Page 9 of Coffee Shop Cupid
“Yeah,” I agreed.
I grabbed a metal jug and started steaming some milk, but my thoughts were on the handsome omega.
I’d noticed him as soon as Natalie had told me where to take the danishes. His shoulder-length brown hair and scruffy beard were gorgeous, and his brown eyes held amazing depth behind his glasses.
There was something else about him too. I couldn’t explain it, but he radiated pain. It made me want to wrap him in my arms and hold him.
My suspicions about him hurting were only verified when I caught up with him outside and saw him crying. It had taken all my willpower to merely hand him his food and walk away. But it wasn’t my place to attempt to soothe his emotions. I’d never seen him before, and for all I knew he was visiting from out of town.
Despite what he’d said, it was possible that I would never see him again.
The thought was unsettling.
Did he have anybody to lean on; a support system to help him through whatever he was facing? It worried me that the answer seemed to be ‘no’.
Why else would he have been alone—crying—in a coffee shop during the morning rush?
“Order for Sandy,” I called out, setting the drink on the line. Then a buzzer sounded from the back and I hurried to pull a tray of croissants from the oven.
I didn’t have time to think about the omega, no matter how much I wanted to. He was gone, and I had a business to run.
∞∞∞
“Ok, spill,” Natalie said as she carried a bus-tub back and set it next to the dishwasher. “You’ve been distracted since that omega ran out this morning.”
I glanced up from where I’d been slicing tomatoes in advance of the lunch-rush. “Huh? What do you mean?”
“She’s right, boss,” chimed in my cook, Lenny. “It’s good you can run this place on auto-pilot, or we’d be majorly backed up today.”
“I haven’t been that bad,” I argued.
Lenny set his knife down with a clunk, crossed his arms and leveled a stare at me. “I had to remind you to use pot-holders. You damn-near pulled a tray of cookies from the oven without them.”
“Are you serious?” Natalie asked, doubling over with laughter. “I knew he was spacey out front, but I didn’t know it was that bad.”
“Yuck it up,” I grumbled. “Everybody has off days.”
“Yeah, but they normally start that way, not as a result of chasing some random guy down the street.”
“He did what now?” Lenny asked.
Natalie laughed. “That’s right, you didn’t see it. So there was this cute omega that came in this morning. He’d waited for some danishes, and Chase took them out. But then just a minute later the guy runs out, leaving the danishes untouched. Chase bagged them up, poured his coffee into a to-go cup and ran after him with it all.”
“Damn boss,” Lenny laughed. “Really going after those five-star reviews, aren’t you?”
“Ha, ha.”
“Seriously though,” Natalie said. “You’ve been distracted ever since. Everything ok?”
I sighed. “It’s just… he seemed so sad. It kinda hit all the alpha parts of me that wanted to protect him.”
“Ah,” Lenny replied. “Makes sense then.”
“Huh?” Natalie asked.
He chuckled. “You’re an omega, so you don’t know how strong those protective urges can be. It can really mess with us when our alpha sides demand we take care of somebody.”
“Neither of you have ever been like that around me,” she griped.
