She gave Johnny a wry grin while sticking an order pad and pen in her apron. “Bite me, Anders.”
As the old guys stopped playing to shout their hellos to the waitress, she made her way around the front of the bar and offered her own greetings in the way of smartass comments. Aiden started to ask Johnny if he could see a bar menu when he heard a squeal next to him.
Her foot had slipped on the spilled beer and sent her on a one-way trip to the floor. Reflexes took over. He took one large step to the left and snaked an arm around her waist, bringing her up short before she hit the ground. Instinctively, her arms had latched onto his neck for dear life, bringing her body flush with his.
Somewhere in the background, whistles and catcalls filled the bar for saving the woman, but he didn’t acknowledge them. Or anything else for that matter. His chest felt branded where her breasts pressed against the steel bars in his nipples and sent shockwaves of pleasure to his balls. Desperate to derail his train of thought, he focused on her face, now only inches from his.
Natural beauty. That’s what popped into his head. Everything about her looked like it had been pulled from one of the four elements. He’d been wrong to think of her hair as merely “red.” Now that he saw it up close, it reminded him of the orange and gold streaks of a sunrise.
Blue eyes with a hue of green, like the water in a brochure for the perfect island vacation, gazed up at him with an innocent uncertainty.
The rest of her face was variant shades of peach: the lightest being her flawless skin, the darkest being her plump lips, and the feature that used every shade in between…
Freckles.
Looked like he’d been wrong after all. Because despite the wrong name, the reason Aiden left Boston for this Podunk town in the middle of nowhere just literally fell into his arms.
Chapter One
Two months later…
Aiden scanned the room of the rowdy backwoods bar and studied the various stages of inebriation of its patrons: drunk, really drunk, and totally shitfaced.
The crowd had hit its peak, but Kat MacGregor, who went by the ill-fitting alias Sydney Carter, kept pace between the bar and her tables without any problems.
Since finding her, Aiden had gotten himself hired as a cooler for the bar and allowed to put together a small team. It had only taken a couple days of observing the damage caused by nightly bar fights to sell Lou on the idea. Especially since they were getting paid just as shitty as the rest of the employees. The bar owner ended up making out in the deal, since he didn’t have to keep replacing beer glasses and tables.
Aiden had called his good friend and old teammate, Xander James, and soon after, Xan had loaded up his worldly possessions and Aiden’s other bike and driven down to become part of the team and “find his next adventure.”
Aiden had recruited Johnny Anders and a couple of Johnny’s buddies to round out the team. Now, on any given night, Lou’s had two coolers working the floor. Usually three or four on weekends, depending on when the full moon came around because the crazy seemed to flow like the beer on those days.
The hardest part had been teaching Johnny and the others the difference between a bouncer and a cooler. They kept thinking that their job was to step in once an issue became a problem, which was the job of a bouncer.
Coolers were proactive. They did their best to contain things before they became problems, ensuring the bar stayed busy, if a little on the rambunctious side.
Xan and Aiden had to shadow them the first couple weeks to show them what they were supposed to look for as coolers. Once they got the hang of it, though, there was a lot less broken shit to clean up at the end of the night. Not that a night at Lou’s Riverview was anything close to calm and uneventful, but it was a lot less volatile than before.
And if he could make Kat’s environment a little safer for now, then he was satisfied.
“Same shite, different night, eh mate?” The British-accented voice of Xander crackled through the comm-link in his ear. Aiden had ponied up the cash for those babies, which had been the deal clincher for Lou. So long as his backup could hear him if he needed them, he didn’t care.
Every Friday night was the same. When the people of Alabaster blew off steam from their workweek, the bar became a hotbed for trouble. Emotions ran high, fueled by pitchers of beer and rounds of shots. The entire scene was underscored by the classic rock and country music blaring through the sound system.
“Always is,” he said absently as Kat whooshed by holding a tray of bottlenecks.