Speakeasy (True North #5)(50)

I lean over to pick her up and spot Zara in hot pursuit. “She doesn’t want to go to bed.”

“Book!” Nicole demands.

“I’ll read you a book,” I say immediately. I should go tend bar, but Zara looks frazzled, and May is glaring at me. Nicole likes me more than the rest of the women in the room right now.

“Would you?” Zara sighs. “I’ll give you free coffee tomorrow.”

“Deal.”

“Ack!” the little tyrant addresses me. “Mine,” she says, reaching for the clothespin on my shirt pocket.

“Okay, baby,” I say, and then kiss her soft little cheek.

May’s expression finally softens. I like the way she’s looking at me a hell of a lot better than she was a minute ago.

Not that I can say so, of course. Because that would break a rule that I no longer understand.

So I carry Nicole out of the room and up the stairs.





Chapter Nineteen





May


I watch Alec go, his long legs eating up the stairs two at a time, and I feel simultaneously irritated at him and disappointed that he’s gone.

That’s pretty much the theme tonight. The moment he walked through the door, I felt heat rising off him and directed at me. And I loved it. The way Alec looks at me—the way he treats me—is flattering.

But it’s not real.

When Alec looks at me he sees his sexy hookup buddy. He doesn’t see the other, more complicated parts of me. He missed the drunk-and-in-denial years. And he can’t see how freaked out I feel inside—about my job, my life.

And about my sobriety, which sometimes feels as sturdy as a strand of spaghetti.

I can’t even guess why he got so weird about the perfectly nice guy with questionable taste in sweaters chatting me up. It’s not like that happens to me very often, either.

From the start, Alec has been very clear about the terms of our temporary little arrangement. He’s not the relationship kind, he’s told me. He’s allergic to commitment.

I’m perfectly fine with that. But if he causes a scene, that’s not okay.

Lark sidles up to me. “Okay, I don’t mean to pry.”

“But she’s about to,” her fiancé Zach adds. Then he laughs.

“Alec didn’t seem to like it very much when the guy in the sweater hit on you. What’s up with that?”

“I’m really not sure,” I answer, because it’s true up to a point.

“How do you know Officer Friendly, anyway?” Lark asks. Then she giggles. “Officer Friendly Hands. He was hitting on you.”

“No he wasn’t! Jeez. He helped me out once.”

“I think he wants to help you out some more,” Zach says.

“Yes.” Lark high-fives her boyfriend. “Tell us how you know him. Weave the tale.”

“Well…” I’m not sure she’ll enjoy hearing this story. “About a year and a half ago I was really struggling.”

As I predicted, Lark pales immediately. A year and a half ago was when she was fighting for her life on foreign soil. It’s taken her a long time to move past that. There are certain things I try not to bring up, because I never want to trigger her PTSD.

But this story is about my perils, not hers.

“I was drinking a lot, and my family finally caught on. They started confronting me about it. I hated that. One night they were surrounding me, trying to launch some kind of intervention…”

Zach winces, because he was living with us then, and he probably remembers the yelling.

“Anyway, I didn’t like what they had to say, and I wasn’t ready to admit I had a problem. So that night I actually went outside and got into Griff’s truck and drove it off our property. Drunk.”

“Oh, sweetie,” Lark says.

“Hang in there—this story doesn’t end so badly. I was pretty messed up at the time. I didn’t even have a destination in mind.” But I’d needed to get away from my family even though I knew they were right. I’d been just plain mad. Drinking was the only thing I looked forward to, and I wasn’t going to let them take it away from me.

So there I was, crying and carrying on like a crazy person behind the wheel of my brother’s truck. I’d known I shouldn’t drive, but I wasn’t in the mood to care, and there’s never anyone on our dirt road, anyway.

The only person I thought I could hurt was me. Unfortunately, I was all too willing to do that.

“I drove slowly, and I didn’t get very far before I saw the police lights.”

“Officer Friendly pulled you over?” Lark guesses.

“Yeah.” It wasn’t even his jurisdiction. But I didn’t know that. “I was drunk and crying but he was so nice to me. I’m still stunned. He could have tossed me into the back of the cruiser but instead he asked, ‘Did anyone hurt you? Are you in danger?’”

Such a simple question. But it finally made me see things in a different way.

“So of course I told him that nobody was trying to hurt me. And he said, ‘There’s two ways this can go—I can give you a sobriety test and you might end up with a DUI. Or I can give you one chance to turn this around. You’re upset and you’re driving Griffin’s truck—and how do you want this to end? I see a lot of bad endings in my line of work. Don’t be one of them.’”