Love and Whiskers

by Olivia Myers

  “It’s my bar. I get to decide who’s allowed in and who isn’t.”

  “And no one’s allowed in who hits on me, is that it?”

  A muscle in his jaw jumped, but she plowed ahead, leaning in and poking her finger into his chest.

  “The bar may be yours, but I’m not! Trust me, if someone crosses a line with me, I will either let you know or take care of it myself, but you have no right to go all caveman on someone just because I bat my eyelashes at them. Got it?”

  She was panting by the time she finished. Duke crossed his arms. His voice was low when he replied. “I’m just trying to protect you, Lex. A lot of these guys are bad news. Not all of them, but… It might be innocent eyelash batting to you, but some of them have records for not taking ‘no’ for an answer. I know which ones are which. You don’t.”

  Lexi blew out a breath. She knew he had a point, as much as she didn’t want to admit it. At least, he had part of a point.

  “Maybe so. And if that’s the case, you need to talk to me and tell me who I should be careful around. I will listen. But don’t try and tell me that you threw Luca out because you thought he might try and take what wasn’t offered. Or Justin. Or Tex.”

  The muscle twitched in his jaw again. The one that meant he was clenching his teeth.

  “You can’t, because that wasn’t about wanting to protect me. That was about wanting to own me. And I’m not a possession, Duke. I won’t ever be any man’s possession. That’s why I don’t do repeats or relationships. I thought I made that clear.”

  Duke stared down at her, the expression in his dark eyes unreadable. After a long moment filled only with the noise of the bar, pool balls and laughter and old school rock and roll, he exhaled heavily through his nose.

  “You’re right. You did. And I apologize. I was out of line. From now on, the only time I’ll crack a head is if I have to break up a fight…or you ask me to.”

  Lexi chewed her lip, surprised at the sincere words. She opened her mouth, unsure what to say but feeling like she should say something, but Duke cut her off.

  “Let me make it up to you. The gym on Orchard has a climbing wall. Meet me there Tuesday after your last class and I’ll show you how to climb.”

  That stopped her. They’d talked about him teaching her how to climb several times, but she’d always figured it was one of those throw away, ‘sure, sure, let’s totally do that’ type agreements people did when they didn’t really mean it.

  “This isn’t some ploy to get me out on a date?” Normally, Lexi would hardly count learning to rock climb as a date, but considering the reaction she still had every time she got a glimpse of that picture on Duke’s office wall she figured it was a fair question.

  Duke’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. Startled was kind of an adorable look on him.

  “No! I just…you said you wanted to learn. But if you’d rather not, I’ll make it up to you another way. You can cut out early tonight and I’ll clean up or… something.”

  She patted his bulging bicep. “Relax, boss. Rock climbing Tuesday afternoon it is.”

  ***

  Rock climbing with Lexi had been a terrible idea. Duke bit back another groan as she leaned into him, warm and strong and smelling faintly of coconuts and sweat. He’d tried just instructing her from the ground, coaching her where to put her feet, which grips to try for, but it hadn’t gone well. For the first half an hour, she barely made it a few feet up the wall before falling.

  She wasn’t afraid to fall, at least. She trusted the harness and auto belay device. She just hadn’t yet figured out the rhythm to climbing, how to grip and reach, grip and reach. Her body wasn’t used to the movement.

  He’d finally given up watching (as if seeing her ass in the tight black leggings wasn’t torture enough) and climbed up with the auto belay device to instruct her hands-on. Now, he was reduced to desperately calculating times tables in his head to keep his mind off the feel of Lexi’s body. Despite that, he was still half hard. They were both just pretending he wasn’t.

  “Here, now make sure your grip is tight and swing your right leg up to that blue peg.”

  “Right foot blue, got it. Like some sadistic form of adult Twister.”

  She chuckled lightly, but the image her words conjured up nearly made Duke swear out loud. Was she trying to kill him?

  He’d meant it when he said the offer was strictly platonic, an olive branch to make up for his bullshit alpha male behavior of the last few weeks. Lexi had never led him on or made any promises. In fact, she’d done just the opposite. The fact that he hated the thought of any other man touching her was his problem and he had no right to make it hers.

  But he hadn’t thought through what often went into teaching another person something physical like rock climbing. In order to show her where it was best to place her hands and feet, he had to climb up behind her. They’d spent most of the last forty-five minutes pressed together from shoulder to groin.

  “Ha! I did it!”

  Lexi’s triumphant shout thankfully pulled his attention from the feel of her ass brushing his erection. Glancing up, he saw they were nearly at the top of the wall. Both of them were drenched in sweat. Not that this was a particularly difficult climb for him, but being this close to Lexi got his blood boiling, just like always.

  “Great! Now… hmmm. Let’s see. Why don’t you try left hand, yellow?”

  She snickered. “Which yellow? Oh. Okay, got it.”

  It would have been easier if she had turned out to be the rich bitch he’d thought she was when she first showed up at Shotguns. Then he could have written her off as a hot fuck and moved on. Not that she wasn’t a hot fuck. She was the hottest, actually. Duke hadn’t ever gotten that worked up by another woman. He’d never had fantasies about tying a woman up, either, but seeing her wrists wrapped up in his climbing rope had… well, it had just done it for him. He’d nearly drilled her into the wall.

  Right afterwards, he’d been a bit aghast at himself. He’d never done anything like that before in his life. He wanted to do it again.

  But Lexi didn’t do repeats. And God help him, but he didn’t want to do it with anyone else.

  As he helped guide her up the last few feet of wall, he tried to reason that out. He understood her reluctance. They talked while they cleaned during down time at work and she’d told him a little about her mother and stepfather.

  Personally, Duke thought she was taking the ‘I refuse to belong to anyone’ thing a bit far, but he could understand her wanting to stay single at least until she finished college (she had one more semester), got a job, and could stand on her own two feet. He respected her for it, even. That didn’t mean he had to like it.

  After one or two attempts to convince her of the folly of her ways with sound reasoning, he’d given up. It only pissed her off. And while Duke found pissed off Lexi hot, he didn’t like it when she was genuinely upset with him. Instead, he’d taken to teasing her about giving him another shot. That worked much better.

  Even though she never took any of his offers, she teased back. Things had been going well, he’d thought.

  Until he’d screwed it all up by getting jealous. The first time, with Luca, he’d reacted without thinking. When he’d seen the pinched look on her face, her normally plush lips pursed, he’d known he’d fucked up. He’d expected her to explode, but she hadn’t.

  Not until Sunday night when she’d called him out for treating her like his possession.

  Duke wanted to blame it on stress. Bills were piling up and he’d been staying awake until all hours after the bar was closed to try and find ways to cut costs and bring in more revenue. Shotguns had a steady stream of customers, but they mostly ordered cheap beer and well liquor. He earned enough to cover his overhead and pay the mortgage on his little ranch house at the edge of town. Or he used to.

  He really should have called the cops on Barb. He still wasn’t sure how much she’d stolen from him over the two years she worked the
re, but he figured it had to be somewhere in the thousands. Maybe tens of thousands. It had been a slow leak, gradual enough that he’d just thought business was dropping off. He’d gotten behind on payments to his vendors and mortgage payments and had to borrow against his credit.

  Getting rid of Barb had helped, but it was looking more and more like the damage was already done.

  “Oh my god! That was incredible!”

  Duke couldn’t help but smile at the breathless squeal Lexi gave as she finished pulling herself up on top of the wall. He climbed up beside her, grateful for the distraction.

  “I told you that you’d love it.”

  Lexi bumped her bare shoulder against his, her breathing still a little ragged. “Yeah, yeah. Don’t let it go to your head, boss. You’re still mostly a moron.”

  “Careful. Don’t forget I know seventeen ways to kill a man with my thumb.” He flicked her thigh, hard. She rubbed the spot but rolled her eyes at the bad joke.

  “I’m so scared.”

  She gave a gratifying shriek that earned them both a scowl from one of the trainers when he made a lunge as if he was going to toss her off the top of the wall. Hearing her laugh and threaten to stab him with the fruit knife one night when he was least expecting it was worth it though.

  Maybe taking her rock climbing hadn’t been such a bad idea after all. She’d forgiven him for being a ‘total Neanderthal,’ anyway, and surely with the two of them busting their asses, things at Shotguns were bound to get better.

  Of course, that sentiment came back to bite him in the ass not two days later. It was slow even for a Thursday night, so he’d left Lexi up front to handle the handful of customers while he once again ensconced himself in mountains of paperwork to try and figure out how to dig himself out of this mess.

  A headache pounded behind his left eye as he stared down at the columns of black numbers until they went all blurry and squiggly.

  “Hey, you can’t just go back there!”

  Lexi’s voice raised in outrage was a sound he was familiar with after nearly three months working together, but it was usually aimed at him. He glanced up as his office door was yanked open. At the sight of his CPA Marcus, he sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “Sorry, boss. I tried to tell this asshat you’re busy, but he’s apparently really important.” She had her hands on her hips and rolled her eyes when she caught his gaze. Duke had the sudden urge to scoop her into his arms and kiss her senseless.

  Knowing that would go over like a lead balloon, he shook his head and smiled at her instead. He was going to ask her to get them a drink, which would probably get a sarcastic response, but he did enjoy those from her. Before he could open his mouth, Marcus flopped down into the slightly rickety chair Lexi had placed in front of his desk so she could pester him while he did his ordering.

  “You’ve been ignoring my calls, Duke. You can’t make this problem go away just by pretending it doesn’t exist.”

  Marcus was an old friend, but at the moment Duke wanted to punch him in his narrow face. Right on cue, Lexi crossed her arms and frowned at him.

  “What problem?”

  “I’m not going to discuss —”

  Lexi cut Marcus off with a slice of her hand. “Not talking to you, buddy.”

  Duke couldn’t help but chuckle at the look on Marcus’s face. It drifted off into nothing a moment later, however, when Lexi turned her narrowed blue eyes on him.

  “Problem?”

  He dropped his forehead into his palms and pressed the heels of his hands against his tired eyes. “Go ahead and tell her, Marc.”

  After a pointedly silent moment that conveyed he wasn’t at all sure about what he was about to do, Marcus outlined the financial situation Duke was in. He spelled it out pretty clearly. Either he thought Lexi was stupid, or Duke was. Probably the latter.

  She didn’t speak the entire time. When Marcus finished, she stalked across the room, balled up her little fist, and socked him in the shoulder. Hard. He’d been expecting it, but it still hurt.

  “You moron.”

  Marcus sputtered a laugh, but Duke just rubbed his sore shoulder. “Don’t you have some customers to serve?” He knew he was grumbling, but he was tired and his head hurt.

  “Two more months. Were you going to tell me or just let me show up to work one day and find an OUT OF BUSINESS sign on the door?”

  “Lex…”

  She hissed at him. “No. I’m not speaking to you right now. And you!” She pointed a buffed nail at Marcus. “I want to see everything.”

  Marcus opened his mouth, obviously to protest. Duke sighed.

  “Give her whatever she wants, Marc. She won’t shut up until you do.”

  “Oh, fuck you, boss.”

  “Any time, Blondie,” he replied with half a smile.

  ***

  Lexi was in big trouble. She rubbed her tired, gritty eyes and tried to think her way out of it. It was all she’d been doing for the better part of the last two weeks.

  Damn him. Damn him and his stupid furrowed brow and his surly attitude and sexy scowl and sculpted lips. Damn his amused snort and his crooked smile and his big, capable hands. Damn him for apologizing when he was wrong and admitting his bad behavior and making the effort to correct it. Damn him for teaching her rock climbing with patience and restraint when he could have tried to take advantage. Damn him for making her laugh and for making her angry and for making her care and for making her want to have someone belong to just her… and for making her want to belong to him.

  Most of all damn him for that last one.

  And damn Marcus the scrawny CPA too, while she was at it. It hadn’t been easy to keep her hands off Duke, to keep their relationship firmly in the “boss/employee who are also friends (and had sex that one time)” category, but she’d been managing. And then Marcus had barged into Duke’s office and spilled the beans about the fate of the bar, and now…

  Now, she was spending all her free time on the computer, making phone calls, researching, and even grilling her professors. Trying to find a way to save Shotguns. And despite what she’d been telling herself, it wasn’t because she didn’t want to lose a good job.

  She’d known Duke was dangerous. And not just because he was a big, muscular guy who could physically overpower her if he wanted to. No, that danger wasn’t one she faced from him.

  He was a whole different kind of danger. One she’d been trying to avoid since she’d first discovered boys.

  “Well done, Alexis,” she mumbled to the ceiling of her bedroom. Her weary voice sounded eerily like her mother and she shivered.

  Stretching her arms above her head, she flopped back against her pillows and scanned her lapful of papers. There it was, in black and white in front of her… the solution to her problems. Both of them, if she wanted.

  Which was the million dollar question. Or, the quarter of a million dollar question, technically.

  That’s how she phrased it the next afternoon when she stood in front of Duke, anyway. Perhaps she should have waited until she’d had another full night of sleep before bringing it up, because he stared at her as if she’d spoke Swahili or something.

  “What?”

  “I said, I quit.”

  Duke glanced from the two separate stacks of neatly bound paper she’d laid on his desk a minute ago back up to her face. His heavy brows drew down and the furrow appeared between them, making Lexi’s heart spin. She forced herself to remain straight-faced and unaffected in the face of his anger and confusion.

  “And these?”

  The low growl of his voice stroked up her spine like a velvet finger, instantly hardening her nipples.

  “Are exactly what I said they were. Business plans. This one,” she tapped the one on the left with a pointed finger. “This one is what you need to do if you want to keep the bar open and eventually start turning a profit again.”

  He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his broad chest. Aside from
the fact that he was sitting down instead of standing behind the bar, his posture was identical to the day she’d first walked into the bar. That seemed fitting.

  “The other?”

  Lexi swallowed past the lump in her throat, because here she’d gone out a bit of a limb. Well, in for a penny, she thought. Really, the whole thing was one big giant limb…

  “That’s what you need to do if you want to gut the place and turn it into a premiere rock climbing facility.”

  Duke just stared at her from beneath those thick, black brows. She shrugged and glanced away, her gaze lingering on the picture of him climbing in what she now knew was Arizona.

  “I tried to think of a way to combine the two, you know? Like maybe a bar where people could rock climb? But… well, it just wouldn’t work. The insurance alone would be cost prohibitive. So, it had to be one or the other. I couldn’t decide which, so I figured… well, it’s your bar, so you should decide.”

  “It won’t be my bar. Not if I take your advice.”

  She was surprised he was being so calm. Honestly, she’d expected him to blow up as soon as she brought up her plan. Or at least to argue about the money. He knew, after all, how she felt about the trust fund.

  “It would too. I’d just be giving you a loan. You’d pay me back. The terms are all in there.” Lexi felt the heat creeping up her throat. She needed to end the conversation and get out of there. That had been the plan. Drop off the paperwork, tell him she was done, and get out. She knew it wasn’t cool to leave him in the lurch, but it was Thursday. Thursdays were slow.

  Her heart pounded in her chest as he scowled up at her. She wanted to crawl over the desk and climb into his lap, but instead she curled her hands into tight fists and squared her shoulders.

  “Which is why I don’t think I should work here anymore. Either way, it would just make things… awkward.”

  Yes, it would be very awkward if she had continue working with him and pretending she wasn’t falling ridiculously in love with the stubborn moron.