at the corner. “And while my Kace was the initial inspiration for the book’s hero, I did make Jace much more alpha, much more of an asshole, and much more stubborn.”
“Hey,” Kace protested. “I’m alpha.”
“He’s not,” Brooke stage whispered. “I love the man, but what I love the most is that even though he strives to take care of me, even though he can be pushy and demanding sometimes, that he is not an alpha. He’s a beta or even what I’d consider a pussy cat.”
Kace made a strangled noise.
I was suddenly feeling a lot better, especially when Iris nodded and said, “Alphas. Fun to read. Not so fun to live with.”
“I’d take Kace over Jace, every day of the week,” Brooke said. “He’s a much better kisser than a fictional hero and that goes doubly so for in the—”
Now it was my turn to make a strangled noise.
Kace glanced over at me, made a sympathetic face. “We’ve gotta get out of here, dude, before we hear more shit we shouldn’t.”
“Gems of the female psyche you mean,” Brooke teased. “But seriously, that guy needs a beer before he loses his shit.” She pointed to a man who was angrily occupying a stool on my end of the bar. “Clean up your stations, take care of your customers, and let Iris and me chat.”
I glanced at Iris, and her eyes came to mine, still wide but filled with excitement.
So, I nodded, took off for my end, stowed the box carefully because I sure as shit wasn’t sharing my food spoils with Jace-slash-Kace burly, broody, bartender beauty extraordinaire. Then I washed my hands and started running through orders.
I’d been working—taking requests, pulling beers, mixing drinks, pocketing tips—for almost fifteen minutes before I managed to take a breath.
Kace glanced up from the tray he was filling for one of the waitresses, a plethora of cocktails for one group of their regulars—including Heather O’Keith, who owned a small portion of Bobby’s still, but had sold the rest of her portion of the business to Kace. He signaled to the waitress that the drinks were ready to go and then crossed over to me.
“Um, it’s been three days since I’ve seen you, bro,” he said. “Want to clue me in to what happened?”
My eyes flicked toward Iris, not that they’d been doing much else aside from the bare minimum required for me to focus on pouring the drinks but not overfilling them. She was still chatting away with Brooke, her color high, her expression excited. Brooke, for her part, used to be exceptionally shy but had come out of her shell in the last year. Plus, I’d had the feeling that she and Iris would hit it off.
Just so long as she didn’t hit it off with Kace.
Asshole.
I grunted, turned away to pull a few more beers and set them on the server’s tray.
Kace was standing there, looking perfectly at ease, except for one raised brow.
“She came into the bar on Christmas Eve. I noticed her, she left. Came back because she left her purse.”
“And now you’re saving seats and plunking her ass next to Brooke’s?”
“She’s too good for me.”
“Know that feeling well, bro,” he said. “So, you gonna stay away from this too-good girl?”
I shrugged. “I probably should.”
“That’s not a no.”
It wasn’t. Because I knew that I wasn’t a great guy, even though I had a checkered past, the least of which was not being there for the sister of my best friend when that best friend had lost his life; the most of which was the fact that I hadn’t been able to save that best friend in the first place. But I knew that even despite those things, I still wanted Iris.
Hayden had a person to go back to.
I’d had no one.
He’d died. I’d lived.
It should have been the other way around. But I still wanted Iris.
“You deserve to be happy.”
I shrugged. Maybe logically, I knew that. Maybe logically, I wanted that. But also mixed in with that logic was the fact that I knew if Hayden hadn’t thrown himself in front of that fucking IED then I would have died, and he would have lived.
Maybe he would have had the bum back I’d spent a long fucking time in physical therapy working through, but he would have still been alive.
And even having all of that running through my brain, knowing that the better man didn’t live, I also knew that I wasn’t going to be able to walk away from Iris.