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It had taken Ben another half a year to back away from that ledge. He’d tried everything anybody suggested—prescription drugs, yoga, meditation, even an anger therapy group. None of it had done any good, but the bees helped. So did all the hours he’d put in on the rooftop at Figs, getting his hands dirty pulling weeds, digging holes, and spreading cow shit. Making things grow.
He was getting better, but he had a long way to go before he’d be any good at polite chitchat with brown-eyed dairymaids.
He should go back to the couch. The woman radiated fragility. She was like that assignment in high school where you had to carry around an egg for a week and pretend it was your baby. If he was too much of an asshole, she’d crack open. Spill all over the place, and then he’d have to deal with the mess.
But it was strange. That laugh—so loud and unapologetic. It didn’t fit.
It didn’t fit that she’d tried to pick him up, either. She’d been far from oblivious to the signal he was putting out. Busy here. Fuck off.
Ben had already burned through the obligatory post-divorce phase of sleeping with any passably attractive woman who was into it. He’d landed in the ashes on the other side—tired, bleary-eyed, flat-out not interested.
He wasn’t interested now. This wasn’t interest. It was something else. An opportunity.
Because how was he supposed to learn how not to be a dick, except by talking to someone who actually seemed to notice when he was one?
The logic probably wouldn’t survive scrutiny. Ben didn’t stop to scrutinize it. He moved.
“You want to play darts?” he asked her.
She gave him a skeptical look. “No.”
“What, did Connor warn you off?”
“He said you were sorrier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.”
That explained the laughter. They’d been mocking him.
“What, you’re some kind of master?”
“I’m all right.”
“Play me either way. I’ll buy you a drink.”
After a moment, she nodded. “Okay to the drink.”
“Not the darts?”
“Not the darts.”
He could live with that. “What do you want?”
She scanned the selections behind the bar. “Glenlivet, if you’re buying. And a Red Hook.”
“That bad, huh?”
She did that thing with her mouth, that whip-frown, and
his heart kicked his ribs again.
Those weren’t a milkmaid’s eyes. They were sharp and intelligent, full of a feeling he knew far too well.
“You have no idea,” she said.
But he did. He knew repressed fury when he saw it.
CHAPTER THREE
When Ben came through to the back room from the bar carrying four drinks, May wiped her hand over her mouth. It had settled into a sort of battle rigor. She forced herself to smile.
