Chapter 2
Two
L owey retreated to the bathroom of the bar.
At the back of the building, the restrooms had at least been spared the worst of the damage.
Still, a bullet had traveled through the wall and embedded itself in the mirror.
The spider web crack around it brought home to her just how much danger they’d been in.
Her hands trembled as she tried to shake the bits of glass and wood from her hair.
She had half a dozen tiny, stinging cuts all over her, but Quentin had borne the brunt of it.
She still couldn’t fathom how he’d moved so quickly given the shape he was in.
Someone had kicked his ass up one side and down the other, and while she was feeling somewhat more sympathetic to him than normal at the moment, there wasn’t a doubt in her mind that whatever he’d gotten, he’d asked for.
No one, not even her nutball, rage-addict of an ex-husband, could make her as crazy as Quentin Darcy could.
And he’d made it more than clear that he wasn’t in the market for anything more from her than rolling around in the sheets from time to time.
So why was he there? Why, when his life had clearly gone to shit, and she unknowingly needed him the most, did he have to show up?
And, of course, he was saying all the right things, too.
But then, he was good at that. Quentin could be a charming devil, at least when he was trying to get in your pants, he was.
“Get it together, Lowey,” she whispered to herself. “You’re going to have to face down your asshole ex-in-laws, and you can’t do that if he’s mucking up your brain!”
With some degree of composure returned and most of the glass shards shaken out of her clothes and her hair, Lowey walked back into the main room of the bar and felt it all shatter around her again.
It had been her grandpa’s before it was hers.
He’d come back from Korea and opened a little watering hole, as he’d liked to call it—a gathering place for men.
Eventually, women had taken up coming there too, but by and large, it had been envisioned by him as a place where other old soldiers like himself could gather.
It was a place where they didn’t have to worry about being polite or following the rules of a society they didn’t really belong in anymore.
Now it was a shambles. The last connection she had to him, and to her grandmother also, had been destroyed.
It looked like the war zones he would never speak of to her, or to anybody else.
There were things broken and shattered on the floor, pictures and mementos of his life that she would never be able to repair or replace.
Joey Barnes had robbed her of something else, she thought bitterly.
He hadn’t been content with convincing her to marry him when she was still too young to know better, then ruining her life.
He’d had to come back and fuck it all up again and again.
“You okay?”
Lowey looked up and realized that she’d just been standing in the middle of the room in a pile of broken glass and busted wood, staring around like someone in a trance.
The question had come from Quentin, who looked at her with enough concern for her to believe he might actually care.
But she knew better than to fall into that trap again.
Regardless of what he’d said, he wasn’t someone she could ever count on.
Sure, he didn’t want anything bad to happen to her, but counting on him for more than that would just get her heart broken.
“I’m fine. Just trying to assess the damage,” she lied. “You don’t have to stick around. I know you’ve got better things to do with your time than help me deal with the Barnes Family Drama Hour.”
“If I leave, I just have to deal with the Darcy Family Drama Hour,” he said. “Hell, it might even be a two-hour special after today…besides, I’m the only one who saw Joey’s tr uck. And we both know Silas is going to give you a ton of shit about this. Somehow, he’ll make it out to be your fault.”
Truer words , she thought bitterly. Whatever else could be said of the Barnes family, they knew how to stick together, through thick, thin, and probation.
Silas had given her shit at every opportunity since the day she’d turned Joey in for cooking meth.
She’d filed for divorce while he was incarcerated for that, and Silas had written her tickets for everything coming and going.
Then Joey had gotten out, beat her half to death, and somehow, by sending him back to prison for it, she was still the bad guy.
Thinking about the Barnes family wouldn’t get her anywhere. She’d been questioning the family dynamic and how they functioned for years, and it still wasn’t any clearer. So, she focused on something else altogether.
Curious and wanting to think about anything besides her ex-husband and his misbegotten clan, she asked, “So what did happen today?”
Quentin had his hands on his hips, the jeans he wore riding low on lean hips with a plaid shirt and a V-neck sweater over it.
The shoes he wore probably cost more than her monthly car payment.
He’d clearly been in a fight, then he’d rolled around in busted glass and spilled liquor to save her ass, and he still looked like he’d stepped right out of a men’s fashion magazine.
She hated him for that—more than a little.
“I got into a fight with my brother,” he replied evenly.
“You and Clayton? That’s hard to believe.”
“Not Clayton,” he answered. “My other brother…the new one.”
She wanted to know more, but given what she already knew of Samuel Darcy, she was a little afraid to ask.
The Darcy family drama was way more high-end than her own homegrown variety, but that didn’t make it any less toxic.
The degree of Quentin’s inability to commit to anything other than running away from relationships was proof positive of that.
On the surface, Quentin appeared to have it all together.
He dressed nicely, drove a nice car, went to work every day, and while he drank more than he should, he never got sloppy.
And if the day ever came where he couldn’t just drop the bottle without looking back, she knew he’d quit or die trying.
Quentin Darcy was too determined to never need anyone or anything to be an addict.
But he was still a hot mess on the inside, and that son of a bitch Samuel Darcy was one hundred percent responsible for that.
Good Lord, did she really want to go down that road again ?
Parts of her said yes. They said it eagerly and with great enthusiasm.
He wasn’t the only lover she’d had since her divorce, but he was certainly the best. No one had ever made her feel the way he did or made her feel the same kind of intense need that he did.
Recalling just how good it had felt, how dazed and desperate he could make her with nothing more than a touch, Lowey knew that her willpower had no chance of outlasting her need for him.
She’d cave. It was just a matter of time.
The thought had no sooner crossed her mind than the sound of approaching sirens filled the bar. Gravel spewed as they flew into the parking lot like a bunch of stunt drivers, or more accurately, like a bunch of overgrown adolescents in cars they didn’t have to pay for.
“If they scratched my paint…” he muttered.
Lowey rolled her eyes. He babied his car. She was pretty sure he petted it and called it pretty names when no one was looking. “It’s fine. I’m sure your car is fine. If it’s not, either your insurance or mine will cover it.”
“That’s not the damn point, now is it?” he asked.
The door, or what was left of it, flew open with enough force that it banged against the wall.
One of the already fragile hinges simply gave way and it listed to one side a little as Sheriff Silas Barnes strutted in.
Like the cock of the walk, as her grandmother would have said, she thought bitterly.
God, she hated him—him and his whole damn family.
“Looks like you’ve had a rough day, Lowey. But it’s never an easy thing…running a low-rent establishment like this. Especially when it caters to the lowest population in the town,” Silas said.
“My patrons did not shoot up my bar, Silas,” she snapped. “Your cousin did…the one who is on parole and who I was supposed to be notified of his release since he tried to kill me and all.”
Silas smiled. “We’re behind on paperwork. Budget cuts. Besides, there’s no way to say for you to be sure that Joey did this. Why, I just talked to his mama, and he’s sitting at home on the couch right now. Been there all day.”
Lowey laughed. “His mother who is so cowed by every single bullying man in your family that she wouldn’t even sneeze unless one of y’all gave her permission?”
The smile never left Silas’s face, but there was a coldness in his gaze that hadn’t been there a moment earlier. He was just as cruel and vicious as Joey. He’d just gotten better at covering it up. “I don’t like your tone, Mrs. Barnes. ”
“Tate,” she snapped out the correction with a little more heat than was wise when dealing with an officer of the law.
More calmly, she continued, “My name is Ms. Tate . I took it back the second I shed myself of your worthless cousin…he was here. He shot up my bar. He could have killed any one of us!”
“You’ve got no proof,” Silas said. “I’ll be happy to take a statement and write up a report for your insurance company that an unknown assailant allegedly damaged your property.”
Quentin wanted to strangle the smug bastard.
While he knew that Lowey wanted to handle things on her own, he also knew that because of her history with Barnes, it would never be handled fairly.
Silas Barnes was as crooked as a dog’s hind leg, to quote Evelyn’s favorite phrase.
She’d been with the Darcy family for a generation, so clearly, she’d know.