“Ain’t that the same old story,” he said, nodding appreciatively at my logic. He turned toward the biker guys by the jukebox, and hollered to them: “Sonny! Put on that song!”
“What song?” a guy with more silver jewelry than an entire Nevada mine asked.
“Don’t you ‘what song’ me!” the bartender said with a roll of his eyes. “The song that lady with the leopard print tights sings about a man what done her wrong!”
“Oh, that song. Well, why didn’t you just say?” He whacked the jukebox and a new mournful wail issued from it, this one with a distinctly country twang.
“Dolly Parton,” the bartender said thoughtfully, his face creased in bliss. “Ain’t a thing about heartbreak that woman don’t know.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, tossing back the second shot. It burned even more, and I coughed. In my experience, alcohol worked a damn sight better than country music when it came to heartbreak. Still, it’d been a sweet gesture on his part. “I’d appreciate it if you could keep these coming.”
The bikers joined us up at the bar. They looked considerably less threatening as they bobbed their heads to the song’s melody. One of them even had a twinkle in his eye that reminded me of my late grandpa, if Gramps had had a tattoo on his shoulder of a cobra sinking its fangs into a heart while an eagle dug its claws into the cobra’s coils.
Cobra Tattoo caught me staring and smiled. “Ah, I see that old bit of ink’s caught your eye. A little souvenir from my own piece of heartbreak.” His eyes grew misty. “Juniper Raleigh, her name was, and I thought she set the stars in the sky. Hair like a bonfire and eyes like fireworks. I courted her for damn near five years before she’d say yes to a night at the pictures, but in the end she said yes to marriage too.”
“That doesn’t sound too heartbreaking,” I said, my tongue loosened by the tequila. “Did she break up with you or something?”
“The cancer took her,” he said simply. “Over in a year. Hell of thing.”
“Oh,” I said. I felt like the world’s biggest jerk. “Sorry for…well, I guess I didn’t say that too respectfully.”
“I was only nineteen, and I thought the world had come crashing down,” he said with a forgiving smile. “And it had. It always does, with heartbreak. Other people might not be able to see it, but when your heart’s in pieces it’s like your own personal Armageddon. I’m not going to hold a bit of blunt speaking against someone who’s standing on such trembling ground.”
His simple acceptance threatened to bring tears to my eyes.
“It’s—a guy,” I blurted, surprising myself. “I love—no, no, I don’t. There’s no way I love him. I’ve only just started to know him. But I wanted to get to know him. I wanted to find out if I could have loved him, really loved him. I wanted that chance. And now it’s just…” My hand was trembling on the counter. “It’s just gone.”
Shit, this wasn’t what I needed. I wanted a raucous night out, the sweet numbing of liquor, not a drunken crying fest. One more shot ought to do it—
I reached for the tequila but Cobra Tattoo made a gesture like I was reaching for a live cobra, and I stopped. He strode over and took a sip from the glass; grimaced.
“Dwayne, you letting her drink this hogwash?”
The bartender—Dwayne, apparently—shrugged. It was a shrug with a slightly defensive look. “Figured she was old enough to pick her poison.”
“There’s poison and then there’s poison.” Cobra Tattoo shook his head at me severely, or it would have been severely if that kind twinkle in his eyes hadn’t made him look like a down on his luck cross between Santa Claus and Dumbledore. “Girlie, this tequila’s no good. Not that I’m a fan of tequila much in the first place, but this label? The things they do to an agave plant would make you cry. For heartbreak you don’t want nothing but the best to ease that pain, make it burn across your heart before it can fade away.”
Normally I bristled at this much intimation that I didn’t know what I was doing, but he spoke so earnestly that I couldn’t bring myself to bite his head off. “Okay. What tequila should I drink then?”
“Shouldn’t be drinking no tequila at all! That’s a drink for gals who go on spring break and show off their titties for a free T-shirt, not a serious stand-up gal like you.” He clasped my hand like he was trying to pull me free from quicksand. “You need Knox bourbon. Best in the South.”
Despite all the talk of heartache, the friendly conversation had been keeping a portion of the pain at bay.
Until I heard Hunter’s last name.
Pain lanced through me like a sword, shot through with the memory of his scent and the touch of his mouth.
The way he said my name, the way I had wanted to hear him say my name…
Great. Even in a hick bar, I couldn’t escape Hunter.
“No thanks,” I said.