The Harder they Come

Excerpt from: The Harder They Come

“What are you looking at?” Ellaina asked Nell and Jade as the kitchen door swung shut behind her. Setting down a tray of pies, she joined her two waitresses at the counter, trying to figure out what had captivated the women. It was lunchtime and the Starlight Café was full, definitely not a time to be standing and staring out the window.

“Not what, who,” Nell whispered.

“Pardon?”

Instead of answering, Nell just nodded towards the sidewalk in front of the café. Ellaina followed her gaze. And sucked in her breath.

She’d always thought reactions like these were just fanciful musings from the romance novels she secretly liked to read. There was no way they could take place in real life—the speeding up of the heart, the flush warming face and neck, the delicious dampness between the legs. Yet those very things were happening to her thirty-nine year old body as she watched the man climb off the shiny black and chrome motorcycle to stand beside the beast.

He was tall, well over six feet, with wide shoulders encased in a black leather jacket. As he unzipped it, Ellaina caught a glimpse of a black T-shirt tucked into a pair of worn jeans, but it was his face she wanted to see. He lifted the visor, slipped off the helmet and set it on the seat of the bike, answering her silent wish. Long, dark brown hair framed a lean face, a beautiful face that belonged on the cover of a magazine, not gracing the main street of Spring Ridge, Texas. It was a face that just happened to have a body to match.

Her mind was full of questions, starting with a simple one, How did that powerful motorcycle pull up out front without me hearing it? and moving to more complex ones like, Where did a man like that come from since he certainly doesn’t belong in Spring Ridge? and most importantly, Why does he have to be so much younger than I am?

The response to the first one was easy. He’d arrived while she was in the kitchen getting the fresh pies. And the answers to the other two didn’t really matter since question three shut down any discussion on the subject.

If she had to guess, she’d say he was about ten years too young. A man who looked like that, especially a younger man, wouldn’t have much interest in a woman who was facing forty candles on the cake next year.

Dragging her gaze from the window, she made a shooing motion with her hands. “Don’t you two have jobs to do?”

At the sound of her voice, Nell and Jade started, as if awakening from a trance.

Turning to first one, “I’m sure there are customers needing attention, Nell,” and then the other, “Can you put the pies in the display case and then see if there are tables to be cleared, Jade?” she managed to bring things back under control.

And that’s what she prided herself on, her control. That’s how she ran her café, and her life.

Nell and Jade resumed their duties, leaving Ellaina alone behind the counter.

When the bells above the front door jingled and the screen door slammed shut, she looked up.

Is this how it happens? As soon as your eyes meet, the breath leaves your lungs in one fell swoop? You know everything is out of your control and nothing will ever be the same?

He smiled, and she was a goner.