Sirens (Townsend Harbor #5)
1. In the weeds
ONE
In the weeds
WHEN SOMEONE IS SO BUSY—OFTEN OVERWHELMED—THAT THEY CAN’T CATCH UP AND SERVICE QUALITY TAKES A HIT
Maggie Michaels stared blankly at the backlit array of bottles, desperately trying to remember what the hell actually went into a Long Island Iced Tea.
Which was kind of ironic, because wasn’t obliterating your memory kind of the point of a Long Island Iced Tea?
Or was that just a thing at Kelly’s Irish Pub back in Boston?
After several stymied moments drumming her long, elaborately painted nails on the old wood bar, all she could recall was a beverage that tasted vaguely like its refreshing, lemony namesake, and had frequently resulted in the loss of her keys, several items of clothing, and a shit-ton of pride.
And hell, just about any combination of the mood-enhancing elixirs in front of her would do that, right?
Grabbing a glass from the rack, she dumped in a shovel of ice and began tipping in healthy glugs of everything but eye of newt. Next came a blast of cola, which turned the drink something kind of like the right shade. She topped it off with a chunk of lemon that could only be described as a wedge by someone who was excessively kind or legally blind.
Whatever. It was at least worth the “Four-dollar mixed drinks!!” advertised on the happy hour chalkboard propped near the entrance.
Happy hour.
If Maggie had a time machine, she’d zap herself back to find whatever asshat had come up with the concept and punch him in the neck meat.
Okay, first, she’d zap herself back to 1880s London to have tea and Tea with infamous madam Marry Jeffries, then she’d punch happy-hour guy—because it was surely a guy—in the neck meat.
Or the dick.
“Is that mine?”
Speaking of…
Maggie turned on her heel to find Kurt, whose fingers she might have to bend into a pretzel if he didn’t stop snapping them at her every damn time he shoved a new slip of paper into the already overloaded drink ticket carousel, looking at her expectantly.
“Sure is.” Maggie slid the glass across the bar just hard enough to send a tiny amber wave tipping over the Kurt-ward side.
“What is it?” he asked, eyeing the glass.
“A Long Island Iced Tea.”
Kurt’s thin lips pursed into a judicious pout. “It doesn’t look like a Long Island Iced Tea.”
“It’s from South Shore,” Maggie said, parking a hand on her hip. “You got a problem with that?”
It was almost refreshing, letting the East Coast burr of her youth flirt with the syllables of her question after years spent carefully training it out of her voice.
Kurt wisely decided he didn’t.
He gave her a beleaguered sigh and mopped the glass with an already badly used towel before shuttling it off to one of the many packed tables.
Maggie sucked in a lungful of air carrying a cocktail of scents as odd as the one she’d just mixed. Briny air gusting in the second-story deck where patrons fought the seagulls for their battered fries. The earthy pong of the deep-fat fryer responsible for said fries. The roasty undercurrent of beer that said fries were being washed down with.
And beneath it all, Sirens Pub itself.
With its nautical kitsch of real fishing nets draped across the ceiling and faux portholes on the walls, this joint really knew how to beat a theme to literal death. Because: mermaids. Mermaids on the menus, mermaids on the taps, a massive mural behind the bar featuring a mermaid squeezing her excessively perky, titanic tits.
Definitely painted by a man.
Pausing to massage a sympathetic pang in her lower back, Maggie turned back to the wheel of tickets.
Two vodka sodas with lime—thank God, something relatively easy.
One gin and tonic also with lime—her raw cuticles already hated her, but whatever.
One Raven Creek stout—she might just live through her first day yet.
And…a Ramos Gin Fizz?
The fuck was that even?
Maggie covertly slipped her phone from her apron pocket and consulted the search engine. Her eyes got as far as the second ingredient when she slapped the ticket on the margarita-salt-confettied counter and whipped through the other five drinks while she ignored the sixth on principle.
The very idea of egg whites in a beverage that didn’t also contain wheatgrass and/or protein powder… Who the hell had decided that egg whites had any place near a cocktail?
Probably the French .
“Will my RGF be arriving any time before the heat death of the universe, Mads?”
Acronym-happy and an unsolicited nicknamer.
Oh, they were just going to be the very best of friends.
You’re not here to make friends.
The thought appeared spontaneously in her head in a voice that made her heart give a painful little lurch.
Mark Kelly. Her best friend.
The one whose idea it had been for her to haul her ass all the way across the country to Townsend Harbor in the first place.
The one whose younger brother, Gabe, had called in several favors to get her this job.
That she was obviously spectacularly unqualified for.
Which proved just how well Mark Kelly knew her.
Ever since Gabe had bounced from Boston and landed smack in the middle of a friggin’ Hallmark movie, Mark had been convinced that Maggie ought to follow suit.
She’d mostly blown him off until the clever bastard had to go and drop a trump card on her.
Madame Katz.
Townsend Harbor’s very own Victorian villainess. Rumored to have had a hand—among other body parts—in the disappearance of thirty plus men.
Basically, perfect podcast fodder wrapped up in a homicidal bow.
Despite her swan dive down a research rabbit hole, she could find surprisingly little about either Madam Katz or the sailors she’d supposedly seduced into her brothel then conveniently vanished.
Which was when Mark’s suggestion that she do some on-site research in Townsend Harbor started to sound a lot more seductive.
Because if there was one thing Maggie couldn’t resist, it was a mystery.
Even if it meant subjecting herself to the low-grade torture of slinging drinks in the hopes of unraveling it. Because booze made people more likely to talk, and after the feverish research she’d done online, Maggie knew she needed a certain person to do a lot of talking about a certain topic.
But that certain person had yet to show as Gabe promised he would, so instead, Maggie had to keep pumping everyone’s face holes with one of the last legal toxins and listen to the mostly meaningless bullshit flooding out of them.
Which wouldn’t have bothered her, per se. God knew she had an impressive collection of name tags under her belt already. But her ineptitude reflecting on the Kelly brothers after the mess they’d already helped her clean up in Boston? That bothered the shit right out of her.
“Coming right up!”
Your ass.
Kurt propped his pristine tray against his also-pristine apron rather than resting it on Maggie’s not-so-pristine counter to wait.
After a blur of pouring, spilling, swearing, shaking, squeezing, and more swearing, she handed Kurt a drink that almost looked like the bougie Orange Julius she’d glimpsed ahead of the seventeen-page-long story that preceded the recipe.
And Kurt looked—dare she say it—mildly impressed.
Without so much as disapproving snort, he set a cocktail napkin on his tray and whisked it away.
Spattered with an unholy slew of booze and mixers, Maggie excused herself under the guise of restocking her garnish caddy and slipped into the walk-in fridge.
The stainless-steel door was cool against her forehead, the sudden insulated quiet like a little pocket of heaven after the chaotic jazz of clinked glasses and conversation.
She was so. Damn. Tired.
And not just because this was the first job that required her to stand on her feet for hours at a time since working the Sabrett hot dog stand at Jones Beach the summer after her sophomore year of high school. At least then, she’d had sixteen-year-old cartilage and ready access to funnel cakes.
No.
Maggie was mentally exhausted from trying to remember drink orders and bartending techniques she had learned on the fly. Emotionally pulped from being in a new place after hastily leaving behind everything familiar. Even if that familiar wasn’t especially pleasant.
“Mads?” Kurt shrilled through several layers of metal and insulation.
Right on fucking cue.
Maggie thumped her head on the other side of the door. “Yeah?”
“The customer at table twelve sent his RGF back. I’m going to need you to remake that on the fly .”
Acronym happy, unsolicited nicknamer, and a kitchen lingo dropper.
If this guy were any more determined to sabotage her, she’d be tempted to date him. He seemed to be her type.
“Oh, and I just put in an order for three Old Fashioneds and a Lemon Drop when you get a sec.”
When you get a sec. As if someone was wandering around handing out buckets of unoccupied time.
Fuck. That.
Reaching for a bottle of seltzer from a nearby crate, Maggie knocked the cap off on one of the shelves and took a swallow. The aggressive bubbles made her eyes water, but successfully banished the dangerous clench at the base of her throat. She stashed it behind a bin of lemons and shouldered her way through the door.
“Where is he?” she asked.
Kurt blinked at her, his sad little soul patch dipping as his mouth formed the perfect O of a Christmas card angel.
“Who?” he asked.
“The guy who sent this back,” she said, snatching the drink from Kurt’s hand.
Even now, the condensation-kissed glass looked serenely golden, the pillowy cloud of heavy whipping cream and egg white atop it as fresh as new-fallen snow.
It was ethereal.
Celestial.
Goddamn it, she had even measured .
“That’s him,” Kurt said, inclining his head toward the water-view side of the dining room. “In the yellow shirt.”
Maggie nudged in beside Kurt’s bony shoulder, peering through a rack of kitchen tools to locate her target.
And promptly had to steady herself against an industrial-sized whisk.
The man was… perfect . A goddamn GQ ad cut from the fabric of the universe and pasted into this chaotic everyday scene.
Most males of her acquaintance “got dressed.” This dude put together a whole-ass ensemble . The kind she could easily see one of those Ken-doll-perfect mannequins wearing in a display window on Fifth Avenue.
Crisp, tailored shirt. Expertly cut trousers.
But it wasn’t just the clothes. It was the way he wore them. Like they were the elegant but totally unnecessary wrapper of a ten-course meal, and the rest of the world would be lucky to get a single bite.
Which, judging by what she could see of his body, was an empirical fact.
Mr. GQ didn’t just work out . He had a regimen. One that made his shoulders just the right kind of broad, his torso the perfect sort of cut to fit a tux he’d be wearing to swagger up to a roulette table on the French Riviera. Probably sit his equally perfect ass down across from a Bondian super-villain with an intriguing characteristic scar, eyeing him cooly across the green felt.
No wonder he was so goddamn picky about his drinks.
“Not today, James.”
Maggie hadn’t realized she’d spoken or that she’d begun moving in GQ’s direction until Kurt’s hand clamped around her wrist, panic plain on his features.
“What are you doing?”
Maggie attempted a mild smile. “I’m going to go talk to him.”
“Talk to him?” Kurt’s eyebrows and voice lifted simultaneously. “Why? Why would you do that?”
“Because I’d like to know what he finds so objectionable.” Maggie slipped past him, only to have Kurt leapfrog back into her path.
“Can’t we just assume it’s everything?” he asked.
Several acidic replies burned their way up her throat but were promptly neutralized by the chance glimpse of the antique mermaid masthead mounted on the wall, hair very nearly the same shade of scarlet as Maggie’s, a secret smile playing about her painted lips.
The kind of smile that might advertise to lonely nineteenth-century sailors arriving in Townsend Harbor from ports across the known world that convivial companionship might just be on offer—for a price.
“The sooner I get this little conversation out of the way, the sooner I can get back to making the rest of your drink order,” Maggie said.
“You know he’s”—Kurt’s words snapped off mid-sentence—”one of our regulars, right?” he said, speed-walking to catch up with her. “And kind of an important one at that. Please don’t piss him off.”
“Piss him off?” Maggie snorted, rolling her eyes. “What on earth would make you think that I’m going to piss him off?”
“Maybe the Manhattan you managed to dump into the fire chief’s lap earlier?”
A fresh wave of irritation heated Maggie’s skin at the memory. “That was an innocent accident and had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that hairy-knuckled letch spent almost an entire hour ogling my cleavage.”
“I mean, it’s kind of hard not to.”
Maggie stopped so abruptly that Kurt clipped her shoulder.
“And what do you mean by that?” she asked.
A single bead of sweat slid down Kurt’s forehead as his eyes tried—and failed—to find a safe place to land.
Ever since hitting puberty, Maggie had been blessed—cursed?—with very large, very real breasts that had her confined to beige boulder slings when the rest of her middle school classmates were flitting around the PE dressing room like fairies in their delicate lace bralettes.
Galvanized by the memory, Maggie tugged down the neckline of her fitted Sirens t-shirt to reveal a whole extra inch of cleavage before fixing Kurt with a smug look. She marched past him and directly up to Mr. GQ’s table, where she cleared her throat and waited for him to look up from his paper.
And then he did.
And then she died a little.
Because he wasn’t perfect .
But he wasn’t perfect in the most devastatingly attractive ways.
When those obscenely beautiful lips parted in a smile, they revealed the tiniest gap between his perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth. And when that smile reached his leonine eyes, a slim, dusky scar slicing his left eyebrow gave the lid a sleepy, sexy squint. Like a never-ending wink.
When that wink made him cock his head to look up at her, the last rays of coastal sunset revealed another scar just under his meticulously shaved jaw.
And when that jaw flexed in preparation to speak, Maggie felt her knees go all buttery.
“Hey,” he said, flicking the briefest of glances toward her name tag, “Madison.”
And the sound of it was so warm, so friendly, she almost forgot that Madison wasn’t even her real name, just what happened to be on the name tag bestowed on her by Chris, Sirens’ tough-as-nails and twice-as-practical owner, who didn’t want to go the trouble of having a new one made—a process that clearly involved a wood-burning tool on a mermaid-tail-shaped plaque—since Maggie had no intention of being a long-term employee.
“I go by Maggie,” she said for reasons she couldn’t fathom. “And you are?”
“Trent,” he said. The smile deepened, and so did the odds of Maggie/Madison wobbling on her totally adorable if not totally practical Vince Camuto booties.“But everyone around here calls me McGarvey.”
“Trent,” she repeated, then stood there frozen in the tractor beam of his smile for a span of time she was afraid to calculate.
Only when a staccato cackle of women’s laughter drew his eye toward the bar did Maggie find the presence of mind to continue.
“I would like to know what you find so objectionable about this drink.” She set the glass down on the table, only to notice that in the time that it had taken her to walk from the kitchen, the foam had all but disappeared, and the contents separated into something that now resembled spoiled milk.
A crease appeared in the center of his smooth, brown brow as he considered the glass, then looked back at her.
“Taste it,” he said.
Maggie swallowed hard, alarmed by the odd flutter developing behind her apron. “I don’t need to taste it,” she said, her voice lacking anything even remotely resembling conviction. “I know it’s right because I followed the recipe.”
“Recipe.” Trent chuckled as he leaned back in his chair, the movement releasing the olfactory equivalent of a pheromone freight train. “Recipes are fine if you’re baking a cake or mixing concrete. But cocktails… ”
Was it her imagination, or had he placed just the tiniest hint of extra emphasis on cock ?
“Cocktails are a sensory experience,” he continued. “Temperature. Flavor balance. You have to develop a sense for it. And you can’t develop a sense for it if you don’t use yours. Taste it .”
Maggie saw his gaze flick toward her fingers as she reached for the glass, one corner of his mouth curling as he registered her nails. His eyes tracked her hand as she lifted it toward her lips, meeting hers above a rim lacy with the remnants of egg-white suds.
Milliseconds before she put her mouth where his had been, she spotted a shock of expertly styled salt-and-pepper hair in a clump of patrons gathering near the door.
Bingo.
The pilot light of her curiosity flared into urgency, burning away the magnetic hold this Trent Whateverthefuck had over her.
“Look, you don’t like the drink, try ordering something off the menu next time,” she said, adding an extra dash of South Shore sass.
Trent leaned forward, his dark eyes boring into hers. “Fine. I’ll have a Manhattan, then.”
Maggie opened her mouth, but no retort came. The crowded room rose in temperature by twenty degrees.
“Coming right up.” She felt his gaze on her as she made her way back to the bar might have worked a little extra swing into her hips as she slid behind it.
Her hands trembled with a brew more potent than any she could craft as she reached for the bourbon, her attention fixed on her target as he made his way through the crush. Shaking hands. Slapping backs. Bestowing veneered grins of the proper self-deprecating wattage.
Until, at last, he parked on the stool she’d done her utmost to ensure remained empty for his arrival. The fact that she’d had actual provocation to unceremoniously evacuate the fire chief had just been an added bonus.
“Hello there.” Maggie slid a cocktail napkin across the bar and gave him what she hoped was a winning smile. “What can I get for you, handsome?”
His overly manscaped brows shot toward his surgically perfected hairline as an embarrassingly pleased smile stretched across his face. “Well, hello there. You must be new.”
“How’d you guess?” she asked, batting her eyelashes.
“It’s my job to know everyone in Townsend Harbor,” he said, pronouncing the tiny coastal town’s name with an extra flourish of pride. “I’m?—”
“Oh, I know exactly who you are, Mr. Mayor.” Maggie winked at him.
And soon, the 37,000-plus listeners of Maggie Michaels’ Murderous Victorian Madams podcast would too.
Especially since—according to at least one contemporaneous source—Townsend Harbor’s mostly ornamental political figurehead happened to be living in the mansion that once belonged to one Madame Katz during the height of her rumored dirty dealings.
“But you don’t know my usual drink?” Mayor Stewart gave Maggie an extra-toothy grin.
“Give a girl a break,” she said, leaning forward just enough that her breasts brushed her forearms. “I’ve been in town for all of five minutes. Let me finish memorizing Townsend Harbor’s most influential citizens, and I promise I’ll get their drinks licked.”
The mayor’s Adam’s apple bobbed above his starched collar. His lips parted to issue what she assumed would be a lame-ass retort when his cell phone vibrated on the bar.
He glanced down at it and frowned. “Will you excuse me?”
“Of course.”
The smile he gave her as he slid from his stool was tighter. Less polished.
Maggie watched him weave through the tables and out into the hallway, the phone pressed to his ear. She was still watching him when she registered a shape moving toward the mayor’s still-warm barstool in her peripheral vision.
“Seat’s taken,” she said.
“Not anymore.”
Had her head whipped toward the voice any faster, Maggie might have slipped a cervical vertebra.
Again.
Trent McGarvey leveraged his impressive wingspan to reach behind the bar and grab a towel, keeping his eyes on hers as he breeched a barrier that felt far more sensual than it should.
Maggie watched, open-mouthed as he efficiently wiped a stretch of the old wood clean before setting down his leather messenger bag and plopping down on the stool.
“Now,” he said, pinning her with a killer smirk. “How about that Manhattan?”