Jeez. Nick might forgive, but it sure as hell looked like forget wasn’t on his agenda. “Yeah.”
“Good. Tell you what,” he said, his expression going sharp around the edges as he methodically filled a pint glass first with ice, then with just the right ratio of lemonade to iced tea. “Drink’s on the house, but it’s the only thing you’re going to get out of me. I don’t talk to reporters. Especially not if they’re you.”
Before Ava could work through her shock to reply, Nick placed the glass directly on top of her business card and turned to walk away.
Brennan got four steps away from the end of the bar before he realized there was a zero percent chance this night wasn’t going to strike him dead. Not to go all Casablanca or anything, but of all the bars in the Blue Ridge—hell, on the entire eastern seaboard, for Chrissake—Ava Mancuso just had to walk into his. Tonight. Looking for a fucking story?
There wasn’t enough distraction or liquor in ten small-town restaurants for this.
“Jeez, Brennan. You okay?” The degree of concern glinting in Teagan’s eyes was Brennan’s first clue that his normally ironclad composure was unraveling like his grandmother’s knitting, and he funneled every last shred of control into his inhale.
“Yup. We’re low on Cold Creek’s summer ale. I’m going to grab a case from the walk-in.” Of course his back would probably dish up a whole lot of I’m-glad-you-think-so-tough-guy over hauling around anything heavier than a cheeseburger after the strain of this morning’s rescue mission, but so be it. He’d come to terms with the fact that hurting went hand in hand with being busy a long time ago.
The pain kept him grounded, reminding him that he could do worse than hurting, and anyway, if he wasn’t busy working himself into exhaustion, he’d have way too much time to think about things. Like how the burnt smell of smoke still lingered in his hair even though he’d washed it three damned times, or how he could still feel the weight of Ava’s emerald green stare on his back from halfway across the bar.
Time to go.
Brennan crossed the narrow channel of space behind the bar in half as many strides as usual, the startling lack of sound filling his ears with relief as he pushed through the swinging door to the kitchen. Bypassing Jesse with a nod and a quick “hey,” Brennan cut a hot path to the walk-in, not stopping his forward momentum until he was surrounded by three walls of industrial steel shelving and a whole bunch of cold, calm air.
Inhale. Exhale. Find control. Inhale . . .
Damn it, how had Ava Mancuso gotten even prettier in seven years?
“You look like shit, my friend.”
“Jesus!” Brennan’s head jacked around, his eyes stinging from the frigid wake-up call as they popped back open to land smack on Adrian’s crossed arms and raised eyebrow. “You do know sneaking up on people is uncool, right?” He reached up to the shelf across from him to grab the case of beer that would keep him busy until Ava was good and gone from the bar, but Adrian stepped in his path, the door clicking shut behind him.
“And you do know that you’re changing the subject, right?”
The words were all gravelly statement and left no wiggle room, but Brennan met them with a perfectly practiced and very blank stare.
“There’s no subject to change. I’m fine.” Getting into a pissing match with the guy wasn’t usually on Brennan’s to-do list, especially since Adrian was roughly the size of a small nation. But the last thing Brennan wanted was to pop the cork on all of his ridiculous emotions right now.
Which sucked for him, because Adrian didn’t budge. “You’re rattled as hell. You want to air this out, or do I need to send you home?”
“You can’t send me home.” Panic spurted in Brennan’s chest, and he sucked in a breath of frosty air to dilute it. “The holiday season just started. The bar is slammed.”
“Jesse just went out to cover the crowd and the overflow. I don’t want to replace you, but I will if I have to.” Adrian waited, and when nothing but the low hum of the walk-in and his buddy’s brows-up what gives passed between them, Brennan knew he was the captain of a sinking ship. If he wanted to stay and keep busy, keep moving, and keep his shit together, he was going to have to earn it.
“Look, all these reporters just give me the shakes, all right? I’m not exactly a public-eye kind of guy.”
Adrian hit him with a look that read fair enough. “That pretty woman at the end of the bar is a reporter?”
“Among other things,” Brennan muttered, and damn it, he really needed to keep his big mouth on lockdown.
“Clearly, you know her.” Adrian held up a massive hand to cut off Brennan’s protest at the knees. “Before you try to argue, Teagan already told me the woman asked for you by your first name.”
“So?”
“So, we’ve been friends for more than half a year and I didn’t even know you had a first name. Come on, Brennan. I get that you don’t want to take out a billboard, but between what went down this morning and the way you look right now, you’re torqued up to ten. I’ve got a bar full of people out there, some of whom are liquored up and all of whom want a piece of you. You don’t have to talk about this, but you do have to be straight before I let you back behind the wood to deal with them.”
Brennan’s defeated exhale puffed around his face in the frigid air. “Okay. Yes, she’s a reporter at the Riverside Daily, and yes, I know her. We used to”—be madly, insanely, irreversibly in love—“have a thing,” he bit out. “It was a long time ago.”
“Looks like you two did a number on each other.” Adrian tipped his platinum blond head at Brennan in a clear bid for more intel, but screw it. Brennan wasn’t getting away without at least telling him something, and maybe if he unloaded a little of what had happened, he could blow it off like the steam it was and get back to normal.
“It was the summer after college. Prime time to be young and dumb. I got a line on a job waiting tables at the beach resort out on Sapphire Island. You know, off the coast of Virginia Beach?” Brennan turned toward the open-air shelf at his side, straightening the cardboard cases full of beer against the metal grooves. God, Mason had been so freaking pleased with himself when he’d landed them both on the short list to work at the prestigious resort for the summer. Two best friends, one last hurrah before the fire academy, and a gorgeous beach town full of beer and bikinis.
Brennan cranked down on the memory and stuffed it away. Copping to his summer with Ava was one thing, but the rest of his past wasn’t up for grabs. Not now.
Not ever.
“I met Ava on the first day there. She was part of the summer staff too, working as a hostess,” he said, pulling a case of beer flush with the front of the shelf while Adrian fell into step straightening the cases on the opposite side of the walk-in. “I missed every single word the restaurant manager told us in orientation, but it was worth it. The way that woman looks in a pair of cutoffs should be a fucking felony.”
Adrian chuffed out a laugh. “Sounds like love at first sight.”
Brennan returned the laughter, only without any humor. “More like love is blind. We spent the entire summer glued together, and I thought we really had something. But the morning after our last shift, Ava packed her bags and took off. No good-bye, no note, no phone call, no nothing. She just disappeared.”
“Ouch. Did you ever try to find her?”
Brennan’s pulse kicked beneath the heavy cloak of his composure. “I was twenty-two and off my rocker for the woman. Hell yes, I tried to find her. But Ava was a ghost.”
“Come on,” Adrian said, turning from the shelf to nail him with a doubtful look. “Between Google and social media, nobody’s a ghost these days.”
“This was seven years ago, remember? Anyway, I did look for her, online and in person. Her roommate had no clue where she’d gone, and her cell had been disconnected. There was no trace of her, not even in her hometown. I looked everywhere I could think of, but nobody had ever heard of her. It was as if she didn’t even
exist.”
Except in his memory, and there, Ava had been all too real. Glittering, bright green eyes, the brown-sugar smell of her skin, a smile so sexy and sweet he’d get half hard just thinking about it, the seductive, velvety sighs she’d make underneath him that took him the rest of the way there . . .
No. No more. Ava Mancuso was in his rearview, and he needed to slap a big, fat ROAD CLOSED sign over memory lane and reroute this shit, permanently.
“Anyway.” Brennan cleared his throat, then did it again just to make sure his vocal cords got the message to put some extra indifference on his words. “After a couple of weeks, I figured she didn’t want to be found. So I took the hint and stopped looking.”
“And now she’s here looking for a story?” Adrian jerked his stubble-covered chin toward the beer on the shelf in front of them.
Relief swirled in Brennan’s gut at passing the I-really-am-fine muster. He hefted a case of summer ale from the rack, even though his back protested heartily under the sudden added weight. “Along with half the other reporters in the Blue Ridge. Too bad for them I’ve got nothing to say.”
“Hmm.” Adrian slid a case of beer of his own to his shoulder, flipping his tree trunk of an arm over the cardboard to balance it one-handed while he popped the walk-in handle with his other palm. “You tell her that?”
A tiny kernel in Brennan’s subconscious flinched, but no way. He might’ve been a little colder to Ava than necessary, but she’d earned every frost-encrusted syllable.
“Yeah,” Brennan said, following Adrian through the now-quiet kitchen toward the pass-through. He’d made it wildly clear he wasn’t giving Ava what she’d come for, and she’d had plenty of time to gather her purse and her pride and walk out the door. Now, finally, Brennan could get on with his night and his life. “All I want to do is tend bar. I’m not interested in anything else.”
Wait . . . had the crowd gotten even bigger in the ten minutes he and Adrian had been in the kitchen?
“Looks like you’re gonna get your wish,” Adrian half hollered over the wide expanse of his shoulder, and even then Brennan had to strain to hear him over the loud thrum of voices and music. He moved toward the alcove at the midpoint of the overly crowded bar, intending to get these beers on ice so he could start serving up drinks, stat, but Adrian stopped him midstride.
“You sure you’re really good to go?”
Brennan nodded. “Absolutely.” Christ, he was more than ready to loosen the death grip of this day with some good, old-fashioned, bone-numbing work.
“Good.” His buddy stood to the height of his six foot, five inches, scanning the bar with a crooked smile before saying, “Because your reporter is digging in as hard as you are. And it looks like her drink is empty.”
Chapter Four
After the fourth time Ava reread the same ho-hum line from the Pine Mountain Fire Department’s press release on the blaze at Joe’s Grocery, she gave in and let her eyes drift shut. Okay, so it served her right for letting her stubborn pride keep her ass glued to her seat at the Double Shot’s bar until last call a mere eight hours ago, but come on. Her worth was on the line. She didn’t care how much sleep she had to sacrifice, she was going to get this story.
No matter how many hard-edged, silent stares Nick sent to the end of the bar along with her drink refills.
And there had been a lot of them.
“Hey.” Layla leaned against the flimsy entryway to Ava’s cubicle, a stack of photo printouts tucked in the crook of her arm. “Did you talk to the hero guy?”
“Good morning to you too,” Ava flipped back, arching a brow to take any potential sting off the words. She’d always admired Layla’s propensity for cutting to the chase. Took one to know one, and all that rot. “I’m working on the, uh, hero guy. But nothing solid yet.”
“Sounds like a tough source. I bet half the Blue Ridge wants a shot at him after yesterday.”
Ava stiffened against the back of her creaky old desk chair. “I can handle a difficult source.”
Layla winced and twisted the end of her white blond ponytail between her fingers, and great—here came the kid gloves. “Crap, Ava, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. You’re a great reporter. Gary’s totally giving you the raw end of the deal with all these lame assignments.”
“To an extent, I get it.” Ava dialed down her voice to its lowest setting to avoid being overheard, because Gary’s hearing bordered on superpower freakish. “I fully admit that I screwed up that first really big assignment he gave me by not double-checking my source.”
Okay, so “screwed up” was putting it a bit mildly. But she’d been really gung ho to break her first meaningful story, and the allegations of misconduct in the workplace at a prestigious local law firm had seemed very legit. Until Ava’s source admitted after the fact that she’d made up her story after an argument with her boss, and said boss had come within inches of suing the Daily for libel, even after they’d printed a front-page retraction.
And Ava had been at the bottom of the career ladder, with Gary absolutely convinced she couldn’t properly work a source ever since.
“Still,” she continued, leaning closer to Layla. “it’s been long enough. Fact-checking myself to death and covering nearly nonexistent stories while my colleagues get the lion’s share of great assignments isn’t what I signed on for.”
Layla transferred the photos in her arms to the corner of Ava’s desk, sliding into the seat across from her and dropping her voice to a hushed murmur. “Look, Ava, don’t get me wrong. I love working with you and don’t want you to leave, but not all newspapers are run by managing editors like Gary. If he’s still giving you crap assignments after all this time, maybe you should just move on to greener pastures.”
A heavy ache settled in behind her breastbone, and Ava reached for the supersized container of Tums she’d been using as a paperweight. “I can’t. Gary might be putting me through the wringer, but I’ve got five years under my belt here. If I go somewhere else, I’ll lose my seniority and have to start all over again. Plus, it’s not as if there are a ton of prime reporting jobs in the Blue Ridge.”
“You’ve got a point there. The paper in Pine Mountain is even smaller than this one,” Layla admitted.
“All I need is one chance—one big story to prove what I’ve got—and Gary won’t have any choice but to give me more plum assignments.”
“That’s true,” Layla said thoughtfully. “Even Mr. Royce would notice if you broke something huge and didn’t get bumped up to some better stories, especially with newspaper sales kind of flagging lately.”
Ava nodded at the mention of the Daily’s owner. “Which is exactly why I need to break this story on the fire at Joe’s, no matter what.”
Well, that was the main reason, anyway. Copping to the fact that she also didn’t want to leave Riverside because her brother Pete lived a hop-skip away in Pine Mountain wasn’t in Ava’s game plan. After all, most people would find it utterly strange that she and her older brother went to such great lengths to stick together.
And explaining that it was a deeply ingrained survival tactic as the children of two raging alcoholics didn’t really make for lively conversation.
Layla reached out to squeeze her shoulder, and the move anchored Ava back down to her overstuffed cubicle. “Okay. What can I do to help?”
Ava opened her mouth to dive into what she’d uncovered so far on the fire—and more importantly, what she hadn’t been able to uncover on Nick Brennan—but her words fell prey to the sound of a very gruff, very irritated throat being cleared.
“You’re late, Mancuso.”
Ava’s heart hit her breastbone, and she winged around in her cubicle just in time to catch her boss’s trademark scowl right in the chest. For as often as Gary wore the expression, she’d swear it had to be permanently etched on his beefy face.
“But I’ve been here since nine o’clock,” she said, twisting in her desk chair to double-check the time stamp on her
laptop. Not even an extra slap to the snooze button was worth the beady-eyed wrath she’d incur for walking in at 9:08. And considering she was probably a dead ringer for a cast extra in a zombie movie right now, that was totally saying something.
Gary, however, was clearly unimpressed. “The weekly reporter’s meeting was supposed to start in the conference room three minutes ago.” He paused to give his gold-plated watch an exaggerated tap, crossing his arms over his considerable paunch as Ava’s confusion multiplied.
“But that’s not until noon.” They’d done their weekly wrap-ups at lunch on Friday for the last five years. Ava knew, because she’d never missed a single one.
“Not today,” Gary said, his frown traveling upward to land in a crease between his brows. “Now did you want to join the rest of us for the reporter’s meeting, or are you in over your head with your copy edits?”
The question was laced with just enough suggestion that Ava’s belly went tight, and she lifted her spine to its full height. “Nope,” she said, not balking but not breaking their eye contact either. “Not at all. I’m ready whenever you are.”
Giving Layla a quick nod, Ava grabbed the blue-fabric-covered notebook she’d been using to gather her research on yesterday’s fire and followed Gary into the tiny conference room at the end of the hall. Of course, the other three reporters on staff were already seated at the four-person table, leaving her to drag a chair from the perimeter of the room and squeeze into a self-made spot. Part of her was irritated as hell to have to wing her way through this meeting two hours early, but Ava had learned ages ago to be prepared for anything as far as Gary was concerned. Ironically, it made her a better reporter. Provided she could actually snag an assignment of value, anyway.
Cue the segue.
“Right. Now that we’re all finally here—” Gary’s squinty gaze landed on Ava with all the subtlety of a hand grenade, but she met it toe-to-toe. She might be willing to prove her worth by working her buns off, but she wasn’t anybody’s rag doll to be tattered or tossed around at will.
All Wrapped Up (A Pine Mountain Novel) Page 4
