Page 2 of The Grumpy Billionaire
“No one? Really? I was beginning to think our friend group would be responsible for populating the entire kindergarten class of Eastport Bay Elementary in a few years.”
“Don't look at me,” Hap said, raising his hands up to the sides. “Even if I had any news—which I don’t—Rachel would kill me for spilling the beans before she's ready to.”
I looked around the table. “Okay then, anybody else find their soulmate and fall in love in the past few weeks? Any pending engagements I should be aware of?”
My tone was lighthearted, but at the rate these guys had been working, it wasn't that far-fetched of a question. It seemed like all you had to do was walk down Main Street in this town and the love of your life would bump into you and spill her purse, a meet-cute ready and waiting on every corner.
Unfortunately for me, I’d already met the love of my life in high school, and she’d decided she didnotfeel the same.
Mara had left town suddenly without a word of explanation and had refused to see me or return my calls, emails, and letters once I’d managed to track her down.
Maybe I was a slow learner, but I had finallyfinallygotten the message.
“Not yet,” Aiden said, answering my question and shaking me out of my morose trip down memory lane. “But I'm always open to it.”
Paul spoke up. “I’m thinking of proposing to my new doctor. Everyone else just threw meds at me, but she worked at getting to the root cause of my allergy issues. For the first time in my life, somebody’s figured out the right combination of treatments for me. I'm on a new diet and a new histamine drug, and I feel like a different person.”
“IthoughtI’d noticed a distinct lack of sneezing,” I quipped. “Guess we can't call you ‘Sneezy’ anymore.”
Hunter’s brother Jack had nicknamed us the Seven Dwarves when we’d all shared a mansion while working round the clock to launch Chipp. I’d thought it was pretty funny, and once we all considered it, the individual nicknames had been surprisingly fitting.
“Well, I’m still calling you ‘Grumpy,’” Paul shot back. “It’ll take more than one friendly lunch for me to be convinced that your ogre-ly ways are in the past.”
“That’s fair,” I conceded.
“Since we’re getting all personal, I guess I’ll mention I’m going in for adult ADHD testing.” Josh said. “Maybe you guys will stop calling me ‘Dopey’ once I get some treatment for that. I can't believe I never figured out what the issue was before, but I took one of those online quizzes and I had basically every symptom in the book.”
“That is awesome, man.” I clapped a hand on his shoulder.
Hopefully my tone expressed the sincerity of my words. “Believe me, I understand what it's like to be dealing with a challenge for so many years you can hardly even remember what it was like to live without it.”
That admission elicited more sympathetic glances than I would have liked. I jumped up from the booth.
“I’m going to check out the pie bar and grab a plate. Anybody else want some?”
Tuck, who ate more than any one I'd ever seen and yet seemed to always stay thin, put in an order. “Grab me a slice of the turtle cheesecake pie.”
“Sure thing. Anybody else?”
“Yeah, I guess I could go for some apple ginger custard pie,” Hunter said.
I walked up to the long stainless-steel-topped counter that had anchored Nooky's Diner since my earliest memories of coming here as a kid with my mom on her rare days off.
The owner Pamela Nookson was behind the counter wearing what appeared to be the same apron her dad used to wear back when he’d been a daily fixture at the diner he’d founded and named after himself.
She had a short pouf of blonde hair and a red pencil tucked behind one ear.
“Hey Pam. Busy day. How are you?”
“Well, hey there, Reid. How are you honey? How's your mama?”
“Oh, she's doing great. Thanks for asking.”
“Has she retired, or is she still working for the Neely family?” Pam asked.
I bristled at the sound of that last name. It represented both the greatest love and the greatest hatred of my life.
“No, she's still working there… unfortunately,” I said. “I’ve begged her to retire and travel, or chill at the beach every day, or at least move out of her house on their property and into mine—or to let me buy her a better house of her own.”
