Chapter Three
Cole
“You look like you need a drink,” I say as Holly stops behind the stool next to me holding a cake box in her hands. Along with everyone else in the restaurant, I just witnessed the three-car pileup that masqueraded as a family reunion. Holly may be wearing a cocky expression, but there’s something off in her eyes. Like she’s a wild animal that has been chased to the edge of a cliff and is either going to get eaten or leap.
So am I the predator or the cliff?
The encounter at her table has left her more shaken up than she wants to let on. Then again, she’d be more like the computer programs she used to write back in high school if it hadn’t affected her.
“Why aren’t you gloating?” she asks in a tone so dry it would shame the Sahara Desert.
“Gloating?” I ask in surprise. “I prefer to reserve my gloating for non-disasters.”
Like hell I’d gloat over this.
Her dad is a piece of shit. Or at least he was back in the day, and based on that pathetic attempt at a reunion, he hasn’t changed. Holly didn’t talk about her parents in high school, butmost people knew that her and Bryn’s dad had left town when they were little, andeveryoneknew their mother was a piece of work.Then one afternoon early in my senior year, to my shock, I found Holly crying in the woods over her dumbass dad. She’d reached out to him, and it hadn’t gone well. Tough as balls Holly, who’d single-handedly eviscerated an asshole two years older than her in the school parking lot after he disrespected a fellow classmate, was crying. In front ofme. We spent an hour talking, and I walked her home. I almost kissed her too—almostbeing the important word.
I pull out the stool next to me. “Here. I’ll even buy it for you.” I lift a finger to flag down the bartender.
Holly tilts her head as she eyes me suspiciously.
I understand why. We’ve been adversarial since that afternoon in the woods. It’s at least partly my fault. I wanted to ask her out back then, before I started dating my future wife, but something held me back. I didn’t want to be the next asshole who made Holly Mayberry vulnerable. Besides, I looked at her and saw a woman who would blow Highland Hills the moment she could. I figured she’d be running Google or something by now. It hadn’t occurred to me that someone like her, talented and driven, would stay back and work at Mayberry Matchmakers. So I avoided her, and apparently she didn’t like that, because she grew claws.
These days we bicker every time our paths cross. The whole feud seems even more stupid since we’re both in our thirties—Holly just turned thirty-three as evidenced by the number on her cake—but it seems to have only gotten worse since my wife died six years ago.
“Look,” I say with a sigh. “You’ve had a shitty night. I’m having a shitty night. What do you say we call an hour or two truce?”
“You think I’m going to be here for two hours?” she scoffs.
I hold my hands out to my sides. “Just covering my bases.”
Her face softens, but she still looks wary as she sets the box on the counter and sits on the stool next to me.
The bartender walks over. I’ve seen her in Ziggy’s, the brewery I own, but I don’t know her name, nor have I ever talked to her other than to take her order when she came up to the bar. At least before tonight. She’s made it very clear she’s interested in me, but I’ve played like I’m clueless. Even if Iwereinterested, I wouldn’t fuck her. She lives in Highland Hills, and I have a hard and fast rule to never screw any woman who lives within a fifty mile radius. I’m not interested in a relationship, and it’s a hell of a lot less messy this way.
Holly orders a bourbon, and I tell the bartender to put it on my tab, earning a look of disappointment before she goes off to fix the drink.
“I can buy my own drinks, Cole. I have a dumb father. I’m not broke.”
I lift a shoulder into a lazy shrug as I turn in my seat to study her. “Sounds like he hasn’t changed much.”
Her eyes widen slightly. She turns away from me, just an inch or two, but enough that I notice. “So you remember that.”
“You telling me about your derelict dad back when we were in high school? Of course.”
For a moment, I think she’s going to get up and leave, but the bartender shows up with the glass. Holly snatches it from her, chugs it down, then hands back the empty glass. “I’ll take another.” She shoots me a smirk, then turns back to the waitress. “On him.”
The bartender—is her name Lacy? Loretta? Something with an L—shoots Holly a disapproving look before turning to comply.
“Not wasting any time getting shitfaced, huh?” I ask sarcastically, but I’m concerned.
“Hey,” she says, facing the wall behind the bar. It’s an interesting wall, covered in tiny marble tiles in gray, white, and black, but I know that’s not why she’s pretending to stare at it. “I’m not the sort to say no to free drinks.”
She’s not fooling me. We may not have had a single cordial conversation in years, but I’ve noticed things. I know she doesn’t let many people see this side of her, dejected and a little broken. Somehow she’s let me see it twice.
“So Bryn’s pissed because your dad dropped by to surprise you two?” I say. “That hardly seems fair.”
She rests her chin on her hand. “I told him where we were.”
