I sent off a text to Gemma to let her know I wasn’t going to blow off karaoke (who knew you could hope for a flash case of tonsilitis?) and went into the restaurant.
The Porch had a rectangular bar in the middle, some tables and chairs, booths around the walls, and approximately seven thousand, six hundred and nineteen TVs all over the place.
Brady was sitting in a booth in the back.
I headed that way.
He slid out when I got there, his smile not near the fun-loving, easy-going Brady I knew him to be.
Yup.
Something was on his mind.
Brady was about the same height as Knox. He had dark hair with a burnished cast, and a full, kickass russet beard that flirted with being almost too long, so obviously it was awesome.
He also had the prerequisite Nightingale built body and inherent confidence.
When we met him, we dubbed him Lumberjack Hottie, because he was so Lumberjack Hottie and he so worked it.
After we hugged hello, he waited for me to slide in (so, yeah…also the inherent Nightingale gentlemanly manners) before he slid in opposite me.
He already had a beer.
After I did a scan of the joint to ascertain if Cheynne was there coincidentally (she wasn’t, so it appeared stalking was a probability), I barely reached for the menu when the server was at our table.
I ordered an ale.
She took off.
“What’s shaking?” I asked Brady.
“You know where I work?” he asked back.
I nodded.
“Then you know everything’s shaking because everything always is,” he answered.
I smiled at him.
“Let’s order and get into it,” he said.
The way he said that didn’t sound promising, but I perused the menu, got stuck on the Nashville hot chicken sandwich and stopped looking, because I knew if I kept looking I’d probably find five other things I wanted, and then I’d be undecided.
A huge pet peeve of mine was when people hemmed and hawed over what they ordered, making the server return five times, and everyone at their table have to wait an extra twenty minutes to get to their food.
Find something you like. Stick.
And yes, this was partly because I was a server who got annoyed when I had to go back to a table five times for an order…but even when I was out in the wild, it irritated me.
I set the menu aside and saw Brady taking a sip of his beer.
“You going to karaoke?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he answered.
I smiled again. “What are you going to sing?”
He leveled his sky-blue eyes at me. “I’m only going as an observer.”
