Royally Endowed(4)

Who the fuck has time for sleep?

I jack up the volume on my phone and scoop a tablespoon of instant coffee grounds into my mouth—washing the bitter, spiky granules down with a gulp of black, cold coffee. We don’t serve instant for the coffee shop. Instant coffee is disgusting.

But it serves a purpose. It’s effective—efficient. I love caffeine. Love it. The high, the rush, the feeling that I’m Wonder Woman’s long-lost cousin and there ain’t shit I can’t do.

I would mainline it, if that were actually a thing.

I would probably become a meth-head if it weren’t for the rotting-teeth, ruined-life, most-likely-dying-by-overdose elements of it all. I’m a high school senior, not an asshole.

After swallowing my nasty liquid-of-life, I get back into the song—shaking my hips and shoulders, flipping my mermaid multicolor-streaked blond hair back and forth. I spin on my toes, I twerk and shimmy, I may even leap like a ballerina—though I’ll deny it—all while filling the pie dishes on the counter with ooey-gooey, yummy, freshly sliced fruit and rolling out the balls of floured dough for the top layer of the two dozen pies I need to make before we open.

My mother’s pies—her recipes—they’re what Amelia’s is known for and the only reason we didn’t go under years ago. We used to need only a dozen, but when news of my sister’s romance with the Crown Prince of Wessco hit, the fangirls, royal-watchers, mildly interested passersby and psycho-stalkers came out of the woodwork . . . and right to our door.

Business is booming, which is a double-edged sword. Money’s a little less tight, but the workload has doubled, and with my sister gone, the workforce just got cut in half. More than half, actually—more like a third, because Olivia really ran the show. Up until recently, I was a total slacker. That’s why I was adamant she go to Wessco—why I swore I could rise to the occasion and handle things while she was gone.

I owed her and I knew it.

And if I’m going to actually keep up my end of the deal, I really need to move my ass with these pies.

I sprinkle some flour on the dough and roll it out with the heavy, wooden rolling pin. Once it’s the perfect size and thickness, I flip the rolling pin around and sing into the handle—American Idol style.

“Calling Gloriaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa . . .”

And then I turn around.

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

Without thinking, I bend my arm and throw the rolling pin like a tomahawk . . . straight at the head of the guy who’s standing just inside the kitchen door.

The guy I didn’t hear come in.

The guy who catches the hurling rolling pin without flinching—one-handed and cool as a gorgeous cucumber—just an inch from his perfect face.

He tilts his head to the left, looking around the rolling pin to meet my eyes with his soulful brown ones. “Nice toss.”

Logan St. James.

Bodyguard. Totally badass. Sexiest guy I have ever seen—and that includes books, movies and TV, foreign and domestic. He’s the perfect combo of boyishly could-go-to-my-school kind of handsome, mixed with dangerously hot and tantalizingly mysterious. If comic-book Superman, James Dean, Jason Bourne and some guy with the smoothest, most perfectly pitched, British-Scottish-esque, Wessconian-accented voice all melded together into one person, they would make Logan fucking St. James.

And I just tried to clock him with a baking tool—while wearing my Rick and Morty pajama short-shorts, a Winnie-the-Pooh T-shirt I’ve had since I was eight and my SpongeBob SquarePants slippers.

And no bra.

Not that I have a whole lot going on upstairs, but still . . .

“Christ on a saltine!” I grasp at my chest like an old woman with a pacemaker.

Logan’s brow wrinkles. “Haven’t heard that one before.”

Oh fuck—did he see me dancing? Did he see me leap? God, let me die now.

I yank on my earbuds’ cord, popping them from my ears. “What the hell, dude?! Make some noise when you walk in—let a girl know she’s not alone. You could’ve given me a heart attack. And I could’ve killed you with my awesome ninja skills.”

The corner of his mouth quirks. “No, you couldn’t.”

He sets the rolling pin down on the counter.

“I knocked on the kitchen door so I wouldn’t frighten you, but you were busy with your . . . performance.”

Blood and heat rush to my face. And I want to melt into the floor and then all the way down to the Earth’s core.

Logan points toward the front of the coffee shop. “The door wasn’t bolted. I thought Marty was going to replace the broken lock?”

Relieved to have a reason not to look at him, I turn around and get the lock set out of the drawer—still in the packaging. “He bought it, but we got swamped the other day and he didn’t have time to install it.”