The Bartender's Secret (Masterson, Texas Book 1)

by Caro Carson

  “Enough for what?”

  She wanted to strike up a conversation with him, did she? Her hair was fluffed, her lips were shiny. Connor knew the signs. She’d come to flirt.

  This was definitely trouble.

  Connor couldn’t make small talk with a woman who looked like a painting and laughed like sunlight and nailed an impersonation of a video game, not if she was just killing time with him while she waited for Kristopher to return.

  “I like it enough to suffer through Bridget and Kristopher’s performances, even when I have to listen to them cooing like a couple of lovebirds to each other on my stage.” In his peripheral vision, he saw Bridget pick up her head. He spoke to Rembrandt. “Doesn’t bother me. Does it bother you?”

  Bridget rolled her eyes and flounced away without a goodbye. If Rembrandt was her rival for Kristopher, Bridget wasn’t putting up a fight.

  Connor watched Rembrandt watching Bridget leaving the field of battle, as it were. Rembrandt looked sad instead of victorious.

  No romantic rivalry there, then. Connor felt victorious instead of sad.

  Bridget tried to slam the door behind herself, but the door had a damper that prevented anyone from closing it too quickly.

  Rembrandt sighed as she turned back to him. “Never have a Romeo and Juliet hated each other so much.”

  “Hate? Is that what’s going on there?”

  “You don’t think they hate each other?”

  Connor picked up a clean dishtowel and polished the water spots off a wineglass. “Love and hate can look a lot alike at their age.” Maybe he was laying it on a bit thick by pointing out Kristopher’s relative youth.

  “Can you keep a secret?” she asked.

  “I’m a bartender.”

  “The two of them were in my class last semester, and the whole time, I kept thinking what a cute couple they’d make. I hope you’re right. I hope they don’t really hate each other.”

  Connor turned his back to hang up the wineglass. Jubilation wasn’t an emotion he often dealt with, but jubilant he felt. She did not return Kristopher’s obvious interest in her, not at all. It shouldn’t have mattered, but it did.

  He wiped the smile off his face and turned toward her again. “We’ll see. The course of true love never did run smooth.”

  “So quick, bright things come to confusion.”

  He stopped polishing.

  “Sorry.” She seemed embarrassed. “You said that line about the course of true love, so I was adding another line that from that scene. A Midsummer’s Night Dream, act one, scene one.”

  “That’s an impressive bar trick. Most girls just try to tie a cherry stem into a knot with their tongue.”

  She sighed wistfully. “My roommate in New England could do that. I gave up trying, but I have to warn you, if we have a contest to see who can slip in the most Shakespeare lines, I’ll win.”

  “I have no doubt.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him in a calculating way. “And not because you’d let me win in some misbegotten notion that the customer is always right.”

  Connor only smiled. His Rembrandt was here, right here at his bar, empty glass in hand. What’s your pleasure?

  A different question came out. “What’s your name?”

  “You’ll never guess it.” She was being playful.

  He draped the dishtowel over his shoulder and braced his hands on the bar, giving her his full attention, but something else had caught hers. Her gaze had dropped to his arm. His left arm, the one with the tattoo. He didn’t need to check whether or not his sleeve had ridden up and revealed some ink. It obviously had. Women loved it. Rembrandt was most definitely a woman.

  Quickly, she looked him in the eye again. Her blush added a warm touch of pink to the picture she made. “I’ll give you one guess, though.”

  “Rembrandt.”

  Her second of surprise was followed by that bright laugh. “That sounds like the name an art history professor would give to his puppy. Rembrandt. Kind of cute for a dog.”

  “There went my one guess. I guess you’re going to have to tell me now.”

  Her smile dimmed. “It’s Delphinia. I know, I know. If you knew my parents, you wouldn’t be surprised. They are exactly the kind of people who would give a baby the four-syllable name of a somewhat-persnickety flower. The flower is delphinium, by the way. Not Delphinia.”

  “What’s in a name?” Connor asked, since he’d just gotten a refresher this afternoon on the lines from Romeo and Juliet. “That which we call a delphinium by any other word would smell as sweet.”

  Her smile returned, brighter. “It doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it? My parents could have given me a more normal flower name, like Rose. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. That’s catchy. Might last a century or four.”

  “Sure, but why should you envy a common name? Rose. Lily. Daisy is really a roadside weed. None of them sound as sweet.”

  She pinkened so perfectly. He leaned in a little closer, so he could murmur his question quietly. “So, my one and only Delphinia, what’s your pleasure?”

  Her breath left her in a soft rush, and then, silence. She looked at him, and he looked at her. Suddenly, he wasn’t breathing, either. In the little space between them, something sparked to life, burning up all the oxygen they weren’t breathing. He felt it on his skin, energy just waiting to happen, static ready to spark if they touched.

  He wanted her.

  “Oh,” she said, in the way a woman might say oh when she was touched just right while making love. Oh.

  He wanted to bury his fingers in that whiskey-brown hair. He wanted to taste the lips that she’d glossed just for him. Lust, yes—but in this space between them, the lust coalesced into something so intense, so tight, it left room for another feeling to rush in. He didn’t know what it was, exactly, but he knew with certainty that he wanted this woman, this one woman, and the devil could take everything else.

  The pub’s door opened, people came in. Connor couldn’t stop looking at Delphinia, not when she couldn’t stop looking at him, either, but he eased back as Kristopher jogged behind the bar toward him.

  Kristopher gave him a single slap on the shoulder, like he was tagging someone for a relay race. “I’m back. Made it in ten. You can go.”

  Delphinia looked down at her glass. The spell was broken.

  Connor took a breath. The bar was still here. The new customers were sitting down. It was jarring to realize that nothing had actually happened. A man and a woman had looked at one another for a few heartbeats. That was all.

  But his throat felt too tight to speak. He nodded an acknowledgment that he’d heard Kristopher, and he indicated the new customers with a jerk of his chin.

  Kristopher bounded over to them. “What can I get y’all?”

  Connor stayed by Delphinia. He held up her glass and found his voice. “What’s your pleasure?”

  “I was having ice water.”

  He got her a clean glass and filled it with ice, feeling more normal with each familiar move. They’d shared one of those Are you thinking what I’m thinking? moments. Nothing too exotic about that. They’d done it earlier from across the room, when the weepy Othello had made them want to laugh.

  He topped the ice off with water and set it on the coaster. “Water’s a necessity. The question was, what’s your pleasure?”

  She shifted in her chair and tossed her hair back a bit, and he knew she was trying to shake off that weird moment of silence between them, too. She looked everywhere except at him. He understood.

  Her gaze settled on the mirrored shelves behind him, moving across the long row of whiskey bottles the same way it had moved across the lines on the pages of her book.

  “I don’t really know what the proper drink is at an Irish pub,” she said.

  “It
’s anything you want it to be. There’s no law that says you must have a Guinness.”

  “Is there such a thing as whiskey for beginners? A trainer whiskey?”

  She was cute and beautiful at the same time. The very fact that she existed made him want to smile, so he did. “How about a bourbon and Coke?”

  She smiled, too. They could look at one another again now. “That sounds like something I can handle. It sounds more dignified than ‘trainer whiskey,’ too.”

  “Over twenty-one?” He didn’t need to check her ID, although it was tempting, if only to find out where she lived.

  “Twenty-nine,” she said.

  His age, or nearly. He wouldn’t have guessed. She didn’t look as old as he did. Then again, he’d quit school, he’d fought, he’d starved. He was glad she didn’t look as battle-hardened as he did, but it was a sobering reminder of how unalike their lives were. She would take her degree and move on. That was right; she should.

  Connor mixed her drink as more customers came in. Because of the large university, there were always strangers, but the town of Masterson itself was small, so there were regulars he knew by name. Ernie, one of the city councilmen, took a seat and nodded at Connor.

  Connor set Delphinia’s drink in front of her and moved on like a normal bartender would, no matter how little he wanted to. He started building a Guinness for the city councilman without waiting for him to order it.

  Connor had been pressuring Ernie and the rest of the council for the better part of a year to fund a safer crosswalk at the intersection between the campus and the Tipsy Musketeer. Too many students jaywalked to get to one of the student-friendly storefronts on the block: a coffee shop, a bookstore, a Mexican cantina. Connor had even paid to have preliminary sketches made for a pedestrian bridge that could span Athos Avenue and let the college kids come and go as they pleased, since they obviously had no patience to wait for the traffic lights and never would.

  One student had been hit last year. Connor couldn’t forget the image of her lying on the pavement, legs twisted in a way legs could not twist. According to the college newspaper, it had taken a year of surgeries, but she’d returned to campus. No one had been hit so far this year, but there’d been too many near misses. Connor heard the screech of tires outside his windows each time, and each time he ran outside to help. It was a relief to see a driver and pedestrian yelling at one another, instead of another student’s life derailed by a year of pain, or worse. Connor wanted them all to get their diplomas and go on to bigger things.

  Like Delphinia would.

  As he and the councilman talked municipal budgets for a few minutes, impatience ate at him. He was doing what he needed to be doing, but a beautiful Rembrandt had never walked into his bar before today, and there was no guarantee she’d ever return. If this was the only time he’d be able to talk to her, then he wanted to talk to her.

  He glanced her way. Kristopher was standing in his place.

  “So, we’ll talk before the next meeting,” Ernie said. “I’ll bring Joe around. We need to get him in on this. Joe Manzetti. You know him?”

  “Sure. I’d be happy to talk to Joe any time.” Any time but now. Connor headed back down the length of the bar.

  Delphinia was looking at her phone, not at Kristopher. The sadness was back, a new anxiety along with it. Connor could see it from two paces away.

  “I’m sorry, I’ve got to leave,” she said to Kristopher. “How much do I owe you?”

  Kristopher turned to the touchscreen of the register as he asked Connor to confirm what the drink had been. “Seat seven is a bourbon and Coke?”

  Connor waved him off the register. “On the house.”

  “There you go,” Kristopher said to her, like he’d just done her a favor. He casually leaned on the bar, giving Delphinia the same suggestive smile he’d given to other college coeds. “You were great this afternoon. I really enjoyed myself.”

  “I did, too.” She was distracted, somber, as she turned off her phone and slipped it into her bag.

  Kristopher tried harder, adding a wink to his smile. “We should do it again.”

  Connor had been here during the rehearsals. He knew exactly what Kristopher was talking about, but the sexual innuendo of enjoying Delphinia in the afternoon screwed with Connor’s head.

  She wasn’t his. He knew that. He did.

  It didn’t matter. There was no way Connor would ever be able to stand by while another man painted that picture, no matter how irrational this possessive instinct was. He gave Kristopher an almost-friendly push in the direction of some other customers.

  Delphinia stepped down from her barstool, anxiety and urgency evident in every move. Connor’s first impression by the window had been correct: something in her world made her very unhappy.

  She was so rushed, he expected her to turn and go without so much as a wave, but she reached toward him and set her palm on the mahogany, as if she were putting her hand on his arm. “Thank you for the drink, but I forgot myself. I forgot something I’m supposed to do.”

  Back to her sad life she had to go, but she’d been happy here for an afternoon. That was what a good pub could do for a person. It was all a good pub could do.

  “It was nice to meet you, Rembrandt. Come back any time you need to take a break from the world.”

  Come back again, so I can look at you and lose my mind. Please.

  She dragged her palm over the polished wood as she backed away, then she turned and made a beeline for the door.

  Kristopher returned to enter an order on the touchscreen. “She’s great, isn’t she?”

  Connor grunted an agreement around the churning craziness in his chest.

  An unfamiliar woman sat at seat seven and smiled at him. “White wine, please. Something sweet.”

  Connor was getting a bottle of Riesling out of the wine cooler under the register when Kristopher said, “You can see why she’s my favorite professor.”

  Connor stopped with his hand wrapped around the neck of the bottle. “Professor?”

  “Yeah, she’s the Dr. Dee I had last semester. Bridget and I talked about her, remember?”

  “That was Dr. Dee? She’s... She’s young.” He kept his voice down and his back to the customers as he uncorked the wine.

  “Tell me about it. When she walked into class last semester, I wasn’t the only guy singing ‘Hot for Teacher’ in my head.” Kristopher started singing the chorus under his breath.

  “Your professor,” Connor repeated through clenched teeth.

  Kristopher looked confused. “What?”

  “You were making a move on your professor this afternoon?”

  Kristopher didn’t deny it. He turned away, but Connor turned him right back with a hand on his shoulder. They might look to the public like coworkers reviewing an order on a touchscreen, but Connor wanted to pick him up by the scruff of the neck and shake some sense into him. “What is wrong with you? Do you know how much trouble she’d be in if she slept with one of her students? She’d be fired.”

  “I wasn’t trying to sleep with—well, I mean, I wouldn’t turn it down—but I wanted to see if we got along, you know? Outside of class. She’s not my professor this semester.”

  “She’s not interested,” Connor said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I have eyes.” He really was losing his mind. He felt driven to protect a woman who was not his to protect. “You know what she is now? She’s in danger of having her reputation trashed, her professional reputation. You acted like she was your friend all afternoon, your buddy, not your professor. You helped yourself to her personal space, sitting in the snug with her, and you made it look exactly the way you wanted it to look to the other guys.”

  “Okay, okay. No harm done. Nothing happened.”

  “It’s not what you’re doing, it’s what it
looks like you’re doing. That’s the way the world works. You better learn that, quick, before somebody gets hurt.” Connor let go of him.

  Another one of his employees joined them at the register, a server named Gina. “Hi, guys. Is something wrong with the touchscreen? I need to clock in.”

  “Go ahead.” Connor stepped back, hoping he seemed normal when he felt anything but.

  Gina looked at his T-shirt. “Aren’t you going to change? Kris and I can handle this.”

  The staff uniforms were a bit upscale, a nod to the elegant brass and glass of the place, but nothing too formal. It was a pub, after all. She and Kristopher were wearing black button-downs and pin-striped black slacks. Connor was still in jeans and a T-shirt.

  “I’m going up now.”

  After Gina moved away, a more contrite Kristopher spoke under his breath to Connor. “Don’t worry. I’ll tell the guys she stone-cold blocked me. She did, too, right before you walked up. Gave me the choice to call her either ‘professor’ or ‘doctor.’ Harsh, right?”

  Connor clung to his last shred of patience. “No, you won’t say anything to your friends except how useful it was to have her there to tutor all of you. That’s it. Tutoring. School. Grades. Not a whiff of anything else gets connected to her. Are we clear?”

  Connor was barely aware of leaving the bar, yet he was already pounding up the back stairs to the third floor before he saw any color but red.

  Kristopher needed to grow up and stop thinking of sex as a sport and every woman he met as fair game on his playing field. Someone needed to teach him how the world worked, how the game was played. You didn’t try to charm a married woman into your bed, for one. You didn’t try to seduce coworkers. You didn’t take advantage of a girl who thought she was in love with you—Connor stumbled on that step.

  How many women had told him they loved him? He didn’t try to make them fall in love with him; they just did, once sex became part of the relationship. He kissed them without answering and let them believe they loved him for as many weeks or months as they wanted to, until the day they inevitably changed their minds and moved on.