24. Chapter 24
Chapter 24
Right as they finished throwing their shots back, Evan saw Jules approaching on Paige’s right. She was a little flushed from dancing and her eyes narrowed slightly as she took in the scene. Thinking she was upset about the unauthorized drink, Evan opened his mouth to defend it, only to have his attention snagged by Mandy with a drink order.
When he was finally able to return to Paige and Jules, several minutes had passed, and it was to find Paige gone and Jules staring at him like Hannibal Lecter.
“Are you a good guy, Evan?” Jules asked when he was standing in front of her.
While he’d been occupied making some drinks, she’d used the time to really take him in and had come to the conclusion that he was at least three handfuls of trouble. His reddish-brown hair was thick and wavy and could’ve been styled by last night’s hook-up holding his head in place between her legs, and his light layer of facial scruff looked like it would provide just the right amount of friction anywhere it was needed. His dark brown eyes were almost pretty, giving him an attentive, sensitive air that probably fooled every woman into thinking he’d be a sweet lover, up until the moment they landed on their back with their feet up in the air.
In another lifetime, Jules would’ve been all over him, but in this one, she was going to have a few words with him regarding his intentions toward her best friend.
Evan blinked at the question. “I like to think so,” he replied evenly, wondering where this was going.
“Well, I like to think my tits will always be nice to look at, but they probably won’t,” she said blandly. “So, let me ask you again. Are you a good guy?”
The voice in his head screamed at him to avoid looking anywhere near her tits, that if he even glanced in their direction, she would punch him in the throat. However, his eyes apparently decided to go rogue and they looked.
Right. At. Her. Tits.
He self-corrected almost immediately, but by then it was too late. When he looked up, it was to find her indigo eyes staring at him, as if she had anticipated it and been waiting.
Her voice was deadly soft. “That’s what I thought.”
“No, wait—”
“I’m going to be brutally honest with you, Evan, because I only have one setting. The entire time I was grinding against Jake, I was watching you and Paige—”
“Jack.”
“What?”
“His name is Jack.”
“No, I think his name is Jake.”
Evan shook his head. “He’s kind of a regular and in the two years he’s been coming here, his name has always been Jack. So, unless he legally changed it recently—”
“Fine,” she cut him off. “The entire time I was grinding against Jack, I was keeping an eye on you and Paige—”
“Why?”
“Because she’s the most important person in my life, that’s why,” Jules answered, her gaze direct and fierce. “That’s not hyperbole, by the way.”
For a moment, he was distracted by her use of the word ‘hyperbole’, which had been his Word-of-the-Day a few weeks ago and he almost missed what she said next.
“I would go to the mattresses for her.”
He blinked at her intensity, which was a complete turn-on, as was the fact that she was apparently a fan of The Godfather.
She snapped her fingers at him. “Are you listening to me?”
“Yes.”
“That means I won’t let anyone fuck around with her,” she continued, cheeks a little flushed due to her heated emotions and the touchy subject matter. “Especially a hot bartender who might want to just fuck around with her and then disappear, because she doesn’t need that.”
He put his hands on the bar and leaned forward, thankful that it kept her from seeing the hard-on she was giving him. “I’m going to be honest with you, too,” he said, keeping his voice low, as if soothing a wild animal. “I don’t want to fuck around with her. I steer clear of the nice ones and she’s off-the-charts nice.”
Jules pursed her lips, weighing his sincerity.
“But, even if I did want to fuck around with her, it wouldn’t matter, because she doesn’t want to fuck around with me—” he broke off as she raised her eyebrows. “It’s true. She and I talked a lot while you were grinding against Jack, so I know what she’s looking for and it looks a lot like her ex-husband and not a hook-up with a hot bartender. So … are we kosher?”
Her expression flattened a little—he assumed at the mention of the ex-husband—and she nodded, before picking up her phone.
In fascination, he gazed at her bent head, digging the way the red in her hair was even more pronounced under the dim lights in the bar and pictured it fisted in his hand … or draped across his thighs … or spread out over one of his pillows …
Jesus Christ. His hard-on was now a real problem.
With a quick shake of his head, he forced himself to look away just as Paige reappeared, coming from the direction of the bathrooms. To his amusement, she seemed slightly unsteady, as if the three recent shots she’d put away had all caught up with her.
“The Uber’s on its way,” Jules said, putting her phone down as Paige carefully climbed onto her barstool.
Evan set a fresh glass of water in front of her. “Drink up.”
As Paige drank, Jules took her credit card out of her purse to pay their bar tab, but when she tried to hand it to Evan, he shook his head. “Tonight’s on me.”
Slowly, Jules tucked the card back in her purse. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Evan then asked them if they had a business card. When they looked at him a little strangely, he pointed to a large glass bowl next to the cash register, which was half-full of business cards, with a sign above it that read, ‘Leave a business card and enter to win a free drink! Winners chosen on the 1st of every month’.
Paige immediately dug one out of her purse, while Jules took her time before finally getting one of her own and handing it over.
As he wrote his name on the backs of both cards and then put them in the bowl, he explained that he and his brother, Everett, and his sister, Evelyn, also used the give-away as a friendly ‘competition’ between the three of them. “We write our name on the back of each card we collect, and after we randomly pick a winner, whoever has their name written on the back, gets two extra days off the following month.”
“Well, good luck,” Paige said.
When their Uber arrived, Evan reached across the bar to shake their hands in farewell.
“Good night, Paige,” he said.
She smiled and gave his hand a friendly squeeze. “Good night, Evan.”
Then he turned to Jules. “Good night, Jules.”
She hesitated for a moment before taking his hand and shaking it. “Good night, Evan.”
After they left, he retrieved Jules’s card from the bowl, eyebrows raising in surprise when he saw that she was a self-employed Managerial Accountant, with a focus on something called ‘cost accounting’. He hadn’t given much thought to what she did professionally, but he never would have guessed that in a million years, because accountants were old men with thinning hair, in ill-fitting suits, and she definitely wasn’t that.
Bemused, he stared at the cell phone number listed on it, briefly wondering what would happen if he ever called it.
Probably nothing good, he decided.
Pushing Jules from his mind, Evan returned her card to the bowl, then went back to work.