A Guy Walks Into My Bar - Lauren Blakely Page 0,124
while I’m at The Pub, he’ll find it on the kitchen counter.
A note that says: Remember that time you walked into my bar? You said some things were hard to resist. You said, too, that you’d show me if I told you what time I got off. Tonight, I get off at one. I’ll show you what’s hard to resist, after I make you a martini that goes to your head. Pros of being married to a bar owner.
But first, Leo arrives at The Pub in the early evening. We chat for a few minutes, as he tells me all about what went down when Lulu showed up at some sort of chocolate event, and then he helped her get a job at his company.
“Level with me. Are you prepared to work with her?” I ask my friend.
“She’s a contractor. We’re not going to be in the same offices.”
“You completely dodged the question,” I point out, since things are different now with her. Well, they could be different, since his friend Tripp died a few years ago, shortly after I became friends with Leo.
“It’ll be fine. We’re friends,” Leo says of Lulu. “We’ve been through plenty, as you know. And plenty of people who have history work together.”
Laughing, I slap my palm on the bar. “That is the best understatement among all the understatements in contention for Understatement of the Century.”
Leo grins, shrugging. “Who doesn’t have history?”
“You two have so much history you could write a new textbook.” But then I stop the ribbing. “Listen, all I’m saying is, once upon a time, you were in love with her. Now all you have to do is keep it on the level as you work with her. It ought to be easy, right?”
“Piece of cake.”
But when Lulu strolls in, and Leo gives her a look like she’s the answer to all his prayers, I have a feeling he’s going to be back here in a few days, needing a much stronger drink.
And I’ll be here when he needs me.
Later, after I close the bar and clean up, there’s a knock.
My reaction is Pavlovian. My skin heats up. My dick starts to harden as I walk to the door.
Blue eyes, hot as sin, greet me as I open it.
“I believe you said you’d make me a martini,” Fitz says in a low rumble.
“You want the kind that goes to your head?”
“Yeah, I do,” he says, and his gaze is hungry already, since he’s been on the road for a week.
In an instant, the air between us is charged.
Flickering with arousal. With the promise of hot, dirty deeds.
Three years in, it’s still there.
It’s still pulsing.
It’s still powerful.
This connection. This intimacy. This desire.
He grabs my face and devours my lips.
We kiss hungrily for a few minutes, then I break the kiss and pull him to the bar, away from the doorway and from the eyes of anyone on the street past midnight. “Sit. Have your drink.”
“Someday,” he says, echoing the words we both voiced at the club the night I said I’d make it for him. Our wish to have all our somedays together.
“You get all your somedays, Fitz.” I hand him a martini.
Fitz knocks back a thirsty drink as Sam Smith plays on the sound system. “I want all my somedays,” he says, desire in his voice as he hands the cocktail to me. I find the spot on the glass where his lips were and drink from there, meeting his gaze the whole time, as a pulse seems to beat between us.
He groans his appreciation. “It’s already working.”
“Is it now?” I put down the glass.
His eyes won’t leave me. They stay on me, full of heat. “You go to my fucking head, Dean.” My husband stands, walks behind the bar, and grabs the waistband of my jeans. He jerks me toward him, our bodies pressing together. “That drink makes me want you. Or maybe it was a week on the road. Seven lonely fucking nights.”
“You missed my cock.”
He runs a thumb along my jaw. “Missed your cock. Missed your face. Missed your sarcasm.” He grips my chin harder. “Let me fuck you here.”
I shake my head. “No. We’re not fucking behind the bar. I can’t in good conscience serve a customer knowing we screwed here.”
“I want to, babe,” he says, on a needy, hungry plea. “What if I do chores, like you and Maeve?”
I laugh. “Wait a second. Chores are in the running? That might change everything.”