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Authors: Lindy Dale

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The Taming of the Bastard

BOOK: The Taming of the Bastard
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THE
TAMING
OF
THE
BASTARD

 

Lindy
Dale

© 2011 Secret
Creek Press

Smashwords
Edition

 

 

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1

 

F
or longer than I could remember, well, at least the
last three years, I’ve had a dream life mapped out in my head. By
the time I was thirty I was going to be living on a tropical island
with water lapping at my feet and a little B & B nestled in the
palm trees behind. I was going to be my own boss. Of course, no one
I told believed I’d ever do it. Most people thought I was the type
of girl who wandered through life looking for something she’d never
find. Most of them thought I was some sort of flighty,
under-achieving ditz. Little did they know that hidden behind my
collection of Pandora beads was a business head like no other.

Okay, I might
be exaggerating a little but I was definitely smarter than they
gave me credit for. I did have a Bachelor degree in Communications.
With honours.

Having skirted
my way around a minefield of professions after graduation—PR Girl,
Personal Assistant and Tupperware Lady, to name a few—I’d come to
the conclusion what I needed was for my life to be pared back.
Simple. Uncomplicated. Anything was preferable to my current life
choice of nanny-slash-waitress at the local German beer house. Yep,
five days a week I chased a set of twins and a six year old round
the house. And two nights a week, and sometimes on Saturdays, I
could be found wearing a natty frilled apron over a red checked
frock. It was never my number one choice as a career path but
rather a means to an end. And with the small inheritance I’d
received it looked as if my dream might become a reality sooner
than even I’d planned. Everything was going swimmingly, in a ditzy,
organic chicken and pilsner kind of way.

Then I met Sam
Brockton.

Hot, sexy, and
utterly bastardly Sam Brockton.

And my life
became something I never thought it would.

*****

 

It was Thursday
evening at
The Lederhosen
and the dining room was packed to
the gills. Our regular gang of businessmen were at their table in
the corner partaking in after work ales. A party of girls sat at
another table in the centre of the room. In a corner of the bar,
three bikies in manky black jackets sat swilling schooners of lager
and Dianne—the bar manager—was polishing glasses while chatting to
them. I was in the servery and Bob, the owner of this classy
establishment, was helping me to prepare garlic bread for a table
near the window. Bob had a habit of popping up during busy periods
on the pretext of lending a hand. I didn’t mind. I knew he was
keeping an eye on me because he thought I was hopeless.

You see, though
my job was easy, I had a habit of becoming distracted by little
things around me and this often led to an annoying trait of mine:
destruction. I was public enemy number one to all manner of
breakable things and a few that were once considered
imperishable.

“Have you met
the new bloke just started working in the front bar, Millie?” Bob
asked, as he stood between the microwave and me, guarding it like
that soggy bit of garlic bread was crown jewels. Bob was still
perplexed as to how, on a previous shift, I’d managed to jam my
fingers in the door of said machine and not realise I was nuking
them. He said it wasn’t that he didn’t trust me with the microwave
anymore but rather didn’t want to have to explain my lack of digits
to the customers. I knew he was trying to spare my feelings. Deep
down, he loved me.

“No,” I
said.

“You two will
get on like a house on fire.”

“How so?”

“He’s hot.
You’re single. I see romance in the air.” Bob paused to slap the
garlic bread into the basket, a little glob of butter splashing
onto his polo shirt. Then, he winked at me in such a way I wondered
what it could be that would make him think such a thing. Did I look
like I had ‘shag me’ tattooed on my forehead? Did I
really
look the type of girl who slept with the any man who smiled at me?
Really
?

Shaking my
head, I wandered off in the direction of table six to deliver the
bread. That comment had been way off base and, well, frankly, a
little hurtful. I hadn’t had a boyfriend in months. Another couple
of weeks and I’d officially be declared a natural disaster, a woman
in the depths of a man drought. And if
anyone
was deserving
of such a rude tag, it was probably Chantelle. Or Donna. And
possibly Dianne. I was pretty sure they had some kind of tally
system going under the timber of the front bar.

Shoving the
thought from my mind, I put the baskets of bread down on the table
and turned back to the servery. I remember it exactly because it
was the precise moment the double doors at the end of the dining
room flung open, like a scene from an old fashioned western
movie.

A masculine
form filled the space.

It was
tall.

It had
shoulders the size of a small European country.

And for reasons
even Helen Keller could see, I suddenly realised what Bob had
meant. I’d definitely shag that given half a chance. I might even
do it on the first date. Naughty me.

The figure
paused inside the doorframe and perused the scene before him. A
boyish grin spread across his face, revealing a dimple in his
cheek. Oceanic eyes twinkled with bad boy mischief. Though I tried
not to, I fully checked him out as I collected a heap of dirty
plates and walked back to my station, a doleful sigh escaping my
lips.

It had to be
the new guy.

Nobody else who
worked at
The Lederhosen
looked like
that
. In fact,
the majority of men I worked with were the product of one too many
German sausages with extra sauerkraut.

This guy was
sex on legs.

So much so,
that as I stared while trying to look like I wasn’t, I lurched full
frontal into one of the pillars that had been strategically placed
for just such a moment. My carefully constructed tower of dishes
flew into the air and fell with a clatter to their death. Left over
bolognaise sauce stained the carpet. I tumbled to the ground,
landing right in the centre of the mess.

It was a moment
frozen in time.

And not a good
one.

Ignoring the
stunned silence from the men beside me and the tittering from the
group of girls, I wiped the splodges of tomato sauce from my bottom
and rolled to my knees. Tears of mortification stung my eyes. The
whole place had seen me fall and not one of them was offering
assistance. They merely sat with their mouths open. Well, except
for the new guy. He was laughing so hard he was drowning out the
mood music.

Bob appeared,
handing me a sponge and a bucket of soapy water. “That’ll have to
come out of your pay, Millie,” he grumbled and stacked the broken
china into plastic crate. “I can’t afford for you to keep doing
this. You’re a one woman demolition team.”

“Sorry Bob.” I
didn’t bother to add anything further, there was no point; his face
was that frightening shade of puce that could not be put right with
words. Besides, it was all that new guy’s fault. A girl needed
protective glasses to look at him.

*****

 

A few nights
later, keeping my nose to the grindstone and out of Bob’s way, I
was polishing forks when the new guy came in. As if it happened
every day, he ignored the crowd that parted before him like the Red
Sea and made his way across the room. Determined, I held my breath
and kept my eyes on my work. I was not going to be led astray by
his shoulders again. I had to keep my job.

“Here he
comes,” whispered Alex. “Oh my... he’s way hotter than Chantelle
said.” She flicked her blackened locks over her shoulder and pushed
out her ample Greek bosom. I think it had been a while between
drinks for her, too.


Hmph
,”
I snorted in reply.

“Do you know
his name?” she whispered.

New guy was
getting closer. He must have known we were talking about him; he
had that cheeky grin on his face. The one that looked like it could
persuade women to sleep with him even if they preferred women.


Smug
Face
?”

“Be
serious.”


I’m Too
Sexy For This Bar
?”

Alex gave me a
look. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

I was about to
ask her the same thing. She was behaving like she’d never seen a
man before.

New guy waltzed
up to where we were standing, looking like a walking shagfest. His
mohair jumper, just a tad too fitted for fashionable, showed off
his body a treat and his sooty hair, sexily unkempt, added to his
hot guy persona. Even the stubble was sprinkled to perfection
across his jawline. He rested his large, smooth hands on the
counter. A little tuft of mohair wafted from his jumper and landed
on Alex’s cleavage. “Hi.”

Alex was
mute.

“Has my dinner
arrived yet?—”

Mesmerised,
Alex let out an audible whimper. I slunk into my tea towel and
tried to pretend he wasn’t there. His presence was making me dizzy.
I couldn’t acknowledge him. It would be so weak; perving like
everyone else. It would go against everything I’d ever said about
looks not being everything, the person inside being the most
important and all that.

“My dinner?” he
asked again. “I’ve only got a fifteen minute break.”

“Um...er,
yeah.” I swallowed, taking his fish from the dumb waiter and
handing it to him. Our fingertips collided on the edge of the plate
and I ripped my hand away, curling and uncurling it behind my back
as lightning bolts surged up my arm and my brain registered signals
it hadn’t felt in quite some time. Flustered, I gave him a hint of
a smile. Surely, he’d sensed it too?

“Thanks.” He
whisked the cutlery from the counter. With a wink at Alex, he
disappeared to the front bar.

What the?

I was
bewildered. Why had he looked straight through me then practically
tickled Alex’s cheek? Surely, he’d felt the chemistry? Where was my
flash of smile?

We watched him
leave and I prised Alex’s fingers from my arm. I handed her an
order book. There was no point in drooling. He had no interest in
us. We were waitresses. “Go take the order at table three.”

“It’s not just
me, is it?” she asked, as I propelled her out into the sea of beer
steins and schnitzels, “He is the hottest thing you’ve ever seen,
isn’t he?”

Hot enough to
get well and truly burned, I’d say.

“He’s cute but
he didn’t even have the decency to introduce himself.” Not that he
needed to. We all knew who he was. Even after a week on the job,
the gossip was rife.

“Maybe he’s
shy?”

“Well, I
thought he was rude. Smug and rude.” And that was my defence,
feeble as it was. I ask you…what hope did I have?

 


2

For the next
couple of weeks I watched New Guy—now christened Sam courtesy of
Chantelle who’d been the only one game enough to ask him his
name—with the eyes of a hawk, while pretending to do my work. I was
mystified by the assumption everyone had that he was irresistible.
Yes, he was hot and his charisma was enormous but from what I’d
witnessed, so was his ego. He swanned around the bar, flirting with
customers and staff alike, basking in his own magnetism. He didn’t
do one scrap of work. Yet, in the eyes of my colleagues, he could
do no wrong.

During this
time, I discovered two very important things. Firstly, and most
distressingly, I was attracted to Sam’s cockiness. It was sort of
refreshing that he laughed when everyone else was grumbling, that
he never stressed over the little things. He didn’t even lose it
when Dianne exploded a beer keg over his shirt and he slipped on
the slate floor of the bar, landing on his bum.

Sam was the
exact opposite to the buttoned up professional types I favoured
under normal circumstances. He wasn’t depressed or overworked. He
didn’t listen to gossip about people because he was too busy making
fun of everything. And, despite the fact that he took the piss out
of us on a daily basis, everyone still liked him.

BOOK: The Taming of the Bastard
11.85Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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