by M. C. Cerny
Love On Tap
A Love By Design Novel
M.C. Cerny
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A Note About The Love By Design Novels
Welcome to New Paltz, NY. The town is real, but these characters are…made up – just don’t tell the voices in my head.
The Love By Design Novels are a small town romance with a big heart. Second chances to get it right, surprises, babies, and house flipping fun. Each book in the series is written to be read as a standalone, but most readers prefer to follow the general series order.
First Love - Prequel
Love Under Construction
Unlovely Things
Heartburn
Tailwind
Love Actually
Mission For Love
Mine To Keep
Love On Tap
Contents
Love On Tap
1. Sierra
2. Andy
3. Sierra
4. Andy
5. Sierra
6. Andy
7. Sierra
8. Andy
9. Sierra
10. Andy
11. Sierra
12. Andy
13. Sierra
14. Andy
15. Sierra
16. Andy
17. Andy
18. Sierra
19. Andy
20. Sierra
21. Andy
22. Sierra
23. Sierra
24. Andy
25. Sierra
26. Andy
27. Sierra
28. Andy
29. Sierra
Epilogue
Excerpt from Love Under Construction
Books by M.C. Cerny
About the Author
Copyright
Love On Tap
Sierra Occho ran as far and as fast as she could the moment she realized Andy Easton was her forever. Forever wasn’t in the cards for her and getting close to anyone only brought on heartache and disappointment. She knew better, and yet the heart wants what it wants.
Andy Easton fell in love with the shy girl holding tight to her Poppa’s pants. He fell in lust with the teenage rebel with the reckless attitude and mouth to match. The night she left town leaving behind his ring and heart, he grew cold waiting for her to return as days turned to weeks, then months, and years.
A decade later and Andy finds himself floundering on a promise kept. A family will forces him to make a decision, but he didn’t count on Sierra’s return changing everything.
1
Sierra
Ten years was a long time to be away. I catalogued the scars both inside and out. I didn’t have a passport filled with stamps unless you counted the casinos in Las Vegas pretending to teleport you to Italy, Paris, or the Pyramids. I didn’t have a photo album stuffed with pictures unless I counted that one trip to Mexico hazed in a blur of tequila and bikinis in a club across the border. I didn’t have a passel of personal belongs, just my backpack and a small storage unit with nothing sentimental. Even the rent was due on that and I considered letting the owners sell it to a pawn shop.
I snorted thinking how they’d be disappointed to find old dishes, fake wooden bookshelves, and few boxes of overdue library books. I didn’t have the heart to return them timely. Especially if I was the only one who’d taken them out and read them over and over again as evidenced by their blank cards inside the pocket. I loved those books and I knew what it was to be a blank card hoping someone would take you out and lovingly turn your pages with appreciation. I’d heard a rumor library fines could become warrants, and if that was the case, it was best I left Nevada and all her attempts to numb my past behind.
I didn’t know if it was a blessing or a curse the way time passed. The rain continued to pelt the sides of the silver greyhound bus as it pulled up to the stop on the corner of Main Street. Anxiety zinged in my veins like electric. My backpack was already in my lap and I was glad to be getting off the bus now that the snoozing college boy next to me had woken up and was chatting for the last hour. I didn’t have much to say, I seldom did, that was my personality, but I also didn’t want him to think me rude, so I made soft sounds committing to a conversation I wanted desperately to be over.
So many missed opportunities for words to be exchanged. I was good at that too. Missing things. Avoiding things. Running away. The fog on the window was thick and blurred the lights outside like greasy smudges of a diner burger on parchment paper. I rubbed with my elbow and watched cars pull up to the light, wait, and then proceed in an orderly fashion. I was anything but orderly. Controlled chaos as my Nona liked to say.
I reached inside my bag for the worn envelope I’d been carrying with me for weeks. White paper dirty from travel back and forth across the country in my bag. I rubbed the paper, thick, and foreboding like the catch in your throat right before you’re about to be sick. I’d memorized every word and traced the jagged curves of his signature at least a thousand times. He wanted closure. It was the one thing I denied him because I was selfish and cruel. My time had finally slipped through the sand leaving me few choices.
A decade passed since I’d been here last and with it the turning of seasons, missed holidays, birthdays, friends gathering, anniversaries, and deaths… I picked at the hole in my jeans as the bus emptied out enough for my row to stand up. I’d taken a window seat thinking I’d find a little solace before the penance, but no luck with the boy sitting next to me.
He stood up but didn’t move except to grab his fancy backpack filled with electronics and clean laundry. He had a clean-cut preppy way about him, but nothing stirred my interests. Despite my thin frame and pixie looks, I was also old enough to know better than get involved with a college townie. I pulled my leather jacket tighter together and mentally repeated the Greek alphabet in my head over and over willing him to move down the aisle.
No such luck.
He smacked his puffy lips and asked, “Hey, are you hungry? There’s this great pub up the street that serves appetizers and drinks.” The boy, named something like Toby, Robby, or something jabbered on, but my eyes caught site of the dance studio across the street. My veins chilled recalling a dark and rainy night ten years ago not so unlike the one tonight. Memories flooded my mind the way water overtakes a boat on the ocean, relentless and unforgiving. The lights were out, but I wondered who owned it now.
There was a time dancing gave me solace and a place to hide from my critical family. There was a time those childish dancing skills paid for a roof over my head and enough food to fill my stomach, but not the empty pit of shame in my soul. Dancing was a savior and a sinner wrapped up in a pretty bow and lies we tell ourselves when the lights flash and the curtain closes on another performance. It keeps us going when we have no other choices, and it stops when the final pirouette ends. I blinked my eyes hard coming back to the conversation pushing down the memories as the rain continued to fall.
He ran a hand through his hair looking impatient with me, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the studio and glanced back. I went after those memories like a bad shiny penny, I wanted to pick it up, turn it over and see if the other side was different
then expected. It’s the sort of thing you know the answer too but can’t help asking like a glutton for punishment.
Doing the same thing over and over was the very definition of insanity and here I was like a kicked puppy starved for affection.
He blocked my exit off the bus and I felt antsy wanting to push through him. “You in?” His phone lit up and he looked down texting someone back, frowning.
“Uh, sorry.” I muttered glancing back out the window which fogged back up blocking my view.
“Darn. Looks like my ride back to campus is early.” He had that expectant look on his face. If he thought I wanted to catch a ride with him, he was mistaken. “Want to exchange numbers?” His thick boyband eyebrows perked up and internally I rolled my eyes. Doing anything with this guy who looked like he barely skated through high school in designer jeans and then decided to attend an overpriced college was a bad idea. While I was a connoisseur of such bad ideas, even I had limits.
“Sure.” I faked my smile, grabbed his phone from his hand and saw his backscreen was a picture of some emo band that was super popular right now. A message comes through asking Bobby why he’s still on the bus. Probably so he can be a creeper and get my number, but I don’t scroll up to see his replies. Instead, I typed in a number wondering how the recipient will feel getting a message from an entitled college boy. That was me letting my chaos out in spurts and spits. My current phone was a prepaid drugstore brand and I wasn’t pulling it out to exchange numbers–least of all with bus-boyband-Bobby.
“Great, catch you later!” He sang, practically bouncing off the bus. I sighed. The only thing that boy would be catching was a chlamydia scare if he was lucky.
Grabbing my bag, I hefted it over my shoulder and wobbled toward the bus door. So many things had changed for me since I left here and I wondered if this would be it. Could I make peace, move on? I had more questions than answers and no idea where to start. Nodding at the driver who looked a bit worse for wear having driven here by way of Philadelphia, I knew he still had a stop in Albany a good ninety minutes away. I didn’t envy his job, but at least he had one. I bet he even had a wife to go home to, maybe some kids, or a loyal dog that missed him.
What did I have? The sum contents of a single backpack weren’t impressing anyone. I breathed in the evening air and looked up the street to that pub the boy mentioned. The signage looked fresh and I imagined a pair of brothers spending a summer painting it, lining the green, orange, and gold up just right. Flower boxes lined the windows, a holdover from the previous owners. I recalled many discussions about taking them down, but unanimously they remained filled with a combination of fake, but well-maintained clovers and violets.
My hand instinctively went for the delicate gold chain inside my shirt making sure my one and only treasure remained. My finger touched the gold clovers lining it. Three inlaid on a short chain. They could have been the holy trinity, the phases of the moon, or the dominions of earth, sky, and sea. In reality, my clovers were a charm against evil having saved me on three occasions, but just barely. No matter how difficult life got, my clovers were the one thing I never gave up and my lips turned upward for a second remembering a happier time. I doubted the gift giver of my clovers would have felt the same way, but soon enough I would find out.
The damp evening chilled my bones and I hiked the sidewalk up the street to the entrance. My anxiety revved up as I brushed past bodies lingering outside. My hand touched the golden knob of the wooden door with a little more than just trepidation. Easton’s Pub was still a favorite local hangout and I followed its owner’s success with micro-brewing over the past few years. He’d won awards and grown a successful business like he said he would.
Andrew Easton was a man who was good at making promises and following through. Bobby probably came here with his college buddies to scope out girls and eat nachos like they were going out of style. It was a good life to live if you had the opportunity. He wasn’t wrong about it being a good place and the curiosity that should have killed my inner cat a long time ago won out as I pushed through the door.
The last time I had been here, I’d walked through these doors as a happy eighteen-year-old bride. Tonight, clutching my backpack and the letter that summoned me here, I had no idea what I’d find of the tattered past I left behind.
2
Andy
“Well would you look at what the cat dragged in.” I raised my head listening to my brother David mutter over the slow pouring of beer from the tap. Tilting the cup, I let the right amount of foam touch the rim. It formed the perfect amount of white froth, thick and heavy against the glass. It would taste bittersweet with berry and caramel hints. I placed the pint of cold beer in front of the customer and followed David’s head-bob and hard eyes to the door.
We had just cleaned up a bunch of red, white, and blue streamers from the election and I wasn’t in the mood for more drama. In a landslide poll, if you counted eight hundred and twenty-seven voters, I lost the mayoral election by about fifty votes. I guessed that the Elks Club wasn’t my biggest supporter despite the free keg of beer. Personally, I blamed the Ladies’ Bridge Club who started this nonsense by lobbying to write me in. Those ladies were savage as they knitted winter items for the homeless and held annual fundraisers for the animal shelter. You simply didn’t say no to a grandmotherly woman who babysat half the adults in this town when we were in diapers.
“Unreal.” My brother grunted swinging back to me with a, what the fuck, Andrew, look on his face.
David was never one to hide his cynicism despite getting laid on a regular basis these days. If I had been honest with myself, the sour pit in my stomach was a well-formed knot of jealously because David finally found someone to take away the pain, whereas I had not.
Glutton for punishment?
It should have been my middle name.
I thought after the last decade, I had been tortured enough and paid my penance. Instead, what I saw in the bar’s entrance was either a ghost from the past or my newest nightmare in the form of slender curves my hands itched to touch and cat shaped eyes with the power to destroy me all over again. She still wore skin tight ripped jeans in black to match her cold heart and I smiled inside thinking that some things never did change.
Her graceful swagger was the same and if you didn’t know Sierra Occho, you would have thought she was the lead in Swan Lake with her fluid movements and princess perfect appearance. A dead ringer for Natalie Portman on the outside. What she really was amounted to the level of Black-Swan-Mila-Kunis-crazy you only survived once. My stomach flip flopped and if I could have jetted into the back office to sort through orders and upload them to David’s idea of slow torture, aka Quick Books hell, I would have.
David’s brow raised and I put more elbow grease into the sweeping movements of cleaning the polished bar top. For once in her damn life, Sierra could get her ass over here. I wasn’t chasing her inside my own bar.
Easton’s was our family pub for as long as we could remember, well before either my brother or I were born. Its roots were in the family for over sixty-nine years. We grew up here barely able to reach the bar top, our grandmother Gloria tended bar and cooked appetizers while chasing grandpa out back at the end of the night snapping her dishtowel. They always carried on about something, but they loved each other deeply up until the day they died, a year apart from each other lingering with bad health and a plethora of memories I regretted not writing down. Even death wasn’t about to keep them apart.
Dad sold the pub five years ago to me with a promise to keep it going. Mom wanted sunshine year-round and dad needed a break from long nights. Despite David’s army deployment early on, I managed it with his help, and my business degree was proving useful.
I worked on the home brew concoctions and David updated the technology. With a few changes we renovated the inside and paid off the loan to our dad. Easton’s had been a staple here in New Paltz and the gust of wind that blew through the door revealed a face I hadn
’t seen in years. She stripped me bare and left me a self-flagellating mess blowing raw in the wind. A rather unwelcome one at that leaving me with a sour taste in my mouth like those first hops I tried brewing unsuccessfully until I got it right.
Practice made perfect.
Or in my case, it made you painfully aware of all your faults.
I still juggled the winery, had controlling interest over it, although little desire to set foot on the dark soil that stained both my boots walking through fields of lush purple grapes. My bruised ego and bitter heart were not in the mood for this, and now she was back and I had no idea how to process this new information even though it was my letter with a final ultimatum that likely prompted her return.
Dressed in a burnt orange leather jacket with fringe that seemed out of place, reminding me of our darkest stout, Sierra Occho sat down in front of me. More like she slid onto the barstool with a feline grace and stealth I didn’t appreciate given the chasm of hurt between us. Her fluid movements fit her devious she-devil persona and it was clear she was still dancing in one form or another.
She looked thinner then when I saw her last if that was possible. Her skin was always translucent, even in summer with a golden hue. Her jeans were threadbare, painted on her legs. Over the bar counter, I spied the ripped fabric exposing a tattoo I’d never seen before, but then again, Sierra was always marking herself. Caramel eyes and freckled honey skin greeted me with a smile I would never forget. Front teeth spaced with a slight gap made her grin infectious no matter how angry I felt with her or that a decade had passed since I last saw her. She was more than a sleek cat; she was a fucking ninja who haunted my dreams and stomped on my heart mercilessly.
