Chapter 9
Nine
No, Facebook. I don’t want to add that girl who slept with my ex. Stop asking.
—Mable’s secret thoughts
Mable
I was angry all over again. Or, more accurately, I was angry on top of angry. Angry squared.
That was why I didn’t stop Cody from tugging me toward the bar across the street.
Toot-Toots was a bar that was older than time.
I was fairly sure that it was the reason that the town was built in the first place.
It still resembled a saloon. The swinging door did nothing to keep the cold out, and Toot-Toots didn’t bother with heating and AC. You froze or you sweated your balls off when you were inside.
Today was a freezing kind of day.
As we made our way into the bar, I wasn’t thinking about the man that I’d seen entering it earlier in his sexy lumberjack getup.
All I was thinking about was what the hell my next step would be if my father refused to pay for the taxes on the property.
For my personal house, I owed somewhere in the ballpark of nineteen hundred dollars in taxes to the state of Montana. For my childhood home, paired with its nine bedrooms, formal ballroom, and six-car garage, it was upward to the cost of nineteen thousand.
I had the money.
My trust fund was decent enough that I could easily pay it and it wouldn’t make a dent.
That wasn’t the point, though.
Nineteen thousand dollars was a lot of money, and I tried very hard to live well within my means. I lived off of what I made for the month. I paid my bills and then budgeted the rest of my monthly allowance off of what was left.
My trust fund never came into play.
It felt like blood money to me.
The only reason I got the money in the first place was because my mother had passed away.
As per her will, upon her death, Mom’s fortune had split exactly in half. One half going to me, and one half going to my dad.
My dad, I was sure, was blowing through his at the speed of light.
One day, the time would come when he would need to examine his lifestyle and tuck it in a bit.
Plus, I’m sure it didn’t help that he was supporting two mooches that hadn’t worked since they came into our lives.
My thoughts were dark and morose as I tucked my belly in close to the bar and called out to Shade. “Hey, can we both get a couple of tequila shots?”
Shade, as his usual douchebag self, barely contained his sneer.
Shade and my sister, Birdee, had been best friends since high school.
Shade had feelings for Birdee, but Shade wasn’t rich enough for her. She would never settle with someone who had less than a million dollars in his bank account.
She had a lifestyle she was accustomed to, and likely would never see anything else but dollar signs when it came to her life partners.
Shade, however, was a lovestruck fool and held out hopes that one day Birdee would be his.
That was why he was such a complete douchebag to me.
“Sure thing,” he said, then went back to scrolling on his phone.
“Buddy, I think the lady ordered a couple of tequila shots,” I heard said from farther down the bar.
I turned to see a man who had the most perfect head of hair I’d ever seen.
He had his large winter jacket hanging on the back of his stool, and it revealed a black long-sleeved tee that was pulled up at his forearms, exposing a lot of forearm porn.
He had rich, blue-black hair, butterscotch brown eyes that seemed to see into the depth of my soul, and a scowl that could freeze stone.
That scowl, luckily, was not directed at me.
No, that was aimed directly at the bartender, who was now busy pouring our shots.
“I think I’m in love,” Cody whispered from my other side.
I turned to her and asked, “I thought you were in love with Jepper?”
“I hate you,” Cody said as the drinks were thunked down in front of us, half of the contents spilling from the glasses.
I looked at the shot glass with the lime on it but Cody beat me to the punch. “No lime, Shade. You know she’s allergic to lime. She’s been allergic to lime for her whole life, and we’ve been in this bar and ordered the same freakin’ thing every month for years.”
I was actually allergic to almost all citrus. Not throat-closing allergic, but my lips puff up and everything tingles allergic.
“Oh, sorry. I must’ve forgot,” Shade lied.
I hated him.
He took the lime off the rim and tossed it onto the bar top beside the drink.
“That’s not good enough, and you know it.” Cody started to get angry now.
Shade rolled his eyes and heaved a sigh. “I swear to God, y’all are so high maintenance.”
That was rich coming from him.
If he wanted to see high maintenance, he only had to look at his partner in crime.
A woman who wouldn’t step foot in the bar that her best friend managed because it was ‘too dirty.’
She hated the peanut shells on the floor and the fact that it wasn’t heated or air-conditioned.
She much preferred her drinks served at a country club bar where her every need was met.
God forbid a sweat droplet or goose bump form on that perfect flesh.
He repoured the drinks, but with his back turned toward us I couldn’t see him making the drink to be sure that he wasn’t poisoning it.
The remakes were correct, and Cody and I downed the shots like they were meant to be enjoyed.
The second round, however, was contaminated.
I hadn’t been paying attention to him making them because Cody and I were whispering fiercely about the man next to me—Cody was seriously in love—so I blindly downed the drink without giving it a second thought.
That was my first mistake.
My lips instantly tingled, and I whipped my head toward Shade. “You did not!”
Shade had a special gleam in his eye that had me fisting my hands, but his face was a mask of perfect confusion as he said, “I didn’t what?”
“You put lime on this, and you know it!” I snapped. “What the absolute fuck, Shade?”
“Seriously?” Cody asked, standing up now.
But since she was shorter than me—barely five feet—she didn’t look all that ferocious.
She did, however, continue moving straight onto the bar as if she was going to launch herself across it at the asshole.
To do that, however, she had to crawl partially down the bar toward where Shade was standing talking to someone at the end.
Which put her ass directly in the face of the man she’d been ogling the entire night.
“Whoa, darlin’,” the man drawled as he reached to save his beer.
He placed his hand on the back of her thigh and squeezed, forcing her to stop crawling across the bar.
She didn’t stop pointing at him, however.
She put on her best teacher voice that she used with all of her students and snarled, “I will murder you. I will pull out your entrails using my hunting knife that I’ve gutted no less than fifty deer with, and I will feed them to you.
You’ll be eating your own shit by the time I’m finished with you. ”
The man that was holding her steady had a manic smile on his face as he heard her speak.
“You can’t do anything to me.” Shade rolled his eyes dramatically. “You can’t prove that I did anything.”
I pointed at my swollen lips. “Then why does it look like I just got filler done, Shade McDonalds?”
“Maybe because you did?” he scoffed. “You are vain as fuck after all.”
That made the man I’d been studiously trying to pretend wasn’t here laugh. “Man, she’s wearing worn jeans with grease stains on them. If that’s what you call vain, then every single person in this bar is.”
He was right.
Everyone had made it an early night and had come straight from work to get a drink due to the storm that was about to hit. Nine-tenths of the people in the room were blue-collar workers that had some version of dirt or grease on them.
Even the man who was holding on to Cody’s thigh still.
Though he had what looked to be a burn mark on his pant leg.
I wondered what he did for a living…
Cody snatched up the tip jar and shoved her hand in it, taking out several bills.
“Hey!” Shade leaped for the jar.
The man holding on to Cody pulled a manly move so smooth that I would’ve never believed it possible had it not happened right in front of my eyes.
Before Shade could get to Cody or the tip jar, the man beside me literally picked Cody up like she weighed nothing and brought her into his chest.
“You can’t steal that!” Shade hollered.
“Actually, I’m going to go next door and buy her some fucking Benadryl, you fucking asshole. And you know the gas station overcharges. You did this to her, you’ll pay the money to fix it.” Cody sneered at him, extricated herself from the man’s arms, and stomped out of the bar.
She had well over the amount that she would need, but no one said anything.
Change and dollar bills fell down in her wake.
No one went to pick anything up.
Yet, they were all very aware of the altercation.
The music wasn’t that loud…