Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
She’d slept.
That was the thing she kept coming back to on the drive over, Lucy in the back seat and CB quiet behind the wheel, the late June morning doing its best impression of a postcard outside the windows.
She’d fallen back asleep at SPS after insisting she would go home once the IV finished. She’d just been attacked, was in a strange room with a man she barely knew, and had still slept for five uninterrupted hours.
She hadn’t done that in months.
When she’d woken the second time, CB was in the chair beside her, head tipped back, eyes closed. If she’d reached out in her sleep and grabbed for something, she’d have found him there.
He’d stayed the whole time. She’d looked at the ceiling for a while and processed that, and then she’d sat up carefully and said his name, and he’d woken immediately.
“Ready?” was all he’d said.
She’d been slightly embarrassed. She was also aware that embarrassment was an indulgence she didn’t have time for, so she’d filed it and said yes.
He’d taken her home and waited in the truck while she showered and changed. She’d stood under the hot water for too long, thinking about the man parked outside her house who’d been awake all night on her behalf and hadn’t complained once.
Lucy had taken one look at the bruising on Regan’s throat and gone very still.
She’d composed herself into the version of Lucy Hill that had survived her husband’s death and her daughter’s complicated choices.
“Tell me everything,” she’d said, and Regan had.
Lucy had listened without interrupting, her hands balling into fists.
Those fists unclenched when Regan told her about the new arrangement with CB working at the bar.
“He’s going to help with a few things,” she told her mom. “He’s good with people.”
“He sure is,” Lucy said. “You better be nice to him. He saved you last night.”
“Mom.”
“Oh, please, Regan. I know you’re into all that ‘I don’t need a man to rescue me’ stuff, but honestly, you did need help last night. You’re a capable woman, just like I raised you to be, but it’s okay to admit when you need help. Besides, I’ve been asking you to hire someone for months.”
Regan had held back her arguments. She didn’t want to fight this morning. “I know.”
“And he has lovely eyes.”
“Get in the truck, Mom.”
Hill’s Tavern in the morning was a different creature than it was at midnight. The light came in at a low angle through the front windows and hit the old wood of the bar in a way that made it look like something worth preserving.
It was.
Regan unlocked the front door and went through the opening sequence—lights, thermostat, the ancient register that needed coaxing, the coffee machine that Lucy considered a personal project.
CB fell into step with her. “Walk me through it,” he said.
She did. The bar layout, the well, the rail, where the backup stock lived, and how she liked it organized.
Next was the lunch prep sequence, the table rotation, and the regulars she needed him to know by name.
“George Maunder takes the same corner booth every day, orders the same beer, tips well, and asks after my father sometimes without remembering he’s gone.
Patrice Newcomb comes in on Tuesdays and Fridays, drinks white wine, works a crossword, and doesn’t like to be talked to much.
Dale Hutchins is loud and harmless and will test your patience within the first hour. ”
CB listened without interrupting. When she finished, he nodded once and went to acquaint himself with the well.
“You get any sleep while you were playing bodyguard last night?” she asked.
“Some.”
“In the chair?”
He glanced at her. Said nothing.
That’s what I thought . She handed him the bar towel and pointed him at the glasses.
Lucy, meanwhile, took her normal place in the kitchen, prepping for the lunch crowd. The smell of coffee filled the bar a few minutes later, and Regan got herself and CB a cup. He smiled when she handed it to him, and her pulse spiked.
She tapped it down and asked her mom to write the day’s special on the chalkboard.
Regan could track her mother’s emotional state by what she cooked, and today’s special—ham salad on fresh bread with the good potato salad on the side—said Lucy Hill was shaken and intended to feed everyone in the county until she felt better about it.
Regan thought about telling her not to worry. Decided against it. Some things you just had to let people do.
She was restocking the bourbon shelf when CB said from somewhere behind her, “I have some ideas about the extortion situation. Ways to make them back off before you go public.”
“Mm.” She moved a bottle three inches to the left.
“There are approaches that don’t require the podcast to drop first. We could?—”
“We’ll talk about it later.”
A pause. “When’s later?”
“Later is when I’m not opening a bar.” She picked up the next bottle. “You’re on the bar. The lunch crowd starts at eleven-thirty.”
She could feel him deciding whether to push it. He didn’t. She gave him a point for that.
She wrote her rules out on a yellow legal pad, tore the page off, and pinned it to the bulletin board in the back room between the delivery schedule and the emergency contact list.
She’d been running this bar alone long enough to know that clear expectations prevented most problems. That was true for distributors, and for the occasional part-timer she brought in during the tourist season.
It was, she was fairly certain, true for ex-Army Rangers who made espresso martinis and thought they knew better.
Hill’s Tavern — House Rules for CB
1. The bar is my domain. You take direction from me on all bar and customer matters.
2. Lucy is queen of the grill. Don’t touch.
3. No business conversations in front of customers.
4. You are a bartender. Act like one.
5. I run the books, the schedule, the vendors, and the floor. You run security. We don’t cross streams unless I say so.
6. If you think something is a threat, you tell me first. I decide what we do about it.
7. My closing routine is mine. You don’t interfere with it.
She capped the pen and began cutting lemons at the prep station.
CB came in and grabbed a rack of clean glasses, the action taking him right past the board. He stopped. Silence followed.
She didn’t turn around.
More silence.
She glanced over her shoulder. He was reading the list with no expression on his face. He set the glasses aside, reached over, and grabbed the pen on the shelf below the board.
He wrote something at the bottom. Recapped the pen. Set it back. Walked out.
She crossed to the board.
His handwriting was neat and blocky.
8. For Regan: Don’t tell me you’re fine when you’re not.
She looked at it for a moment. Reread it.
She went back to cutting lemons with a little more vehemence than before.
He’d brought a security system. She found this out when she emerged from the back and found him on a ladder, installing a camera mount above the front entrance.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Got the back and side entrances done while you were on the phone with the distributor,” he said without looking down.
Their first patron was pulling in. “How long will this take?”
“Just finishing up. System’s top of the line. Motion sensors, alerts to your phone, hundred-foot perimeter on the parking lot.” He came down the ladder. “I’ll show you the app when we have a minute.”
She thought about the cost, then about the note under the back door, and decided this was not the time to argue. “Fine.”
He almost smiled. She was starting to recognize that—the not-quite version of it that happened when she said something that amused him.
“Lunch rush is starting,” she said. “Ladder away.”
“Yes, boss.”
She hesitated, startled by the flutter in her chest.
She’d walked in with the idea that having a man like CB in the bar would mean managing him, navigating around him, explaining herself constantly. That he would hover. That his size and his competence would take up more space than there was room for.
As the place filled up and he covered the bar, talked to patrons like they were old friends, and kept an eye on everything, he didn’t hover.
He greeted every person who came through the door.
Knew some of them already by name, since he’d grown up not far from here.
He moved efficiently and always with purpose, easy with the regulars, watchful with the new faces.
George Maunder came in, took his corner booth, and had his beer in front of him before he’d finished settling. CB had clocked him from across the room, cross-referenced him against the list Regan had downloaded into him that morning, and acted. He hadn’t asked Regan. He hadn’t needed to.
Dale Hutchins came in at twelve-fifteen, loud as advertised, and CB handled him with the patient ease of a man who had dealt with considerably more difficult personalities in considerably more dangerous situations.
“You new?” Dale asked, squinting at him.
“Started today.”
“Regan finally hired some help?” Dale looked around until he found her. “Good! She works too hard. I’ve always said so.”
“She does,” CB agreed, with a pleasantness that somehow made Regan feel like she was being managed, though he wasn’t looking at her.
She wiped down a table that didn’t need wiping.
She found herself actually enjoying the lunch service for the first time in longer than she could remember.
Talking to customers without the low current of dread underneath everything.
Laughing at something Patrice said about her crossword.
Letting herself be present in her own bar instead of scanning every face that came through the door for threat.
This is what it used to feel like .
She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed it.
Even several motorcycle riding customers came in, had a beer and a burger and headed out. None were Outlaws, and they tipped well, interacting with CB when he asked about their bikes. They were more than happy to talk about their babies.