Blame It on the Bikini(2)
‘Come on, gorgeous, show us your stuff!’
Mya glanced up at the bunch of guys crowded round her end of the bar. A stag party, they’d insisted she pour the trick shots for them, not her sidekick, Jonny, down the other end of the bar. She didn’t get big-headed about it—truth was Jonny had taught her the tricks and she was still working towards acing him on them. It was just these guys wanted the female factor.
She’d mixed three for them already and now was onto the finale. She enjoyed it—nothing like lighting up a dozen flaming sambucas for a bunch of wild boys who were megaphone loud in their appreciation. She flicked her wrist and poured the liquid—a running stream into each glass. Then she met the eyes of the groom and flashed him a smile.
‘Are you ready?’ she teased lightly.
The guys nodded and cheered in unison.
She held the lighter to the first shot glass and gently blew, igniting the rest of the line of glasses down the bar. The cheers erupted. She glanced at Jonny and winked. She’d only recently mastered that one, and she knew he was standing right where one of the fire extinguishers was kept.
Grinning, she watched them knock the shots back and slam the glasses onto the bar. Some barracked for more but she already knew the best man had other ideas. Her part in their debauched night was over; they were onto their next destination—she didn’t really want to know where or how much further downhill they were going to slide.
‘A thank-you kiss!’ one of the guys called. ‘Kiss! Kiss!’
They all chanted.
Mya just held up the lighter and flicked it so the flame shot up. She waved it slowly back and forth in front of her face. ‘I wouldn’t want you to get hurt,’ she said with a teasing tilt of her head.
They howled and hissed like water hitting a burning element. Laughing—mostly in relief now—she watched them mobilise and work their way to the door. And that was when she saw him.
Brad High-School-Crush Davenport.
For a second, shock slackened every muscle and she dropped the lighter. Grasping at the last moment to stop it slipping, she accidentally caught the hot end. Damn. She tossed it onto the shelf below the bar and rubbed the palm of her hand on the half-apron tied round her waist. The sharp sting of that small patch of skin didn’t stop her from staring spellbound schoolgirl-fashion at her former HSC. But that was because he was staring right at her as if she were the one and only reason he’d walked into the bar.
Good grief. She tried to stop the burn spreading to her belly because it wasn’t right that one look could ignite such a reaction in her.
Back in the days when she’d believed in fairy tales, she’d also believed Brad would have been her perfect prince. Now she knew so much better: a) there were no princes, b) even if there were, she had no need for a prince and c) Brad Davenport was nowhere near perfect.
Although to be fair, he certainly looked it. Now—impossible though it might be—he looked more perfect than ever. All six feet three and a half inches of him. She knew about the half because it was written in pencil on the door-jamb in the kitchen leading to the butler’s sink, along with Lauren’s height and those of their mum and dad—one of the displays of Happy Familydom his mother had cultivated.
Topping the modelicious height, his dark brown hair was neatly trimmed, giving him a clean-cut, good-boy look. He was anything but good. Then there were the eyes—light brown maple-syrup eyes, with that irresistible golden tinge to them. With a single look that he’d perfected at an eyebrow-raising young age, he could get any woman to beg him to pour it all over her.
And Brad obliged. The guy had had more girlfriends than Mya had worked overtime hours. And Mya had done nothing but work since she’d badgered the local shop owner into letting her do deliveries when she was nine years old.
She tried to move but some trickster had concreted her feet to the floor. She kept staring as he walked through the bar, and with every step he came closer, her temperature lifted another degree. This despite the air-conditioning unit blasting just above the bar.
He was one of those people for whom the crowds parted, as if an invisible bulldozer were clearing the space just ahead of him. It wasn’t just his height, not just his conventionally handsome face with its perfect symmetry and toothpaste-advertisement teeth, but his demeanour. He had the presence thing down pat. No wonder he won every case he took on. People paid attention to him whether they wanted to or not. Right now Mya wasn’t the only person staring. Peripheral vision told her every woman in the bar was; so were most of the men.
She needed to pull it together. She wasn’t going to be yet another woman who rolled over and begged for Brad Davenport—even if he was giving her that look. But why was he giving her that look? He’d never looked at her like that before; in fact he’d never really looked at her at all.
Her heart raced the way it did before an exam when she was in mid ‘OMG I’ve forgotten everything’ panic. Had she entered a parallel universe and somehow turned sixteen all over again?
‘Hi, Brad.’ She forced a normal greeting as he stepped up to the space the stag boys had left at the bar.
‘Hi, Mya.’ He mirrored her casual tone—only his was genuine whereas hers was breathless fakery.
It was so unfair that the guy had been blessed with such gorgeousness. In the attractiveness exam of life, Brad scored in the top point five per cent. But it—and other blessings from birth—had utterly spoilt him. Despite her knowing this, the maple-syrup glow in those eyes continued to cook her brain to mush. She ran both hands down the front of her apron, trying to get her muscles to snap out of the spellbound lethargy. But her body had gone treacly soft inside while on the outside her skin was sizzling hot. What was she waiting for? ‘What can I get you?’
He smiled, the full-bore Brad Davenport charming smile. ‘A beer, please.’
‘Just the one?’ She flicked her hair out of her eyes with a businesslike flip of her fingers. That was better—the sooner she got moving, the more control she’d regain. And she could put herself half in the fridge while she got his beer; that would be a very good thing.
‘And whatever you’re having. Are you due a break soon?’ He stood straight up at the bar, not leaning on it as most of the other customers did. In his dark jacket and white open-neck shirt, he looked the epitome of the ‘hotshot lawyer who’d worked late’.
Mya blinked rapidly. She was due for her break, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to have it with him around. She felt as if she was missing something about this. It was almost as if he thought she’d been expecting him. ‘It’s pretty busy.’
‘But that stag party has left so now’s a good time, right? Let me get you a drink.’
‘I don’t dri—’
‘Water, soda, juice,’ he listed effortlessly. ‘There are other options.’ He countered her no-drinking-on-the-job argument before she’d even got it out.
Good grief. Surely he wasn’t hitting on her? No way—the guy had never noticed her before.
These days Mya was used to being hit on—she worked in a bar after all. The guys there were usually drinking alcohol, so inevitably their minds turned to sex after a time. Any woman would do; it wasn’t that she was anything that special. Naturally they tried it on, and naturally she knew how to put them off. She deliberately dressed in a way that wouldn’t invite attention; her plain vee-neck black tee minimised her boobs and the apron tucked round her hips covered most of her thighs in her black jeans. She did wear the platforms, but the extra couple of inches helped her ability to look customers in the eye.
She still had to look up to Brad. And right now he was looking into her eyes as if there were nothing and no one else in the room to bother with. Yeah, he was good at making a woman feel as if she were everything in his world. Very good.
‘I’ll have some water,’ she muttered. There was zero alcohol in her system but she really needed to sober up. Not to mention cool down. She swallowed, determined to employ some easy bartender-to-customer-type conversation. ‘Been a while since I’ve seen you. What have you been up to?’
‘I’ve been busy with work.’
Of course, he was reputedly amazing in the courtroom, but she bet his work wasn’t all he’d been busy with. The guy was legendary even at school. She and Lauren had been there a full five years after him and there’d been talk of his slayer skills. Lauren had been mega popular with all the older girls because they wanted to get to him through her.
‘You need to get away from the bar to have a break,’ he said once she’d set his drink in front of him.
Actually she quite liked that giant block of wood between them. She’d thought herself well over that teen crush, but all it had taken was that one look from him and she was all saucy inside. But there was a compelling glint in his eyes, and somehow she didn’t manage to refuse.
As he shepherded her through the crowd, she steeled herself against the light brush of his hand on her back. She was not feeling remotely feminine next to his tall, muscled frame. She was not enjoying the bulldozer effect and seeing everyone clear out of his path and him guiding her through as if she were some princess to be protected. Surely she couldn’t be that pathetic?