Chapter Eight
Iwas ten minutes late to work. After getting home from visiting Gran, I sat down on my couch and promptly fell asleep. I hadn’t planned on falling asleep, but the second my head hit the back of the couch, the sleeplessness of last night and the stress of this morning hit me like a ton of bricks.
Now I was paying for it.
I hated being late. I had a drill sergeant in basic training who lived by the phrase “If you’re not fifteen minutes early, you’re late.” Unfortunately, it was one of those things that stuck with me, and knowing I was running behind with no hope of clocking in on time had put me in a foul mood.
Our shift manager for the night was a big Irish bastard named Jimmy O’Keefe.
He was a King and one of Charley’s buddies.
They served in the first Iraq war together.
Everyone else on staff hated the guy. He didn’t do anything during his shifts but drink free beer and bullshit with the customers.
Every now and then he’d bark a command at one of us from his barstool to make it look like he was in charge, and if we didn’t hop to it, he’d jump up and holler in our faces like he was still an active-duty sergeant and we were his knucklehead troops.
Come last call, he was the first one to slip out the door, leaving one of us to close up in his place.
He was usually so late to work that it was a minor miracle he’d beaten me in.
“You’re late,” he barked as I rushed past him.
“You’re early!” I yelled back.
From the dumb look on his face, he didn’t get it.
I left him to stew it over some more and headed toward the bar.
Nina was already behind it, slinging pint glasses, and she raised a brow and eyed me over the tap.
The place was packed even for a Saturday.
I was supposed to be replacing a woman named Judy, who was pushing sixty and still bleached her hair with peroxide from the corner store.
“You’re fucking late,” Judy said.
I stashed my stuff beneath the bar and started logging into the register. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“I’ve been here since noon,” she said, coming right up to my elbow. “My feet are fucking killing me.”
My temper snapped, and I whirled on her. “I already said I’m sorry. What else do you want from me, Judy? I’m not apologizing again.”
The thing about being a five-ten woman with some muscle on my frame was that I could be one intimidating bitch when I put my mind to it. Judy was nearly as short as Nina, and as I loomed over her, I saw a spark of fear light in her rheumy blue eyes.
She took a measured step back, chin held in a hard line, and glanced to her right. The bar was shoulder to shoulder, and we had a crowd of witnesses to this altercation. She had to serve these assholes the same as I did, and if she lost face now, they’d run riot over her during her next shift.
I took a deep breath and shoved my anger down. “Look, I had a shitty day, and nothing I can say will change the fact that I was late. I’m sorry for snapping.”
“Just don’t do it again,” she said before stomping off.
Nina sidled up to my other side and watched her leave. “Nice save.”
“Thanks.”
I punched a few buttons on our digital register harder than was necessary as I tried to get my temper under control. The speakers chimed, and my server ID flashed across the screen, telling me I was clocked in.
Nina leaned close and dropped her voice. “I thought you’d be in a better mood after the night you had.”
My spine stiffened. I glanced down and saw a lecherous grin on her beautiful face. “Who told you?”
She started counting off her fingers. “First my sister texted me. Then I heard it from Sally when I took over her shift”—she nodded toward the bar behind me—“and then Rob and Steve and Derek asked if I’d known you and Jakob were fucking.”
“What did you tell them?”
“That I’m your best friend, so of course I knew.” She caught sight of my face, and the humor fled from hers. “So you two really… ?”
I nodded.
She smacked my arm and leaned in. “Why the hell didn’t you call me?”
“It’s a long story,” I said. “Tell you after we close?”
Her dark eyes sparked. “You better.”
I saw motion out of the corner of my eye. Someone was already flagging me down for a refill. I took a step in their direction, but Nina grabbed my arm. I turned back to her.
“Just tell me if it was as good as we imagined,” she said.
She and I had spent an embarrassing amount of time sitting poolside, talking over which members of the Kings would be the best in the sack. Jakob usually landed in the top five. What sweet summer children we had been.
I lowered my voice and leaned down. “It was better than we thought it would be.”
She blinked. “No way.”
I had a flashback then, not my first of the day, of Jakob fisting my hair as he fucked me sideways. An echo of the orgasm he’d given me rolled through my core, causing a full-body shudder.
Nina noticed and dropped my arm. “Holy shit. That good?”
I nodded, expression grim. “That good.”
Which was why instead of trying to rein my temper in earlier, I’d let it run wild.
If I’d forgotten for even a second who Jakob really was, I would have ended up in the janitor’s closet at Magnolia, pinned to a wall of shelves as he dicked me brainless for the second time in less than twenty-four hours.
“Are you going to see him again?” Nina asked.
“Not if I can help it,” I said. “It was a onetime thing. Can we stop talking about it?”
She nodded.
I went to refill that drink.
Unfortunately, everyone wanted to talk about it.
Jakob had told me that several members of the Kings had relatives in Magnolia.
It turned out those old busybodies had nothing better to do than call up their kin the second I walked past with Jakob and say, “You’ll never believe who’s getting a grand tour of the place. ”
More than one customer dropped the boyfriend word on me.
Each time it hit like a bomb. Within the club, people either fucked, meaning you had promiscuous, no-strings-attached sex with whoever you wanted on any given night, or you had an “old lady” or an “old man,” meaning you were bonded for life like some mated pair of werewolves.
There was no middle ground as far as I could tell.
It turned out Jakob had never claimed an “old lady” before—I made a mental note to violently murder the first person who tried to call me that—and the fact that he’d made an exception for me was considered a Big Deal.
My customers were treating me with a newfound reverence that made me want to hit something.
One of the younger club members slid me a five-dollar bill after I’d served him a two-dollar shot of the cheapest whiskey we had in the house and then said, “Keep the change, ma’am.”
“I work for a living,” I snapped.
In the military, sir and ma’am were reserved for people with bars on their shoulders.
I’d been salt-of-the-earth enlisted, a ground pounder, and I was proud of it.
In the Kings, only enforcers and above earned the right to sir and ma’am, and since I wasn’t even in the club, I’d be damned if people started treating me like I was.
It was so backward that my value suddenly shot up just because they thought I was dating one of their enforcers.
Like this was 1600 and I was some scullery maid who’d married a lord.
This wasn’t 1600. I didn’t inherit Jakob’s rank just because I slept with him, and the next person to insinuate that I did was going to get an earful.
I would have gone on a feminist rampage if I hadn’t seen this same thing happen when one of the women who sat on the council for the Kings got serious with a local mechanic. This wasn’t sexism; this was classism.
Around ten o’clock, a pretty brunette slid onto one of my barstools.
I was working the far end of the bar, and she chose the seat right next to the wall, sitting low in it like she was trying to keep out of sight.
I recognized her. Beth. I’d seen her and Jakob getting hot and heavy back when I first started working at Charley’s, but they’d drifted apart shortly after, and now she was with a guy everyone called Slim.
The two of them seemed pretty happy together, but when I caught sight of her face, a small thread of anxiety wormed through me.
She looked like a woman with something to say.
“What can I get you?” I asked.
“Vodka tonic?” She had a nice voice, deep for a woman, melodic, like she could sing. Add a little rasp to it, and she would probably drive men wild with her bedroom talk.
I poured her drink and slid it in front of her.
She bit her lip and glanced around.
“Anything else?” I asked.
She leaned over the bar a little, and her top dipped forward, revealing ample cleavage. Jakob must be a boob man. I had a fair amount on top too.
“You and Jakob?” she asked.
“What about us?” I said. I’d given everyone vague answers tonight. If growing up in a small town with druggie parents had taught me anything, it was that feeding into rumors, whether you confirmed or denied them, would only prolong the rumor and subsequent interest in it.
“Be careful,” she said.
A tendril of unease slipped up my spine. “Why?”
“He can be a real asshole sometimes.”
“Did he hit you?” I asked.
She shook her head, sending her chocolate curls flying. “God, no. Jakob isn’t the sort. He was never even outright mean to me. He just”—she huffed out a breath and glanced around, as if looking for the right words—“I don’t know, it’s like he doesn’t have a filter.”
I sighed. “Yeah. I’ve noticed that.”
“And he can be really jealous,” she said.
Well, wasn’t she just a fountain of information. I might not be in a relationship with the guy, but I wouldn’t say no to learning more about him. It might come in handy later… somehow.
“How jealous?” I asked.
“He put Ricky Sloan in the hospital after Ricky grabbed my ass one night.”
I frowned. “So he beat up a man who sexually assaulted you?”