Making It Right (Most Likely To #3)

Gill liked her like this, at ease and sassy.

The waitress dropped off their beers and Gill opened a tab.

He took one of his darts and moved close enough to Jo to breathe in her scent. “Where I live now holds little weight on my dart playing ability.”

“Oh?”

It was his turn to twist the dart in his fingers before pulling back and letting it fly. It slid right along hers, but directly in the center, where a proper dart needed to be this early in the game.

He reached around, made sure his arm met with her shoulder as he grabbed his beer. “I grew up outside of Spokane, where my dad still owns a small town bar. My mom helps out with the bookkeeping.”

Jo looked at the board and then him. “I’m guessing you helped your dad. Bouncer?”

Gill answered her with a nod and a grin as he sucked on his beer.

She reached for hers and smiled through her eyes as she drank.

With a sigh, she set the beer back down, reaching across him to do so, and filled her lungs with a fortifying breath. “And here I thought this was going to be easy.”

She did a little rolling of her head on her neck thing, along with the shaking of her right arm, before tossing her next dart. Instead of aiming for the center, where his dart might very well deflect hers, she set her dart in the triple score of the twenty-point zone.

“Oh, game on!”

Pride washed over her face when she turned around.

His hand stopped shy of slapping her butt when she reached for her beer a second time. He glanced over his shoulder at the party going on with their group. Yeah, ass slapping was going to have to wait for another time.

Less than ten minutes later, Jo was handing him twenty bucks and ordering another round. “I want another shot.”

He glanced at their drinks. “You’re not driving, are you?”

“I know about Uber,” she told him.

“Does River Bend have Uber?”

Her eyes were a little glossy, something he didn’t think happened all that often.

“River Bend has me.”

He erased their scores and started over.

“You taxi people around?”

“There have been a few times I’ve been called, mainly by Josie.”

He sat down, waited for their drinks before starting the next game.

“Who is Josie?”

“She owns R&B’s, the bar I told you about.”

“Josie calls the sheriff to drive drunks home?” Gill wasn’t sure his father had ever done that. Then again, the small town he grew up in had an actual police department with more than two men stationed there. And his father wasn’t the only one with a bar.

“Most of them can walk, but yeah . . . sometimes.”

“That’s a hell of a service you have there, Sheriff.”

“It’s a pain in the ass,” she admitted.

The waitress dropped off their round, slapped a bowl of nuts on the table. The increase of salt would increase the drinks. A trick Gill had learned from his father.

“Then why do you do it?” Gill asked her.

“It beats the heartache of having to haul them in for drunk driving, or worse. Besides, it isn’t like everyone calls. Policing the town where you grew up has its upside, and its downside. Downside is, those who know me, call.”

“And the upside?”

Jo blinked at him a few times, narrowed her eyes. “Free meals.”

Gill chuckled. He wasn’t about to tell her that once in a while his meals were comped, too. And most of the law enforcement in the room had plenty of free meals from local businesses without driving anyone’s intoxicated uncle home from a bar.

She stood, grabbed her darts, and nodded toward the board in question. Technically he should take the first turn for the next game, but he agreed, and Jo turned toward the board as she spoke. “The worst part isn’t driving drunks.”

“Oh?”

The dart flew, not that he didn’t bother looking where it landed.

“The hardest part about policing River Bend is trying to erase my youthful transgressions.” She sat back down and twisted her beer in her hand.

“You were a wild child?” he asked.

“Quintessential cop’s daughter. Defiant, skipped school, got caught drinking early on.”

The way she looked beyond him said she was remembering one of those teenage days. “Sounds like a lot of people I knew growing up.”

She sipped her beer, pointed at him when she was finished. “But your dad ran a bar. My dad ran a town.”

“I guess it was expected that I drank, and mandated that you stay sober.”

“I hated it.” The words sounded like a confession.

He leaned forward on his elbows, the dart game forgotten. “Then how did you end up taking over your father’s world?”

If Gill wasn’t watching her so closely, he would have missed the wave of brief pain that washed over her. “He died before I could redeem myself. Before I grew up enough to know I’d acted like an idiot. Going to the academy, talking the right people into putting me on the ballot to become sheriff even though I was too young and too green . . . it’s what my dad would have wanted me to do.”

Probably. But was it what she wanted to do?

He was about to ask when someone tapped his shoulder.

He twisted to see Shauna smiling. “You kids having fun?”

“Relieving Jo’s wallet of her spending money,” he said.

“I’m going to take a few of these monkeys back to their hotel.”

Gill saw Jo glance at her watch, start to stand. “I should probably get going, too.”

He tried to think of an excuse for her to stay. “You wouldn’t earn your money back anyway.”

She sat back down and Gill grinned.

He found himself doing that a lot around this woman.

“I don’t have room in my car anyway,” Shauna informed them. “You can give Jo a ride, right, Clausen?”

The memory of her straddling the back of the bike, the heat of her pressed against his back, moved all the blood in his head south. “Yeah, I have it covered.”

“Good, I’ll see you both tomorrow.”

Gill noticed the women exchange glances. Jo’s held wonder, while Shauna’s was filled with mischief.





Chapter Eight




It took Jo a couple of miles to settle on the back of his bike and for her arms to slide around his waist to hold on.

Gill would have liked to take a long way to get to her hotel, but there weren’t many alternative routes that didn’t shorten the ride.

It was past midnight, the lot was quiet and lit only by the streetlights that spotted the front of the hotel.

He cut the engine the second he turned into a small space.

Jo hesitated before swinging her leg around the back of the bike. She removed the helmet and shook out her hair.

The pink in her cheeks from the cold night air gave her a childish glow: cute. A word Gill was pretty sure she wouldn’t appreciate, so he kept it to himself.

“Thanks for the ride, Clausen.” She handed him his helmet.

He placed it on one of the handlebars.

“Anytime.”

She shuffled her feet once. “And thanks for taking my forty bucks.”

Yeah, that wasn’t exactly gentlemanly of him, but hey, a bet was a bet. “I did buy your drinks.”