Vince, Jack, Diego, and Axel, who were great at technology, checked every camera around our entire building. I wasn’t tech savvy, so I had no clue what they were doing, but they tinkered with those cameras for hours. The only thing they told me was that the cameras had definitely been tampered with, which was why they’d all gone black. So, while we didn’t knowwhodid the break-in, we knew it wasn’t an amateur.
By the time the day ended, I was exhausted, both mentally and physically. I had high hopes that I would fall asleep rapidly that night, but my mind simply wouldn’t shut off. Hour after hour I tried everything to fall asleep, but I couldn’t make it work.
That was why I was not only exhausted but also grumpy on Tuesday when I walked in for my shift.
It was also why I ended up making a huge mistake after my next shift.
As much ascustomers like Donald annoyed the crap out of me, I honestly wished someone like that would come in tonight—if for no other reason than to give me a distraction. A distraction from the thoughts churning in my mind.
The two hours of sleep I had been lucky enough to have managed last night were filled with nightmares. The daytime wasn’t much better. Everywhere I looked, I saw a customer who could be the suspect.
Were they new?
Did they look suspicious?
What if I had been here closing up when that man broke in?
That last thought was the one that gave me shivers.
Every noise rattled me—chairs scraping the floor, glasses clinking in cheers, even the occasional dish that fell onto the floor. Those sounds were part of restaurant life and had never bothered me before.
I had been in the Army, for crying out loud. I had been trained to compartmentalize and stay focused. Apparently, I had lost all those skills the moment I retired.
I’d even dropped a few of my own glasses tonight—six in total, which was more than I’d dropped in all of last year.
“Tammy, you okay?” Axel asked softly from beside me, clearly picking up on my twitchiness.
I nodded and sighed as I tried to get my head back in the game. “Yeah, I’m good.”
It was a lie. I wasn’t good, but I would try to do a better job of faking it.
“You grab your new customer, and I’ll bring in the new rack of glasses,” Axel said, clearly not trusting me to bring them in without breaking them.
I glanced over to my left to see who had sat down on my side of the bar and almost did a double take.
I’d never seen this man before, and I knew I would have remembered because he was gorgeous. Fine with a capitalF.
Damn.
He looked a few years older than my mid-forties, but sometimes it was hard to tell. Wrinkles could be deceiving if you’d had a hard life. I’d met people in their thirties who could pass for fifty, and I’d met people in their sixties who could pass for forty. It all depended on how hard your life was, how well you took care of yourself, and possibly how much Botox you’d had. Though I’d also seen some Botox jobs gone bad that ended upaddingyears to their life instead of the other way around.
Gray streaked the short hair at his temples and even through some of the longer strands on top, as well as his beard. The salt and pepper blend gave him an air of distinction rather than an aged look. His ruggedly handsome face looked like he had some history—a few good stories to tell and a few questionable decisions. Mine likely looked the same to a stranger.
He wasn’t carved like a fitness model, but there also wasn’t an ounce of softness on him either. Fit, but not chiseled like a Greek god. Toned, but not a bodybuilder.
This man was just what the doctor ordered. Something sexy to look at, maybe even flirt with a little, and give myself the distraction I deserved. Needed.
“Welcome to the Watering Hole,” I greeted him, setting a menu down in front of him, along with a glass of water. “My name’s Tammy. Tonight is half-price drafts and seven-dollar pitchers. I’ll give you a couple minutes to look everything over, and I’ll be right back.”
I gave him my best flirty smile before turning back to go fill up another beer for one of my other customers. The smile came from a natural place, because a quick glance down at his hands showed he wasn’t wearing a ring and didn’t appear to have a tan line there either.
Not even three minutes later, I made my way back over to him, surprisingly eager to return. “What can I get for ya?”
“What do you recommend?” He lifted one brow in question.
“Most popular item on our menu is our wings. We’ve got six sauces to choose from and you can’t go wrong with any of them,” I told him as I leaned closer to point at the wings on the menu.
It was a lame move and I knew it, but the man not only looked good…He smelled divine too, and my body felt a pull to get closer to him.
