Conrad
I'd been at the bar twenty minutes when I caught myself looking at the door.
I made myself stop. I drank from my beer and watched the football game on the TV above the bottles and counted the bricks in the back wall behind Kayla the bartender, and after about ninety seconds I looked at the door again anyway.
Since when do I care about who comes in that door or what’s going on outside it?
It was raining out. The kind of cold October rain that meant snow in the higher country by tomorrow and a hard frost down here by the weekend.
The Foundry's front window was blurry with the wet.
Anyone coming in would shake water off before they did anything else, and I would hear the door, and I would have a beat to compose my face before I had to use it.
I was not waiting for anyone.
It had been eight days since she'd walked into my hangar. A week of her being in the building before I got there in the morning, which was a thing I had never seen another regional manager do. I’d been seeing her at briefings, asking the kind of questions that meant she'd done the reading the night before.
The light in her office stayed on after I left at six, and was usually still on when I drove past the lot at seven-thirty to pick up a sandwich, and gone — finally — by the time I came back through at nine for the second drive-by I was not going to admit to anyone I was making.
I’d been seeing her in town, too.
I hadn't expected that. I'd thought she'd keep to the office and her accommodations and the diner across from the airfield, the way the last regional manager had.
But she'd been at the grocery store on Tuesday — I'd spotted the camel coat down an aisle and pulled the brim of my cap down and gone the long way around to the milk.
She'd been at the hardware store, of all places, in the boot aisle, and I'd left through the side entrance without buying what I'd come for.
She'd been at the gas station on Saturday morning, paying inside, and I'd waited in my truck until she pulled out before I went in.
I was a grown man hiding behind a hat brim from a woman who looked like she was half my age. I wasn’t like this. Kayla was about the same age and I didn’t give her a second thought beyond leaving a nice tip.
I couldn't trust my face around Lili. My face had given me away in the hangar on day one. It was even worse during a briefing on her second day, when she said something dry about the Q3 forecast and the corner of my mouth had moved before I'd told it to.
My face nearly teamed up with my dick when she unwrapped a sandwich during a lunch meeting.
I stared as she peeled back the wax paper, noting the calluses I’d been thinking about.
Then she licked a crumb off the side of her thumb, seemingly without thinking, and I stared while my body sprang to life in a long-forgotten urgency.
If I let her see me at the grocery store with no engine between us and no agenda to hide behind, my face was going to tell her something I had no intention of saying.
So I hid. Like a coward.
And then she was still overtaking my thoughts as I tried to drink in peace. I glanced at the door to the Foundry every ninety seconds, thinking about the shape of want and how foreign it felt in my bones.
The door opened and my heart stuttered, but it was Diaz.
He shook the rain off his jacket, hung it on the hook by the door, and looked around. He saw me and tipped his chin, walking over to pull out the stool next to mine.
Diaz never comes here. The crew all tended to drink at Kincaid’s. But Diaz just hooked a thumb at my beer as Kayla nodded and poured another pint of some local ale I couldn’t taste above my lust.
After a minute Diaz said, "Cold rain."
"Yeah."
"Snow up high by tomorrow."
"Yeah."
"Bell ready for the Pinedale runs?"
"She'll do."
"Good."
He drank again. The game was on third down. Somebody in the booth behind us was telling a story too loudly. The bartender wiped a glass at the other end of the bar and didn't look at us.
"Lou," I said.
"Yeah."
"You don't drink here."
"No."
I looked at him.
He kept his eyes on the game.
"I told her my wife I’d look in on you,” he said. "She’s been asking after you lately. I told her Holt drinks alone, that's his thing. She made a face." He drank. "My wife makes a face, I drive across town."
I didn't say anything.
He didn't push.
We watched the football game. A run got stuffed at the line. The clock didn't move much. I drank what was left of my beer slow because the alternative was finishing it and ordering another one and I had a rule about the second one that I wasn't going to break on a work night.
"Bell's a good bird," Diaz said eventually. To the game. To nobody.
"She is."
"You take good care of her."
"That's the job."
There was a silence in which he was saying more than he was saying.
I drank what was left in my glass and set it down on the wood between us and did not pick up the conversation he was offering.
He didn't seem to mind. He sipped his beer and we sat at a bar we did not normally share and the rain ran down the window behind us and the football clock crawled.
The door opened.
I didn't look this time. I had told myself I wasn't going to, and Diaz would notice if I did.
But I felt the air change and Diaz, next to me, made a small sound in his throat and said, "Well."
I looked.
She was at the door with her hair plastered to one side of her face and rain still beading on her coat and a phone in her hand.
Her curves were hidden a bit by jeans this time and I didn’t glance down to see what was on her feet.
She scanned the room, a look of concern on her face.
I didn’t think she’d come here intentionally …
it looked more like she had car trouble and was desperate for help.
Her eyes went past me. Came back. Stopped.
"Holt," she said, from the door. Not loud. Loud enough.
I did not stand up. I did not nod. I did not do any of the things I should have done. I sat at the bar and looked at her with rain on her face and my mouth said, "Ms. Ashford," and Diaz, beside me, took a long slow drink of his beer and his body shook with silent laughter, the bastard.
She came across the room. The Foundry was a small place, and there was not enough room in here for the three of us and my unwelcome feelings toward this woman I had no business lusting after.
I needed to remind myself she was an heiress.
The owner’s daughter. Kin to the people who exiled me here to begin with.
She came up to the bar two stools down on my other side, set the phone face-down on the wood, pushed the hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand, and looked at the bartender.
"Could I have something hot?" she said. "Anything. I just need to hold something warm.”
Kayla nodded like she, too, was shivering cold, and said, "Coffee?"
"Please."
"Black?"
"Whatever's easiest. Thank you."
The bartender went to the pot at the back wall.
Lili put both her hands on the bar in front of her, palms down, the way a person who is cold does when there is no other surface available, and the calluses I had been thinking about for eight days were there in the bar light next to my elbow and I had to look away from them.
I looked at the football game.
"Rough night, Bootsy?” Diaz said. He sounded perfectly relaxed. I wanted to hit him.
"My car wouldn't start. I had to walk from the inn."
“I’d have stayed in, myself.”
She frowned at that, nose wrinkling in a way that had my breath stuttering.
Kayla came back with the coffee. Lili wrapped both hands around the mug, closed her eyes for one count of two, and breathed in, and that nearly did me in.
She was wet through. The collar of her coat was dark with rain.
There was a piece of hair stuck to her cheek that her hand had missed.
Her mouth was a little parted with the warmth coming off the cup and her eyelashes were dark and clumped from the rain and she was, in that second, more beautiful than any woman had any business being.
She opened her eyes and looked at me over the rim of the cup. Lord knows why, but I held her gaze a beat longer than was decent. But she cut away to the bartender and said, "Thank you. This is exactly what I needed."
"On the house, honey," the bartender said. "Rain like this."
"Oh — I can pay."
"On the house."
Diaz lifted his beer about two inches off the bar and said, to nobody, "I love this bar."
I had not, until that moment, ever heard the bartender laugh.
* * *
We sat like that — the three of us in a triangle along the wood—for maybe ten minutes.
Diaz did the talking because I was incapable of it and Lili was visibly thawing and gave him most of her attention out of what looked like pure gratitude.
He told her about the diner across from the airfield and which booth to ask for.
He told her about Whitfield & Sons and Mr. Whitfield Senior, who would size her work boots himself and not let her leave with anything wrong.
He told her that the snow up high by tomorrow probably meant snow down here by the weekend and she should put a blanket and a flashlight in her car if she didn't already have them.
She arched a brow at that advice and I got the sense she was more experienced with extremes than she let on. Where did the Ashfords live? Somewhere in New England. Lili was probably no stranger to a blizzard, young as she might be.
Eventually, she put down her mug and turned toward me. “I’m not used to anyone else coming in as early as me,” she said.
I grunted. She did not stop looking at me.
"You don't like company," she said. It wasn't a question. It also wasn't an accusation.
"No, ma'am."
"Should I stop coming in so early?”
I looked at her. Her hair was still wet. Her hands were starting to come back to life.
"It's your hangar, Ms. Ashford."
"It's not. We both know it's not."
I did not know what to do with that sentence. It went in somewhere it shouldn't have been able to reach and lodged.
"Drink your coffee," I said. “You’re shivering.”
After another minute she stood and said she should go — she had a tow truck coming for the car and she needed to call the inn and figure out how she was getting back tonight. Diaz, damn his eyes, clapped a hand on my back and said, “Holt’ll drive you back. I gotta get home to the missus.”
I looked at him.
That motherfucker winked.
I sighed and said, “Sure, I’ll drive you back.”
“Oh, you don't have to."
“I said I’d take you.”
Diaz, suddenly in much less of a rush to get back to his wife, remained seated, slurping away at his drink while Lili nodded and dropped a ten on the bar.
I dropped cash for my own drink and glared at Diaz, hoping he understood that he’d pay for this behavior. I wasn’t sure how.
She was waiting for me by the door, awkward, with her hair drying in places and the rain still coming down behind the glass.
"Ready?" I said.
"Ready."
I opened the door for her.
She stepped past me into the rain and the night and the inch of space between us as she went through the door was the closest I had been to her since the handshake, and I felt her scent — or her soap, or her, or whatever it was — go through me like a current, and the only thought I was able to form on the sidewalk under the awning while I unlocked the truck was that I had been wrong to think I could outlast her.
I was wrong about everything, hard as stone, and utterly miserable about all of it.
I held the passenger door of the truck open.
She climbed up into the seat. The dome light caught the calluses on her hand again and I was no closer to knowing what they were from than I'd been four days ago, and I was also — somewhere I wasn't going to look at yet — close enough to the answer to feel it sitting in the cab with us.
I shut her door and walked around to my side in the rain.
I was going to drive this woman home, and I was going to behave like a man, and then go home, drink one finger of whiskey, and I would absolutely not touch the flaming rod in my pants to thoughts of her, or her curves, or anything else related to Lilianne Ashford.
She sat with both hands wrapped around herself, shivering a little. I cranked the heat to high without saying anything about it. She made a small noise of gratitude. I put the truck in reverse.
She said, "Thank you, Holt."
I said, "Conrad."
I had not planned to offer her my first name. But there it was, in the cab, between us, in the dark, with the rain on the windshield and the heater coming up and her hands still cold and her hair drying against her cheek.
She was quiet for a beat.
Then she said it back to me.
"Conrad."
And I knew I would never recover from the sound of my name coming from those plump lips.