Chapter 1
Lauren
Friday night
I stepped harder on the gas pedal, but Logan’s voice kept finding me no matter how many miles I put between us.
His voice was deep and smooth, with that rough gravel underneath that could talk a woman into doing dumb shit.
I could still hear him from four hours earlier in his apartment, standing at the foot of the bed with a black Nike duffel open while he packed for a weekend away with Kayla.
“You’re not the kind of girl men marry, Lauren. You’re the kind they fuck and forget.”
His words kept playing on repeat in my head and refusing to shut up.
Kayla wasn’t a client. Wasn’t some misunderstanding. She was his personal trainer’s coworker. The woman he’d been fucking for six months while I worked doubles at Denny’s and helped make rent.
The Jack Daniel’s bottle rode shotgun in the passenger seat. I took another swallow as the highway curved, and the whiskey burned all the way down. At least that burn was clean. It beat sitting there with that ugly, caved-in weight in my chest.
The GPS kept steering me toward Abuela’s house in Morningside, still an hour out. When the sign for Fairview flashed through my headlights, I took the exit before I could talk myself out of it.
I wasn’t ready to show up on Abuela’s porch in the middle of the night with mascara tracks on my face and a breakup I should’ve seen coming stamped all over me.
One drink in a bar where nobody knew me sounded better.
One drink where nobody could take one look at me and see exactly what Logan had already decided I was.
His leather jacket started feeling wrong on me all at once, brown and worn-in, brass zippers scratched to hell.
He’d bought it from some vintage shop and talked about it for a week like he’d unearthed buried treasure with his bare hands.
I’d grabbed it on the way out because mine was buried somewhere in his closet, and I hadn’t been willing to dig through his life one last time.
Now it was on my shoulders, and it felt like I had some part of him on me too.
I shoved the bottle back into the cupholder and reached for the zipper. My bracelet snagged immediately. The thin silver chain Mom had given me for my birthday twisted into the teeth and locked there.
“Of fucking course,” I muttered.
I kept one hand on the steering wheel and yanked harder with the other. The center line drifted at the edge of my vision. I looked up and found headlights coming straight at me, bright and way too close.
Everything in me went cold.
I jerked the wheel left, too hard. The tires screamed, the back end slid, and the car stopped feeling attached to the road. Gravel blasted under the passenger side as I hit the shoulder. A horn tore through the dark.
The other car shot past close enough for me to see the driver, a woman with her mouth open and both hands locked around her wheel. A rosary swung from her mirror. Her side mirror clipped mine with a crack that punched through the cab.
I hauled the wheel back right, and the car bounced onto the pavement so hard my teeth clicked. The seatbelt snapped across my chest and bit into my collarbone.
Then there was nothing except the engine, my pulse, and the sound of my own breathing going too fast.
My hands shook on the wheel. The McDonald’s bag on the passenger floor had spilled open, fries and ketchup packets everywhere.
I pulled onto the shoulder and sat there with the hazards on, orange flashes skimming the road and the line of pine trees beside it.
I could’ve killed somebody. Her or me or whoever had the bad luck to be out here while I was busy making one shitty night worse.
The jacket hung halfway off my left shoulder, and my bracelet was still trapped in the zipper. I ripped it free. The chain snapped. The clasp cut my palm and left a thin red line. I stared at the blood for a second, then threw the jacket onto the back seat on top of my duffel.
He wasn’t even in the car, and he was still wrecking things for me, with his words in my head, his jacket on my skin, his mess reaching farther than he did.
I should’ve turned around. Found a rest stop. Slept it off. Called Grandma. Called literally anybody with more sense than I had left.
I knew that, and I still reached for the bottle.
I wiped the mouth with my sleeve, drank, and kept driving.
Ten minutes later, I turned into the gravel lot at Hayes’ Bar.
The red neon OPEN sign in the window flickered. Toby Keith pushed through the walls under a layer of voices and laughter. It looked exactly like the kind of place where a woman could make one more bad decision without anybody asking follow-up questions.
I killed the engine and got out. My knees went loose the second my boots hit gravel. I caught myself on the side of my car, tried to straighten up, and nearly ate shit on the next step anyway.
A hand closed around my elbow before I could go down.
“You okay?”
I looked up at a man in his early thirties with kind brown eyes, a cigarette between two fingers, and a work jacket over flannel. His boots were tracked with dried mud. He’d probably been leaning against the brick wall smoking when I staggered out.
At least one man in Fairview had basic common sense.
“Not especially,” I said.
His mouth twitched, but he didn’t do that gross hopeful thing some men did when they spotted a drunk woman alone. He just steadied me and looked at my face, then the cut on my palm, then the bottle I’d left visible in the front seat.
“Rough night?”
“Rough taste in men.”
That got a real laugh out of him.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’ll do it.”
He opened the heavy wooden door for me. Warm air, beer, and fried food rolled out into the cold.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Sure. Just be careful in there.”
I snorted. “That warning feels late as hell.”
He smiled a little wider at that, and I went in before I could say anything more humiliating.
The bar was busy enough to feel close and loud without tipping into chaos.
Scratched tables, cheap lights, a pool table shoved into the back corner, country music, too many people pretending they weren’t clocking each other.
It was small-town Friday night, with everybody carrying a story and hoping somebody else’s was worse.
A few heads turned when I came in, then turned back with practiced speed. In a place like this, nobody had to stare. They only needed the basics: strange woman, late, alone, wrong jacket, shaky on her feet. That was enough material for days.
My eyes adjusted and found two men at the bar.
One sat on a stool with a pint glass of Coors and a half-eaten burger in front of him. He wore a clean blue button-up, had dark hair combed back. He looked expensive in a room that wasn’t and calm in a way that felt chosen, not easy.
The other stood behind the bar, wiping down the counter with a white rag.
Dark hair that needed cutting. Stubble. Rolled black sleeves.
One muscular arm covered in black ink, all sharp lines and geometry.
He moved like he already knew where every bottle, body, and problem in the room was before it got there.
The man behind the bar shifted a bowl out of the service lane with the rag still in his hand, and the man on the stool moved his beer over a little without being asked. They’d read each other before either one looked at me.
I grabbed a corner table first, drank half a beer, then gave up pretending I wasn’t already watching them. I headed for the bar because I was already here, and leaving now would’ve looked a little too much like personal growth.
He looked up first. His eyes were blue, sharp, steady, and sober. His attention moved over my face, the half-fallen jacket, the cut in my palm, and the way I held my left shoulder stiff. Then it settled into something too exact to pass for casual.
The bartender read me faster. He caught the whiskey on me, the sway in my balance, the room going interested, and the fact that I’d walked in wearing some other man’s jacket and trying like hell to look steadier than I was.
I slid onto the empty stool beside the clean-cut one and pointed at the top shelf.
“Give me a bottle of your best whiskey.”
The bartender leaned one forearm on the bar. “A bottle.”
“Yes. I’m not really in the mood to pace myself.”
“You driving?”
I gave him a look. “Is that concern or inventory protection?”
“Little of both.”
The man beside me turned his head toward me. Up close, he smelled clean, of soap and something crisp I couldn’t afford. His voice, when it came, was calm and even in a way that instantly got on my nerves.
“Start with a glass.”
The bartender was already reaching for one before the sentence finished.
I looked between them. “This a bar or two men with control issues?”
“Depends how committed you are to being a problem,” the bartender said.
The man beside me didn’t look away. “A glass.”
There it was. Nice shirt, steady eyes, and a decision already made for me.
I turned to him. “You always open with orders, or am I getting premium service?”
Something in his expression shifted, not quite a smile.
The bartender huffed a laugh and reached up for a bottle of Jameson Black Barrel. His shirt lifted enough to show a strip of skin over worn jeans before he set the bottle and the rocks glass in front of me.
The man beside me glanced at my hand. “You’re bleeding.”
I looked down like I’d forgotten I was. “Barely.”
“It’s enough to ruin your jacket.”
My laugh came out ugly. “That’d be fucking tragic.”
Something in his face changed then. Like I’d hit something he hadn’t expected to feel.
The bartender set a stack of napkins near my wrist. Then he looked past me toward the end of the bar, where a man went quiet mid-lift. The bartender only tipped his chin once before the guy found something else to look at.
“Use those,” he said to me. “I’m not letting half the room watch you bleed on my counter.”
“Your bedside manner is incredible.”
“I run a bar, sweetheart. People only call me caring when they’re too drunk to drive.”
The man beside me lifted a brow at sweetheart but said nothing.