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  “I love kids. They call life like they see it. More honestly than anyone who walks through my door. It’s refreshing.”

  “I bet,” she said. Except for you, she thought, staring into his warm eyes with a growing hatred for clocks and jobs and annoyances like the real world. Burgers. Slushies. Afternoons with Brody. Those sounded infinitely better. “You’re a good guy, Brody.” Phebe wasn’t sure if she was praising him or convincing herself. Guys like him didn’t exist in her world. Hot guys with heart? She’d counted them as an urban legend.

  Brody shook his head and turned away. Hidden in the tufts of beard and wavy dark hair a tiny piece of his ear was visible below his nubby pencil. The flesh darkened from pink to hot red. Her compliment had embarrassed him.

  Hot, heart, and humble? No way he was for real. Surely she’d missed something.

  She placed a few bills on the counter. He watched her in the mirror and turned, immediately pushing them back across the lacquered wood.

  “No, that’s for you,” Phebe insisted.

  Without arguing, he took the money and tucked it into the communal tip jar.

  “I’m not interested in your money.” His smile was wide and perfect with an endearing touch of humility left over. She shrugged and turned to her phone to check the million calls she’d missed. While she scrolled, Brody slid a napkin over the bar top.

  “What’s that?” she asked, wiping her mouth with a finger to be sure there was nothing there.

  Brody said nothing. Instead, he took a pen and drew ten dashes in a row. Phebe’s face drew into a question mark punctuated with a smile. They both looked to the napkin, then back at each other. Brody chuckled under his breath, making a small mark between dashes three and four, and another between six and seven. It was a word puzzle. Her phone number the answer.

  Phebe got hit on a lot. Until a man learned there was a wicked-smart brain behind her blond. Then they tucked tail and ran.

  And Brody, God bless him. He had balls big as hers, and something had definitely passed between them. Charming as he was, and as perfect as the unexpected lunch had been, their flirtation couldn’t possibly go anywhere. At the end of the day, he wasn’t who she saw herself ending up with. And time was precious. Phebe didn’t appreciate hers being wasted, and she didn’t waste other people’s, either.

  But she found herself in the unfamiliar place of not wanting to be a bitch. Instead, she took the pen and filled out his puzzle, changing just one number. Somehow, almost giving him her number seemed like a nicer blow-off.

  “You’re quite an original, Brody Cantrell.” Phebe heard the teasing hint in her words. A tone she hadn’t planned.

  “And so are you, Ms. Stark.” Brody’s voice was pillow-talk sexy, smooth and rich as the honey streaking his hazel eyes. Phebe’s blood surged, hotly racing to parts of her it shouldn’t. At least not outside of bedroom walls. She was at the door when something made her pause and turn back. She locked eyes with him, wanting to savor the near perfection of their time together. To breathe it in and hold on to its calm as she reentered the chaos she called life.

  “How did you know Casablanca, anyway?” she asked. Her free hand readjusted the slippery strap of her Louis Vuitton Neverfull. A bag that never lived up to its name.

  Brody unfolded the newspaper he’d been reading and slid it across the bar. Phebe stepped closer. Her mouth gaped. His puzzle—her puzzle—was completed. In pen, no less. Confirming that, yes, Brody Cantrell was most definitely an all-around badass.

  Chapter 4

  Brody

  Brody Cantrell had groaned when his alarm went off at eight. The day would be a son of a bitch. One best forgotten before it began. He couldn’t change that, but he could certainly soften the blow. Two fingers of whiskey and a shot of espresso in his favorite Falcons coffee mug had a way of doing just that. It was a typical bartender move. He hated being typical. But life had a way of doing things. Like demanding room to make its own exceptions whenever the fuck it felt like it.

  Bartenders typically usually fell into two categories: the legitimate alcoholics who blamed their lifestyle on crap excuses like occupational hazards, and the stone-sober ones who had given up the crappy excuses somewhere along their twelve steps.

  Brody was neither of these. He’d wanted a career in academics. Had his life been spared exceptions, he would be earning tenure at a state college somewhere. But he wasn’t. Sophomore year he was sitting in Psych 101 when he got the call. Uncle Nuck was a tough old bastard. Cancer was tougher.

  His death the following spring had left Brody the proud proprietor of The Twenty-One Guns Saloon. In a desperate attempt to honor his surrogate father’s legacy, Brody decided to put his degree on hold and keep the bar open. If he said the decision wasn’t partly made to financially liberate himself from his real father, he’d be lying. In fairness, his dad was a total dick. On Brody’s twenty-first birthday, he gave Pops the finger, signed a stack of papers, and inherited it all—the booze, the babes, the bills, and the problems.

  And boy were there problems.

  The first Irish espresso was so damn good, he decided to have another. Sure, he was procrastinating, but drinking coffee and working the daily crossword were meditative. He wasn’t being a pussy. He was collecting himself. Ignoring problems only gave them more weight. And while Brody’s shoulders were built to carry burdens, he preferred to meet them head-on.

  Still, he begrudged every step separating the peace of his top-floor loft apartment and the street-level bar his uncle had loved like a child. He paused with a hand on the worn wooden door and sent up a silent promise to do right by Uncle Nuck.

  At the end of the day, Nuck’s legacy would remain, or it wouldn’t. That was the simple reality. Brody would do everything he could to keep it from being the latter. It was the only place that had ever felt like his home. A touchstone in a world that grew increasingly foreign. The possibility of losing it wasn’t something he could wrap his head around. At least not soberly. No, he’d finish his day at the bar, meet his attorney, and hope fate was on his side today.

  Optimism was a quality he’d learned from Uncle Nuck. A youth spent as The Guns’ head barback taught Brody a lot about life. Number one being that he didn’t want to end up alone like the regular barflies. Late nights and booze-soaked socks didn’t exactly make him marriage material. It wasn’t a normal life he offered a girl. But she was out there. He just had to find her.

  “How’s it going, boss?” Drew, the bartender hired to replace the one who’d gotten him in this mess in the first place, asked. If bad luck ever had good timing, Brody blindly stumbled into it with Drew. The baby brother of a lifelong friend, Drew had just graduated from college and was desperate for a job. He was fresh out of the frat house. Which meant he knew enough about liquor to keep the customers happy and enough about life to keep himself happy with a bartender’s pay.

  “I’ll make it,” Brody answered with his usual calm reassurance. All the employees knew their job hung in the balance. This afternoon was bigger than just Brody and The Guns. He had employees who counted on him. He didn’t take that lightly. But a sense of doom and gloom was the surest way to ruin a bar business. Nobody sought his bar top to wallow in anyone’s misery but their own. Besides, Brody could slap a smile on the worst of situations. He’d had a lot of practice. “I’ll be in the office if you need me.”

  Drew went back to his opening-bar inventory with a nod.

  Payroll. Brody would go ahead and run that early. Every penny that wasn’t in the bank was one less the courts could take.

  A court summons sat on his desk. One he knew by heart. One that required he fire his most trusted bartender for serving an underage cop. One that required him to appear before a judge to see what other penance the law saw fit. A summons that could also slap a closed sign on his door. Permanently. His stomach roiled at the thought.

 
Instead of worrying over things he couldn’t change, he busied himself working on things he could. Like payroll and inventory. Lost in a mountain of paperwork at a dilapidated desk he couldn’t bear to part with, Brody was jerked back to reality when a wadded paper napkin slipped from the pile. He picked it up, studying the pen marks with increasing amusement. A hand instinctively rose to cover the smile that cut across his face. He wasn’t supposed to be doing that on a day so decidedly grim. But damn, if she couldn’t make him smile, nobody could.

  Phebe Stark.

  Boy had she blown him away. Storming into his bar carrying a burden that weighed more than she did soaking wet. She was a piece of work. Tough as nails without a single fuck given about it.

  Brody leaned back in his desk chair, pushing his fingers through his still wet hair, thinking about the day they’d met. Fuck it. Why not? At the worst, she’d say no. At the least, he opened a door.

  Texting wasn’t his style. Not for a girl he was really interested in. Nothing screamed “I’m terrified of rejection” like a text. Instead, he pulled out his phone and dialed the ten numbers of their crossword puzzle. It was simple, really. Tell a girl you enjoyed meeting her and would love to buy her a cup of coffee sometime. Harmless. Innocent. And way more effective than a text she could easily ignore.

  When a gruff male voice answered, Brody wasn’t ready.

  “Tiny’s Bait and Tackle. Tiny speaking,” a voice that was anything but small barked into the receiver. Brody paused.

  “Is Phebe there?”

  The voice hesitated and then laughed.

  “Sorry, Romeo. No Phebes here.” He hung up the phone before Brody could apologize for the inconvenience.

  “What the hell?” Brody mumbled, comparing the number he’d dialed to the napkin. They were definitely the same. He didn’t know Phebe, but she didn’t seem like the type to give out a fake number. Why go to the trouble when she could just say no?

  He looked closer. It was then that he noticed the area code’s eight looked like it had originally been a four. That made sense, given the “before” number made it one that actually covered the Atlanta area.

  The phone held in his hand vibrated. A calendar reminder to meet his attorney hit his stomach with a sour blow. No time to decipher the possibilities of Phebe Stark. Reality was waiting.

  * * *

  —

  Courtrooms are the antithesis of barrooms, Brody thought to himself, standing rigidly upright in front of an unforgiving oak chair and an equally inhospitable table. The room was cavernous, cold, awash in harsh fluorescent light, and reeked of moldy BO and burned coffee. The kind of smells that permeate carpet and the floor-to-ceiling drapes that framed four exterior windows. Not that barrooms always smelled like roses, but at least those pungent smells were reassuring to some. This place smelled like the dark corner where desperation went to die.

  Beside him, his attorney shuffled through stacks of papers. On the bench, the judge did the same, which did little to settle Brody. Even though he had already concluded that there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about today’s decision. It would go one of two ways, and Brody had no sway over which it might be.

  “You said you already fired…” His attorney’s voice was a whisper as he scanned the papers looking for a name, trying to guess what the judge would ask next, what was possibly taking him so long.

  “Ryan,” Brody mumbled back, feeling the name in his gut. Ryan had been like family. Firing him had been the hardest business move he’d ever made. His attorney had insisted on it, though.

  “Right.” The attorney nodded and looked back to the judge. Brody followed his gaze, taking in the man who held his fate in his hands. Had the judge even bothered to glance at him? Once? Behind Brody, the theater seating was half full of nervous-looking plaintiffs and their briefcase-clad attorneys readying for battle.

  Brody was nothing but a number for the judge. There was zero emotion in his decision. From a purely legal prospective, that was a good thing. Judges should be impartial. From a personal one, it sucked. No judge could ever understand how important The Guns was to Brody.

  “Brody Thomas Cantrell, proprietor of The Twenty-One Guns Saloon.” The judge finally peeked over his glasses at Brody. In an involuntary movement, one that was a natural response to hearing his name, Brody actually smiled at him. Wide and welcoming like he always did. What? He admonished himself the moment he realized what he was doing, forcing his lips into a hard line, hoping the judge didn’t think he wasn’t taking it seriously. He was such an idiot sometimes.

  But the judge did do a double take, glancing from him to the papers and then back again. Words frozen on his lips, taking the measure of Brody standing before him one more time before he spoke. Brody was stiff as the chair pressed against the back of his legs now. Waiting. Hoping. Praying even though he wasn’t particularly religious.

  The judge went back to the papers and cleared his throat.

  “Since this is the first offense of any sort at your establishment in over twenty-five years, I will let you off with a fine and community service.” The judge ran his finger down a paper to his left on the desk.

  “Your honor, my client already volunteers his time with the Boys and Girls Clubs.”

  “Good for him,” the judge said without even looking up from his scanning. “Fine is set at ten thousand dollars. You may remain open for one month to arrange payment. If no payment is made, your license will be revoked. As for community service, I will allow you to serve twenty-five hours with the Boys and Girls Clubs. Be sure the time is recorded accordingly.” With that the gavel fell, echoing in Brody’s ears like a gunshot.

  What?

  Ten thousand dollars might as well be a hundred thousand. He didn’t have that kind of money. Numbly, Brody walked out of the plaintiff’s box, down the aisle of people waiting to take his place, and into the linoleum-tiled lobby.

  “Congratulations.” His attorney grabbed his hand and shook it vigorously.

  “That’s a good sentence?” Brody asked, a little shell-shocked.

  “For this judge? Absolutely. He’s a total hard-ass on alcohol-related offenses. He must have liked you.”

  “Ten thousand dollars?” Brody leaned against a nearby wall and stroked his beard as he thought. His attorney nodded.

  “But he didn’t shut you down. There are ways you can arrange a payment plan. You don’t have to write a ten-thousand-dollar check right now.” He pulled a paper from his briefcase and shoved it into Brody’s reluctant hand. “This is information about fine payments and financing. Call my office if you need any assistance.”

  Brody watched his attorney walk away, slowly following behind him down a long hallway that led to daylight. With each step his new reality sank further in. Ten thousand dollars. That was the only part that really went anywhere—the reality of owing more money than he had. Sure, there were ways to get the money. And the bar would remain open. But the optimist in him hadn’t prepared for such an outcome. It would take a little getting used to.

  Outside, in the blinding afternoon sun, he took a seat on a nearby bench and reached for his phone to check the time. He’d have to pick up more shifts now and cut down on the part-time bartender’s shifts. Only work the full-time employees to save every penny he could. At least for the time being. Hell, maybe longer. Though he didn’t especially want to that consider that possibility.

  When he retrieved his phone something else fluttered to the ground. He leaned over to pick up a bar napkin he didn’t remember tucking in his pocket. When he turned it over in his hand, he found a puzzle he much preferred considering. The black numbers scrawled across the napkin in a decidedly feminine hand made him smile—something he’d thought impossible given the current situation. He ran his thumb over the writing, feeling his spirits lift with each passing digit. At that moment, avoiding a fate he couldn’t change was
exactly what he needed. Bar business could wait a few minutes. His financial situation certainly wasn’t changing anytime soon. His personal one, however, might.

  Because there she was again, falling into his life, demanding to be remembered. Forcing everything else into the backseat. Who was he to tempt fate? She’d intrigued him since he first laid eyes on her. Girls like her didn’t find their way into his world that often. And he’d be an idiot to let her stumble back out without at least trying to make her stay.

  His thumb stopped on the four masquerading as an eight. Phebe Stark didn’t make mistakes, he decided, especially not sloppy ones, which this one assuredly was. Maybe, he reasoned, this was a “weed out” method. Phebe didn’t have time to waste. If a guy was serious, a minor blow-off wouldn’t deter him. And any guy with a brain equal to hers would see the obvious mistake and know what the number should be.

  Without a second thought, he turned to his phone. Dialed. Voicemail picked up before a single ring bore into his ear. Her voice was sharp, straight to the point as ever. Just her name and an obligatory “Leave a message.” No time for pleasantries. She always meant business.

  “Phebe, it’s Brody Cantrell. I’m either making an ass of myself or impressing the hell out of you. Either way, I’d love to see you again. You know where to find me.”

  He hung up the phone and that was that. Brody never understood all the drama some people made out of life. Only one of two things could happen next. If she called back, they’d have some fun. If she didn’t, well, that wasn’t on him. He’d tried. And even though luck didn’t seem to be on his side today, he hoped like hell Phebe Stark might be.

  “Here’s looking at you, kid,” Brody mumbled under his breath, balling the sheet from his attorney in his fist and landing the perfect bank shot in a nearby trash can. Phebe’s napkin, he tucked safely back into his pocket and headed for the bar.