Her eyes drifted closed again. “I can’t tell you that,” she slurred. “Stranger danger.”
I placed my hands on my hips as frustration mounted. I just wanted this townie out of my bar.
Bonnie Clark was a fucking headache, right between the eyes.
I followed Kayla to the register, where she was ringing in an order for sriracha deviled eggs with candied bacon. “I’ll finish your shift. Just take her home.”
Her fingers moved across the touch screen deftly, but she didn’t look away. “No, I need the tips.”
“I’ll pay you.”
Kayla side-eyed me. “Just like a man. Trying to buy your way out of your problems.” I rolled my eyes. “Besides, you have like ten minutes before she pukes all over the bar. Just take her upstairs, Jack. This isn’t that hard.”
“I don’t even know her.”
“You know her enough.” Kayla’s gaze moved over my shoulder and narrowed in obvious anger. “Or you could let that guy take her home.”
Cursing, I spun around to find a very sloppy Bonnie giggling over some tech bro in head-to-toe Patagonia.
I approached with a scowl, but Romeo missed it completely.
“Hey, man. I want to buy the lady here a drink.”
Straightening to my full height, I crossed my arms over my chest. “Seriously,man? Consent. Go look it up.”
His bright white smile slowly slid into frowny confusion. “What?”
I indicated the woozy blond at his side. “She’s barely upright. Get the fuck out of here.”
Tech Bro opened his mouth to argue, but seemed to think better of it. He turned and went back to a table where four other similarly dressed tourists booed his apparent inability to close the deal with a semiconscious woman.
After some yapping from the guy I’d booted, his friends looked in my direction. And, apparently, they had enough sense to read the “fuck off” in my expression because a moment later, they got to their feet and left the bar.
If Bonnie minded that I’d scared off her one-night-stand potential, she didn’t show it. Instead, she had a hand pressed to the base of her throat as she frowned down at the bar top. “I don’t feel so great.”
Fuck, I needed to get her gone.
I clapped twice to get her attention. That felt like something a teacher would respond to. “Listen up, buttercup. Since you won’t tell me where you live, I’m taking you upstairs.”
She was still pale, but she visibly perked up. “Ohhh, what’s upstairs?”
“It’s where I live.”
“I can vouch for him,” Kayla said, suddenly materializing at my side.
Bonnie’s brows furrowed as she looked between the two of us. But then she released a long breath that I thought might knock her off her chair. “Okay, fine. But can I have the rest of that samosa?”
I rolled my eyes, but I went around the bar and gathered her sweater and purse. With her things and my bag of takeout in one hand, I led her back out into the lobby.
Despite stumbling twice, Bonnie refused to hold my arm as we walked slowly up to the second floor. She insisted she was fine. I tried really hard not to notice how short her dress was, and only accomplished it when I remembered that idiot downstairs trying to buy her a drink when she was barely awake. Asshole.
She kicked off her flats as soon as she walked in the door. Then she did a nosy lap of the living room, picking up and looking at everything. Admittedly, there wasn’t much. I wasn’t exactly a knickknack sort of guy.
I watched as she examined my books on the end tables, a wooden coaster set, several small paintings on the wall, my reading glasses, and the framed image of me and my grandmother—the only photograph in the apartment.
My lips twitched as she folded and replaced the blanket I’d left on the back of the couch before turning to face me.
“Where’s your bathroom? I am about to be very sick.”
