Page 19 of Coffee Shop Girl
“As well as can be expected. Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
The deep register of his voice was easygoing, but I still felt myself tense. I kept the counter between us. The intensity of his gaze weakened my knees.
“Sure.”
“Do you have an operations manual?”
“A what?”
“An operations manual.”
“What’s that?”
A quick grin flashed across his face. “I’ll take that as a no.”
I glanced toward the back, mumbling the wordsoperations manualunder my breath. Dad kept a binder full of odds and ends in the storage room. Warranties. Random notes he took. Phone numbers scribbled with a name but no indication who the person was. That was Dad. He knew everyone, and everyone knew him, but give him a task with details and he was lost. The fact that I’d made it to eighteen was a literal miracle.
“I might,” I drawled. “But if I do, I have no idea where it is.”
He seemed to consider that. “Your employee who left the other day. How did you train him?”
“Myself. I showed him how to run everything. Real-time training.” My shoulders straightened. “One-on-one.”
That’s the sort of excellent service you get here,I almost said, then recalled the dry scone and water bottle on the day we met and thought better of it.
“What would he have done if he had a question while you were gone?” he asked.
I blinked. The question didn’t make sense because it had no grounding in reality. “I’m rarely gone during open hours.”
His eyebrows rose. “You live here?”
“Upstairs.”
He took that in smoothly, but wheels turned in his head. Should I have told him that? He didn’t strike me as the creepy type. Not that I’d mind him prowling around more often. My cheeks heated, but his gaze had dropped to the stack of letters next to the cash register. I stepped toward them, but kept from shoving them out of sight by sheer willpower.
“Interesting,” he murmured, with that same shrewd gaze. “And what would happen to this place if you were hospitalized?”
“Hospitalized? That’s a bit macabre.”
“Is it?”
Unnerved, I said, “It would remain closed.”
“And your debt?”
“It would wait.”
He lifted his brow. “Would it?”
“What is this?” I snapped. Considering that my father had died of a heart attack, perhaps I should have asked these questions already. But I hadn’t because I was just trying to stay afloat enough to keep Dad’s dream alive and find mine again. I eyed him with deep skepticism. “Are you an insurance salesman or something?”
He huffed a laugh. “Definitely not that. Who runs your accounts?”
“Like my bookkeeping?”
“Yes.”
“Me.”
