the people he’d seen day in and day out since the day he was born.
They’d taken him at charming, quick-to-grin face value.
That had worked for him for the decade since he’d dropped out of high school—and long before—so he wasn’t about to start sharing the real reasons now.
But it might come out whether he wanted it to or not. The thought was like acid in his gut. Everyone would know... He could lose everything.
But today, he was going to take a page out of the playbook everyone had written for him and worry about his troubles another time. Right now, he would focus on the pretty waitress who was struggling to stay upright.
He wasn’t from the South, but the temptation to say ‘bless her heart’ was almost more than he could stand.
He knew enough about waitressing to know it was hard work. There were a lot of elements involved, a lot of things that could go wrong, and of course, having someone like Mia around to be a royal bitch didn’t help anything.
But he had never seen anyone in his entire life look less like a waitress than this woman. Those shoes were going to be the death of her. Her blouse clung to her back where she was perspiring.
But it was her hair that had really caught his attention. He had no problem with buns. Messy buns, dancer buns, a woman’s I’m about to get shit done buns, he liked them all. But hers was something unique. In the fifteen minutes he’d been here—the ten before Mia and five since she’d promised him the Coke with no onions and hadn’t made it back to the table—he’d seen her fix her bun at least two dozen times. She was obsessed with keeping that thing as neat and orderly as possible.
And it appeared that her bun was equally obsessed with being unruly. Thirty seconds after she smoothed a hair back into place, another one was curling back toward her face.
It fascinated him. Everything about her fascinated him.
How was somebody so obviously not meant to be a waitress here at the Eagle’s Nest, doing a terrible job of waiting tables?
She had big city written all over her. Oak Creek tended to scare those people off pretty quickly.
But this woman seemed desperate to make sure she kept this job—even if it meant putting up with Mia’s antics. She was trying so damned hard, it was kind of adorable.
Even if he was still sitting here with no drink, no order placed, and by the looks of the pretty waitress—who was running food out to tables and shooting him an apologetic glance every time she wasn’t able to come back with his drink—no sign of either happening any time soon.
Yet he couldn’t stop smiling.
Something about this woman—with her ridiculous shoes and her proper posture and her brown hair she obsessively wanted to be perfect, despite its other plans—affected him. Drew him in a way he hadn’t been drawn in a long time. Hell, he couldn’t remember ever being so fascinated with someone at first glance.
Baby got along with everyone. People came naturally to him, men and women. He loved to talk, loved to listen. Loved to get to know someone.
He smiled a lot. He generally didn’t apologize for it. In a town where half the male population seemed to be made up of gruff former Special Forces guys, he’d never felt the urge to be the silent, sullen type.
And he could admit, women flocked to him. He rarely had to spend an evening alone if he didn’t want to.
But he didn’t have sex casually and wasn’t interested in notches on his bedpost or in keeping some sort of score.
He wanted what his parents had had: his dad dancing with his mom in the living room, holding the door open for her whenever they got into the car, and treating her with respect...even when they were fighting. Every single day until the day his father had died when Baby was twelve.
Or his brother’s Finn’s marriage with Charlie for the past seven months. Those two could barely keep from killing each other some days. They were both bullheaded and loved to win an argument. But Baby knew for a fact that Finn would lay down his life for Charlie, and she would do the same for Finn. They’d both proven it.
That’s what Baby wanted. He wasn’t interested in one-night stands or casual relationships.