“Aw, Lisa. I wouldn’t have pegged you for a day over forty-five,” handsome, smiling Ricardo shmoozed. As the youngest of all of us, no more than twenty, he made it his personal mission to make every older lady customer and staff member love him. As he bussed our tables in a shirt with rolled-up sleeves that bared the warm brown skin of his arms, he certainly always caught the eyes of the senior ladies who came in after their Tuesday night canasta meetings. Lisa was used to Ricardo’s shenanigans though, and rolled her eyes at this compliment even as she smiled. It was all the more charming when Marv threw a cutting look at Ricardo, and the kid just smiled innocently. Everyone knew Lisa and Marv, our fearless leader and the little restaurant’s namesake, had been locked in a will-they-won’t-they situationship for longer than I’d been alive. Watching them flirt and fight and flirt through fighting was better than any TV sitcom couple.
The breakfast rush at the diner was usually pretty busy, though less so on weekdays like today. Still, the diner’sproximity to the highway meant we had plenty of long-haul truckers stop in for black coffee and the Whole Shebang breakfast even during the nine-to-five hours a lot of locals kept. I fell easily into the rhythm of my shift, slinging hash browns and omelets at the start of the day and country-fried steaks and patty melts as the day faded into afternoon.
During my break, I hung out in the kitchen with Mitch, our best cook and my apparent work-husband. He was around ten years older than me, not to mention married with kids of his own, but he would have been real husband material in an alternate universe. A man of few words in general, with a large build, dark eyes, and deep Black skin that gleamed on his bald head, a lot of our newer hires felt nervous about trying to chat with him. But Mitch had a soft spot for me and would always entertain my playful flirting as he manned the grill, while I made it my personal mission to mother hen the newbies into seeing that he was actually a big softie. By now, Ricardo had bonded to him about their mutual love of nerdy comic books, and everyone melted when they saw how much Daphne loved him on the rare days when her Gram-Gram brought her to visit Mommy at work. Other than Kara, Mitch was my favorite coworker.
I was chatting with Mitch about his preferred sports team during a down moment in my shift when Kara burst into the kitchen wearing a mischievous smile.
“Allie, babe, you’ll never believe who just sat in your section. Don’t even guess, I’ll tell you—it’s three of the hottest men I’ve maybe ever seen.” She bounced her eyebrows suggestively. “What a good opportunity to get back on the horse, so to speak.”
Kara had been bugging me to start dating again for pretty much as long as we’d been friends. There was always at least one excuse not to, and if it wasn’t Daphne, it was my insistence that there were no hot eligible men in my life. Our friend Brandon was gorgeous and tragically gay, Mitch was gorgeousand tragically married, and everyone else wouldn’t have been interesting to me even under ideal circumstances.
“Okay, but hot to you is very different than hot to me,” I told Kara, reluctant to give in to her meddling yet. She scoffed, and before she could argue, Ricardo jumped in to back her up.
“No, for real, Al. These guys are like textbook hot. I don’t swing that way without alcohol—I mean grape juice!” He hurried to amend his statement when Marv walked in, giving him a dirty look. The old man just grunted as he headed back toward his office, allowing Ricardo to pick up his inappropriate thread. “Anyway, Kara doesn’t have her horny goggles on. Go see for yourself! But maybe push up your bra first.”
Kara nodded at me with solemn reverence, and I let myself think about it for a second. Even as I avoided her insistence that I should start dating again, I had been lamenting my lack of sex to Kara and Brandon for pretty much our entire friendship. I still wasn’t a relationship girl, and I knew a stable father figure would be the best-case scenario for Daphne, so I’d abstained from my typical situationships to make things easier for her.
But surely I was capable of having casual sex, no strings attached, if only to reclaim my mojo. I was still young. I still had an inner drive to get a little wild. And if my morning musings about that night in Vegas were any indication, I was down pretty bad.
Ricardo laughed when I did exactly as he suggested and pushed up my bra, putting my substantial cleavage—a gift having a baby had given me since I was rail-thin and barely curved before—on display. For extra luck, I fluffed my curls and headed out to the dining room, my best flirtatious smile on my face.
I saw the table Kara referenced immediately. A booth by the front window occupied by three men with different shades of darkish hair—black curls on the tallest, a nearly-black long manepulled into a bun for the man to his right, and across from them, a head of thick chocolate brown hair that clearly stayed short most of the time, though at the moment it was getting a little long and curling up around the man’s ears.
Recognition sparked immediately, but I was too focused on getting my groove back to realize what I was feeling until I got within earshot of the table of men. Then, I overheard the quiet rumble of one of their voices, and the last puzzle piece fell into place.
It helped that the last man’s face came into view as I advanced. A dark beard, well-groomed and close-cropped to a strong jaw, and a set of blue eyes I’d never forget. And in the context of his face, a bit older but mostly unchanged from that night five years ago, helped fill in the blanks. The tall, thin man who had pursued me first; the sweeter, long-haired one whose smile had enchanted me.
As if my horny musings this morning had summoned them, three sexy ghosts of my past were back, and I was going to have to face them.
Not exactly the mojo-reclaiming mission I’d had in mind.
2
ALLIE
For a long moment, I was frozen in place. My brain was back in Vegas, my body firmly in Marv’s diner, and my heart was practically running down the street away from me. There was no way these men were here all of a sudden after I hadn’t seen or spoken to them since that fateful night five years ago.
And even if my senses weren’t lying to me, it had to be a coincidence. Sure, this wasn’t the largest town, and I remembered bonding drunkenly over all of us being from the SoCal area long before the whole sexy mess had happened, so was it that far outside of the realm of possibility to think these three friends were traveling somewhere together again and happened to stop into my place of work? Seemed more plausible than them wanting to see me after five years had passed. I’d never given them more than my first name. I willed them not to remember me as I strode closer and closer to their table, hoping time and drunk-fog and my new mom curves would keep them from recognizing me. I could be their server and nothing else.
The worst part? All hopes of reclaiming my wild and sexy youth were now completely dashed. The guys who had changedmy life forever didn’t exactly scream “no strings,” even if they were still visually delicious.
“Hi there, fellas,” I said as I sidled up to the side of their table, wearing my winningest smile. “Thanks for coming in. What can I get started for you?”
The tallest one still seemed like a ringleader among his friends. He met my eyes first, his own dark irises inscrutable but unwavering as he seemed to size me up. He licked his lip, a quick reflexive sort of motion that immediately sparked flames inside me. A memory of him doing that before he leaned in to kiss me hard and pull my lower lip between his teeth. Damn it, he still had canines that were just on the right side of too sharp, and it was still hot as hell.
“What’s good on the menu?” he asked me with an edge of scandal in his tone I was sure wasn’t an accident. Another memory struck me, his sultry voice as his hard cock slid inside me the first time.“Does that feel good, babygirl?”
I shifted on my feet, hoping he wouldn’t notice the way I squirmed with need. I cleared my throat. “Well, our best seller for lunch is the patty melt. I’m partial to the spicy chicken sandwich, personally. But it’s up to you. What are you in the mood for today?”
Oh, Christ. The worst possible turn of phrase I could have picked if I was hoping to de-escalate how turned-on I felt. I avoided Casanova’s eyes as I looked to the man next to him instead; warm olive skin and a shy smile that was less hard to look at directly, but no less alluring. Another unwanted flashback slammed into my head. This man’s soft, open gaze as he spread my thighs apart and met my eyes.“Tell me what you like, okay? I want this to be good for you.”
“I’ll just get some water for now, if you don’t mind,” he asked me. Innocent as everything, but I still wanted to tug at the knotof hair at the back of his head, pull him in to kiss me for the first time in five years.
“Sure thing, handsome,” I told him shamelessly. “Would you two like some drinks to start too? I can give you a second with the menu.”
“Coffee,” the third man piped up, his gruff voice sending tingles over my skin. Blue eyes that pierced mine, a hard line of a mouth that I remembered as soft, so soft, when he sucked my nipple between his lips.
“Cream and sugar?” I practically rasped. He shook his head, a simple, curt denial. There was certainly a dark and stormy side of him that suited the black coffee vibe. It had been there in Vegas too. Even as we stumbled into a chapel together, he’d always stayed so serious, participating in my banter with a dry stoicism that added to his sexy mystique.
