Even if the girls hadn’t shown up, I probably wouldn’t have gotten much sleep. The siren call of the real estate program still beckoned me, but the massive pile of debt always smacked it down. The stack of mail stared at me from the counter. I was far behind.
In more ways than one.
Sweet heaven, but I needed an employee who would stick around.
Shoving that thought aside, I stepped into the storage room to grab more lids. When I returned, Maverick stood at the counter, taking all the air as he peered out the drive-through window. He looked at me as if untangling his thoughts.
Making my tone nonchalant was no simple feat. “Hey. Meetings go well?”
“As well as can be expected. Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
The deep register of his voice was easygoing, but I still felt myself tense. I kept the counter between us. The intensity of his gaze weakened my knees.
“Sure.”
“Do you have an operations manual?”
“A what?”
“An operations manual.”
“What’s that?”
A quick grin flashed across his face. “I’ll take that as a no.”
I glanced toward the back, mumbling the words operations manual under my breath. Dad kept a binder full of odds and ends in the storage room. Warranties. Random notes he took. Phone numbers scribbled with a name but no indication who the person was. That was Dad. He knew everyone, and everyone knew him, but give him a task with details and he was lost. The fact that I’d made it to eighteen was a literal miracle.
“I might,” I drawled. “But if I do, I have no idea where it is.”
He seemed to consider that. “Your employee who left the other day. How did you train him?”
“Myself. I showed him how to run everything. Real-time training.” My shoulders straightened. “One-on-one.”
That’s the sort of excellent service you get here, I almost said, then recalled the dry scone and water bottle on the day we met and thought better of it.
“What would he have done if he had a question while you were gone?” he asked.
I blinked. The question didn’t make sense because it had no grounding in reality. “I’m rarely gone during open hours.”
His eyebrows rose. “You live here?”
“Upstairs.”
He took that in smoothly, but wheels turned in his head. Should I have told him that? He didn’t strike me as the creepy type. Not that I’d mind him prowling around more often. My cheeks heated, but his gaze had dropped to the stack of letters next to the cash register. I stepped toward them, but kept from shoving them out of sight by sheer willpower.
“Interesting,” he murmured, with that same shrewd gaze. “And what would happen to this place if you were hospitalized?”
“Hospitalized? That’s a bit macabre.”
“Is it?”
Unnerved, I said, “It would remain closed.”
“And your debt?”
“It would wait.”
He lifted his brow. “Would it?”
“What is this?” I snapped. Considering that my father had died of a heart attack, perhaps I should have asked these questions already. But I hadn’t because I was just trying to stay afloat enough to keep Dad’s dream alive and find mine again. I eyed him with deep skepticism. “Are you an insurance salesman or something?”
He huffed a laugh. “Definitely not that. Who runs your accounts?”
“Like my bookkeeping?”
“Yes.”
“Me.”
“You do everything?”
I nodded proudly. “My dad taught me. Or I just figured it out. Mostly that.”
My cheeks burned. Did that sound as juvenile to him as it did to me?
“Any reason for the third degree?” I asked as I tied my apron more firmly around my waist. I smoothed wrinkles that didn’t exist. His gaze followed the movement, then skated away. The five o’clock shadow that he’d walked in here with the other day had grown into an early beard, filling the angled hollows of his cheeks. He looked darkly grizzled now.
Enough to set my stomach on fire.
“Yes, actually. There is a reason for my questions. I’m in Pineville because I’m considering a new business. It revolves mostly around taking failing brick-and-mortar stores and turning them into successes.”
My spine tightened like a stack of dominoes with a string. Failing? Okay, he wasn’t wrong. But he didn’t have to be so right, either.
“Oh?”
He flashed another quick smile, but something lingered beneath it. Something solid. Stern, but charming in itself. It reminded me of Dad. I didn’t like that at all.
“We can both pretend that this place isn’t on the brink of disaster. Or we can face the obvious situation for what it is.”
My courage returned on swift feet. “You have some balls to walk in here and say that.”
“Because it’s true?”
“You don’t know anything about my coffee shop.”
“I can guess.”
“Try me,” I snapped.
One side of his lips lifted up in a smirk. “Fine,” he murmured. “I will. You have credit card debt, and it’s piling up. I’m willing to bet you’re almost maxed out, but not quite. You make enough to satisfy the minimum payment, but the balance is starting to get to you. Soon, you won’t be able to do even that.”
My palms started to sweat, but I kept them balled up at my side. He continued easily, as if he’d glimpsed into my life with binoculars.
“You still have business overhead you have to deal with, like rent and supplies. You don’t have an actual accounting system, so you can’t tell me if you’re hitting any growth, and I’d wager you wouldn’t know what KPI stood for if I bet you on it.”
My nostrils flared.
“On top of that, I’m also willing to bet that wasn’t the first employee you’ve lost. You give them a crash course on the store and then leave them to it for a test run, but you have no system set up for them to make decisions. They fail every time. When it comes to supplies, you’re guessing at what you need when you order inventory instead of doing regular audits and budget checks.”
“Wrong,” I said coldly. “We have a great system for new orders.”
Didn’t, because it had more holes than a sponge, but I couldn’t drown here. My system was very much tilt-my-head-and-make-an-educated-guess.
He quirked an eyebrow but still seemed skeptical. “Point taken. One thing in your favor. In the end, you have almost no cash flow, you don’t take home a paycheck, and you’re barely scraping by. You live and breathe this business. You’re starting to hate and resent it. Your own dreams and aspirations are getting sunk into this black hole, and you’re starting to forget what even makes you happy. You’re tethered, drowning, and have no idea how to get out. Is this sounding familiar?”
Oh, he made me want to hiss like a cat. If there was one thing I couldn’t stand, it was bullying and pressure. In particular, when there were notes of truth in it. So many of them, too.
And . . . it wasn’t exactly bullying, because he was totally, dead-on correct.
For several seconds, I stood there, debating how to handle my response. Then the bell on the door rang, announcing another customer. I glared at him.