“You’re giving it back?”
“I like watching you eat.”
“You’re a strange guy.”
“No doubt,” he said agreeably.
Not willing to look a gift horse in the mouth, she took the half cupcake. Bit. Chewed. Swallowed. And then stilled at the realization. “You want something.”
“It’s a small thing.”
Damn. She knew it. She stopped eating. “What?”
“You disappeared before my parents could meet my . . . girlfriend.”
Her tummy quivered, and not necessarily in a bad way, which made her need the clarification. “You mean your pretend girlfriend.”
“My mom wants to meet the woman willing to put up with me. She wants her to come to their fortieth anniversary dinner.”
“Again, not seeing how this is my problem.” Just thinking about it had licks of panic racing through her, even while being fascinated by this family of his.
“It’d be just one family dinner.”
“Oh no,” she said, snorting to hide her rising horror. “No, no, no.”
“Okay, great. So you’ll think about it.”
She had to laugh. “So your Male Selective Hearing is intact.”
“Well, I am a male, so . . .” With a smile, he stood. “Take your time, the dinner’s not for three weeks.” And then he took his sexy ass—yes, it was indeed very sexy—and walked off. He passed the table of gawking nurses and winked at them. “She’s thinking about it,” he said conspiratorially.
In unison the whole table swiveled their heads and stared at Jane.
“No,” she said. “I’m not.”
“Can we then?” Sandra asked.
Jane thunked her head on the table.
THE NEXT MORNING when Jane’s alarm went off at four forty-five, she was still doing nothing but thinking about it. She didn’t have to be at work until eight, but she still got up, showered, and hit the Stovetop Diner by five.
The early bird always gets the worm.
That’s what her grandpa used to say. Which was why she was really here. Not just the diner, but Lake Tahoe in general.
Last year she’d been here for the ski season as usual, and she’d caught sight of her grandpa in this very diner. At the time, she’d been too shocked to talk to him. She wasn’t proud of it, but she’d ducked out before he could see her.
She hadn’t been ready to make contact. Hurt and resentment and her ever-present fear of rejection had ensured that. Complicating things was that her grandpa also inspired some of the best memories of her childhood.
This year, she still felt the same roller coaster of emotions, so she was no closer to making a decision about talking to him.
But none of that stopped her from wanting a peek at him. So she parked at the diner, because if she knew one thing about her grandpa, it was that he was a creature of habit.
The building had been constructed just after the Prohibition era, standing tall as a distillery for decades. In the 1950s, it’d been bought and turned into the first diner on all of the North Shore, complete with black-and-white-checkered floor tiles, red vinyl booths, and jukeboxes. The look had since lost some of its luster, but the food was amazing, ensuring that the place remained a mainstay for the area.
The alcohol license didn’t hurt.
She eyed the table across the room, where indeed her grandpa sat with his cronies drinking their morning espresso and telling stories about growing up here in Tahoe before it’d become a popular tourist destination. “Back in the day . . .” one of them was saying, “you could jump off the cliff at Hidden Falls and not get in trouble.”