“You’re still seven dollars short,” Aiden said. “Any of your friends want to pony up the rest and the lady’s tip?”
The three other men voiced a chorus of, “Karl said he was payin’,” and, “I ain’t got nothin’ on me.” Aiden kept the money and the tab. Jabbing a hard finger into Karl’s chest, Aiden loomed over him to get his point across.
“You’re done for the night, Karl. The next time you come here you’re gonna remember two things: one, you bring enough money to cover your bill and leave a generous tip for whichever waitress busts her ass to bring you your beer, and two, you will treat the waitresses with the respect they deserve. Got it?”
Karl nodded with so much enthusiasm he looked like a bobblehead on speed.
“Good,” Aiden said. “Now go home.”
The man and his small posse didn’t waste any time following orders, and that was one more problem solved for the night.
Aiden put in the last bit missing so it wouldn’t come out of Kat’s wages, then gave the money and the bill to the bartender for settling. From the corner of his eye, he saw Kat walk down the hall toward the back office and the employee bathroom. He grabbed another bill from his wallet and followed her.
“Sydney.”
She turned her head just before entering the bathroom. Aiden walked over and stood next to her, unable to say anything. It was always like this for him. Whenever he helped her out on the floor, he had no problems speaking. He might be a man of few words, but that didn’t mean he didn’t say everything he needed to get his point across.
But when he was alone with Kat, he couldn’t get a damn thing out. He was afraid his “Hey, how was your weekend?” would end up as something entirely different. That opening his mouth to say anything would let out all the things he couldn’t let himself say.
You’re all I fucking think about. I wanna feel your body against mine and wrap your legs around my waist. Feel what it’s like to have your * squeeze my cock as you come and breathe you in until you’re the only thing inside me.
So instead of taking the risk, Aiden simply held out the twenty dollar bill between them until she accepted it. Reluctantly, as always.
Holding up the bill, she said, “I told you to stop this.”
“I know.”
Forcing himself to turn around, he retraced his steps toward the bar.
“Irish.” He stopped just before entering the main room and looked back over his shoulder. Her face softened, the lines around her blue-green eyes gone. “Thank you,” she said. “For what you did in there.”
Aiden nodded and continued out to the bar area. Winding his way through the crowd, he couldn’t help but hear Jax’s parting words echoing in his head.
Everyone deserves to be loved. Even you.
Jax was wrong, though. As far as Aiden was concerned, he’d lost that right on the rainy streets of Boston five long years ago. The night he’d ended Janey’s life.
Chapter Two
Kat’s shitty night just got worse.
They’d found her.
Two states, six months, and a fake name since her previous encounter with them, and they’d still managed to find her. How didn’t matter. It was why that clawed her insides all to hell.
The paper placemat sporting beer stains and a hastily scrawled note shook in her trembling hands. Chancing a quick glance around the barely lit employee parking lot behind Lou’s Riverview, she stared at the words again, praying she’d read them wrong.
Time to pay up!
We got eyes on you & ears with the pigs.
You got 48 hrs.
Nope. She’d read them right the first time. Roughly translated, it said Antony Sicoli wanted his money in the next two days, or she could look forward to another up-close-and-personal tour of the local ER. Or the morgue.
It also told her she was being watched, and Sicoli had already managed to compromise at least one of Alabaster, Louisiana’s finest.
In other words, Kat MacGregor was totally, and utterly, screwed.
Fighting to keep the acid in her stomach where it belonged, she cursed herself six ways to Sunday. She should have known better. She should have dyed her strawberry hair an inky black, maybe hacked off a good twelve inches so it fell to her chin. Should have covered her freckles with caked-on makeup like the other lost souls working at Lou’s for shitty tips and lewd comments.
Waitressing at that rundown joint in the cane breaks of Alabaster was the exact opposite of a “dream job.” But Lou paid under the table and didn’t ask any questions, so for someone on the lam like herself, it qualified as the “perfect job.”
Digging through her purse, she desperately searched for the keys to her shit-brown 1984 Chevy Celebrity, needing to feel the modicum of safety its rusting frame would offer. It might be a piece of crap, but it was the only thing constant in her life from when she left home at the age of seventeen.