Where Loyalty Lies Read Free Page B

Through the glass window at the front of the café, I could see Lisa behind the counter taking orders from the customers who wanted their fry-ups before starting their working days.
    Lisa looked exactly like a cafe manager should look; slightly too large to be called “curvy” and with a worn-down attitude that made her civil but not overly friendly. Her mousy brown hair was, as always, pulled back in a ponytail and, despite it being only quarter past seven in the morning, her white apron already had black smudges on it.
    A frown and slight puckering of her lips was the only acknowledgement she gave of my lateness. I put on my own white apron and set about filling plates and delivering them to tables. The smells of sausage, eggs and bacon filled my nose and made my stomach lurch. Any other time of day, I’d be longing to join the customers and dig in, but I could never eat before nine. 
    For a couple of hours we were rushed off our feet until ten when we slowed to a steady trickle that would take us up to lunch when we’d be busy again.
    When I had time between cooking food, serving customers, washing up and wiping tables, I found other duties to fill my time, hoping that doing jobs that weren’t technically mine would make up for my being late. Again.
    That was the trouble with doing two jobs; I was always so tired that I was constantly running late. I worked at the cafe from seven until three and then I went home and crashed for a couple of hours so that I could go to my second job at a pub from six until midnight. Both jobs paid the minimum wage so it would have made more sense for me to find a normal nine-to-five job with decent pay, but it was impossible to get one of those that paid cash-in-hand and didn’t need a contract.
    Just before lunch I ran out of things to do and I leant up against the counter, trying to rest my feet before the rush.
    “You’ll do yourself in, if you keep burning the candle at both ends,” Lisa said from where she was perched on a stool behind the till. She gave me a studying look from over the top of her romance novel.
    I smiled. I never told Lisa that the reason I was always so knackered was because I had two jobs. For some reason, I thought she would be less tolerant of my lateness if she knew it was because I was working elsewhere rather than going out partying like twenty-one year-olds were supposed to do.
    “If I don’t do it now, I never will,” I said. Lisa gave a non-committal shrug and went back to her steamy fantasy.
    “Another stable boy?” I asked, studying the shirtless blonde guy straddling a bale of straw on the front cover of Lisa’s book. The look on his face said, “Sitting in this position shows off all my muscles and don’t I just know it” .
    “Actually he’s the only son of the wealthy Baron Von Smythe in South Carolina and he’s fallen in love with the eldest daughter of one of the local fishermen who’s struggling to feed his family because the Baron’s shipping business is over-running the dockyard.”
    I looked at the girl on the front cover and snorted, “Well, that explains why she can only afford to cover herself with a scrap of cloth.”
    Lisa studied the cover for a few seconds before shrugging again. “If I had a body like that, then I’d be tempted to only wear a scrap of cloth myself.”
    An image of an almost naked Lisa, draped over the lap of the wealthy Baron Boy, threatened to invade my mind and I quickly changed the topic before I couldn’t look her in the eyes without blushing.
    “I don’t know why you read that crap. I mean, surely it gets boring reading what’s essentially just the same plot-line over and over again, just with different people? Boy meets girl from a different class, they fall in love despite knowing that it’s against society’s rules and then, when said society does find out and do what they can to tear the couple apart, it just pushes the couple closer together because they know that, as long as they