Principal Daddy Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  Letter From The Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  #

  Principal Daddy

  S. L. Finlay

  Copyright © 2019 S. L. Finlay

  All rights reserved.

  Dear Reader,

  I hope you enjoy Principal Daddy, the second book in the Australian-based series where everybody's got a secret, the Emerald Creek series. All books in the series can be read as a standalone novel and have a happily ever after, so don't worry, you can go on and read this even if you haven't read the first book. But, before you go, I have something for you!

  To hear more from the author including updates on new book releases for this series and other books by the same author, in addition to news and giveaways, and a variety of other things I don't talk about anywhere else, please sign up for the newsletter by clicking here.

  Until next time - happy reading!

  S. L. Finlay

  (March, 2019).

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was a normal, boring day in Emerald Creek. One of a string of normal, boring days in Emerald Creek, which felt like they went back forever. It's a wonderful place to live and to raise a child, but it's not always the most exciting place when your time is divided between raising said child, and working to support yourself and said child. Routine is the killer of fun.

  I'd dropped my son off for school, as was my normal routine on a Thursday morning, and had gone in to work. The manager of the best cafe in town - or at least that's what I told myself, they were all fairly decent cafes in town. Melbourne has the best cafe's ever! - I always had busy mornings as the other school mums dropped by for coffee on their way from the school back home or from the school to their daily errands, or even for the ones that worked and had bosses who were good about them having to do the school drop off and coming in a little late.

  I would need to get the coffee machine started and throw down a few chairs before the school mums appeared. Then I'd be rushing around making them coffee and chatting to them about school business while trying to get the rest of the cafe ready for the days business unable to take a breath really until well after ten thirty.

  It was a big cafe, and the owner didn't really care about what happened in the business. The owner barely cared that the business was solvent. But, even when the business was doing well, the owner didn't want to put any extra people to work in the business. As a result of not having enough help I was constantly run off my feet and tired. At the end of the day when my son came home and wanted to play outside, I just wanted to curl up and sleep. My weeks were so long that by the time they were ended, I would need to be reminded of how they even started.

  On this particular Thursday, it was twenty to eleven when I finally got a chance to relax a bit after the morning rush. Today, I had finally been allowed to get the staff member who would act as my extra help throughout the day. My extra help would start at the end of the morning rush. Small wins from the side of getting extra help, but they felt pretty big.

  Sophie, the timid dark haired school lever who I had been allowed to hire - my first hire! - started her shift at ten thirty by taking over orders and coffee making while I threw down more chairs in the large cafe and got the log fire started. We had heating, but the fire was popular. Especially with lunch diners. Getting it started now would mean we'd have a nice little fire by lunch time.

  I pottered around, getting everything ready and slowly saw the morning rush dying down. That was until eleven o'clock, when Sophie and I were getting things ready for lunch at a leisurely pace.

  "Thanks for the extra half hour!" Sophie said, far too willing to please in exchange for helping make my life easier. Sometimes I would feel bad about that, but mostly I just smiled.

  "No problem." I told her, wiping down a table as we chatted. "It's good to have you in earlier. I need all the help I can get."

  "Yeah. It's hectic!" Sophie remarked in the charming way only a teenager can, with eyes wide and face telling you that this was the worst. Even when it really wasn't that bad. Morning rushes are pretty routine for a place serving coffee - the life blood of any town or suburb.

  "You can stay for the whole shift?" I asked and she nodded her head, eyes still wide, this time to emphasize a point though.

  "Good." I said, smiling. This was Sophie's first job since leaving school, so I had to teach her everything fresh. Which wasn't so bad, because she was easy to manage and so amenable to taking on anything I said in my training.

  I was going to train her on how to use the grill when in walked the school principal for the primary school which stood around the corner from the cafe. Rick Calder was a tall, broad-shouldered man with dark hair, hazel eyes and teeth that were just crooked enough to make his smile cute. I always felt like those crooked smiles were the reason why he was so much more formal in his job than previous principals, wearing suits every day and carrying himself with the air of a man who felt the weight of his responsibilities and took them very seriously. Oh, and he was deadly sexy, too! Even if he was in work mode most of the time when I saw him.

  "Oh, hi Rick!" I called, walking around the little counter so I could take his order. "How are you?"

  "Yeah, good thanks Yasmin." He said, a broad grin on his face. "Busy day?"

  "Busy morning!" I said, exaggerating how busy my morning had been with my face and he let out a chuckle.

  "You are a hard working woman, Yasmin." He told me.

  "Yeah, tell me about it! I didn't really stop until Sophie came in to help out!" I told him, motioning towards where Sophie stood immobile near the two of us, a small, awkward smile on her face as she looked on.

  "Hello Mr. Calder!" She called, her voice too formal. I could feel the smirk arriving at my lips from the times he had come in in this past week or so when I was training Sophie before her first official shift today. It wasn't so long ago that she was in primary school and he had been a teacher, I remembered from what she had told me the first time he had come in. She was only sixteen and he had been her grade six teacher before he was promoted the following year. He had only been principal for a few years, and that hadn't quite sunk in for her yet, much less the fact that as much as he wasn't a teacher anymore, he also wasn't her teacher anymore.

  "Hello Sophie. How are you doing?" He asked, his smile sweet and paternal. I loved that smile, it made me melt just a little bit to see him being sweet with kids.

  "Good, Mr. Calder." She told him, "Yasmin was just going to teach me something new."

  "Were you?" He turned to ask me, his eyebrows raised. I could feel his humor and let out a little chuckle.

  "I was just going to teach Sophie how to use the grill. This is her first job, she has never worked anywhere before, much less a place like this. She has to be trained on everything." I told him with a smile.

  "Good." He agreed, "she will be safer that way."

  "Yes, well, that's what I was hoping." I told him, remembering all the injuries I had gotten working in this same kitchen over the years since my son's birth. People might not think it's a dangerous place to work, a cafe, but with all those sharp knives flying around, and hot coffee and tea, you can burn or cut yourself, in addition to a bunch of other injuries from lifting things
or slipping over. Kitchens are death traps, really.

  "Are you coming to Sara's going away?" I asked, unsure what else I could ask and wanting to keep the conversation flowing. I felt awkward saying much else in front of the young Sophie anyway.

  "I should be there, yes." He told me, "I've known her a few years, and she lives right near the school. So I'll go see her off."

  "She's only going for a year, I'm sure she wouldn't mind if you had something else on or-" I began but he cut me off.

  "-Oh no, I will be there." He told me, "Of course."

  "Cool." I said, nodding and trying to keep my face impartial. "It'll be good to see you, you know, outside of my work." I finished the sentence there, but inside my own mind I was thinking, 'outside of my work, where I'm not allowed to kiss or touch you, let alone be bent over one of these tables by you and receive a sound spanking like the naughty girl I am.' But I told myself that even if I didn't say it, he would sense it.

  "Good stuff." He said before asking, "could I order a coffee?"

  "Sure. The usual?" I asked and he nodded.

  I nodded right back before telling Sophie, who had been watching us intently up until that point, "could you make a flat white for Mr. C- I mean, Rick."

  "Sure." She said, happy at being trusted with a task. She floated behind me and started making the coffee, her movements much less expert than my own at doing the same job. As she took far too long to make the coffee just as I knew she would, I chatted to Rick.

  "How have things been for you today?" I asked. Rick came in every day, sometimes multiple times, and his answers would rarely change, but I had no idea what to ask him about beyond his work.

  "Yeah. Good." He told me, "plenty of paperwork, but no kids being sent to my office." He told me.

  "I'm glad. Would hate to have you come in here and tell me one day that you'd seen my son that morning over something he'd done." I told him.

  "I'm sure I'll never see your son in my office, Yasmin." He told me.

  "No?" I asked, even though I knew he was right. My son was a very well behaved boy.

  "Of course not!" He laughed, "he's a good boy, just like his mother." He told me and my eyes widened just enough, and I took control of that blank look I had cultivated for his visits for just long enough to let on. To tell him that perhaps I am not the good girl he thinks I am. I suppressed the urge.

  Then I regained control, but not before his face registered what mine had done and he shot me a wicked grin. He had said it on purpose for a reaction and I had given him one. Internally, I was kicking myself for that.

  I felt naughty, but quickly turned to Sophie by way of a cover.

  "That coffee ready yet?" I asked her.

  "Ah, no. I just." She said as I turned not just my body but my attention to her fully. She had somehow managed to get coffee grounds all over herself and was wiping them off, rather than making the coffee.

  "It's okay." I reassured her, "I'll make this one."

  "No, it's fine." She told me, "The machine is just, broken."

  "Oh, no, really?" I asked her, taking a step closer to the machine for a proper look. I could see she was right even without touching the machine. The coffee machine frequently had problems, I knew. It was one of the many things the owners would need to spend money on that they didn't want to spend.

  I knew the owners books, and I knew coffee, and their clients. I knew all of these things better than they did, and as I tried to make the machine work for me, I reflected on just how frustrating it all was. Why couldn't they just spend the money to get someone out here to fix this?

  Even with my expert hand - expert because of all the time this thing spent out of action - it still took me more time to make the coffee than it should have. I still had the coffee made in about half the time I know Sophie would have made it in even if the machine wasn't broken. I would need to train her more, I reflected. To get her up to the point I wanted her at.

  I gave Rick his coffee, took his money and thanked him as he walked out of the cafe, his step slow, like that of someone who doesn't want to leave, but you're giving them no real option to stay so they must leave.

  "I'll show you how to do that faster." I told Sophie, cleaning the machine before preparing it again and making us both coffees.

  When the coffees were made and I had shown her how to streamline her coffee making, we sipped our drinks and chatted behind the counter.

  Then, the question I was sort of dreading came from her lips, "so, you and Mr. Calder, eh?" She asked me.

  "Please don't call him that." I told her.

  "Why can't I call him that? Sophie asked, a little bewildered by my response. In my mind, it was only okay to call Rick 'Mr. Calder' inside my own sexual fantasies, which normally involved me wearing very little clothes and him taking me over his principals desk, or spanking me for being a naughty girl.

  Of course, I couldn't confess that to Sophie, or anyone. So instead I told her, "because you're not here as his student, you're here as an employee of the cafe, it just sounds a little silly is all." I told her.

  "Oh." She said, her face fallen. I had forgotten how easy it was to wound teenagers until I was working with this one. They are much more sensitive than I remember being.

  "No, it's okay. I mean, you can call him that, it just might be better if you call him Rick from now on when you're at work is all." I told her.

  Sophie nodded very slowly. "Okay." She told me.

  We exchanged a smile and Sophie went back to her original question, only now she was using Rick's first name.

  "So, you and Rick, then?" She asked, this time with much less confidence as she had to call him something she wasn't used to calling him. I felt myself turning red as I opened my mouth to tell her all about Rick, all the things I had been dying to tell someone but hadn't, because it felt a little inappropriate fancying the principal at my kids school, but this girl, this young naive girl, she wasn't a parent of a child at my kids school, so she wasn't about to judge me.

  "I've liked Rick for a long time." I told Sophie, "but he's my son Chris's principal, so it feels a bit, inappropriate."

  "Oh." Sophie said, her face pensive. "But, you like him a lot?" She asked.

  "Yeah, I do." I told her honestly. It felt liberating to be honest about my feelings for Rick finally.

  "Then why don't you just go for it? Who cares what everyone else thinks?" She asked, in that way only a teenager who wasn't wise to the world yet could ask.

  "I guess I care." I told her. "I don't want to be the mum who banged the principal, you know?"

  Sophie let out a loud giggle, and I reflected how I had forgotten how old she was just for long enough to say something to make her giggle like that. I thought that perhaps I shouldn't be talking about banging the principal at work considering at any moment someone could come walking through that door and hear me.

  "Sorry." I said, as much to her as to myself. I didn't want to be having this conversation, yet I had chosen to have it rather than just tell her we didn't talk about those things at work, which wasn't really fair on either of us.

  "Let's keep working." I told her, putting down my coffee cup. "I still have to do some more training for you before the lunch rush starts."

  Then, almost as if I had told them to start arriving, the lunch crowds started flowing through our door.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The march leading up to my friend Sara's going away party - a party where she would be inviting what felt like the whole town - was a busy one for me. I had to keep working my normal hours and at my normal frantic pace so I could afford to look after my son, then also putting in the time to be a great mum. This all while I got everything ready for my friend Sara's party, where I would be a caterer of sorts.

  I had ordered some balloons and some extra food and wine using the company account - something the boss really didn't mind me doing so long as I paid for those things with my own card - and was doing a little extra work behind the scenes to make sure eve
rything ran smoothly: calling the guest list who didn't RSVP to check they got their invites and to get actual numbers for the night, making sure the music was ready and that everything we had playing was exactly what Sara would want, and that would fit along with the theme of the night.

  Sara was going on a zoo keeper exchange program in the US. She had just hosted a ranger on exchange who had actually fallen in love and decided to stay. I hoped she wouldn't do the same over there. We had been friends for a number of years, and I didn't want to lose my sweet Sara.

  Getting things ready for someone else's party though is kind of fun. You don't have to worry about if this or that person won't show up or if they do, they won't fight. At the end of the day, it's not your party and you don't know these people anyway, but you get all the fun of planning without all the headaches your friends and their personalities will give you.

  I had texted Sara a couple of photos of the balloons which had arrived that day - deflated, I would be using the cafes helium to pump them up - she texted me back.

  "Not sure about the helium." She said.

  "What do you mean?" I texted her moments later while counting the stock in our fridge and putting some notes down about what needed to be ordered.

  It took her a while to message me back and when she did her message was short and sweet, "Balloons that float away burst then end up in the ocean where animals eat the plastic. Also, helium is something finite which we need in medical technology, but instead we're using it for balloons at parties like mine."

  It sucked having a zoo keeper as a friend I reflected. Who else thought like this?

  I sighed and put my phone down, for the first time really seeing all the plastic in my work fridge. Yeah, she might be onto something I thought.

  Picking my phone back up I wrote back to her, "how about if some of them have just air in them, and we only put helium in one balloon? A sort of compromise. Just this really special balloon that I like and got for your special." I wrote, feeling my inner child bubbling to the surface in the disappointment over a party with no balloons.