Not many men could make that sound sexy, yet coming in Chad’s whiskey-rough voice, it sounded like temptation poured from a bottle. Eve thought for a moment, unable to put her finger on how he struck her, but the weekend was coming, he was clearly competent behind a bar, and her gut told her he wouldn’t get caught bare-assed in the bed of a Dodge Ram.
“Take a shift tonight,” she said. “If I like what I see, you’re hired. If not, we go our separate ways.”
“Fair enough,” he said.
“Come back around just before five and I’ll get you your shirt and introduce you to the rest of the crew.”
This time all she got was a nod. She continued to study him, absently running her thumb and index finger up and down the glass stem. He met her eyes without reservation, as comfortable with her assessment as he was without it. The silence stretching between them took on an increasingly intemperate life of its own, and she broke eye contact first.
She handed him the glass. His fingers brushed hers as he took it from her, and the brief contact struck sparks along her fingers and halted her breath for a long second.
“Thanks for coming by. I’ll lock up behind you,” she said.
He came around from behind the bar to follow her to the big steel door. She didn’t peek over her shoulder at him. She didn’t put any additional sass into her walk. Yet with each click of her heels against the cement floor, the tension hovering in the bar’s dim, silent air ratcheted up another notch. She opened the door and waited while he slipped between her body and the edge, into the parking lot. Then it was her turn to watch him walk to his Jeep and climb in. The engine caught, revved, the back end of the Jeep skittered a little as the tires spun, then got enough traction to propel the car into traffic.
Startled into laughter, she leaned a shoulder against the doorframe and watched the Jeep zip away. “Not what I expected,” she said. “Not what I expected at all.”
She let the big steel door swing shut, shot the bolt, and was halfway back to the bar when a knock on the door had her turning on her heel and retracing her steps. When she opened the door, her father stood blinking in the sunlight.
“Dad,” she said, heard delight and surprise in her voice.
“Hello, Eve.”
She stepped back to let him in, then gave him a quick hug. “I didn’t know you were coming. What can I get you? Juice? Soda?”
“Just water,” he said.
Her father, a pastor for a small, vibrant church in the heart of the East Side, didn’t drink. She scooped ice into a glass and dispensed water from the nozzle, then set the glass on the bar. Despite a grand opening that drew hundreds of Lancaster’s young professionals, and an entertainment reporter and photographer from the Times-Courier, this was her father’s first visit to Eye Candy. Her heart was pounding, so she picked up the knife and took refuge in the never-ending prep tasks. “What brings you by?”
“I was in the neighborhood,” he said, and looked around again. He looked around the bar, and this time Eve saw a sound system costing more than the average East Side family spent on housing for a year. The wall of premium liquor represented money that could have helped families facing shut-off notices, or repair the only vehicle available to get a breadwinner to a job.
The silence stretched. Eve swept the ends of the lemons into a trash bin, felt the juice sting in a small paper cut on her index finger much as the old argument stung her pride. Pastors’ daughters didn’t open nightclubs. They married sensible, stable men, got nine-to-five jobs with sensible, stable companies, and raised sensible, stable children. She’d tried sensible and stable on for size right after college, because her family deemed her dream of opening her own entertainment venue a frivolous waste of her time and education. So she’d dutifully gone to work in the marketing department of an insurance company, and spent two years gasping for air in a sea of gray-walled cubicles before “throwing her life away” to return to her position as an events coordinator for The Metropolitan Club. She’d saved her commissions, studied the market and the community needs, written business plan after business plan, and a year ago, bought the building housing Eye Candy.
“I’m glad you came. Nat and I missed you at the soft opening,” she said as she ripped open the top of a box of limes with a little more force than necessary. Getting her parents to the grand opening never would have happened.
“Your mother and I thought this was another one of your impulses.” His normally deep, confident voice came with pauses between. The heart attack earlier in the summer had left him weakened, and he’d rushed his recovery to return to his vocation: taking care of the people in his congregation, and the East Side. They’d fought over Eye Candy, and for a moment Eve considered closing her doors to ease her father’s mind.
“It’s two years of work, Dad,” she said simply, “not an impulse.”