Coming Home- Rock Bay 1 Read Online Free PDF

why they’re all looking at you. It was surprisingly not all that bad after he got used to the bug-under-a-microscope feeling. Well, not until lunchtime, anyway.
    Tally had actually started to feel slightly comfortable with his new position, easily ringing people through, stares and all, and barely checking the complicated price cheat sheet. He’d marveled at Lex’s public persona as well, the sweet smiles and bashful chuckles he dished out along with coffee and snacks. One kinda had to wonder where the hell it came from. Public Lex was so different than the irritable grunts and half answers Tally got whenever the bustling little shop had a silent moment or two. Grumpy boss aside, though, the morning hadn’t been horrible. Tally was starting to think he was going to survive.
    Then she came in.
The woman was middle-aged, with a long, silver-threaded ponytail and surprisingly chic clothes. She looked at him like something distasteful her cat may have left on the kitchen floor. He thought she may have worked at the high school before; she looked vaguely familiar. He couldn’t be sure. It was quite apparent that she knew him, however.
“May I help you?” Tally put on his best kiss-ass face. He even tried to affect the shy, unassuming charm that Lex pulled off so magnificently.
The woman acted like she hadn’t heard him speak. She turned and regarded Lex. “I refuse to deal with trash. Lex, darling, I’d love a tall vanilla mocha and one of those delicious orange chocolate chip muffins.”
This is it. Tally knew the woman had drawn a line. He’d gotten his share of silent stares, from mocking and hateful to borderline sympathetic, but she was the first person to actually pull out an egg and aim for his face.
“Ms. Franklin, Tally will take your order and ring you up. I’ll be glad to make your coffee when I’m done with my current order here. And please treat my employee with the same amount of respect that I gave him by hiring him.”
Tally nearly lost his cool; his hands were trembling from the adrenaline confrontation always caused. But he remained silent— possibly because of shock alone.
He couldn’t believe Lex was publicly going to bat for him. Why? He understood that Lex had to stand by his business decisions, but it felt so personal. Like a victory. Lex flashed him a small but genuine smile and continued on with the order he’d started. The poor girl waiting for her coffee, who’d told Tally she was from out of town and just driving through, stood and watched the whole exchange in stunned silence. She even sent Tally a sympathetic smile before she turned and walked out the door.
Tally could tell that Ms. Franklin, whoever she was, was trying to decide if she wanted to walk out herself or pretend that the earlier conversation hadn’t happened and just get her coffee. She must have decided on the latter.
“I’ll have a tall vanilla mocha and an orange chocolate chip muffin.” She said the words grudgingly, refusing to look Tally in the face.
He took Ms. Franklin’s order with resolutely steady hands and passed it on to Lex, just like he’d been doing all morning. Then he rung up her order as efficiently as possible and willed Lex to make her damn drink already so she’d get the hell out of the shop. In an effort to speed her departure, he removed an orange chocolate chip muffin from the glass cabinet with tongs and placed it in a small paper bag with the coffee shop logo on it. The woman snatched it out of his hand without so much as a thank you, pulled it out of the bag, and nibbled on it nervously as she waited for her coffee. As soon as it was in her hand, she turned with no comment and walked out the door. He’d never been so glad to see anyone leave a room in his life. He could only hope that she wasn’t a daily customer.
“Thank you for sticking up for me,” Tally said to Lex once the place was blissfully empty.
Lex shrugged, his narrow shoulders quietly eloquent under a thin long-sleeved