelling.
 
“Can
someone come over here and help me please?
 
I think there’s a piece of cilantro on my fish, and I specifically said
no
cilantro.”

“Of course,” Lindsay called.
 
“Be right there!”
 
She started walking purposefully across
the dining room.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Chace asked, following her.

“I’m working here.
 
Like you said, it’s not Bob’s Big Boy,
but I’m sure I’ll manage.
 
I’m a
fast learner.”
 
She’d reached the
woman with the cilantro problem now, and gave her a big grin.
 
“Hello!
 
I’m Lindsay and I’ll be your server this
afternoon!
 
What seems to be the
problem?”

“Okay,” the woman said, seemingly taken aback
by Lindsay’s cheerfulness.
 
“Um, you
see, I’m not allowed to have cilantro.
 
I’m allergic, and if I eat even one tiny morsel of it, something
horrible will happen.”

“What will happen?” Lindsay asked, curious.

“It will taste like soap.”

Lindsay gasped.
 
“Not soap!”
 
She picked up the plate and peered at
it.
 
“Yup, that is definitely a
piece of cilantro.”
 
She shook her
head.
 
“Who took your order, ma’am?”

“I took her order,” Chace said, grabbing the
plate out of Lindsay’s hand. “You know I took her order, I’m the only one
here.”
 
He looked down at the
plate.
 
“That’s not cilantro,” he
said, handing it back to the woman.
 
“It’s parsley.”

“It takes like soap,” she said.

“No, it doesn’t, it tastes like parsley,” Chace
persisted.

“What’s going on down there?” Martha, the woman
who had called earlier, the president of the group, was looking down the table
with a pinched look on her face.

“Nothing,” Lindsay called back.
 
“It’s just that the waiter made a little
mistake.
 
Got some cilantro mixed
into something that he shouldn’t have.”

“Oh, Lulu can’t have cilantro,” Martha yelled,
nodding knowingly.
 
“It will make
her whole dinner taste like soap.”

“I’ll take it back to the kitchen for you,”
Lindsay said.

“That would be wonderful,” the woman said.

Lindsay started walking toward the kitchen, and
Chace followed her.

“What the
hell
are you doing?” Chace asked as soon as they
were out of earshot.

“Who, me?”

“Yes, you!
 
You can’t just go and start interacting with the customers!”

“Why not?” she asked.
 
“Isn’t that what you wanted me to
do?
 
Didn’t you say we were going to
work out some kind of barter system?”

“No, that’s not….I mean, I didn’t… That woman
did not have cilantro on her plate.
 
And even if she did, I’ve never heard of any kind of allergy that makes
cilantro tastes like soap!”

“Chace,” Lindsay said as she pushed open the
door to the kitchen and stepped inside.
 
“Haven’t you ever heard of the customer always being right?”

But before he could answer her, Lindsay’s foot
slid against a wet spot on the floor.
 
Chace reached out to grab her, but he wasn’t fast enough.
 
She slid right through his hands. The
plate of salmon flew up into the air and then landed on the floor, shattering
into a million pieces.

Lindsay hit her head on the hard tile as she
went down.

And then she lay there on the floor, not
moving.

C
hapter
F
our

They’d met on the internet.
 

Lindsay knew it was a completely corny thing to
do, meeting on the internet, but she got roped in by one of those commercials
that started giving out crazy statistics about how one in five relationships
now started online.

It definitely seemed like it could be
true.
 
If she thought of five random
people, she was sure at least one of them would have started their relationship
online.
 
Her sister Jamie dated a
guy she’d met on the internet once.
 
Of course, it had turned out he was hiding an ex-wife and sixty thousand
dollars in debt that he’d run up buying prostitutes and drugs.
 
But that wasn’t the point.
 
The point was that times were changing,
and nowadays you really did need to use every tool at your disposal to meet
men.

You couldn’t just sit at home, waiting for
someone to pop up in front of you.
 
It didn’t work that way.
 
And
since Lindsay spent most of her time at home, writing by herself, she decided
to take matters into her own hands.

So she’d logged onto the most popular website
there was (the most dates, relationships, and marriages of any site, at least
according to their ads), figuring it was best to cast a wide net.
 
She uploaded her photo, filled out the
questionnaire with what she hoped were pithy and interesting responses, and
then waited.
 
She didn’t get any
winks – the site’s way of letting you know someone was interested -- for
at least six hours, which made her slightly anxious.
 

Was it possible she wasn’t even interesting
enough for random men on the internet?
 
What about the stalkers who were always looking for someone to bother
and cajole into cybersex?
 

Although maybe people didn’t do that
anymore.
 
It was probably all webcam
sex now, people taking their clothes off while Skyping.
 
She would ask Jamie about it later.
 
Jamie was always up on the latest
trends, especially if they had to do with sex.

Lindsay did her best to put the profile out of
her mind, and the world of internet dating must have worked like a watched pot,
because when she checked her email box that night, there were four winks..
 
None of the men seemed particularly
promising (one was married, another had a colony of ants he kept as pets,
etc.), but she was so thrilled someone was responding that she wrote a little
note back to each one, saying they looked lovely, but that she didn’t think
they would be a good match.