B is for Barista (The ABCs of Love Book 2) Read online

  “We, the faithful employees, are supposed to be part of that message. We’re supposed to cultivate a certain look. And that,” she said, pointing to his shirt, his pants, his hair, “is not the look.”

  He looked down the length of his front. “Are you insulting me?” He didn’t look upset. Only interested.

  She leaned close and beckoned him to come nearer. “If I were insulting you, you wouldn’t have to ask. But no. I’m offering to help you get on brand.”

  “Oh.” He put his hands in his pockets and rocked on his heels. It was the most relaxed he’d looked since he walked in. “Thanks, I guess.” He looked around, taking in the dark walls, the posters, the funky furniture. Possibly wondering if he could ever, in a million years, get on brand. She wondered the same.

  Ivy shook her head. “Don’t thank me until you see if this works,” she said. “But I’m guessing it’ll work.”

  He continued to look around as she studied him from a few angles. Looking everywhere but at her. Nervous. Uncomfortable being examined.

  She nodded, her inspection complete. “All right. Unbutton a couple of those,” she said, gesturing to the neck of his shirt. “And untuck.”

  If he wasn’t actually shocked, he did look distinctly awkward. “Um,” he began.

  She shook her head. “Don’t worry. You can do it. Baby steps.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, if you’re going to fit in with this whole image,” she waved to the space over their heads, “you’re going to have to make a couple of little changes. Nothing drastic. Loosen up. Tell your drycleaner to lighten up the starch. Pierce your eyebrow. Undereye teardrop tattoo. That’s it.”

  Now he looked shocked.

  Ivy was enjoying this, but maybe she was pushing too hard. She reached for his wrist and rolled his sleeve up to his elbow. “Face tattoos and piercings optional,” she said, enjoying watching his posture spring between uptight and defensive.

  “Okay, Bentley,” she said, enjoying the sound of his name in her mouth, “you’re already about forty percent improved.”

  He smiled, and somehow the smile reflected the slightly more relaxed, untucked vibe. “Forty percent? Not bad. Can’t complain about that kind of improvement in what, a minute and a half?”

  “I mean, I guess you could,” Ivy said. “Some people will complain about anything.”

  She made a turn-around sign with her fingers.

  He obeyed and did a slow spin in front of the counter.

  “Should I have one of those T-shirts?” he asked, pointing to the merchandise behind the counter.

  Ivy shrugged. “You don’t need it. It’s not a uniform or anything. Honestly, though, when you come in here next time, you should probably tone down the business wear.” She gestured to his shirt.

  He nodded. “Okay. Something more casual would be better?”

  “Definitely.”

  He looked around. “Should I dress more like you?”

  Ivy looked down at her black tights under a lace-trimmed skirt, her vintage oxblood Doc Martin’s, and her leather cuff bracelets.

  “That would be very strange,” she said, laughing. Right away she worried she’d offended him. “It’s not as if your look is all wrong. Just a little bit wrong for working here. Totally right for, I don’t know, brokering stocks or something. Do you by any chance,” she asked, leaning closer to him and lowering her voice, “have a master’s degree in business or finance?”

  He leaned in. “How many master’s degrees in business or finance does it take to learn to make a cup of coffee?” His eyes, dark brown and rimmed with thick, dark lashes, connected with hers.

  She may have stood there staring back into his eyes for hours before she shook herself free from her reverie.

  “Speaking of learning to make coffee, I should teach you how to make the coffee.”

  He shook his head. “I actually know how. And I’m very familiar with the menu here. I think if I can shadow you for a few hours, I’ll be ready to go.” His faced took on a new, nervously hopeful look. “But can you help me look right? I mean, for the shop?”

  “It just so happens,” Ivy said, “that makeovers are my second favorite thing.”

  He grinned at her, and with his loosened-up collar, he looked significantly more relaxed and less intimidating. “Second favorite? What’s first?”

  She rolled her eyes. “That is a very personal question, sir.” She put her hands up to her head and shook them around, tousling her dark hair. “Do this,” she said.

  He looked concerned.

  “Not to me. Do this to your hair.”

  He wasn’t convinced. “Mess it up?”

  “Loosen it up,” she corrected.

  He tried.

  She sighed and motioned him to lean down. Putting her hands in his hair, she attempted not to notice how nice he smelled. Or how closely they were standing to each other. Or how he was looking at her with complete trust. She finger-combed his hair forward from its product-assisted perfection. It stood up in strange and improbable directions.

  “Nope,” Ivy said.

  Bentley looked worried.

  “Never fear,” she said, reaching under the counter to her purse. She pulled out her favorite cotton-knit beanie that Grammy had made her and tossed it to him. “Put that on. Oh, and these,” she said, reaching into the lost and found bin, which was also on a shelf under the counter. She pulled out a pair of plastic-rimmed glasses and rubbed them on her apron. “I checked the day they showed up—no prescription.” She grinned. “They were made for looking cool.” Handing them over, she stood and waited.

  He settled the glasses on his face and turned to her.

  “Well?” he asked, a small, insecure smile on his face.

  “Wow.” Had she said that aloud? She cleared her throat, but it didn’t fix the feeling that she was breathing through a damp towel. “You look completely different.”

  He hesitated. “Different than you expected?”

  She shook her head. “Different than before. Better.” She noticed him wince at her words and realized what it sounded like. She scrambled to take them back. “I mean, better suited to sell coffee. More approachable. More like a normal person. Less like a boss. Ten minutes ago, you could have been Titus Cameron himself. Now you look like a real guy.”

  He laughed. “I could have been Titus Cameron? Is that true?”

  With a shrug, Ivy turned her back to him but kept talking as she reached to replace a towel that didn’t need replacing. “How much of anything that happens here is true?” she asked. “Every carefully placed decoration, every one-of-a-kind item that’s really an exact copy, every independent and original interaction is scripted to fool customers into believing that they’re having a hip, unique experience.”

  She could see his posture change. His arms straightened against the counter, increasing the space between them. “Wow. You really hate this?”

  She turned back and leaned across the counter again. “No. I like working here. I told you. Coffee’s good. Pastries are nearly perfect. Great music on the loop. It pays the rent. I get to meet all kinds of interesting people. I’m just not a big fan of the hypocrisy.”

  He looked uncomfortable. “I don’t get it.”

  Shaking her head, Ivy said, “Forget it. Sorry. There are moments when the whole idea of Velvet and Mr. Titus Cameron, wonder-boy creator of the perfect franchise, just makes me tired.”

  He stood at the counter blinking.

  “Hey,” Ivy said. “Sorry to get all existential-crisis on you. This is a great job, really, and if you never wander into another Velvet Undergrounds shop, you’ll even be able to believe in all this.” She motioned to the air around their heads. “Meanwhile, as long as you’re working, coffee will be free.”

  She smiled but felt the tension in the air, and she wondered again why she always felt the need to say what she was thinking. Making this encounter awkward was not in her plan, but she could tell she’d said too much. H
er commentary on the shop had made him uncomfortable.

  She’d make it up to him. She’d offer to create the schedule for the next couple of weeks so he could avoid working with Old Betty.

  He could do all his shifts with Ivy. It was the least she could do. She smiled to herself.

  Hearing the bell, she turned to welcome the next customer. Smiling at Bentley, she said, “Ready? Let’s do this.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Walking to the car, Bentley played those last few hours with Ivy over and over in his head. How she’d reached for his arm to roll up his sleeves. He wondered if she’d felt the spark of electricity he’d noticed when they touched. The way she’d smiled. How she’d flipped her chin-length black hair behind her ear, giving him a peek of the underlying deep purple dye. How easy it was to laugh with her. The way she’d talked to him like any other coworker.

  It had been a long time since anyone had treated him like any other coworker. In fact, his first jobs had been for his father’s hotels, and even though he’d started in housekeeping, grounds crew, and mailroom jobs, everyone knew he was a Hollis. He’d always been looked at differently. He’d always been treated like he was untouchable.

  Until today.

  Until Ivy. He smiled at the memory of her hands on his arms, how their fingers had grazed over cups of coffee.

  Not to mention the part where she reached up and touched his hair. He put his hand to his head and realized that he was still wearing her beanie. Thinking about seeing her again to give it back made him smile.

  But in remembering the pleasant pieces of the afternoon, he also remembered the sting of hearing her spit out the words “Mr. Titus Cameron,” like it was the name of an infectious disease. It was hard to maintain upright posture after a hit like that. He didn’t need to ask. Ivy the coffee girl despised Titus Cameron, the inventor of the Velvet Undergrounds franchise.

  It felt personal.

  Because it was personal.

  Not that she’d ever know that. Bentley, along with everyone else who knew that Bentley had created both the Velvet Undergrounds franchise and Titus Cameron, was under strict legal contract to say nothing about it.

  He clicked the unlock button on his Tesla and slid in behind the wheel. He didn’t even have time to start the car before Lexus called.

  He picked up on the first ring. “Hey.” He switched on the car and cranked the air conditioning.

  His sister’s voice came through his phone. “So? How did it go?”

  He laughed into the phone, even though he wasn’t all that amused. “You were sitting right there, so you tell me. How did it look?”

  “I’d say you’ve got a ninety percent chance of success with the coffee girl.” Her voice sounded bored, possibly contemptuous. As usual.

  “You’re not still inside, are you?” Bentley wouldn’t put it past his sister to talk about Ivy while she sat on a couch fifteen feet from Ivy. That was so Lex.

  She sighed. “No worries. I walked out a minute after you did. Good frozen hot chocolate, by the way. Just like Mom used to make.”

  He grunted. “Which one did you get?”

  “Sonic Youth. Very clever name.” Her bored voice took on a small sliver of humor.

  “You would say that. You named it.”

  Now her silvery laugh rang through his phone. “I did a very fine job with this one.”

  Bentley grunted again.

  “What?” Lex asked.

  With an almost-dramatic sigh, Bentley said, “She hates me.”

  “Untrue.”

  “Unfortunately, totally true.” He rubbed the back of his neck.

  “She touched your shirt. She touched your hair. Not at all sanitary, by the way. She leaned in.” Lexus sounded like she planned to keep listing ways that Ivy appeared attracted. Not the point.

  He rested his head on the steering wheel. “She kind of liked Bentley, I think. She liked the idea of me, anyway. Kind of a fixer-upper.”

  It wasn’t until he said the words that he wondered if she was the kind of woman who was on the lookout for someone to change. He’d lived through that a couple of times, and he wasn’t sure he’d like it more at Ivy’s hand than he’d liked it before. But somehow, her changes had felt constructive. Helpful.

  Lex made a dismissive sound. “She definitely wanted to change you. You looked like a tool in that hat, by the way.”

  He reached up and touched the hat again. It was soft as anything he’d ever felt. “I looked like a barista,” he corrected. “But you should have heard her say Titus. Pure venom.”

  She let out an exasperated breath through the phone. “You brought up Titus? You’re supposed to keep that on the down-low.”

  He hated the way his voice rose when he was feeling defensive. “I didn’t bring him up. She did. She has all kinds of opinions about the ethics of irony.”

  “That is not a thing.” Lex’s bored voice was back.

  He leaned his head against the back of his seat. “She said Titus and it sounded like poison. She hates him. Me. Whatever.”

  “Maybe she wasn’t saying Titus at all. Sounds like typhus, which, when you think about it is kind of the same thing as poison.”

  He laughed in spite of himself.

  “I’m here. Open up.” She tapped her fingernails against the car window.

  Bentley hit the unlock and his sister slid into the passenger seat. She adjusted the air vents to blow through her perfectly-styled blond hair. He slid his phone into his shirt pocket.

  She took one look at him and shook her head. “Don’t fall to pieces. This is the part you breathe through. You’ve made your first contact. You walked inside one of your stores for the first time as your own employee. Day one of sixty. You can do this.”

  Lex, for all her visible perfections and manufactured coolness, was very good at helping him find his confidence. She always had been.

  He’d heard her tell him he could do this for years; more specifically for the past two and a half years. There were days he believed her.

  He’d believed her on the day he presented his grad school capstone project: a chain store that snubbed the idea of chain stores. A hipster’s delight.

  He’d believed her when she said he could do it on the day he created a board of directors to be the face of the company. A board borrowed liberally from his father’s existing corporations; one made up of men and women who had been successful longer than Bentley had been alive.

  He believed on the day he announced that all credit for creation of the Velvet Undergrounds would go to a fictional guy called Titus Cameron, would-be punk band star, now creator of the best coffee shops in the city.

  He believed Lexus when she told him he could do it on the day their father made his deal: That Bentley would go work at his own coffee house as a normal employee. If he could handle two months of part-time barista work, he would obtain majority control of the corporation. Walter Hollis assured him that he believed in Bentley’s business abilities; now he needed to see that Bentley understood the company from the ground up. Or the grounds up, as it were.

  Walter Hollis thought he was so funny.

  But Bentley understood his father’s reasoning. His dad had told him all his life that working from the bottom up had made Walter the man he was today. Walter hadn’t inherited his money; he’d created it through hard work and a sharp mind. His first hotel was a tiny bed and breakfast. From his humble beginnings, Walter’s business had soared upward—literally. He’d built his high-rise hotel franchise from practically nothing, and he’d become one of the most wealthy, successful, and well-respected businessmen in the United States. Bentley knew he was also one of the most functional human beings: happily married, successfully retired, and gladly watching over his various business ventures from boardrooms and golf courses.

  Bentley stretched his arms over the steering wheel and then readjusted the air vent so it pointed directly into his face. Then he turned to Lex. “Thanks for being in there with me,” he said. “I
t helped knowing you were there.”

  “It’s completely adorable how nervous you are,” she said, petting his shoulder. “But this is just silly.” She pulled the beanie off his head and tossed it in the back seat.

  He glanced in the mirror to see where it landed. “Don’t lose that. I need to recreate this look tomorrow.”

  Lex squeezed the back of his neck. “Or you could let barista girl do it for you. She looked willing.”

  “She has a name. Ivy. And Ivy was being nice,” Bentley said. But as he thought about it, nice wasn’t really the word. What, he wondered, was the word?

  She was cool and complicated, funny, a little edgy, and a tiny bit scary. She looked nice, though, he thought, remembering her striking green eyes and that funky dyed hair. And her mouth that moved in subtle and quirky ways. He definitely thought her mouth looked nice.

  He liked the way she looked completely different from any of the women in his life: from his sisters with their careless elegance that somehow belonged to them and to all their friends, an appearance that might seem subtle, but always carried the understanding of wealth; from his college girlfriends who each fit into the same physical mold; from his mom with her constant attempts to reverse time and gravity. Ivy didn’t have any of that. Her chin-length black-and-purple hair, her retro boots, her piercings, her punk-rock eye makeup all sent a message that her smile contradicted. Everything in her image that said she didn’t care was something she manufactured, something she added. The smile that danced in her eyes? That was obviously original Ivy material.

  Bentley suddenly came to attention and realized that he was smiling. Lex watched him with a half-grin on her face. He cleared his throat and put the car in gear.

  Lexus clicked her seatbelt. “Benny, are you by any chance falling for the coffee shop girl? Because that would make this whole experience about a thousand times more sellable.” In all of Lex’s conversations, she never forgot her job as Titus Cameron’s public relations director. She took her job curating the company’s image very seriously. She slid her Dolce and Gabbana sunglasses onto her face and pointed down the street. “Time to meet Daddy and the board,” she said, as if he’d forgotten.