“Don’t be angry? Are you kidding me?” He hit the wall again, this time leaving a red stain on the dingy white. “My pregnant wife is working her ass off to support me and this goddamn money pit of a pub, and I’m not supposed to be angry?”
“Not you,” she said quietly. “Us. We’re in this together, Jack, and I’m just doing my part. You’re putting in sixteen hour days. When you’re not working the bar, you’re patching walls, fixing plumbing, sanding floors, building new cabinets, -—”
“I never should have bought this place. What the hell was I thinking?”
“Stop it. Now,” she said firmly, stepping close to him and wrapping her arms around his waist. “You were thinking of our future, and you were right. It’s tough now, but we’ll get through it.”
Jack felt some of the anger start to drain away. With her soft touch and steel core, she had a way of pulling him back. “I don’t deserve you.”
She chuckled against his chest. “No, probably not. But you’re stuck with me, Jack Callaghan, so you’d best just deal with it.”
Jack gathered her against him and kissed the top of her head. “Like I’d ever let you go.”
“You’re going to have to if I’m going to make it to Erin’s on time.”
He did, reluctantly, only by telling himself that he was going to find a way to fix this. The first thing he was going to do, was look at the books and see just how bad things were. It was something best done while Kathleen was at her sister’s.
Chapter Seventeen
––––––––
“Jack!”
“What?!” Jack looked up from the ledger to find Brian standing in front of him. Judging by the sharpness of Brian’s tone, it wasn’t the first time he’d called his name. Jack had been so immersed in the account books, he hadn’t heard much of anything.
“The distributor’s here, wants a check.” Brian thumbed over his shoulder at the middle-aged guy sitting at the bar with Danny Finnegan. Based on their smiles and laughter, they were on friendly terms.
“Did he pay for that drink?”
“No. The old man told me to put it on his tab.”
Jack snorted. That would have fine, if the old man ever actually paid his tab.
“Got an invoice?”
Brian held the piece of paper out to him. Jack looked it over, his brows furrowing as he read through the several lines of handwritten items. “That’s more than double the amount of Macallan we ordered last month.”
The top-shelf, single-malt Scotch was arguably one of the best, but at its hefty price tag, it was not one of the big sellers among the primarily blue-collar patrons. Brian’s eyes flicked back to Danny again, and Jack had a pretty good idea of where it was going.
His furrows deepened when he saw similarly inflated numbers for high quality bourbon, gin, and vodka. Who had adjusted the order? Brian wouldn’t have, not without running it by him first, and neither would Kathleen.
“Excuse me.” Jack approached the delivery man, glancing down at the name stitched onto the pocket of the blue button-down. Sal. “There’s been a mistake. This is more than I ordered.”
Sal shot a sideways glance at Danny, and Jack’s suspicions were confirmed. Danny had padded the order. That explained the bottles Kathleen had seen Danny sneaking out, as well as why he hadn’t noticed a hit on the inventory. It was hard to miss what you didn’t know you had.
Jack didn’t know what bothered him more – the fact that Danny was taking it upon himself to up the order, or that Danny didn’t think he’d notice. Granted, he hadn’t been looming over anyone’s shoulder, but he hadn’t really thought he’d needed to, either.
Well, he was going to put an end to that, right now. Keeping Danny around out of a sense of moral obligation was one thing, but being taken advantage of was another.
And there was no way his pregnant wife was going to work three fucking jobs so Danny Finnegan could “buy” a bunch of friends with top-shelf liquor using the Pub’s accounts.
“Mr. Finnegan no longer owns the bar, Sal,” Jack said clearly. “I do, which means I determine what we will stock and how much, not Mr. Finnegan. Is that clear?”
Jack blacklined several of the items and put a corrected version of the receipt on the bar, along with a check for substantially less than the original invoice. “This is what I ordered, and this is what I will pay for. Take the rest of it back. Unless, of course, Mr. Finnegan is planning on paying the difference?”
Color rushed to the older man’s cheeks, and fire blazed in his eyes. He didn’t appreciate being called out, but Jack was finished coddling the old man. Finnegan ran the pub into the ground when he owned it; Jack sure as hell wasn’t about to let him do the same to him.
“No? All right then. Glad we’ve cleared that up. I don’t expect we’ll have any more misunderstandings from now on.”
Sal was not particularly happy about taking back the high-priced inventory, but he did. Afterward, Jack intended to have a long overdue conversation with Danny, but the old man left in a huff before he got the chance.