set the drink in front of him. Then she served Owen his and again checked in with the others. “Your lunch should be up shortly.”
“What did you do on the weekend?” Scott asked him in a challenging tone.
“Friday night I hosted a little bachelor party for my buddy. He’s getting married in a few weeks. Rest his soul.” He lifted his drink and the other guys all toasted. “We hired a girl from the Kitten Club. Topless waitress came and served us drinks and did a few lap dances and played some games.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Dash breathed. “That’s fucking awesome.”
“She was cool,” Levi agreed. He didn’t tell them he’d been a reluctant participant in the whole thing, but the other guys had insisted they had to do something raunchy for poor Jacob. It had turned out okay. The Kitten Club had strict rules about what the girls would and would not do, and he’d made sure they followed the rules. He did not want any kind of sick trouble, especially with Jacob’s fiancée Tara who would rip him a new one if Jacob got in any kind of trouble right before the wedding. Or any time.
Levi actually really liked Tara. She was damn near perfect. Smart and pretty and fun, she didn’t take crap but she also wasn’t a bitch. She let Jacob have his time with the guys, and the times she joined them she laughed at their crude and rude jokes and could drink some of them under the table. Levi had no desire for a relationship or marriage at this point in his life, but he understood why Jacob had fallen hard for Tara and was willing to forgo sex with any other woman for the rest of his life to be with her.
To Levi, sex with only one woman for the rest of his life sounded like wretched, torturous hell. He enjoyed variety.
Their burgers arrived. Cute Waitress again leaned in close as she served him his and whispered, “I gave you premium Wisconsin cheddar, no extra charge.”
“Thanks, doll,” he murmured back.
He picked up his burger and took a big bite. “This is fantastic,” he said a moment later.
“Yeah, we like this place. We come here a lot. Sometimes we come and brainstorm over a beer.”
“Excellent.” He approved of getting out of the office to get creative. And he’d done the alcohol-fuelled brainstorming a few times, but you had to be careful with that. Sometimes the ideas that seemed genius after several shots of tequila were just plain stupid the next day.
They ate and talked and ordered more beers, moving on to the Natural Belgian Blonde—heh—then the Albatross Ale and the Grasshopper Wheat. The wheat beer came with a slice of fresh orange. Fuck, that was good. They were all damn fine beers. Not like he’d never drunk Verhoeven Beer before—anyone who lived in Illinois drank Verhoeven beer; okay, anyone in America drank Verhoeven beer—but some of these newer specialty beers were ones he hadn’t tried.
Around one thirty he suggested it might be time to get back to the office. They were having a big meeting at two thirty. The guys all waved that idea away and ordered another round, so he shrugged and went with it. Flying Pigs Pale Ale.
“I should hit the john before we leave,” he ventured.
“Don’t do it, man,” Ravi said. “Once you break the seal…”
Levi laughed. “I know, right?”
“That’s an actual fact,” Dash said. “Because it’s not just the volume of liquid you drink, but with alcohol there’s the added diuretic effect.”
“For every gram of alcohol you drink urine excretion increases by ten milliliters. Also alcohol reduces the production of the hormone vasopressin, which tells your kidneys to reabsorb water rather than flush it,” Ravi said.
Jesus, nerd much? But Levi grinned. He’d consumed a fair amount of liquid. “Verhoeven now has an extensive collection of beer,” he mused as he knocked the last of that one back.
“They do,” Scott agreed. “Okay, we better get going.”
They paid their tabs, though it seemed to take forever since they wanted separate checks. When Cute Waitress handed Levi his bill he smiled to see that she’d written Thanks so much, my name’s Piper and here’s my number… He caught her eye and winked as he handed over his credit card, slipping the check into his wallet. Hey, you never knew.
He checked his cell phone for calls, messages and emails as they walked back to the Lachman Building. Jesus Christ! It was nearly two thirty and