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Ah, hell. As if being his big sister wasn’t bad enough, Tess was also a reporter. She was both perceptive and damnably hard to shake. “Joe’s opening the bar today,” Mark said. “My shift doesn’t start till four.”
“Which hasn’t stopped you from being there at eleven every other day this week.”
He shrugged, not denying it.
“It didn’t go well, did it?” Tess’s golden gaze was concerned. “Your meeting with the new owner.”
Not well. Now, there was an understatement.
Mark cut the string on the bakery box. “She hasn’t fired me yet, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Of course she didn’t fire you,” Tess said. “She’d be a fool to fire you. You’re all that’s kept that place running.”
His sister’s quick loyalty was both touching and more than he could bear right now.
“I don’t know if I want the job.”
Tess frowned. “What else would you do?”
That was the problem, Mark acknowledged. Despite his stint in the marines, he didn’t like taking orders. He had enjoyed running the bar. Calling the shots. But Nicole Reed, with her silk blouses and dot-com fortune, had nixed his dream of making the place his own.
Since he came back to Eden a year ago, he was just drifting through civilian life. So far he’d avoided repeating his old mistakes. He wasn’t drinking, and he hadn’t been arrested. Not yet, anyway. He’d come close a couple of months ago. But he couldn’t blame his sister for looking at him like a loose boat cruising toward an accident.
He regarded her with affection. “Is that why you’re here? To stand over my shoulder like you did when I had that paper due in Mrs. Williams’s English class?”
“Of course not,” Tess said. But her cheeks turned dull red. “I came to tell you you’ve got a tux fitting tomorrow at ten-thirty.”
“You could have called.”
“And to bring you dessert.”
“You could have waited.”
“And to deliver your mail.”
She must have collected it from his mat when she let herself into his apartment.
He stuck out his palm. “Fine. Hand it over.”
She marched around him, scooped a sheaf of envelopes and circulars from the mess on the coffee table, and thrust it at him. “There. Special delivery.”
“Gee, thanks. But you shouldn’t have.” He started to thumb through the stack. “There’s nothing here that can’t—”
A heavy cream envelope with an embossed return address snagged his attention. Johnson, Neil and Younger. Since when did high-priced Gold Coast law firms troll for business in tiny Eden?
“What?” Tess said. “What is it?”
Mark slit the flap and unfolded the letter inside.
Dear Mr. Delucca, I am writing to you, blah blah, guardian ad litem— What the hell was that? —for Daniel Wainscott. More blah, inform you of the passing of Elizabeth Jane Wainscott—
His eye caught. His mind stumbled. Betsy? Betsy was dead?
—will suggested that you are Daniel’s father and requested that you become his guardian.
The news slammed his chest like a swinging boom. The air left his lungs. The room tilted.
“Mark? What’s the matter?”
He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t think. He could only read while his world capsized around him.
Phrases leaped off the page. The words were jumbled and his vision blurred, but the meaning seemed horribly clear.
…no legally binding effect.
Daniel’s grandparents, Robert and Helen Wainscott, have expressed interest in adopting Daniel and appear ready to pursue all legal avenues to do so.
…advise you……choose to prove paternity……seek custody of Daniel…
“Mark!” Tess touched his arm.
The letter in his grip quivered like the edge of a sail. Mark folded it and tucked it back into the stack. But the words still burned and swirled in his brain.
…possibility that you are, indeed, Daniel’s father……act quickly to avoid losing your rights…
“It’s nothing,” he lied. “A mistake. Want a pastry?”
Chapter 2
She was pretty when she smiled.
Mark paused in the dark entryway. Behind the bar, chubby Joe Scholz was trying to explain the idiosyncrasies of the Blue Moon’s cash register to Nicole Reed. Her blond head was bowed. Her pink lips curved in a secret smile. And with the suddenness of a squall, swift, blind, animal lust took Mark by the throat and shook him at the root.
He sucked in his breath and waited in the dark, his blood roaring, until his eyes adjusted fully to the dim room and his body recovered from the impact of that smile.
Nicole glanced toward the entrance and saw him. Just for a second, surprise and relief shone in those blue eyes. And then her slim shoulders squared, and her smile disappeared as if it had never been.
Mark took another breath. Good.
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” she said in her precise, private school voice.
He forced himself to move forward; summoned a shrug. “Then I guess you didn’t look at the work schedule.”
Her lips firmed. “I looked.”
“Then you should have known I was on at four.”
“I thought you hadn’t decided yet whether you would continue to work here.”
He liked the way she took the battle to him, instead of dithering around. But he couldn’t afford to like her too much. He couldn’t afford to say too much, either.
The problem was, he hadn’t decided what to do yet. Nobody in town would believe it—the Delucca men weren’t exactly known for sticking around—but Mark’s pride wouldn’t let him walk away without at least giving notice.
Not to mention that as long as there was the slightest chance there was a kid out there somewhere with the Wainscott name and Delucca genes, this could be a really bad time for Mark to find himself unemployed.
Mark’s jaw tightened. No, he wouldn’t mention that.
He wouldn’t even think about it.
Much.
He lifted up a section of the counter and slid behind the bar. “You need a bartender.”
Nicole slipped out of his way, watching him with her too-cool, too-perceptive blue eyes. In the cigarette-and-beer-tinged air, her scent lingered, expensive and out of place. “Joe is here.”
Joe was doing his best to fade into the bottles behind the bar. “Joe’s off now.”
“I would have managed.”
“They teach you how to mix drinks in business school?”
“No,” she admitted. “But I pour a mean glass of chardonnay.”
Mark stopped inventorying the glassware for the evening rush to stare at her. Little Miss Michigan Avenue wasn’t actually poking fun at herself, was she?
She offered him a small smile. It didn’t transform her face the way the other one did, but it was still very, very nice. “Thank you for coming in,” she said. Like she meant it.
He lifted one shoulder. “Don’t thank me. That’s what you pay me for.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
Uh-oh. Another minute, and he might start liking this chick. And that would be as big a mistake as mixing beer and brandy.
“Try staying out of my way,” he suggested, not caring if he sounded like a jerk. Hell, hoping he sounded like a jerk, like somebody she wouldn’t in a million years want to get to know better. The last thing he needed was another sweet-smelling, spoiled blonde complicating his life.
…need to consider the possibility that you are, indeed, Daniel’s father.
Damn.
A couple of regulars dragged in—the eight-to-four shift was ending at the nearby paper plant—and Mark greeted them with smiles and relief.
“Hey, Tom, Ed. How’s it going?” He moved smoothly to pull a beer and pour a whiskey, comfortable with the demands of his job, easy in the world he’d created.
A world where he knew almost everybody by name and could give them what they wanted without having to think about it too much.
Okay, he was good, Nicole admitted several hours into Mark’s shift.
Good to look at, too, she thought as he turned to set a drink at the other end of the bar and she had the chance to admire his hard, lean back and the fit of his Rough Rider jeans.
Not that his appearance mattered, she reminded herself. She was here to evaluate his job performance, not his butt. She stole another surreptitious glance. Although at the moment she had no complaint with either one.
He didn’t spin or flip or juggle bottles. Unlike Joe, who had kept up an unthreatening stream of jokes and small talk through the afternoon, he didn’t try to entertain the customers. Surely he could offer them more than, “What can I get you?” and “Be with you in a sec.”
But he never got an order wrong, Nicole noticed. He never asked a customer to repeat one, either. His memory—and his patience—astounded her.
It wavered only once, when an older man in a well-cut suit and ill-fitting hairpiece gulped half his drink and then demanded a new one.
Mark raised an eyebrow. “Can I ask you what’s wrong with what you’ve got?”
The older man scowled. “I ordered a Manhattan, damn it. I can’t even taste the scotch in this.”
Mark whisked the offending drink away. “Let me take care of that for you.”
Nicole shifted on her stool at the other end of the bar. Maybe the University of Chicago didn’t offer courses in mixology, but…
“What’s in a Manhattan?” she asked as Mark approached her perch.
“Vermouth, bourbon. Bitters.” He barely glanced at her. His eyes and hands were busy on his bottles. Below his turned-back sleeves, he had long, lean hands and muscled forearms and—heavens, was that a tattoo riding the curve of his biceps, peeking below the cuff? “But our guy doesn’t want that,” he continued. “He wants a Rob Roy.”
Nicole tore her attention from his arm. Liquor was expensive. She wasn’t giving away free drinks because Mr. Hairpiece didn’t know his ingredients. “I’m sure if you explained to him that he ordered the wrong drink—”
“—I’d be wasting my breath.” Mark added a twist of lemon peel to the fresh drink. “The customer’s always right, boss. I’m surprised they didn’t teach you that in business school,” he added over his shoulder.
Cocky, conceited, know-it-all jerk. Nicole twisted her rings in her lap.
“Well, hel-lo, pretty lady.” A warm, male, lookee-what-we-got-here voice swam up on her other side. “I haven’t seen you here before.”
Nicole squeezed her eyes briefly shut. She was a loser magnet, that’s what she was. She took a quick peek through her lashes at the man crowding her bar stool. Not quite young, not exactly good-looking, and married. She would bet on it. She sighed.
“That’s because I haven’t been here before.”
He laughed as if she’d said something funny. “Guess it’s up to me to make you feel welcome, then.”
“No, thank you, I—”
He leaned into her, his stomach nudging the back of her arm, his face earnest and too close. “What’ll you have?”
“Miss Reed doesn’t need you to buy her a drink, Carl.” Mark DeLucca’s voice was edged with amusement and something else. “She owns the bar.”
The pressure on her arm eased as the man—Carl—took a step back. “This bar?”
“This very one. And if you want to come back, I suggest you take your beer and go join your pals.”
“Well, excuse me,” Carl blustered.
“You bet,” Mark said.
Nicole was grateful. Embarrassed. Defensive. The author of Losing the Losers in Your Life was adamant that a successful life plan did not include waiting for rescue.
