2. McGarvey Highballer
TWO
McGarvey Highballer
SPEEDING MOTORIST DUCKING THE COPS
Trent leaned against the polished oak bar, his elbows pressed into a countertop so old the Virgin Mary might have given birth on it.
He glanced at the familiar menu with the Thursday specials of fish and chips, marionberry cheesecake, or jambalaya.
On Thursday, he read through emails and approved Deputy Probable cause statements over a much-needed cocktail, sometimes ate the jambalaya (decent for this far north), then turned in before the live music at nine thirty.
Tonight, though, his eyes refused to follow anything but the incredible curves of the terrible bartender’s body as she made a mockery of her profession.
He was a sucker for a woman possessed of so many round cheeks. And she was killing him with her red hair pulled back in a bouncy ponytail, revealing the damp, downy skin of her neck and the adorable curve of her stubborn jaw.
Trent felt a twinge of guilt as he watched her, knowing that he should not be admiring her so openly, but he could swear to every god that her V-neck wasn’t pulled that low a minute ago.
He glanced around to find something less seductive to focus on. Suddenly the glass vases in the windows took on incredibly feminine curves, the drink menu now seemed to offer only sexy liquors, and the décor?
Forget it.
Why did mermaids always have their perfect tits out? And the mermaids with red hair? Was that a thing, or one of those Disney visuals that just hung out in the general mythos?
Due to the immortal poetry of that sainted knight, Sir Mix-a-Lot, people always assumed he was an ass man.
Which…he was.
But Trent McGarvey’s kryptonite? Big, soft, natural breasts.
The lady in question winked as she walked past him, her chest flushed pink with exertion. He felt a foreign surge of heat that emptied his mouth of all moisture. He cleared his throat and tried to think of something to say, but she and her swinging ponytail bopped away before he’d landed on a sufficiently pithy comment.
Her confidence was magnetic, even if he didn’t want to admit it. He was gone . What that meant? He wasn’t sure. All he knew was…
No other woman in the room existed.
She acted coy, like she didn’t notice him watching her, avoiding eye contact as she wiped down glasses and restocked limes.
Trent wasn’t fooled—the surreptitious glimpses she stole from beneath her lashes and the faint glow to her cheeks gave her away.
He couldn’t help but notice that Maggie also kept glancing toward the door with expectancy, her green eyes flickering with an almost palpable sense of anxious anticipation.
Was she waiting for someone special? An enemy? A long-lost family member?
A love interest?
Trent winced at a pang of curiosity and, if he were honest with himself, a touch of jealousy.
He wasn’t a detective yet , so he should cool it with the hyperawareness.
“Barkeep!” bellowed Myrtle Le Grande, everyone’s favorite pansexual septuagenarian, as she helped her wife, Vivian “Vee” Prescott, onto a barstool. “I’ll have the slipperiest of nipples and my lady, here, will have her usual pitcher.”
Trent had to squint against Maggie’s megawatt smile. If anything, she needed to register that thing as a weapon of mass distraction .
“Pitcher of what?” Maggie asked, grabbing a few glasses from beneath the bar.
“Scotch,” Vee moaned in her stolid British accent before dramatically resting her forehead against her hands.
“It’s been a day,” Myrtle explained, before whispering behind her hand, “She’ll take a half and half with Newcastle and Raven Creek Nitro Stout, please.”
“Still in a pitcher?” Maggie asked.
Vee groaned again.
“A bucket, if you got one,” Myrtle translated.
“I’m on it.”
Trent’s mouth twitched as he counted the sixth time Maggie turned to the dark corner behind the hanging speakeasy lights to Google a cocktail recipe.
Slippery Nipple. Irish Cream, Sambuca, Grenadine. Sweet, slick, boozy, and should coat the tongue with a silky layer of cream and sugar. A favorite of drunk coeds on spring break and…apparently stressed-out lesbians.
“Want to talk about it?” Maggie asked the pile of Vee’s silver-streaked hair as she placed the pitcher beneath the nitro stout tap.
Don’t tell her. Do. Not. Tell her that she should be pulling the lighter ale first, as it would settle on the bottom beneath the stout!
Trent bit down hard on his tongue so the mansplaining didn’t fall out.
Myrtle watched Maggie with all the one-eyed speculation of an old-timey prospector panning for gold. “You’re new here.”
“That obvious?” Maggie flashed that smile again. The one that would be considered indecent in some countries and probably the entire Bible Belt.
A trainee. She’d never been a bartender before, that was for fucking sure.
“No, I mean you’re not a local yokel, or I’d know ya.” Myrtle threw her knitted leopard-print beret on the counter and began to take off the matching fingerless gloves. The woman always looked like she’d stepped off a stage during Fashion Week, but not in the good way. In the WTF, no one would ever wear that way. Today’s ensemble was something Trent would call Golden Girls Chic, where the leopard print was rainbow colored and somehow there were palm leaves on her pink shirt and sequins on her sunglasses and three-inch platform sandals.
He checked the windows just to make sure it was still February.
Yup. And raining.
“The fuck?” Myrtle grimaced after one sip of her drink and slid it back across the counter at Maggie. “No offense, honey, but this Slippery Nipple tastes like licorice-flavored lighter fluid! Here, try this.” She shoved the drink toward Trent. “One sip and tell me it’s not like a butterscotch suicide-bombed a Twizzlers factory.”
Curious, Trent reached for the stem of the glass only to be cock-blocked by Maggie.
“Oops!” She relieved the woman of her glass and poured the abomination into the sink. “Must have gotten your drink and someone else’s mixed up in the middle.”
“Or…accidentally traded Irish cream for butterscotch, which…” Trent offered to Maggie beneath his breath with a shudder.
Drink probably tasted like cough syrup.
Maggie blanched. “Then what even makes it extra slippery?”
“The grenadine.” He couldn’t help but grin. “Amaretto if you’re feeling sassy.”
Trent bet himself his next paycheck that she’d add the amaretto and
When proximity roped him into the conversation, he did his best to follow Vee’s warbly tale of woe regarding a missed shipment of monster-themed dildos to her sex-positive, vagina-oriented boutique. Much as a story including Vee’s Lady Garden made for a good yarn, his attention remained arrested by Townsend Harbor’s newest character.
Trent was pleased to see that Maggie nailed Myrtle’s drink on her second try, and his libido noticed that she’d poured the amaretto in his line of sight.
She wanted him to know she was feeling sassy.
Message received.
“Are you a local lush, or just passing through?” Maggie returned to Trent when she noticed his glass was empty.
“Recent transplant,” Trent answered, enjoying the lo-fi background music and intimate lighting. “Got soul weary in the city, trying the small-town life on for size.”
“Oh yeah?” She scooped ice into two glasses for a classic G&T on the rocks. “What city?”
“You’ve never been there.” He laughed, trying to picture her ginger skin beneath the unrelenting Southwest sun.
She snorted and tossed him a look full of attitude. “I’ve been just about everywhere, you don’t know?—”
“Albuquerque.”
Her mouth tipped down. “Okay. Yeah. Never been there,” she mumbled with a self-deprecating laugh.
Trent was a big fan of not saying I told you so when it was obvious, so he basked in the unspoken victory, enjoying her discomfiture more than he ought to.
Why was it so sexy when someone could laugh at themselves?
“Okay, smarty-pants,” she challenged, leaning over the bar in a way that deepened her cleavage to indecent levels. “Any more words of wisdom before I make your next Manhattan?”
“Actually, yes,” he retorted, feigning seriousness. “You can shake a martini, fine. But never shake a Manhattan without asking. I prefer my vermouth unbruised.”
“Fuck off, you can bruise alcohol?”
Trent almost did a spit take of his last sip but wrestled the unappealing brew down his gullet. “Do you have blackmail on Chris?” he asked, wondering why the fuck Sirens’ owner would hire such an obvious newbie at the town’s favorite watering hole without more extensive training.
Sure, she was an oasis of sexiness in the desert that was Townsend Harbor’s under-fifty dating pool, but her bartending—if one could call it that—couldn’t be good for business.
Maybe she was kin?
He eyed Chris, the owner, a sparkplug of a thin blonde with a dark tan and darker eyes. If she and Maggie were related, he’d claim Ed Sheeran as a sibling.
Maybe she had a good sob story? Needed a quick job out of desperation?
Frowning, Trent studied her, looking for any victim vibes and not exactly sensing them from her. Didn’t mean anything, per se. He was proud of his investigative instincts, but he wasn’t a damsel-in-distress divining rod or anything.
“Hey, how about a round of flaming rim shots for my friends here?” a customer called out, breaking the tension.
Maggie glanced at Trent, who raised an eyebrow.
“Sure thing,” she said, grabbing shot glasses and filling them with tequila. “Just remember, I’m not responsible for any bad decisions made after these.”
“Fair enough,” the customer agreed, clinking his glass against hers before downing the shot. “Think you could be one of those bad decisions?”
The smile she flashed him was flat as day-old soda. “Trust me, neither of us wants that.”
Trent sucked some air through the gap in his teeth, a habit when chewing on a problem. Something about her just set off his spider-senses.
“Hey, hot stuff, how about a refill?” Bernie Crowder slurred, eyeing Maggie’s cleavage a little too long for Trent’s comfort.
“How about you sip some water instead, Bernie?” She slid him a glass, unfazed. “Gotta stay hydrated. The night is young.”
Trent was impressed with her perceptivity, though Bernie was not deterred.
“The night is young and so are we, sweetheart,” the sixty-year-old crab fisherman brayed, his overalls catching on his rain slicker as he peeled it from his briny layers. “Tell me when you get off your shift and I’ll be waiting to get you off again.”
A few men laughed.
No women did.
Maggie’s face drained of any remaining color, but she squared her shoulders at the man, jutting her jaw forward in a stubborn refusal to show fear.
“Maybe you can answer me a question, Crowder,” Trent chimed in, pulling his cuff links below his suit coat in case he had to unlatch them in order to hand this old white perv his own ass. “Men like you have a tendency I can’t figure out… You walk into a place like this looking like you just quit your shift beneath a bridge terrorizing the local children, and you hit on the prettiest young woman you can find as if your dick were dipped in gold. Is it? Is your dick dipped in gold, Bernie Crowder?”
The scowling seaman ran a hand over what sweat-greased hair he had left before mumbling, “No.”
“Does a world exist where a woman that young and fine goes home with you?” Trent gestured to an open-mouthed Maggie, who startled when the beer she pulled overflowed, drenching her hand.
Bernie’s beard sank below his clavicles as he bowed his head. “No.”
“Then maybe sit the hell down and stop harassing the servers, yeah?”
“Yes, sir.”
The atmosphere was heavy with a pregnant pause as the customers waited for permission to breathe again.
Trent gave it by ordering his third and final drink.
“One for the road?” He tipped his empty glass toward Maggie, who was looking at him with an odd fascination.
“Anything you want.” Something in her heavy-lidded eyes caused everything south of his belly button to melt…then harden. “I just have to light this on fire for these guys first.”
“You have to do what?”
Maggie grabbed a bottle and two shot glasses. As she reached for the matches to flame the shots, her hand knocked over a display of cocktail napkins, which tumbled to the bar in a messy pile. Unaware, she struck the match and touched the flame to the rim of the shot glasses, which ignited dramatically.
But as Maggie placed the flaming shots on the bar, the trailing edge of her sleeve grazed the flames, and then the pile of napkins, setting a corner of the bar on fire.
“Shit!” she yelped, shaking her arm fast enough to smother her sleeve. But the flames spread quickly across the napkins.
Trent leapt up, grabbing a pitcher of water.
But Maggie was faster. She snatched the soda gun and doused the growing fire before it could spread.
For Sirens, it was a near miss.
For Kurt, it was a direct hit to the vitals, drenching him sternum to knees with freezing soda water.
Trent wasn’t that mad about it. Kurt was one of those assholes who hid their true nature behind burlap shirts and waxed hipster mustaches.
“Oh no, I’m so, so sorry,” Maggie said for what had to be the thousandth time that night.
“It’s fine,” said Chris as she relieved an astonished Maggie of the soda gun through her giggles. “Go home and change your panties, Kurt—I’ll cover your tables.”
Maggie sputtered at her boss. “I promise, I?—”
“No worries,” said Chris with the laid-back demeanor of a woman who’d seen it all happen within these walls. “I don’t mind a mess if you take it on yourself to clean it up as you go. Besides,” she whispered as she leaned in with a conspiratorial smirk, “Kurt needs a good douche every so often. Keeps him from getting too big for his britches.”
Maggie let out a shaky laugh as she swept the soggy napkins into the trash. But Trent noticed her hands trembling slightly as she took the bleach rag and wiped beneath the patient bar patron’s glasses and took their good-natured ribbing with genuine humor.
When she reached Trent, he couldn’t stop staring at the peach blush spreading beneath her light freckles.
A natural redhead, then.
Fuck. He couldn’t know that.
“Hey, you handled that like a pro,” he encouraged her. “Might have a future at the fire department.”
Maggie snorted. “Might have…but I dumped a drink on the fire chief an hour ago, so I think that vocational avenue is closed for good.”
“What? Why’d you do that?” Trent asked with a laugh.
“Because that pervy old goat grabbed my ass and pretended it was an accident.”
Trent shook his head, his expression turning serious. “Someone should do something about that problematic motherfucker. You want to press charges?”
Maggie gave him a small smile that snaked through his insides with a slick desire. “It’s okay. I handle assclowns like him a ton in my line of work. But thanks for having my back.”
Trent lifted his glass in a mock toast. “What is your line of work, anyways?” he asked, only half teasing. “We both know it’s not bartending.”
Maggie chuckled, but the mirth didn’t reach her eyes.
Because anxiety flared there.
Interesting…
She was saved from giving him a reply by a customer at the other end of the bar.
Trent turned back to his tablet, promising himself he could go five minutes without glancing at her.
And he did.
Well, four minutes.
All right, three minutes and twenty-seven seconds…
…was his record over the next hour and the extra Manhattan he’d ordered to wash out the flavor of the one before it.
How the hell was she getting worse at her job as the night wore on?
Every time Trent looked up at her, she was watching the door, her shoulders tense until they drooped in disappointment when she didn’t recognize the face.
“Expecting someone?” he finally asked around a sip.
Maggie’s head snapped up, her cheeks flushing slightly. “What? Oh, nope. No one special.”
Trent raised an eyebrow. “You sure about that? You’ve been watching that door like a hawk all night.”
“Pfft, how would you know?”
“Because I’ve been watching you all night,” Trent murmured.
The flirt was out before he could call it back, landing with an extra swoop of her butterfly-wing lashes.
He couldn’t call it back, but he could stuff it down and smooth it over. Smooth was his calling card. His specialty. His motherfucking descriptor.
“Watching you commit multiple offenses against Townsend Harbor’s post-dinner drinks crowd.” Clearly he shouldn’t have had that fourth awful drink. It was giving him equally awful ideas.
Oh damn, he was a sucker for a woman who could laugh at herself, and her laugh wasn’t just infectious—it imbued every smile within its blast radius with an extra glow. “Well, so long as you don’t turn me into the authorities.”
“Please, I am the authorities.”
“And humble, too.”
His entire vocabulary abandoned him as a familiar feminine expression darkened her eyes from jade to forest and her gaze set fires of appreciation to all the right places. Not just the fit of his suit over his more sculpted parts…
She checked his empty ring finger.
Twice.
He liked that. She was ethical. Or…at least careful.
Trent McGarvey from Albuquerque’s fifth precinct would have pulled some stupid show-off shit with the maraschino cherry stem and had her screaming his name before midnight.
But that wasn’t him. Not anymore.
Trent McGarvey of Townsend Harbor had this village tucked in by ten on a school night and did nice things for dangerously pretty, mysterious ginger women without any of the moves from his player’s handbook.
“Listen, I have all day tomorrow free and an apartment down the block and around the corner. How about you come around to my place and we can go over a few bartending basics?”
Her hesitation was almost as offensive as her mixed drinks. Eyes darted just about everywhere as an entire conflicted conversation splashed across her ultra-expressive features.
“You’re asking me to your place?”
“Yup.”
“In the middle of the afternoon.”
“Uh-huh.”
She tucked an invisible hair behind her ear. “Like…a date?”
“Like…an intervention.” He softened his tease with a wink, and she choked on her next inhale.
“I work the lunch shift tomorrow,” she warned with a licentious quirk of her lips. “I don’t get off until five.”
“Then come by afterward,” he offered, fully aware that he’d said it far more casually than he meant it.
Something about her sent every instinct he had into overdrive. This wasn’t just an intervention, it was an investigation.
Nah, not that serious. Not assigning it a case number and establishing a file kind of serious. More like…an exploratory expedition.
Because Maggie wasn’t what she was claiming to be…and to him, she’d just become a person of fucking interest.
Even though the only crimes thus far had been against their livers.
“Are you sure you want to risk teaching me?” she asked playfully, her voice laced with sarcasm and a little bit of sin. “I mean, I did just almost burn down the pub.”
“I’m not scared,” Trent lied, more nervous for the damage she could wreak on his taste buds, liver, and carpeting than anything.
Maggie snagged the little plastic skewer of maraschino cherries from the dregs of his glass and slid them past her plump, glossed lips with a smile that could have set the devil on fire.
“You probably should be.”