Chapter Seven
Keane stared up at the bright neon light that
proclaimed this space to be The Barn. And it looked a lot like one except there
was rocking music coming out of it and a whole bunch of people partying inside.
“Do you want to set a pickup time, boys?” Gwen had the front
window of the station wagon down, and sure enough his old friend Muffin was
looking out beside her. The dog had switched to her lap after he got out of the
car. “My business closes down at eight. Muffin needs her beauty sleep.”
Garrett looked around the parking lot and then walked off,
leaving him to hand Gwen a twenty-dollar bill.
He wasn’t sure how Muffin was alive. This time around he and
Garrett had gotten a long recitation of everything that was wrong with that
dog.
Anxiety, bad knees, perpetual weird sneezes, terrible
breath, and whatever made her eyes so bugged out.
But he kind of liked that she liked him. Maybe it wouldn’t
be terrible to have a dog. A working dog. A shepherd or a retriever.
And he also kind of liked Gwen. She was weird. He liked
weird. Huh. It was funny that he spent so much time trying to survive and then
trying to keep his job and please everyone around him so he didn’t fuck things
up for Garrett, that he had never considered what he liked outside of sex and
food.
He liked dogs and weird people. “Ms. Gwen, we’ll make our
way from here. I think Garrett already found what we’re looking for.”
They were looking for the vehicle their pretty princess had
sped away in.
“It’s the same SUV from the security footage.” Garrett
jogged up. “She’s still here. I checked the plate and it matches.”
It had been hours since Olivia walked out on them, and Keane
was equal parts ready to leave and ready to spank her ass silly and explain why
she was never going to do that again.
She ran. She’d been on the edge of agreeing to Garrett’s
proposal but she’d run, and wasn’t that interesting.
Olivia Barnes-Fleetwood was a badass bitch who took no crap
from anyone.
Unless her heart was involved. He’d talked to several of the
hands who adored her. They said she was a fair boss and genuinely thoughtful, but
they knew she sometimes had a hard time with the men she negotiated with. She
was used to hard negotiations when it came to business.
So why run?
The part of himself that was still an eight-year-old kid
trying to survive the day thought she’d run because she didn’t want him.
The confident man who knew how to read a sub was starting to
think she’d run for the opposite reason.
So they’d done some research, and lucky for them the
household security cams weren’t all that hard to break into. Garrett wasn’t a
hacker, per se, but he had some skills.
And Keane was the one who went to prison. Lucky him.
“Any idea who the women at the door were?” Keane asked.
“I think it’s Trev McNamara’s daughter and Gigi Dawson. You
haven’t met Win Dawson and his wife, Naomi, yet, but I’ve had a couple of
meetings with him. From what Bobby told me they’re some of Olivia’s closest
friends.”
So safety had shown up and she bolted.
He should have taken that as her answer and headed to the
bunkhouse, but he’d caught sight of a picture of her as a kid all wild hair and
happy smiles. Josh had stood in the background, obviously younger but far more
serious and stern than his sister. Jack and Sam and Abby had looked on at their
kids, but it was clear that Olivia was the sun in the sky.
When was the last time Olivia Barnes-Fleetwood had that
carefree smile on her face? He knew the answer. It was the night before when
she let herself go. He would bet a lot that she rarely let herself go that way.
But they had gotten her there. Briefly. They could do it
again.
When he figured out she needed him, he put aside his
protective barriers and decided it was time to take her at her word. She wanted
them to help her. Well, he was going to help her.
“Did you ask Bobby about them?” Keane asked. They had
exchanged numbers the night before. Bobby was a protective friend who wanted
all the information he could have since Olivia wanted none. So when she ran,
Garrett had texted.
It took a while, but the guy texted back and he seemed
concerned.
“He said she’s not usually like this. He said she usually
stands her ground and fights when she needs to. I think he was worried about
her. Especially when I mentioned the name Scott,” Garrett explained. “It was a
bad time, apparently. Bobby said maybe we should go back to Olivia’s and cook
her dinner and wait for her to come home. She’s probably nervous.”
“So she goes out drinking with her friends?” Keane opened
the door, and raucous music blasted through him. The Barn was hopping for a
Sunday night. It was a luxurious roadhouse trying to fit in with touches of a
broke-down bar. The trouble was Keane had been to actual broke-down bars, and
this place was pretending. Inside there were groups of women chatting over
margaritas and a bunch of guys staring at the Rangers game on the big screen
while they downed beers and talked about the coaching staff.
“Like we haven’t hit a bar before when times are tough,”
Garrett shot back, having to talk louder over the music.
He didn’t think this qualified as tough times. Her ex was
back, but she had a plan and they were willing to go along with it.
“We were in the middle of a discussion.” That was what truly
bugged him. She hadn’t told them she needed time to think about what they were
offering. She hadn’t given them her own plan. Hadn’t explained that she would
like to talk this whole thing through with her friends. Hadn’t even told them
good-bye. Just left them sitting there like idiots.
He was going to have such fun slapping that gorgeous ass of
hers.
They had barely gotten to real discipline the night before,
and she seemed to love it. He could give her so much more.
If he could find her in this place. It looked huge. There
seemed to be a couple of different bars and a part of the building that served
as a sit-down restaurant, and apparently a dance hall, if all the hooting and
hollering was any indication. It was a massive East Texas redneck paradise.
Which was different from the town. They’d taken a tour of the town, and it
seemed quiet and a little uptight. While Gwen had driven them around Olivia’s
regular haunts, she’d imparted an enormous amount of wisdom about Willow Fork.
And by wisdom he meant gossip.
“And she got scared.” Garrett stopped him before they could
get to the hostess station. “She needs time. Maybe we should listen to Bobby. I
think we shouldn’t push her.”
But she was begging for it. If she didn’t want to be pushed,
she would have explained calmly that she needed to think about the situation
and she would have gotten her purse and her cell phone. Instead, she’d run away
like a bride who figured out she wasn’t ready to get married. She created
drama, and from what he could tell that wasn’t something she did most of the
time.
So deep down he suspected this was some kind of a test. Even
if she didn’t realize it was.
Bobby might know her, but he didn’t know the sexual side of
the woman, the intimate side, the submissive side.
It occurred to him that Olivia had been left behind by a lot
of men she cared about. Not her family. They were solid, but just because she
had wonderful fathers didn’t mean other men hadn’t hurt her. It didn’t mean she
wasn’t reluctant to throw her whole self into a new relationship.
She had men who loved and adored her, but none who spoke to
her submissive side. This felt like a plea for discipline to him. If she was
rejecting them, she would say it. She wouldn’t sugarcoat it. She wouldn’t
hesitate. She would kindly tell them it wouldn’t work for her.
That wasn’t what she had done.
“Hello. Welcome to The Barn,” a cheery hostess said. She was
dressed in jeans and a Western shirt, a pink cowboy hat on her head. She might
be twenty. Maybe. “Would you like a seat in the bar or the dining hall? We have
a short wait on the dining hall, but the bar has some spots since karaoke
already started, and the special tonight is the best brisket you’ve ever had.
Also, the beer of the week is a lager.”
“That actually sounds pretty good,” Garrett began. “I
checked the fridge and it feels like no one’s been to the store.”
He was always hungry. Keane ignored him. They were on a
mission. “Have you seen Olivia Barnes-Fleetwood?”
The petite hostess’s eyes widened. “Of course. She’s a
regular around here. You know her father is the reason The Barn opened in the
first place.” She gestured to a large portrait that hung behind the hostess
station. It was four people, three men and a woman. Two of them were very
familiar. Jack and Sam. They stood in front of a building that was somewhat
similar to the one they were in now, only much smaller and without all the luxuries.
“Her dad owns the place?” Garrett asked.
Keane was pretty sure Jack Barnes owned most of this world,
and anything he didn’t Julian Lodge did. It was something that should scare him
more than it did.
“A part of it. My parents own the other part,” the young
woman explained and then cleared her throat and seemed to go into a rehearsed
speech. “The Barn was established over twenty years ago when two ranchers
sought a nice place to have a beer without the judgment of the community. Mr.
Fleetwood had some trouble in town, and Mr. Barnes came up with a solution. To
build their own watering hole. They reached out to a couple with experience
running a bar and were surprised to discover that despite Willow Fork’s
reputation for sobriety, there was a thirst for beer that had been unquenched
to that point. So The Barn opened on unincorporated land to get around the
local alcohol laws. We like to think of it as our own speakeasy.”
“Speakeasys are private,” Garrett pointed out. “This place
is not.”
It definitely wasn’t. It was crowded and rowdy, and where
the hell was his sub? Not that she was his sub. His temporary sub, if she said
yes.
She was making him crazy, and normally he would say that was
a bad thing, but he felt more alive than he had in…ever.