Chapter 12
Joe
Then
The Friday-night crowd at the Mustang Lounge had thinned. A table of volunteers from the fire department sat under a wall covered in first-responder patches, drinking beer and swapping stories. A handful of regulars hunched over drinks. A bunch of frat bros had taken over a corner in the back.
Joe nodded to the firefighters on his way to the bar.
He was filthy, sweaty, and covered in sawdust. Turned out the floor he and Rob were restoring needed more than a few boards replaced.
Joe had sistered up a joist, installing a new beam, but the extra work had cost them a day, and tonight he’d stayed behind to sand the floors so they could get back on schedule.
He needed a beer, a shower, and some ibuprofen.
Not necessarily in that order. But tonight his mom was enjoying a rare night in with seven-year-old Hailey, and there was no way Joe was crashing their princess movie marathon.
Cindy LaSalle—her impressive rack showcased in a red thirst responder T-shirt—slid him a coaster and a smile. “What can I get you, Joe?”
“Blackrocks. Thanks.”
She stuck a glass under the tap. “Flying solo tonight?”
He wondered if she was flirting or looking out for her friend’s best interests. Sometimes with women it was hard to tell.
“They asked Brittany to pick up an extra shift,” Joe said. “At the hotel. They’re hosting the prom tonight.”
Only nine kids in the senior class, but Mackinac still threw them a prom, inviting the younger grades and other high schools to make up the numbers.
Even Rob had been…not excited, exactly, but kind of sentimental his baby girl was celebrating another island rite of passage before she went off to college in the fall.
There would be lots of parents taking pictures on the hotel porch, Joe imagined.
Probably some tears, too, from Rob if not from Maddie.
“Leaving you all alone,” Cindy said.
Still talking about Brittany.
He sipped his beer. “It’s fine.” They weren’t attached at the hip. She’d made that clear. Everything was temporary with Britt. The job. Joe. A muscle pulled across his shoulders, like his shirt was too tight. “I had to finish a job anyway.”
A burst of laughter erupted from the table at the back. He glanced toward the sound. It felt like a long time since he’d been that young. Or that drunk.
A flash of red snagged his attention. A girl. A redhead in a strapless red dress, with her hair piled up and a lot of pale skin showing. He looked again. Anne.
Long, glittery earrings swung against her neck as she turned her head to say something to the guy pressed up against her in the corner. Some jackass in a pink shirt nudged his drink toward her across the table.
Cindy followed his gaze and put down her bar rag. “Be right back.”
Joe’s jaw set. “I’ve got it.”
Because, shit, this was Anne. His boss’s daughter.
Sitting in a bar with a bunch of wasted douche bros instead of dancing the night away or whatever with her friends at the hotel.
She’d done something to her eyes, he thought, to make them look bigger, and her lips were red to match her dress.
It should have been cute, like Hailey getting into their mother’s makeup.
Except in that dress, Anne didn’t look like anybody’s kid sister.
Something stirred in him, low and warm, like lust. Not lust. Anger, he told himself. Concern.
He made his way through the tables to the back. Stood there, silently, until his presence registered with the group at the table.
Anne’s eyes widened. “Joe!” If he didn’t know any better he would have thought she sounded glad to see him.
He ignored her, staring down the asshole trying to sneak her a drink. “Dude, she’s seventeen.”
The kid’s hand curled around his mug as if he wanted to pull it back across the table. “So?”
“She’s underage.”
“What are you, a cop?”
“Maybe he’s her dad,” another joker said, and the rest of them laughed.
Joe heard the edge to it. Five of them, drunk enough and entitled enough to make things difficult. But he was bigger. Older, by at least a couple of years. And he had the home field advantage.
“I’m a friend of her dad,” he said evenly. “I’m also friends with that whole table of first responders sitting over there. Who would be really upset to learn that our mutual friend’s kid was being taken advantage of by a bunch of shit-faced frat boys from out of town.”
The laughter died.
Joe looked at Anne, his jaw pulsing. “Let’s go.”
She raised her pointed little chin. “You can’t tell me what to do. I’ll be eighteen in a couple of months. I’m going away to college.”
“Where you’ll be somebody else’s problem.”
She glared.
“You want this place to lose its liquor license?” he asked quietly.
A flush spread from her face to her pale, freckled chest. “Of course not! I didn’t mean…I didn’t think…”
“You never do.” He watched her cheeks go from red to white and felt almost bad. He backed up a step, enough to let her push away from the table. “I’ll walk you home.”
Nobody protested as she slid out of her chair. Joe left a twenty and his almost-untouched beer on the bar, aware of Cindy watching them on their way to the door.
“Take care, Joe.”
“Thanks. You, too.”
Outside, the night was clear. The stars were out.
It was cold. Early May. Anne shivered, clacking along beside him in her little red dress and impractical shoes.
Joe suppressed a surge of sympathy. Maybe a little suffering would teach her a lesson.
What had she been thinking, crammed at a table with guys four, five years too old for her, all dressed up like…
He looked at her, her upswept hair, her slicked-up mouth, the sparkly earrings swinging against her neck.
Like she was trying on adulthood like a dress.
Like she was going places.
Joe shortened his stride, already regretting that crack about her being thoughtless.
He’d always secretly liked the way her brain worked, the way she had something to say about everything and nothing, darting from one topic to another, barely stopping for breath.
She probably could have talked herself out of trouble back there.
Rob always bragged about how smart his daughter was.
She’d been accepted to Northwestern, for God’s sake, the first of her family, as far as Joe knew, to go to college. But she was still a kid. Young. Na?ve.
“Do you know what was in that glass that guy was trying to slip you?”
She rolled her eyes. “Beer. Duh.”
“Okay, smart girl. What else?”
She dropped her chin, looking at him sideways. “What do you mean?”
“Listen, Pest, when you go away, if you’re at a bar”—underage, he reminded himself, she wouldn’t, shouldn’t, be going into bars anytime soon, but he was making a point here—“or at a frat party or something, you don’t drink from an open container.
Closed cans only. If you leave your drink on the table to dance or fix your hair, you don’t finish it when you get back.
Because anybody could put anything in your drink and you’d never know. You have to protect yourself.”
She frowned. “You mean, from drugs.”
“From rape.”
She hugged her arms to herself. Shit. Now he felt like he’d kicked a puppy. But she was going off island in three months, away from the people who had known and looked out for her her entire life. She couldn’t go bounding up to strangers, hoping for a pat, trusting only good things would happen.
He shrugged out of his flannel shirt and handed it to her. It was filthy. Probably smelly, too, but he didn’t have anything better to offer her.
She shook her head, not quite meeting his eyes. “I’m okay.”
He didn’t argue, just held out the shirt and waited. It worked, because she took it, slipping her arms into the sleeves, covering all that pale, bare skin.
“Thanks,” she said in a small voice. For the shirt? For the warning?
Joe didn’t want her thanks. He wanted…He balled up that thought like a dirty shirt and stuffed it in his mental closet. “What the hell were you doing at the Mustang, anyway?”
“It was open, and I didn’t want to go home. And before you start lecturing me again, I was perfectly safe. I know everybody there.”
“Except the guys you sat with.”
“That was kind of the point. I figured they wouldn’t treat me like a kid. Besides, all I had to do was open my mouth and scream, and there was an entire table full of big, strong firefighters who would have fallen over themselves coming to my rescue.”
Joe ignored the logic of this. He felt oddly off-balance, distracted by that long white throat framed by the collar of his shirt. “You’re supposed to be at prom.” Safely surrounded by friends. Parents. Chaperones.
“I was.” She smiled crookedly. “My date dumped me for someone else.”
Rob hadn’t mentioned a date. “You want me to find him and beat him up for you?” Joe offered, joking. Mostly joking.
“Not him. The whole idea of sitting around waiting for some guy to ask you to a school dance is stupid. I went with Daanis.”
“Yeah, no, I’m not beating up on your best friend.” Anne laughed, which made him feel better about the whole situation. “I thought Daanis was dating Zeke Bartok.”
Joe wasn’t exactly up on the high school gossip, but his mom talked. The Bartok kid was a nice guy, a couple of years behind Joe in school. He’d needed to bring up his grades, Joe remembered, and Anne had tutored him in English. He’d joined the coast guard or something.