if I didn’t get a man a drink when he asked for one?”
She slid me onto a barstool and went around to the other side of the bar, her eyes dancing with mischief. “Now, what’ll it be?”
And that was how I found myself sitting in a bar in Chicago at six in the morning, drinking a margarita and talking to the hottest bartender I’d ever seen—while desperately trying to remember what hotel I was supposed to be staying in, and how to get back there without my security guard to direct me.
Chapter 2
Erika
Strictly speaking, I wasn’t supposed to be talking to the guy at all. I mean, he was a guy who’d come into the bar just before midnight last night and then gotten into a huge fight with someone who he now claimed was his brother’s ‘man’—whatever that meant. They’d caused a huge ruckus and broken more than their fair share of glasses, plus a table and two chairs, and we were going to have one hell of a time convincing the owner of the bar not to press charges for any of that.
But I’d talked to Gwen, the other girl on the bar at the time, and we’d agreed that we weren’t going to bother telling the owner what had happened. We’d just chalk the table and chairs up to general disrepair and leave it at that. I mean, furniture wore out. Especially when that furniture had been sentenced to spend its life in a dive bar in Chicago, where people weren’t exactly kind to the things they were using.
And no, it wasn’t because the guy who’d done much of the damage was passed out within minutes of the fight, in a sad ball in the corner. No, it wasn’t because that guy was insanely hot, either, or had been shouting in an accent that made him even hotter, all mussed-up curls and flashing brown eyes, with scruff that went a whole lot further than your standard five-o’clock shadow and right to ‘I Haven’t Shaved in Two Days’ scruff.
It wasn’t the fact that his eyes met mine in the middle of the fight and lit up with such heat that they’d almost melted my bones—for no good reason at all, considering I’d never laid eyes on the guy before.
I mean, I know what you’re thinking, and yeah, any normal girl would have taken that last bit and said she’d do just about anything to feel that sudden rush of heat through her body again. But I didn’t have that luxury. I was a bartender, in a job that I literally couldn’t afford to lose. I wasn’t about to mess that up by breaking the owner’s rules about the tenders sleeping with customers. Even irregular ones—or first-timers.
No matter how good-looking this particular customer might be.
The truth was, I needed the job too badly to risk it. Because, like many other people of a certain age, I’d gotten out of high school and gone right to college. A good and very expensive college, for a major in music.
Why, you ask? Because I was a writer and a musician, and I’d had very big, very exciting aspirations to get a major in my passion, then go out and make a career out of that passion. I was going to take my music and my poetry and the songs I wrote and make a name for myself. The assumption that it was all going to work out made it really easy to sign on that dotted line when it came to taking out thousands and thousands of dollars in loans.
And it kept my faith going until the day I graduated… and found out that a bachelor’s in music didn’t bring you all that much when it came to the music industry.
Instead, I’d graduated with a whole lot of debt and absolutely no way to pay it off. And that led to me working here, where I got to take advantage of the open mic nights… but barely made enough money to cover those student loans I’d so willingly sold my soul for.
So yeah, I needed the job. And when it came to following the owner’s regulations, I was usually pretty good at it.
So why had Gwen and I agreed to lie to him about what had happened to the furniture?
Because it straight up wasn’t worth the trouble. It wasn’t worth all the paperwork and the new rules about respecting the furniture that we’d have to slap up on the wall and then