Free Stepbrother Reunited (Billionaire Stepbrother BBW Romance) by Harper Bloom

Stepbrother Reunited
     
    I got to work early this morning by a good 15 minutes. Most people wouldn’t understand it, but I love my job. When I was a kid, what I wanted to be more than anything else in the world was a waitress. I wanted to wear a white apron and smile at people, pour their coffee, find out what they were doing or where they were going. That was before I knew the reality of it, of course: the bad shifts where nothing comes out of the kitchen right or the weird nights when the kitchen and I are both totally killing it and tips are still lousy. When you’re a kid, you don’t think about how much your knees and hips are going to ache after a ten hour shift. But here I am, and I still love my job so much I get here early most mornings. The only thing that’s really changed since I was a little girl is that I call myself a “server” now instead of a “waitress”.
     
    The diner is quiet at this time of the morning, which is another reason I like coming in early. Around seven, my regulars will trickle in and start telling me about the news and butchering the better jokes from last night’s Jimmy Fallon, the ones that I slept through. My regulars always tip at least two dollars, even if all they have is a cup of coffee and a donut. That’s not why I love them, though. It’s because Harry always brings in new pictures of his grandkids and Pete lets me touch the scar in his side where he took a bullet in Vietnam. I love them because I’m a part of their lives. Again, I know this doesn’t make sense to other people, because it’s not how they live their lives. This is the best family I’ve ever known, the one that gets together every morning at a diner.
     
    I was tying my apron on (at least that’s something I got to keep from my girlhood dreams) and about to leave the break room to start the day when my co-worker, Mindy, came through the door, wide-eyed and grinning. “Chloe,” she hissed, “you can’t go out there yet.”
     
    “What? Why?”
     
    “He’s here!” She shifted back and forth on the balls of her feet in an excited little dance.
     
    “What? Who?”
     
    “The guy . The sexy guy you told me came in twice last week.”
     
    “Who, Giorgio Armani?”
     
    “Yes! It’s gotta be. How many guys that look like that come through this dump at five in the morning?”
     
    That wasn’t his name, of course, it was just the nickname I came up with for him. I didn’t know his real name because he never paid with a card. He always paid with cash, with a crisp hundred dollar bill peeled off from a gold money clip that looked like it was squeezed around at least fifty more bills just like it. He didn’t let me keep all of the change, but he did usually leave more than what he ate cost. The cash alone would be enough to make him the subject of gossip around the diner, but the rest was making him a legend.
     
    He always wore tailored suits, expensive ones. I had no idea if they were actually Armani suits but maybe they were. I don’t know much about high-end men’s clothes, since my boyfriends tend toward the kind of shirt with their names sewn on the left breast on a patch. I don’t know much, but I could tell enough to know that the guy’s suits probably cost more than I made in two months of good tips. He was handsome, too, with a square jaw, full lips, and dark wavy hair he left too long on top to be something buttoned-down, like a lawyer or a banker. I didn’t know what color his eyes were, because I’d never seen them. He always wore a pair of dark aviators, even inside the diner. With that kind of screen up, it was impossible to know exactly what his expression was, but I could guess.
     
    It would have been a lot easier to flirt with him if I could have seen his eyes, but I had some other hints he was interested. The first time he sat in my section, he had his face tilted towards me the whole time I took his order. Most people look back at the menu a few times, even if they