“Comes with the scotch.”
“Speaking of which.” He held up his tumbler. At least he’d switched to scotch and water.
“Can I trust that your fancy New York City chef knows what he’s doing with chicken and waffles?” Harry asked, not quite smiling, but not quite looking like the world was going to crush him.
“Well, our chef is from Mobile, so she might know her way around.” She set the refilled tumbler back down in front of him. “It’s raining out?”
“Yeah … I stepped out to get some air and it’s cats and dogs out there.”
Cats and dogs? she thought, swallowing her smile. That’s just adorable.
Rain could go either way for business, and Lord knew she needed the money of a good night, but she was content at this quiet end of her bar.
“This is kind of you,” he said, contemplating the food.
“Well, you seem like a nice guy.”
“I’ve barely said two words to you.”
“Well, I have a sixth sense about these things, and those two words were serious and well-meaning.”
“Serious and well-meaning is exactly me.” He cocked his head, watching her from beneath long lashes. “Or a pet dog; I can’t be sure.”
She laughed, happy to see that he was getting into the spirit of the banter. “I have never had a well-meaning dog in my life. Thieves and layabouts, all of them.”
“I had one. As a kid. Daisey. She meant well.”
Oh God, he was walking down old-dead-dog memory lane.
“You are just all kinds of sad tonight, aren’t you?”
He spun his glass in a slow circle. “I guess so.”
“You know,” she said, “where I grew up there was this bar called The Sunset right down the street. A real dive bar. Guys went in after their shifts on Friday and didn’t come out until Sunday afternoon. Well, they got this new daytime bartender. A real soft touch. She fell for every hard-luck story that sat down in the corner. And then word got out that Ben Polecka came in there crying after his wife left and the bartender gave him free beers all afternoon. Soon, everyone was going in there pretending to cry to get free beer. And my sister, always a bit of an entrepreneur, decides she and I should go stand outside the bar and charge guys five dollars to kick them in the balls. You know, as a kind of guarantee of real tears.”
He laughed, which of course had been the idea, but it still came as a bit of a surprise.
“How much money did you make?”
“Five bucks,” she shrugged. “We were out there for like three hours, and finally Bruce Dinkle took pity on us.”
“That was his real name?”
“Yep.”
“And Bruce Dinkle paid you to kick him in the balls?”
“He did. We bought some ice cream, and it felt like we were on top of the world.”
His laughter faded and then the smile vanished, and then the weight of the world was rolled back up on his shoulders.
She leaned against the bar and crossed her arms over her chest, well aware that her breasts nearly spilled from the vest she wore, but Harry’s eye didn’t wander. They stayed glued to hers as if he didn’t even see the body beneath her chin. “Okay, you sad sack. Tell me. Who is your best not good enough for? A wife?”
“No wife.”
“Girlfriend?”
He shook his head, and she would be lying if she didn’t say she was relieved.
“A boss?”
“I’ve never had a boss.”
No boss? What planet is this guy from?
“Then who, my friend, is making you feel this way?”
“Why?” He smiled at her, looser than he’d been, but not yet totally unwound. The guy could hold his booze; she’d give him that. “You going to give them a talking-to?”
“I just might.”
“What would you say?”
“I would probably say, listen …” She paused, waiting for him to fill in the blank.
He shook his head, that blond hair gleaming red and then blue under the lights. “I’m afraid it’s … complicated.”
Gary, her manager, glanced over from across the room, and Ryan reached for some unprepped garnishes under the bar and made a good show of stripping mint leaves off the stem for mojitos. “Give me the gist. You don’t have to spill state secrets, but you might feel better getting some of this off your chest.”
“You an expert on that too?”
“I’m a bartender, Harry. I am an expert on lots of things.” She chucked the mint stem into the trash under the bar. “Lay your burdens down, my friend.”
“It’s my sister. She’s in trouble.”
“Ah, oddly enough, this is a subject in which I have plenty of experience.”
“You have a sister who gets in trouble?”
“I am the sister who gets in trouble.” Something buzzed up the back of her neck. A warning to shut her mouth and walk on, perhaps send Lindsey over. But she ignored it, despite having gotten so much better at heeding those internal warnings. She grabbed more mint just so she’d have something to do with her hands.
“So, is she in big trouble or little trouble? Like if one is dating a jerk and ten is living on the streets, where does she fall?”
“She isn’t even on that spectrum.” Something in his voice made her realize the jokes were soon to become offensive. That there was no part of this he was going to find funny. And funny was a huge part of her armor. And without her armor she was just vulnerable and sympathetic—two things that had gotten her in more than her fair share of trouble.
Leave, she thought. Switch sides with Lindsey. Forget about Sad Ken Doll.
But that was impossible. His anger and grief were magnetic.
She put down the mint.
“I’m so sorry, Harry,” she told him sincerely.
“It’s fine.” His smile revealed the dimple, and for a moment she was distracted enough not to realize he was lying. But she had been a bartender for over a decade and she could smell a lie a mile away. And whatever the situation was with his sister, it was far from fine.
“That’s what you’ve been working on for the last few days. With the phones? Trying to help your sister?”
“I couldn’t stare at the walls of my room anymore. All day, every day, trying …”
He sighed, pushing away the plate with the half-eaten chicken on it. For a moment Ryan thought he was going to walk out; he was coiled, poised to just vanish.
And that would be for the best, she thought. For her. Maybe for him. Because the last thing he probably needed was a sister in trouble and a hangover in the morning. And the last thing she needed was this compassion—this empathy and curiosity, the rusted guts of her desire—making her decisions for her.
But then he relaxed back into his chair. Back into the moment with her.
She exhaled the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
“Not that it’s done much good. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to help her.”
There was an invisible barrier down the middle of the bar. This one and every other upscale bar in the five boroughs. The barrier was well documented not only in The Cobalt Bar employee handbook, but also in her own rule book: no fraternizing with the drinkers. A lesson she’d learned twice the hard way.
But she shoved her fist right through that barrier and put her hand over his. To her surprise, he grabbed her fingers and held them tight in his, like a lifeline he was terribly in need of.
“She’s … she’s my baby sister. And she hasn’t needed anything from me in so long and now … now that she does, now that she really needs me, I might not be able to help her. It’s killing me.”
Everything, the empathy and the desire and the shock of his touch, twisted and turned inside her, making her ache. Making her wish there wasn’t a bar between them, that she could wrap her arms around him properly.
She squeezed his hand instead. “Do you have any other family?” she asked. “Someone else who can help you?”<
br />
“I am heading home tomorrow morning to talk to them.” His tone indicated that this was a bad, bad thing.
“They won’t be able to help?”
“Help or hurt—it could go either way. Smart money is on hurt.”
She stood there, silently bearing witness to his grief. Letting him grip her hand so hard their knuckles rubbed up against each other’s.
“It’s so crazy, and my mother … Mother is not going to handle this well. She’s never approved of my sister, and this is going to put her right over the edge.” He shot her a wry look and then sighed. “The one bright spot is, I think I know a guy who can help.”
“That’s good,” she said.
“Well, there is a decent chance that he will laugh in my face and tell me to go fuck myself. And then …” He hung his head, wiping his hand across his face. “Oh God, then I have no idea what I’m going to do.”
Screw the barrier. Screw the rule book. Screw the rest of the bar. She lifted her hand from his grip and touched his cheek, the perfect bone structure of his jaw. The fine scruff of his beard felt good against her palm.
The man needed some sympathy. Some human connection. He’d been wrestling with what seemed like a nightmare for the last three days. And she … maybe she, who lived behind a solid glass wall of rules created by shitty past experience, could use a little human connection, too.
“He won’t,” she said. “You’ll convince him.”
He turned his face and whispered, “How do you know that?” into her hand.
The sensation of his breath between her fingers sizzled up her arm and across her chest, settling in her belly, where it smoldered and burned.
“Because I’m a little sister, too. And my big brother would tear down the world to help me. That’s what big brothers do.”
She smiled into his bloodshot blue eyes when he opened them.
The thick air crackled with the power of all the desperate grief and anger he was throwing off.
She felt the touch of his gaze across her face. Her lips and eyes, the cheekbones that had earned her quite a bit of money. Her hair pulled back in a high ponytail and falling over her shoulders like a luxurious cape.
What he saw wasn’t really her. It was a quirk of genetics, a lucky break in the womb. To have her mother’s nose and her father’s eyes. Her grandmother’s bone structure and her grandfather’s outrageous thick, shiny hair.
It was just what she looked like. The tools she used to make a living.
And it had taken her years of destroying nearly every relationship that ever meant anything to realize that.
“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
She pulled her hands free of his. The moment of intense connection between them was fading to something slightly more manageable. Attraction and appeal. A rare camaraderie, but at least she wasn’t ready to crawl over the bar into his lap.
“That’s the scotch talking.”
“Give me some credit. It’s not just your looks, Ryan. You’re lovely.” For no good reason, that made her flustered, made her feel stupid for reaching across the barrier.
The rules were in place for a reason, after all.
“Ryan!” Lindsey said. “A little help?”
Ryan turned to see Lindsey inundated with gray-suited Wall Street types, so she gave Harry a quick smile and headed over to help her.
“Getting a little cozy, aren’t you?” Lindsey asked, her eyes twinkling. She was a good sport, Lindsey. As long as someone had the chance to get lucky, she was happy.
“He’s a nice guy.”
“They always are. But listen.” She jerked his chin across the bar where their manager, Gary, was talking to a few of the regulars in the corner. “Gary’s watching you, so just be careful. He fired Will last month for going home with that crazy bitch from Saks.”
As if he heard, Gary looked over. Gary was a nice enough guy, but the rules were pretty ironclad and he could lose his job for ignoring them.
The rush at the bar lasted a good hour and finally around ten p.m. slowed down to a trickle. Lindsey sent out another martini, a watermelon margarita, and three more Coronas and checked her watch. “It’s cutting time,” she said.
“You’ve been here since three,” Ryan said, because the first one in was usually the first one to go home unless they were working a double. She set dirty glassware under the bar in the gray bins and then handed them to Sam, who was heading back to the kitchen.
“Grab me some lemons, would you? And more mint and more thyme. Thanks.”
Sam, a notorious flirt, winked at her, taking the bins with him.
“Yeah, but I don’t have a hot guy at the end of the bar waiting for me,” Lindsey said.
Ryan looked over her shoulder to where Harry sat, looking at his phone, nursing a Corona, the chicken and waffles forgotten at his elbow.
“I don’t.”
“Ugh, denial is so boring,” Lindsey said, grabbing two more pint glasses and starting the intricate pour-and-wait system for Guinness. “Get into my back pocket.”
Ryan reached into the tight pocket of Lindsey’s shorts and pulled out two sticks of gum, a twenty-dollar bill, and a condom.
“Go,” Lindsey said. “Stock my garnishes and then take Sad Ken Doll someplace and cheer him up.”
It had been a long time since Ryan had gone home with a guy. Picking up at a bar was for other women, younger women. Women who hadn’t been burned quite as effectively as she had.
There was also the small matter of losing her job if management found out.
But as with every job, there were ways of getting around management, if a woman wanted to bad enough.
She glanced back at Harry and caught him staring at her.
His eyes flared and the bar fell away again, the whole world disappeared. He had some kind of magical power when he really looked at her, a way of making her feel like the only woman on the planet. And hundreds of lesser men had tried and never, ever come close to doing that. Of engaging the old and rusted machine of her desire.
This man did it with one look.
A sudden breathlessness seized her, and the fifteen minutes she had left on her shift was too much. The time it would take her to get up to his room was too much. The fact that he—serious and well-meaning—might not take her up on what she was going to offer was a reality she had no interest in.
She wanted him—his scruffy face, the burning anger in his eyes, the beautiful symmetry of his body, the delicious humanity of his grief.
Without a second thought, she slipped the condom in her own pocket.
“Thanks, Linds,” she said.
“No problem.” She wiggled her butt while Ryan tucked the twenty back in her pocket.
An asshole at the bar whistled.
“Oh, you wish, buddy,” Lindsey said.
“Hey,” the guy said, leaning across the bar toward Ryan. “You look really familiar to me.”
“Because you were in here last week.”
“No … My friend,” he jerked his thumb over his shoulder, vaguely referencing one of the other guys in suits with manicured hands behind him. “He says you were the Lips Girl like fifteen years ago. Is that true? Can you do the thing? The slogan—”
“Your friend is wrong,” she lied, and dismissed the guy by turning her back on him. There were bigger things on her horizon than trying to put a shine on ancient history.
Ryan walked over to Harry and picked up his plate of half-eaten dinner.
“No wife?” she asked. “No girlfriend? No woman waiting at home for you? Don’t bother lying—I’ll be able to tell.”
He shook his head.
“Are you gay?”
That made him smile, and again she felt that little spike of pleasure. Of a job well done. “I’m not gay, and no one is waiting for me, Ryan.”
“Are you staying at the hotel?” she asked.
His burning blue eyes met hers, and there was no confusion; he knew what she was asking.
“I am.”
“I’m getting off in about fifteen minutes.”
Harry stood, a new urgency in his movement. He tossed several bills on the bar, but she pushed them back at him.
“It’s on me,” she said. “The Sister in Trouble special.”
By the shocked and blank look on his face it was obvious no one ever joked with him, and she wondered if he had any friends. Why would a man like him in what seemed to be the worst three days of his life show up alone at her bar?
But when he did laugh, it was a good one. Full-throated and deep, the kind of laugh that made other people smile. But not Manager Gary, who walked by giving Ryan a serious warning glare.
She took Harry’s plate and stepped away.
“Room 534,” he said.
She nodded once, the number tucked away.
“Ryan?” he said.
“Yes?”
“Hurry.”
Chapter 2
It wasn’t a hard thing to get up to the guest rooms from the bar. You had to go through the lobby and upstairs to get to the bathrooms anyway. She had changed out of her work clothes in the bathroom, the tight leather vest and dark shorts, and put on a camisole tank top and a gray jersey skirt. The boots stayed—overkill maybe, but they were too big to fit in her bag.
On her back, the top of her tattoo was visible just over the edge of her tank top. Ophelia’s hands and the blue-green vines that bound them.
Her stomach fluttered with nerves, and her palms were damp. It had been … a very long time since she’d done this. There had been that two-year round-robin of questionable choices after her divorce six years ago. After which all the rules about guys from bars were formed and up to this point, easily unbroken.
But she found as she got into the quiet solace of the elevator, where she expected to be swarmed with second thoughts and serious misgivings, that she was only more excited. So much so that beneath the camisole her nipples were hard and her breath was short. Between her legs anticipation made her ache.
The door pinged open and she stepped into the opulent hallway that made up The Cobalt Hotel. Room 534 was just left of the elevators and down the hallway a few steps. Outside the door she took a deep breath and then knocked lightly.
Indecent Proposal (Boys of Bishop) Page 2
