“Who’s here this early?” I ask Zen, as if they’ll have any more of an idea than I do.
“My powers of deduction tell me someone who’s messy,” they reply.
“Your powers of deduction are so acute this time of day.”
They grin and head for the dining room.
I hang up my coat, which is beginning to smell exactly like the café, peek inside Jitter’s doghouse and come up disappointed that he’s not there, and then I follow my nibling.
“Zen!” an unfamiliar woman’s voice says. “You made it. Good. We were getting worried.”
“Morning, Iris,” Zen replies cheerfully.
“Come sit by me,” someone else says. “Look. I got the special Guatemalan coffee beans from my friend for you to try. Here. Have a cup.”
“You are a goddess.”
What on earth?
I stop in the doorway and survey the Bean & Nugget dining room, which is housing roughly a dozen people at five in the morning, all of them drinking coffee and enjoying pastries.
There’s Devi who owns the art gallery and her grandmother who runs House of Curry, which makes delicious food when you’re not wearing it. Shirlene, the health department inspector. Marley, our neighbor with the little girl who knocks on Sabrina’s door regularly looking for Jitter. Bitsy, who dropped by a mouth-watering casserole the other day that was just as good as her English Sunday dinner, which is a sentence I never expected to come out of my mouth, but is still true. A few other people look familiar, but I can’t immediately place their names or where I’ve seen them.
And then there’s a woman who’s so startlingly similar to Sabrina, but with a few more crow’s lines at her eyes, that it must be her mother.
Her mother.
That’ll make a guy nervous this early in the morning.
I take an extra breath, tell my dick to stay down, and let myself look at Sabrina too.
Naturally, she’s here.
Naturally, she’s gorgeous. Sipping coffee and laughing at something Devi said. Completely in her element. Her hair’s slightly damp, like she didn’t have time to dry it all the way after her shower, and now I’m remembering her request to see what I could do in the bathtub.
I shoot a glance at her mother again, and that helps get my cock back under control.
Then I notice Jitter. He’s sprawled on his back by the fire with his fur and fluff and jowls so askew that he looks more like furry, mis-assembled IKEA furniture than he does like a hundred-pound not-still-a-puppy, but not-yet-a-dog dog.
“Oh, Grey, good, you’re here.” Bitsy smiles and waves me into the room. “We need some male input on the speed dating event next weekend.”
“The…what?”
“Speed dating,” Sabrina’s mom supplies. “Bean & Nugget hosts it every Valentine’s Day.”
“Are you participating this year?” someone asks me.
Zen chokes on their coffee.
I almost choke on my own spit.
“You should,” someone else says. “You’ve been single for, what, two years now?”
Half the people in the room are shooting sly glances at Sabrina. The other half are watching me.
Including Sabrina.
The weight of her gaze is even heavier than the weight of her dog when he presses his waggling body against me, which I wouldn’t mind him doing right now for a distraction.
But Jitter’s snoozing like this is too early for him today.
“Uncle Grey is totes single,” Zen says.
I am.
But I’m not.
As in, I’m not too keen on getting back in the dating game.
Probably.
Unless it involves some kind of friends-with-benefits arrangement with the woman whose café I’ve sworn to destroy.
How, exactly, did I get myself into this again?
One of the older ladies claps. “Oh, good. I’ll tell my daughter you’ll be there.”
“I don’t—” I start.
“Back up just a second,” an even older lady says. “My granddaughter’s coming in from Denver for this. And she already knows him.”
“Are you sure it’s wise for Addison to be in Snaggletooth Creek right now?” Sabrina’s mother says. “I hear it wasn’t the most pleasant for her when she came up last week.”
A hush falls on half the group.
Three ladies share so it’s gonna be a throwdown glances.
Wish I didn’t know what that looked like.
Wish I wasn’t the reason it’s being tossed about.
“Can we all please remember that Chandler is the biggest problem in the Tooth?” Sabrina says. “Marley, have you talked to Gail Kingston yet about those custom tissue packs?”