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"I wish that were true," she replied. I settled into my seat and glanced at the beers lining the inside of the fridge behind her.
"I’ll take one of those," I told her.
"Aren’t you working?" Avda asked me, his voice low. Damn, he was really annoyed – he wanted me out of here, and if anything, that was just making me more intent on sticking around.
"Not really, not yet," I replied. "My shift doesn’t start for another couple of hours. I can have a little drink before then, right?"
"You could," Jo agreed, as though she didn’t want me to go anywhere.
"Hey, Avda, why don’t you get one too?" I suggested. I knew he didn’t want to, probably wanted to keep his wits about him, but he wasn’t going to let me look more chill and laid-back than him.
"Sure," he muttered, and Jo grabbed us both a bottle of beer from the fridge behind her.
"Here you go," she murmured, as she pushed the bottles across the table towards us, flashing us both a smile. I wasn’t sure exactly what they had been talking about before I came over here, but right now, I didn’t care. I just wanted to stick around a little longer, maybe get to know her a little better in the process – I didn’t know exactly where this was going to go, but I was enjoying Avda’s annoyance – and Jo’s attention – way too much to give up on this quite yet.
"To Jo," I remarked, grabbing my beer and tapping it against Avda’s. "Right, Avda?"
"Right," Avda replied, his voice terse.
"Best bartender in town," I added, and Jo’s cheeks flushed a little darker.
"Oh, I don’t know about that," she protested, but she was smiling. She clearly enjoyed the flattery. And, to be honest, I liked flattering her. There was something about seeing her cute little reactions that turned me on, seeing how easy it was to get her a little flustered.
I knew that Avda wanted something from her. Hell, probably the same thing that I did right now. But honestly? I liked a little healthy competition. I felt like it kept things interesting. And I wasn’t going to let myself get scared off by someone like Avda, someone who was used to throwing his weight around and getting everything he wanted.
No, I wasn’t that easy to get rid of. And I wasn’t going to let his glare push me away from Jo. I lifted the beer to my lips and locked eyes with her as my mouth caressed the top of the bottle, and noticed how she darted her gaze away from me, her teeth resting on her bottom lip.
Oh, yeah. I got the feeling that this was going to be fun. The kind of fun that might land me in trouble, sure – but that was, as far as I was concerned, the best fun you could have.
Chapter Six – Avda
I leaned outside the staff entrance, shooting periodic looks toward the door. I had checked the schedule, and I knew she would be finishing her shift soon enough. I wanted to speak to her. No, not wanted – I needed to speak to her. Because I hadn’t had a chance to wrap my head around exactly what her confession to me the other night had meant – and exactly how I was meant to deal with the news that I had a daughter.
She had been doing her best to avoid me since then, and, the few times I had managed to get her on her own, Sasha had been there to get in the way, push his cocky attitude into the middle of our conversation, and force us to pay attention to him. I knew he thought he was being cute, trying to come on to her when he knew I was interested, but he had no idea just how serious this all was.
My head had been a mess ever since I had found out the truth of what had come from that fateful night we had spent together, and I didn’t have a damn clue how I was meant to deal with the shock of it. I had a daughter. A child. A fucking child. She hadn’t denied it – I hadn’t managed to bring it up again directly, but I had dropped a couple of hints, waiting for her to contradict me and tell me that I had gotten it all wrong, but there was nothing. If there was any chance that this wasn’t the truth, any chance that I had someone managed to make a mess of this, she would have put me right now, I was sure of it.
Which meant I needed to figure out what in the hell I was going to do now that I had a kid. I had been trying to figure out exactly how I felt about it this last week, since her confession, but all I’d managed was to spend hours tossing and turning in my bed, head reeling, body tense and on edge as I wrapped my head around the enormity of it. I didn’t understand how I was just meant to move through the world again like nothing had changed like nothing had happened when it felt as though everything I had been resting on for support had just given way beneath me.
Eventually, I came to the conclusion that I wanted to meet her. That was the least I could do, right? I might not have known about her existence until a few days ago, but that didn’t give me the right to be a completely useless deadbeat dad. Now that I knew she was out there in the world, I wanted to at least show my face around her. I wanted to show her that I hadn’t just turned my back on her. Shit, it wasn’t as though I had been given much of a choice in the matter.
And that made me angry, to some extent. But I knew that wasn’t fair on Jo. She hadn’t even known my name, after all – back then, I had been into those hot, anonymous hook-ups, and that didn’t exactly lead to exchanging addresses at the end of the night. She’d had no choice but to go it alone...
And now that I had managed to walk back into her life, by pure chance, I could tell she wasn’t exactly enthused about the idea. And maybe she was right not to be. I was Bratva, after all, and we were talking about a little girl who had, as far as I knew, been raised with nothing to do with that part of the world – she was young, innocent, and likely didn’t know a damn thing about how dark this world could get.
But I wasn’t going to turn up there with a gun to discuss my body count. I just wanted to meet her. The curiosity was killing me, this need to see what a daughter of mine would look like, sound like, talk like, act like, and I figured the only way I could start to get a little closer to her was if I went through Jo. I wanted to give her the respect she deserved as her mother, but at the same time, I felt as though I deserved some too.
I checked my watch again. Any minute now, and Jo would be coming out of the Flood. I knew this was the only way I was going to be able to get her alone, given the way that Sasha had been intimating himself into our conversations every time he saw the two of us together. Irritating, yes, but he wasn’t my priority right now...
"Avda?”
I turned, and there she was – pulling on her jacket, her hair wrapped in a ponytail at the back of her head, staring at me in complete surprise.
"Jo," I breathed. God, she was beautiful, even in the dim half-light of this alleyway behind the bar.
"What are you doing here?" she asked, crossing her arms protectively over her chest.
"Let me give you a lift home," I replied, pointing to where my car was parked a few feet away. She hesitated.
