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Women. They never knew when to leave a man alone.
He rolled off the bed, yanked the window open, then flopped onto his stomach. All the cool breeze did was blow around her phantom scent so he pulled the pillow over his head. He tossed and turned for what seemed like hours, the memory of Charlotte standing before him in nothing but jeans and a bra imprinting itself in his mind. When he finally, gratefully, fell asleep, he dreamed of her. Of her long legs, bright hair and wary eyes.
And when he woke, hard and aching for her, he could have sworn he still tasted the whisper of her kiss on his lips.
CHAPTER TWO
Seven months later
BEHIND THE BAR, Kane wiped his hands on the towel he kept in his back pocket. Julie Moffat, law student by day and kick-ass waitress by night, wove her way through the crowd at O’Riley’s, a tray of cosmos in her raised hand. She delivered the drinks to a table of coeds celebrating a twenty-first birthday, said something to the girls then nodded toward the corner where two dudes raised their beers in a toast. By the time the girls smiled their thanks to the guys, Julie was back at the bar.
“I need four margaritas,” she told Sadie, “two regular, one of those no salt. One strawberry, the other pomegranate, both blended. And four shots of Cuervo.”
Sadie, already pouring tequila into the blender, raised her eyebrows. “Sympathizing, celebrating or just loosening inhibitions?”
“They’re celebrating,” Julie said with a nod toward the four middle-aged women at a booth by the dartboard. “The blonde in the mom jeans got some big promotion, finally getting out from under the ass-hat supervisor she’s had to deal with for the past five years.”
“Good triumphs over evil.” Sadie raised the bottle in a toast before setting it on the counter. “I love when that happens.”
Kane handed a customer two bottles of Corona, a lime quarter wedged in each one. “Give the ladies that round on the house,” he told Julie.
“Will do.” And with that, she and her asymmetrical dark hair and neck tattoo were off again.
Sadie poured herself a glass of ginger ale. “While I have your attention—”
“You don’t have my attention.” He pointedly took in her cheetah-print dress, the snug material hugging her curves. “But PETA called. They’d like to talk to you about that outfit.”
“Oh, ha-ha. Such wit. Ease your mind, my little animal advocate. No cheetahs were injured during the making of this dress.”
“Maybe not, but you’ve blinded half the people in here with those tights.”
She glanced down at the neon pink covering her legs. Grinned. “Just trying to bring a little bit of brightness to this dreary place. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to do so next weekend as I need it off. That’s the whole weekend—two days. Two. Don’t try to schedule me for Saturday night and then claim you thought I meant only Friday.”
“You don’t seem to get how this works,” he said. “I’m the boss. I write the paychecks. I make the rules.”
And holy shit, but he had sounded just like his father.
“Yes, yes,” Sadie agreed pushing her fluffy blond hair from her shoulder. “You’re the big boss man. You have all the power in this relationship while I am just an employee, et cetera and so forth.”
“Glad you finally see things my way.”
“And as your employee, I’m giving you advance notice that I will be unable to work next weekend.”
“No.”
“You don’t seem to get how this works,” she said, throwing his words back at him with a sunny grin that made his left eye twitch. “I’m not asking for permission. I’m telling you I’m not working next weekend. James and I are going out of town.”
Sadie and James had become an official couple not long after Kane kicked Sadie and Charlotte out of his apartment last fall. They lived together. Why did they have to go out of town?
“You have to work.” He kept his tone calm. No sense losing his temper or his control. Though dealing with Sadie Nixon would be enough to make the most patient man lose his cool. “I already gave Mary Susan the weekend off so she could drive down to see her granddaughter in some school play.”
Sadie patted his arm, all faux conciliatory, as if the headache he’d developed wasn’t entirely her fault. “You’ll figure something out.”
“Do I have any other choice?”
Frowning, she pursed her mouth as if she seriously considered his question. “You could always close the bar. Hey, you could take a little vacation yourself. You haven’t had a day off since I started working here.”
He finished his water, tossed the empty bottle into the recycling bin. “You take enough days off for both of us.”
“So fire me.”
It was one of her favorite rejoinders, one she used mostly because she knew damn well he had no intention of doing it. He hated having anyone read him so clearly. If people knew you too well, they had the power to use that knowledge against you.
“Don’t think I’m not considering it.”
She laughed loudly, the sound somehow rising above the bar’s din. Several people—mostly men because, hey, pretty blonde in a tight, low-cut dress—glanced their way. “Oh, you slay me. You really do.”
“What’s so funny?” Bryce Gow, a heavyset elderly man with red cheeks and a bulbous nose, asked as he hefted himself onto a stool.
Sadie fixed his usual—rum and Coke—and set it on the bar, then leaned forward to tip her head conspiratorially toward Bryce. “Kane said he’s going to fire me,” she told the retired electrician.
Bryce’s expression brightened, but that could’ve been due to the fact that Sadie’s pose gave him an excellent view of her cleavage. “Fired shmired.” He sipped his drink, then patted Sadie’s hand. “Quit this dump—”
“Funny how this being a dump hasn’t stopped you from parking yourself on that stool every Saturday night for the past one hundred years,” Kane said.
Bryce, eighty if he was a day, and a regular long before Kane had ever set foot inside O’Riley’s—hell, before Kane, or even his father, had been born—glared, then turned back to Sadie. “You can work for my grandson,” he told her. “He’s a good boy. Respectful of his elders and his paying customers.”
Kane pulled yet another beer. “Last week you said he was lazy, ungrateful and running the company you’d built into the ground. You called him an idiot who’d touched one live wire too many and fried his brain.”
Bryce lowered his eyebrows. “At least he’s smart enough to appreciate good employees.”
“I am undervalued and underappreciated,” Sadie agreed with a sigh that was pure heartfelt drama. “I would quit in a heartbeat, but if I wasn’t around, poor Kane would miss me—”
“Poor Kane?” he mumbled, seriously considering sticking her head under the beer tap and giving her a good dousing. “Jesus Christ.”
She batted her eyelashes at him. “And I’d hate to see a grown man as pretty as him cry.”
“You’re a pain in the ass.”
“So I’ve been told,” she said cheerfully. She blew him a kiss. “You know you adore me.”
The worst part? It was true.
“I’m heading to the back of the bar,” he said. “Give you and that big head of yours more room.”
He really should fire her, he thought, as he made his way to the other end of the bar. She was flighty and unreliable, showed up for most of her shifts late, and took too many breaks when she was working.
She was also a great bartender, cheerful and chatty, always ready with a joke, a compliment or a sympathetic ear.
As much as he hated to admit it, he liked her. Hell, if he believed men and women could be friends without sex getting in the way, he might just say she was the closest thing he’d had to a friend in years.
If she ever suspected, she’d never let him hear the end of it.
“Slow night,” Sadie commented, joining him.
“Not too bad,” he said. “The birthday ladies alone are making us a lot of money.”
“Only because every guy under the age of fifty keeps buying them drinks. Men. Always so hopeful they’ll get lucky.”
“It’s what gets us through each day. Any of them getting pushy?”
“If they do, Julie will let you know.”
He expected that. Was glad his employees knew to come to him if there was a problem. He kept an eye out for everyone in his place. Took care of them.
He’d been in Shady Grove less than a year and already he was turning into a damned Boy Scout.
For another thirty minutes, Kane filled drink orders, yakking with those who wanted to chat, leaving the ones who didn’t alone with their thoughts and alcohol. The song on the jukebox ended and the familiar opening riff of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—a Saturday night mainstay at O’Riley’s, along with Guns n’ Roses’ “Sweet Child o’ Mine” and Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer”—started.
It was a good song. A classic. At one time it had been one of Kane’s favorites.
Until he’d seen people dance to it.
It wasn’t a tune made for smooth moves, but that didn’t stop a small portion of his customers. All that twitching and hopping and head-banging—most of the time simultaneously—could put off even the most die-hard Nirvana fan.
Averting his gaze from the dance floor, he opened a bottle of water and took a long drink. Scanned his domain from his position behind the bar. The booths along the back wall were filled, as were a few of the tables, late diners finishing their meals or enjoying a nightcap before heading home. The in-between stage of the evening meant those who’d come in for good food at reasonable prices mixed and mingled with the drinking crowd.
Shady Grove was a long way from Houston, but if there was one thing Kane had learned it was that people—whether at a honky-tonk stomping their cowboy boots to classic Hank Williams or in an exclusive club shaking their designer-clad asses to the latest techno hit—were the same everywhere. When Saturday night rolled around, they wanted a good time. To forget their problems, lose their inhibitions and seek out the mystical happy place where their pain magically disappeared, their checkbook wasn’t overdrawn and their boss/spouse/parent/kid wasn’t such a douche bag.
Only to wake up Sunday morning hungover and right back where they’d started.
Nothing sucked the life out of a good time like the real world. But, for a few hours he gave them a reprieve from their lives. That the reprieve came with copious amounts of alcohol caused him some guilt. Not so much he seriously considered turning O’Riley’s into a coffee shop or bookstore, but enough that he wanted it to be more than a bar where the locals got hammered every weekend.
He’d come up with the idea of serving meals. Full dinners instead of bar fare—though they offered burgers, wings and a variety of vegetables coated in thick batter and deep-fried.
Turning O’Riley’s into as much restaurant as bar had been a good idea, a smart one. An idea that had increased his business’s revenue over 30 percent since the fall. He wasn’t about the bottom line—that was his old man’s thing—but he couldn’t deny the sense of pride that came with being successful.
O’Riley’s was in the black, and it was all because of him.
Not that it had been a struggling business to begin with. When Kane had first stepped into O’Riley’s, it had a solid customer base, a good reputation and income enough for Gordon, the previous owner, and his one employee.
Now Kane did enough business for him to be more than generous with his six employees and still have money left over.
He should use it to buy some new chairs, maybe have the floors redone or renovate the kitchen. After all, this was his place. Every shot glass, every bottle of whiskey, every damn thing, from the beer taps to the utility bills to dealing with pain-in-the-ass customers who couldn’t hold their drinks or their tempers, was his problem. He knew these people, the men and women—young, old and in between—who came here night after night, weekend after weekend. He was a business owner, a member of the Shady Grove Chamber of Commerce for Christ’s sake.
In a short time, he’d somehow become enmeshed in this small town, a part of it.
He could see himself here next year. And the year after that. His roots digging deeper and deeper into the Pennsylvania ground, his ties to this community, to these people, growing tighter and tighter.
Cold touched the back of his neck. His stomach got queasy.
He’d tried ignoring the signs, had pushed aside the sense of unease, which had dogged him for weeks, riding his back like a deranged monkey, screeching, tugging his hair and slapping him upside the head. A man could only escape the truth for so long.
It was time to move on.
He’d given it a good run, he told himself, twisting the lid onto his water bottle and setting it aside to take an order from a fortysomething-year-old guy in khakis and a button-down shirt. He drew a beer for Button-Down, exchanged it for money and added the small tip to the wide-mouth jar under the counter.
Buying this place had been an impulsive move, born of instinct and perhaps heredity. He’d seen an opportunity to take a business and build it up, make it bigger, better and more profitable.
And if that opportunity just happened to be in some small town where no one knew him or his family, far away from Houston and his past? All the better.
O’Riley’s was doing well, better than he’d expected. Despite his best intentions, he’d taken after his father after all. At least in one area: making money.
But staying in one place too long was never a good idea. It made a man comfortable. Complacent. Careless.
Better to stay one step ahead. Always.
First thing Monday morning, he’d call a real estate agent, see about getting the building appraised. Start thinking about where he wanted to go next. Maybe he’d head north this time. It didn’t matter where he ended up, Maine or Greenland or somewhere in between. As long as he kept moving.
* * *
IT’D TAKEN A WHILE, but Charlotte was back on the horse.
Her sneakers squeaked on the gray floor as she walked down the main hallway of Shady Grove Memorial’s E.R. The baby with a high fever in room 3 cried, his scream heartbreaking and eardrum-piercing. Two middle-aged men—brothers by the resemblance between them—spoke quietly outside room 5, their faces drawn in worry.
Char approached the nurses’ station. Okay, so technically there was no horse to speak of, but figuratively she was there, sitting tall in the saddle, ready to gallop after her dreams.
And to think, she’d almost talked herself into believing she’d made a mistake, a big one, in going after what she’d wanted. In planning, scheduling and goal-setting. That she could float along, living the rest of her life taking each moment as it came all willy-nilly without a thought or care about her future.
Oh, she’d tried to do exactly that. Hard not to want to try something different after you’ve been rejected by the man you’d planned on marrying. Throw in a second rejection, this time by a man the complete opposite of what you were looking for, and any woman would question herself, her choices. So she’d gone in the opposite direction of anything and everything she’d ever done.
She’d stuck with it for as long as she could, shoving aside her dreams and goals and letting life happen. She’d gone to the grocery store without a list, didn’t note appointments in her phone’s calendar and spent her weekends zoned out in front of the TV, ignoring the work needing done around her new house. For six long months she’d been laid-back, spontaneous and impractical.
It had been torture. Pure, unadulterated torture.
Until one gloomy Wednesday morning last month when, on her way to the store to buy milk after discovering the empty carton in her fridge, her car had run out of gas. Waiting for her mother to come get her, good sense returned. Once back at home, she’d immediately listed her one-month, six-month and yearlong goals, cleaned and organized her refrigerator, and balanced her checkbook and, just like that, all was right in the world again.
Sitting back and waiting didn’t make things happen. It took planning. Control. Discipline. With those three things—traits she had in spades, thank you very much—anything was possible. Any goal achievable.
She walked around the high counter of the nurses’ station, plugged in her laptop and printed out her patient’s discharge papers. She’d been foolish, idiotic even, to try to be something she wasn’t. Someone she wasn’t.
Someone like her sister.
It’d taken time, but luckily she had come to her senses, Char thought as she gathered the papers and scanned them to make sure the information was correct. There was no way she could blithely toss aside all her dreams and the future she wanted.
Her mistake wasn’t in believing in that future, in working toward it. No, her mistake was choosing the wrong man to share it with. Yes, technically James fit the bill when it came to the type of man she wanted to marry. He was successful and smart, handsome and kind.
It was his kindness that had done it. He’d been so sweet to her when she’d been a gawky teenager, too tall, too thin and way too awkward around the boys her own age. James had assured her those boys were blind and stupid not to notice the wonder and awesomeness that was Charlotte Ellison, and they would, one day, line up for the chance to be with her.
