"That's kind of funny," Juniper said. "I bet your mom is where you get all your one-liners from."
"She's got a sarcastic streak, that's for sure. But she has to, to be married to my dad and to have me for a kid." He shifted his weight. "Is this shift in conversation your way of avoiding answering a question that's been asked and answered five dozen times."
"Fifteen, but who's counting." She winked. "I think persistence wins this time. Let's have dinner."
He blinked. He honestly didn't know what to say. While he could be a quiet and contemplative man he always had room for words. But not this time. He stood there, staring, and saying nothing.
She laughed. "Tomorrow night," she said. "The Crab Shack. I think I can let the bar run itself for one night."
"How about seven?" he asked, grateful his voice didn't crack.
"That works."
He leaned in, pressed his mouth to her cheek, and he let it linger a half-second longer than he'd planned to. She smelled like vanilla and tequila. He stepped back. "Goodnight."
"Goodnight, Sterling."
Turning, he walked the rest of the way to the truck. She'd agreed to dinner. That thought bounced around in his brain like a rubber ball he couldn't snag. It was just dinner. It wasn’t like they hadn’t spent hours together at the bar talking before. It wasn’t like they weren't friends.
But the sudden realization that this could be filed away in his librarian brain as a date? He damn near dropped the plate when he tried to open the truck door.
Chapter Two
The Southwest Florida sun poured through the open shutters in long, flat sheets that turned the wide-plank floor the color of weak tea and showed every speck of dust Juniper hadn't gotten to on the rum bottles behind the bar. Manny, the cook, told her that the dust made the bar look classic.
Juniper thought it just made the place look dirty.
The ceiling fan turned slowly above her head. The air smelled of the clean, fishy brine of the grouper Manny had pulled out of the walk-in that morning. And underneath it, a faint tang of salt and mangrove from the inlet. She'd hated that undertone when she'd first moved to Calusa Cove. But today, it settled in her body like her skin soaking in much-needed moisture.
She leaned a hip against the counter and stared out into the pub. Two booths along the wall held a pair of retirees nursing iced teas and a young mother she didn't recognize with a baby asleep in a sling against her chest. She'd been watching the young mother all morning. She'd learned early in her career that the person in the room least likely to be carrying a gun was always the one packing.
The rest of the bar was half-full of locals, just like it was every other day of the week.
Outside the kitchen, Manny called out a lunch ticket in that deep voice of his that reminded Juniper of her dad, which was funny because Manny wasn't much older than her.
Her father had been gone for ten years now. Lung cancer that had taken him fast. She'd driven home from Quantico and sat with him for nine days, and then he was gone.
Her mother had followed five years later. That loss had been slower. A stroke had taken her mind two years before it took her body. Juniper had buried her on a gray morning in Maryland and had gone back to work the following Monday because she needed to focus on something.
Tara Pajeski, her day manager, stood at the service end of the bar. She wore a black tank top, a long apron, and her dark blond hair was pulled back so tight her eyebrows lifted. According to Tara, that was her own personal at-home facelift. A pen lived behind her ear. Two more lived in the apron pocket. On Manny’s recommendation, Juniper had hired her on day one, and Tara had run the lunch shift with the authority of a woman who'd grown up watching her mother do the same job at a roadhouse in the panhandle.
"Walk me through tonight," Juniper said, crossing behind the bar to run her hands under hot water in the small sink by the well.
"Linton's doubled the gumbo. We got that extra case of the IPA in this morning, so we're set on draft. Sully's already here, as you can see. He'll bartend for you, and I told him your standing list of what not to let the regulars get away with."
Juniper laughed. "Hawke's invoice."
"I called Vinnie. He said don't sweat it. Monday."
"You're a saint."
"I'm a saint-adjacent tyrant, and don't you forget it." Tara dropped a lime wheel into a glass of soda water and slid it onto her serving tray. She turned and leaned a hip against the bar. "Speaking of all the sexy saints around town and the gossip that goes with them…"
"Don't."
"I'm gonna."
Juniper rolled her eyes because there was no stopping this freight train. Not in this small town.
