Cosmo (Murphy’s Pub #1)

1. Chapter One

Chapter One

Sitting in the booth in the darkest corner of the pub, Connor Murphy, whom everyone referred to by last name, poured his friend another shot as his sister set her hand over her own glass and whispered, “No more, thanks.”

“Enough for you, Tally?”

Her bright sky-blue eyes, that were exactly like his own, sparkled as she laughed. “I’ve got errands to run in the morning and I’d rather not do them with my head splitting apart.”

“Lightweight,” he said, laughing. “Dad will be disappointed in you.”

Murphy’s friend, Clifford Mumford, came to her rescue. “If you tell Mick, that makes you a snitch, which means our association is over.”

They all got a good laugh from that. “Fine, I won’t tell the old man.”

“Old man,” Cliff scoffed. “You have as much gray in your hair as him and he can still outdrink you.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

Clifford was a good friend, but also a business partner of sorts. He worked in the prison system and his wife worked in social services. Together, they found the young men that Murphy needed to work for him.

“So, Cliffy, tell us about this new one. Is he a petty thief that I’ll have to train in both bartending and in everything else?”

Cliff lost his grin and took the shot, then poured himself another and swallowed that too before he got on with it. “Nah, this one is… special. I don’t even know if he’s going to want to work for you. Your boys and you all, you become family, and this boy, he’s not into that. Ran from every foster home he had after running away from his home at ten when his father remarried. His father didn’t want him back. That’s all Lori could find out from his records.”

Tally’s empathy was strong, and she became a mother to the boys that most of them needed badly. Her hand went to her throat as she asked, “Bad?”

“Real bad. Liam’s his name, Liam MacManus, and he had to have had one of those nightmare childhoods that you usually see in horror movies. With the records sealed, we won’t know exactly what it was, though.”

“Records sealed? His criminal activity?” Murphy asked.

“No. His criminal records start when he was twelve and Lori got into those easily enough. She’s the head of her department, so she needs to access them, as you know, for placement in foster families. They don’t cut her off when the kids age out of the system. Loophole, I guess.”

“He might talk about it, or he might trust no one,” Tally surmised.

“Cliff, he could be, well, I hate to say it, dangerous. What was he in prison for? What if he, I don’t know, is one of the psycho kids with no conscience?”

Cliff smiled at him. “Grand theft auto.”

The reason for the smile was obvious. Murphy had a special place in his heart for car thieves. “How good can he be? He got caught.”

Those were words that had come from him many times. At least half of the boys who worked for him had come from prison. Cliff had been expecting the question. He was so used to it.

His deep laugh lines creased, and his brows shot up, exposing even deeper lines across his pale forehead. “The only reason he was caught was a snitch. One guy he worked with got busted and he took the whole crew down with him.”

That was a familiar story. It was exactly how Eazy, Murphy’s husband, had been caught doing the same line of work. Tally even chuckled. “Ouch, you got him hooked now.”

“No, now, I’m not hooked! Just maybe a little more interested.”

“Really, he’s skirted the law all his life. The car theft happened when he was seventeen and he did his time in juvie, then they moved him to prison to do the rest of the time. I have the means to get the parole board to release him into your custody, per our usual agreement.”

Murphy sat back and played with his empty shot glass until Cliff refilled it again.

After slugging it down, letting the warmth soothe him, Murphy ran fingers through his long, trimmed beard. It was so much thicker now that more than half of it was white. Coarser, thicker, and Eazy loved feeling it on his back when Murphy kissed a line down his spine.

“My brother wants him, I can tell,” Tally commented with a smile.

“I might. I’ll have to talk to him first.”

Cliff nodded and said, “I know. I’ve arranged it for Thursday. You’ll have him in a room meant for attorney/client conferences, along with the cameras and mics off. You just need to give me the word.”

Murphy looked at his sister, whom he trusted more than anyone else, except his father and husband. “What do you think?”

He knew what the answer would be just by looking into her eyes.

The lady was sweet, tough and so smart, it was scary. She had an enormous heart, especially for the young men at Murphy’s Pub, and had been the one to encourage the relationship with Eazy when he confessed his growing feelings for the man.

Soft blonde hair that hung a little past her slender shoulders glowed with the flickering candle in the green glass bowl on the table. It made her look like an angel, but she had as much devil in her as the rest of the family. “Meet him. Warn him that the others think of us and themselves as family, but he may keep to himself if he would like to.”

“You won’t allow that, Tallulah Murphy, and you know it.”

That twinkle in her eyes told on her. “Whatever do you mean?”

Cliff took out his phone to call a ride share. “I’ll set it up for Thursday then and start talking to the parole board.”

Murphy felt backed into a corner by the two of them, but he knew himself well enough. He’d likely take the guy if Liam wanted to work for him. “He’s…handsome, right?”

“Connor,” Tally whispered. “That’s terrible.”

“Tally, the customers come for the show, but they don’t exactly want ugly guys doing that show, right?”

“He’s very handsome,” Cliff said to stop the argument. “And prison life turns most into muscle bound brutes, all the carbs and weights they lift. He’s not huge, but he’s in shape.” Out of his suit coat pocket, he took out a picture, setting it on the table and sliding it over to Murphy.

Murphy hated himself for asking, but it was part of the business. Hot bartenders brought in customers. Once he picked up the picture, he smiled.

Liam MacManus was beautiful. Blond hair cut shorter on the sides than on the top. The tight gray DOC T-shirt showed he was, indeed, in great shape.

Great jawline and those heavily lidded bedroom eyes that were on the gray side of olive green. Those eyes….

“Well, I’ll head up Thursday. I’m not making any promises,” he said gruffly, while his two companions rolled their eyes.

“Sure, Murph. I’ll start on the parole board tomorrow.”

“What?”

After Tally and Cliff left, he went to the back stairs of the building after checking all the locks and alarms. As he slowly climbed, he thought about starting again, a new guy, and all that entailed.

After he got almost to the landing, he saw Eazy sitting on the top step. “Hey, Murph.”

“Hey, my love. How are the kids?”

“You know they’re fine.”

Tallulah carried their two kids, using her own eggs and Eazy’s sperm to fertilize them in the little petri dish. That was the best way to make them part of Murphy and part of Eazy. They were so beautiful with the features of his African American husband and his mostly Irish blood people, that people stopped on the streets to stare at them in awe. They were the light of his life.

Eazy was a lot younger than him, but from the moment he’d come into Murphy’s Pub, and into the owner’s life, Murphy had fallen for the guy. Deep walnut colored skin, closely cut hair, big, beautiful amber eyes and a smile that was wide, bright, and lovely. Yeah, he’d fallen hard.

Connor Murphy sat beside his husband, laughing. “The new one, he’s a car thief. Hard childhood, we think. The details are locked down tight.”

“We’ll get Mimosa on it. He’ll know what’s up in no time.”

Mimosa, Hypnotic, Gold Rush. His employees were nicknamed after bar drinks. They were each given one, to give out to customers and to anyone else that may ask. It made it better in the computer age to hide their true identities.

They did that for a lot of reasons. Eazy had been Hurricane, and that’s what he’d done to Murphy. He’d come into his life like a storm, blowing him away into a place he’d longed for and never thought he’d find.

“So, we’re thinking up red drinks again?”

“It’s been a while since we’ve had a red. Yeah,” Murphy mused, kissing his husband’s temple. “I promise not to fall in love with this one.”

“You better not. I’ll tell Katie on you.”

Katie, their daughter, was not a normal happy-go-lucky child. She was mellow as could be until she got angry, then her Irish came through and she was a whole different kind of storm.

“No need for that. In fact, let’s go check on them. I hate when I can’t get up with them in the morning.”

Above the pub was where Murphy and his family lived, but also all the men that worked for him. On the east side, the second and third floors were their home, while the guys had rooms and common areas on the west side on those two floors.

It had been renovated from the small corner pub it had been when it was purchased by his grandfather and handed down to Mick, Connor Murphy’s father. The neighboring businesses closed and became available to buy, so he’d put himself into major debt to purchase and renovate the place that took up half a city block.

Moving through the hall to the bedrooms on the top floor, he and Eazy looked in on their five-year-old, Katie, first. Her thick blonde hair was spread out over the pink pillow while her lips were parted to let in and out the shallow breaths she took.

Her light blue eyes were closed, her round cheeks flushed with the warmth of the yellow and pink duvet that covered her. Murphy sometimes couldn’t believe how much he loved her. It was so…big.

Then they sneaked into Little Mick’s room where he lay in his bed, stars and rockets covering his blanket that was balled around his feet, as usual. Murphy covered him, knowing he’d stay that way only an hour, if that.

Little Mick ran hot, always. They thought he’d had a perpetual fever when he was a baby until his doctor figured out that their baby was just hot blooded.

Dark, curled hair like Eazy, and big brown eyes too. He and his sister had the same face, but completely different coloring. “He lost his teddy earlier.”

“Uh oh.”

Eazy laughed. “We found it. He went to bed an hour late though, so he’ll be cranky in the morning.”

“Goody.”

In their room, Murphy held Eazy under their black duvet and kissed his neck. “Training a new guy. The unease of letting him in on the secrets. It’s been a while. I don’t know how ready I am for this.”

“You say that every time, babe. You’ll be fine. We’ll be fine. I’ll help. The guys will help. Stop stressing.”

“You seem to think a few words from you will take away my worries.”

Turning over to face him, Eazy smiled sweetly, kissing Murphy’s nose. “Yeah. I sure do.”

“You’re a pain in the ass.”

“ You could be, if you play your cards right.”

“Tease.”

In the morning, around ten, Murphy got out of bed and stumbled down the stairs to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee. His home was done in an industrial loft style that he and Eazy just loved.

Eazy had gone into interior decorating and had done the entire building himself. Except the pub, that is. The pub was much the same as their apartment, the old brick walls uncovered and presented as a part of the décor, dark woods and metal light fixtures all around the place.

The employees’ apartments, however, were experiments for Eazy. One common living room was mid-century modern in design, orange, purple and green colors highlighted.

The other was monochrome white furniture and fixtures with green plants and a splash of butter yellow to break up the monochrome with brick and old tongue-and-groove floors.

Each of the guys’ bedrooms were done in different styles too, the color of their nicknames playing center stage. It was fun and the guys all loved it, and it had helped Eazy to put together a beautiful portfolio.

The door that stood between the two halves of the upper floors opened and a familiar voice rang out, “Hey! Everyone decent?”

It was Gold Rush, AKA Thomas Marion, but everyone now called him Goldie. He was a brute of a man, six foot five, muscled, skin as dark as a moonless night and so handsome, half those gay men that flocked to the pub each weekend had given over their numbers to the guy.

He came into the kitchen, smiling, as usual. “Murph, hey. Eazy. Where are those kids?”

“Tally came to take them to run errands so she could get Little Mick new shoes and Katie some art supplies,” Eazy told him, then kissed Goldie’s cheek and handed him a big mug of coffee. “Where are the others?”

“All in bed, mostly. Mims had a hot date last night and didn’t get in until the wee hours.”

Mims was Mimosa, AKA Ali Bajwa, their resident computer expert and the one of them constantly looking for love in all the wrong places.

Goldie picked at a muffin he’d taken from the basket on the big, square island in the center of the kitchen. While Murphy nodded to one of the ten stools around it. “Sit, Goldie. We might have another guy coming on.”

“Oh, shit,” he said, taking a seat on one of the metal stools. Murphy always wondered how the things held the big man. “Who is it?”

“A guy getting paroled, if we want him. Cliff sat Tally and me down last night to tell us about him, and…well, he looks like our type of guy. He’s got an issue with families, though. Maybe you and Abs can talk sweet to Mims and get the info dump on him.”

“If the date went well, it won’t be a problem. If it didn’t, he’ll be sulking for a few days.”

“Yeah. I know.”

Eazy cautiously said, “Abs might be able to get the information. He’s good with computers, too.”

Abs referred to Absinthe, AKA Andre Fernandez, their resident goth that was into all things dark, except his hair, which he liked to keep the ultra-blond it had always been. A tiny man, barely five foot three, and so skinny, they all made sure he was eating. He was. He just had an amazing metabolism.

“He hates looking into people’s lives, Eazy. When he finds something bad, it bothers him.”

“I know. But if we tell him it’s for the safety of the kids…”

Goldie grinned at him. “You’re sneaky.”

“It’s what made him a great car thief,” Murphy said proudly.

“I’ll make sure the room is ready for him. No one’s slept in there since I remodeled, so it’ll be nice to see if he likes it.”

Modern with furniture and fabrics that were red or white, it was the first room Eazy had done. “If he doesn’t, you can always redo it. I know you miss doing stuff around here.”

“It was a lot of work,” Eazy reminded him. “The way you had it, old furniture all over, no style at all!”

“And you still fell for me.”

“I took pity on you.”

Goldie whispered, “There it is.”

“You’re fired, Goldie.”

“I’m out. I’ll see what I can do with Abs.”

After Goldie left, Murphy backed his husband against the stove and kissed him sweetly. “Last night was great.”

“Yes, it was, but you only have an hour before you open, and the kids are due back, so don’t get any ideas.”

Eazy’s deep voice was sexy, and his eyes got completely dark when he was aroused. “You are the one looking so…hot.”

“I always look this way.”

“I know.” Sighing after Eazy pushed him away, Murphy resigned to go to work. “I have paperwork anyway. Come down before we open and you can help.”

“I will. I’m not set to do that bathroom reno for another three days, so I would love to spend some time with my kids and my husband.”

Mick waddled into the room and grumped. “What’s all the noise?”

“Dad, literally no one made any noise.”

“Then why did I hear it?”

Mick Murphy was an old codger, but sweet under all the gruff. Shorter than Murphy by a half a foot, he waddled from the aches and pains of being over seventy.

He lived with them and helped at the bar when he could, though he couldn’t “cotton to” all the gays around the place he’d once owned.

Back when it was the corner pub he ran, where the older men gathered to complain about their wives over room temperature mugs of Guinness and shots of Jameson, and they brought in just enough to survive. Still, he’d liked it that way and fought his son over every change.

Though he hated his son being gay, he adored Eazy and the kids so much, he rarely mentioned it anymore. It was progress, at least.

“I’m headed down to the pub, Dad. Come down later for a pint and a shot.”

“Like I need to be invited to my own bar?”

Oh, and he still thought he owned the place. Murphy never corrected him, mostly because it was no use. It was in the family, therefore, being the patriarch, he still owned it.

Murphy headed downstairs via the back staircase and turned on the lights and started set up for the day. The place shined from the cleaning it received every morning from a darling local lady and her three teenage kids.

They were undocumented, and he’d never met someone that worked harder and loved the job so much. He paid them well, and from that, they’d rented a better apartment. Murphy had even hooked them up with fake IDs that were so good they’d passed the noses of the local cops.

Once he was sitting on a stool behind the bar, he got started on the previous night’s receipts, but couldn’t stop thinking about the new guy. What could have been so bad to turn him off of family the way it had? Why had he run from every foster home? He knew some were shit, but some of them were truly good folks.

The questions piled up on him. The worry began, but he knew he’d likely take the kid on. Society had shunned the men that were thrown into prisons or hurt in other ways. He’d seen the humanity in those men. How they just needed something to touch their hearts a little. How someone like him could become a father figure to men that might not have had that before in their lives.

Thinking of those eyes, beyond being beautiful, there was also a dark pain in them that had saturated every bit of his life. Murphy wanted to help him. The only question was, did Liam MacManus want to be helped?