Chapter 2
Deacon St. Claire had never seen such a beautiful woman in his life, but that wasn’t what was going on between them, at least on his end.
It wasn’t her beauty that undid him, though she had it in spades, a kind of radiant, untouchable grace that didn’t belong in a dive like O’Grady’s, no offense to his best friend’s bar.
No, it was something deeper and stranger, a sense that this woman was orbiting in his own private gravity, the magnetic pull so strong that it forced him to recalibrate the axis of his world.
He’d never had a reaction to a woman like he was having to her.
She’d sucked the static out of the air, and all the energy in the room had condensed around her barstool.
She was a beacon. Or maybe a warning. There was a familiarity, a responsibility he’d never sensed with anyone before, not even the mother of his child.
Deacon felt every wall he’d spent his life building splinter and crack.
Until he saw her, he was walking around with a dark cloud over him thinking his day had sucked.
He’d buried both of his parents that morning in a double funeral and had to try to explain to his three-year-old daughter that she would never see her grandparents again.
She’d already lost so much in her tiny life.
She never knew her mother, who died in childbirth, and now the only other family she had besides him, except for distant great uncles and aunts she’d met today for the first time, were gone.
His head was so filled with his own shit, but the second he walked out from changing the kegs, all of that disappeared.
It was just her. All he could see was the ball-kneeing wingless angel.
He’d had to make himself look away from her.
She was like the sun. Except the sun didn’t cause you to make stupid declarations of love or ask you to marry it, which is why Deacon had to force himself to break eye contact before he said something stupid.
When he looked in her eyes, he’d seen her.
And she’d seen him, recognized him, but not as Deacon St. Claire, heir to the St. Claire empire, the way everyone else in his life recognized him.
The first thing the college kids did when they walked in was ask if he was Deacon St. Claire, thankfully, he’d convinced them he just got told he looked like St. Claire a lot, and one of them remembered his parents’ funeral was today, which threw them off his scent.
Which he was grateful for. If not, they might have made a TikTok or Snapchat announcing him being there, and then their friends would have shown up.
He didn’t understand why his parents’ businesses or his money made him famous, but it did.
He wished like hell it didn’t, but it did.
But for the first time in…he couldn’t remember, he was sure this woman had no clue who he was.
When she looked up at him, she saw him. Just him, and he saw her.
That was the only way he knew how to describe it.
He knew she’d had a bad day, but he had an overwhelming sense she’d marinated in a lifetime of crap luck and disappointment, yet she rose above it.
She wasn’t there to drink, not really. She was there to not be somewhere else.
She was there to disappear. He recognized the look in her eye. It was like looking in a mirror.
Deacon understood the urge to vanish. To be invisible in a world of people who put you under a microscope. He’d spent his life wishing the same thing. Maybe now that his parents were gone, he’d get it. Or maybe now it would be a hundred times worse. Only time would tell.
The woman’s phone lit up with another call after she’d just silenced it. Reading it upside down, he saw the name James. She sent it to voicemail as she took in a shaky breath. “Can I get a glass of house red?”
You can literally have anything you want, Deacon thought to himself. I would give you the moon. Literally, he would happily go to the moon, get a piece for her, and bring it back if that was what she wanted.
He would move heaven and earth for this woman.
This woman who had that dickhead college kid, who towered over her and had a hundred pounds on her easily, whimpering and tattling like a preschooler, without breaking a sweat or seeming affected at all by his bullshit.
It made him wonder just how much bullshit she had to put up with on a regular basis.
She looked young, and if he were solely going off of how she presented, he would have carded her as soon as he came back from changing the keg, but once he’d looked into her eyes, he knew she was much older than her very youthful appearance.
He grabbed the most expensive merlot from the back shelf, which wasn’t a huge step above the house, but it was something.
This woman was not paying for her drinks.
He’d reimburse Cillian for anything she had.
Or hell, he might even upcharge the trio of tiny dicks for their drinks.
They’d been assholes since they arrived.
As tempting as that was, he wouldn’t do that to his friend. If this were his bar, it would be a no-brainer. Although, if this was his bar, he’d have thrown that asshole and his friends out after she kneed him. But it wasn’t.
He started to present the wine for tasting, then remembered this was O’Grady’s, and instead he set the glass down in front of her, uncorked the bottle and poured.
She looked up at him then, really looked, her eyes tracing his face like she was mapping the layout of a burning building. “Thanks,” she said, and her mouth softened for just a second. He felt the shift in her expression reverberate in his chest, like a tuning fork struck hard enough to ring.
When a tiny smile slid up on her face as she glanced down at her glass, just for a moment, the whole room tilted on its axis.
Deacon had spent his life trying to guard himself, to protect himself, and to keep everyone at arm’s length and doing a damn fine job, and now a single grin from this stranger made him feel everything at once: exposed, hopeful, fucking terrified.
She lifted her glass to her lips and their eyes met again, and it knocked the wind out of him like the time he went four-wheeling with Cillian, they flipped over, and he fell down the hill.
She took a slow sip, her hand trembling just enough that he pretended not to notice.
He wondered if she was feeling even a quarter of what he was.
He watched as she licked the line of wine stain from her lips, her eyes never leaving his.
It was the most erotic thing he’d ever seen, she was the most erotic thing he’d ever seen.
Not because of her body—which, even though she was trying to hide beneath a hoodie, he could see she was the kind of woman men wrote songs about and started wars over—but because of the soul burning through her.
She was all impulse and grit, desperate to stay afloat, and it made him want to dive in, even if it meant drowning alongside her.
She closed her eyes, set the glass down, and let out a sigh.
“Better?” he asked, his voice pitched low and gentle, like he was coaxing a wounded animal to eat from his hand.
She nodded, didn’t open her eyes, just let her head tip back as if she were daring herself to surrender, even for just a few seconds.
For the first time all day, Deacon felt himself relax.
Not because anything had been fixed or solved.
He wasn’t sure anything ever would be fixed.
But because, for a few seconds, he could just exist with her.
Then she licked her lips again, this time slower, and he nearly groaned at the sight of the pink tip of her tongue sliding across her plump, wine-stained mouth. Needing distance from her, he stepped back, crossed his arms, and leaned against the bar.
The screen of her phone lit up as it vibrated. Again. She glanced down and sent it to voicemail before taking another drink. This time a much bigger one.
Fuck, he wanted to ask her her name so badly, but if he did that, then she’d ask him his name, and that was not something he wanted to disclose.
Instead, he asked, “Want to talk about it?”
Her eyes lifted to his, and he could see that she was considering it. He felt honored. For some reason, he knew she wasn’t the type to open up to just anyone. Even if she was just mulling over the idea of discussing her life with him, it was a win in his book.
“It wasn’t a surprise.” She took in a shaky breath and took another drink, practically finishing the entire glass, as the screen of her iPhone lit up once more. She sent it to voicemail.
“The cheating or…?” He didn’t finish the sentence, not really sure how to phrase it.
“Or the dying?” she said bluntly as she set the glass down and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Neither, actually. My mom was in hospice for the past year.”
“Year?” He hadn’t meant to sound surprised. He’d just always been under the assumption that hospice care was for much shorter periods of time.
The deaths he’d experienced had been sudden. His wife, Tabby’s mom, lost blood during delivery and was gone. His parents were driving, and they hit a tree. It was a freak accident. Sudden. To drag something out…
“Yep.” She nodded. “A year.”
“I’m so sorry, that must have been really, really, I don’t—"
“Before I got the call last year that she was dying, I hadn’t seen her in seventeen years…so…” She shrugged, as if that negated it from being difficult.
“Wow, still.”
“I moved out when I was sixteen and didn’t speak to her or see her until the hospice nurse called. She didn’t even know I was married, twice, or that she had a granddaughter.”
Deacon was storing all the information she was revealing to him. She was a mom. She’d moved out at sixteen and hadn’t spoken to her mother in seventeen years until last year, so that made her thirty-four. Damn, he would have never guessed a day over twenty-eight.