“I am so sorry, Mr. Rollins. I’m new. I had no idea who you are. Please don’t fire me.”
Tucker laughed and waved her off, looking a little sheepish. Not only was Leslie gawking at him, but now, several other tables were, as well. It wasn’t a look of recognition, but a look of whether they should recognize him.
“What’s your name? Stephanie? Is that right?” he asked the waitress.
“Ye-yes,” she replied, biting her lip.
“I’m not going to fire you. Don’t worry about it,” he said, pulling his wallet from this pocket and taking back the card. He handed her a twenty-dollar-bill instead.
“Oh. No. Maggie said I couldn’t take your money. She said we don’t charge you for food here.”
“It’s not for the bill, Stephanie. It’s for you. It’s your tip.”
She looked at it doubtfully, glancing toward the woman at the register, who Leslie assumed was Maggie. Maggie wasn’t paying any attention, having turned her attention to someone else.
“It’s okay, Stephanie. Take it. I hope you stay with us for a long time.”
“Thank you, Mr. Rollins,” the girl said, her voice hardly audible.
“Just Tucker will do,” he told her. “I’m going to start asking for you when I come in from now on. Give my regards to Spuds. Tell him I’ll stop by when I have more time to chat him up.”
“Yes, Sir. I mean, I will . . . Tucker.”
“Thanks, Stephanie.”
Leslie was at a loss for words. Why hadn’t he told her he owned the place? She waited until they were in the car again to ask.
“You own the restaurant?”
“I might.”
“You mean, you do.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know. I don’t really think much about it, you know. I’ve owned it since my mid-twenties.”
“Investment?”
“My parents owned it. I inherited it from them.”
“That’s why it has such sentimental value.”
“Yes. We used to go to that restaurant when I was a kid and they loved it. The owner eventually put it up for sale because he had gotten too old to manage it. It needed a lot of work that no one seemed to think was worth the return on investment, so it was going to be closed and possibly destroyed. Mom and Dad couldn’t bear to let it go. They had met there, and Dad had proposed there.”
“Wait. You said you’ve owned it since your mid-twenties, that you inherited it, but your father died only just recently, didn’t he?”
“Yes. He turned it over to me after my mother died. He couldn’t bear to be in it anymore. He stopped eating here and didn’t want anything to do with it.”
“I guess I can understand that. I’m surprised you would want to.”
“I enjoyed the memories in a way my father couldn’t appreciate. I guess it is one thing to lose a parent - I mean, it’s painful - but not like losing the love of your life.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Leslie replied without thinking.
“Me either,” he replied.
She glanced at him and, just for a moment, thought she caught a glimpse of something, but it was lost as they pulled into the parking area at the pack’s club.
“Ready to do this?”
“Yep.”CHAPTER EIGHTEENThere were different processes for selecting a new alpha among packs. In Tucker’s pack, it was customary that the eldest son of the previous Alpha step in as the new leader once his father had passed. Tucker had held no interest in doing so, which is why it had opened up to his brother. Despite being twins, Marshall was the younger of the two by a whole four minutes. Under their rules, that did not automatically make him the new Alpha. Instead, he became so for a trial period before he could be confirmed by the pack.
Tucker stepping back into the picture had created a bit of a change in how they normally did things, so he now followed the same protocol. If Marshall had stayed, they would have been in competition for leadership. Now, he fell back on where his brother had left off, requiring only to be voted in by the pack and confirmed by the council. It was a strange set of rules that sometimes made no sense, even to the people in the pack, but whatever the council said was how it went.
In the end, the process took about an hour. The votes were cast ahead of time, so it was just a matter of counting them. With that done, the council moved to confirm him and he became the new Alpha by unanimous consent. So, he would leave here as the new leader of his wolf pack, but though the individual members of the pack’s vote were private, it was evident that he did not have their full support by the missing members and the number of people who cheered his official announcement. In their minds, Tucker had abandoned them before and that was not something they were likely to let him overcome anytime soon.