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I let go of Jake’s shoulder, and remove his hands from my hips. This little charade is over. “I see,” I tell him quietly, my face still showing a smile for the cameras. “You can see yourself out of my lounge, Mr. Ferry. Thanks for dropping by.”
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His reaction is a mystery; I’m sure I’ll see it on YouTube later when Red Hall gets tagged in the Facebook post for it right alongside Ferry Lights. For now, though, I don’t look at him as I stalk away through the crowd, ignoring the smartphones pointed at me.
I can’t believe I fell for that.
Chapter 47
Janie
Chester is a smart guy, and he keeps his mouth shut when I step behind the bar and discreetly pour myself a shot of the closest bottle of dark liquor I can reach—cognac, turns out. His eyes do get a little wide when I turn away from the crowd and quickly down the shot. No, I don’t normally drink when I’m at work and it’s against the rules for everyone else. Sometimes it’s good to be the boss.
Luckily, Chester knows me well enough to simply retrieve the shot glass from my tense fingers and even tap the bottle in question.
I shake my head. One shot is fine, just enough to put a different kind of warmth in my stomach than what’s already there.
Jake fucking Ferry. “I could strangle him, that dirty son of a bitch.”
Chester clears his throat, his face angled down as though busy with bar work. “Okay,” he mutters, trying to calm me, “do you need a moment? Maybe in the back? Where no one can take any more videos?”
Shit. I shake my head, and then blow out a long breath to get a handle on myself, just like Mama’s therapist tells her to do. “I’m fine,” I tell Chester.
“So,” he says when he’s assessed that I might be telling the truth, “that was awkward, huh? What was that all about?”
Rehashing it is the last thing I want, so I wave Chester’s curiosity off. “Forget it.”
He seems to—Chester is good like that—but I certainly can’t. Where does that Ferry prick even get off thinking that I would want or need his fucking PR influence like some kind of social climbing groupie slut? Sure, Red Hall is taking a temporary hit from the foray of Ferry Lights into the neighborhood—but that’s just the way the market works. A few more weeks and the pressure will equalize and my place will be back on top where it started.
After all, every celebrity—A, B, C, or even D-list—that shows up at my place comes because they want to be here. Not because I pay them.
I’m not good at staying angry. I try to hold grudges, but they never last very long. As this one wanes and I recover myself, my traitorous imagination takes the opportunity to defect. Whispering images of Jake’s flushed lips, and that glint in his eyes that made me briefly imagine what was going on in his head to make him look at me like that. Worst of all was that it had worked; that swell of heat between my legs wasn’t a fever.
Nope. Nope, nope, nope. I turn, pasting the smile back on my face. It can set like plaster for all I care. Tonight I have guests. Tonight I have work to do. No way am I going to let Jake Ferry screw up my head.
For me, the best way to clear my head and get focused is to throw myself hard into work. So that’s what I do, schmoozing and mingling until Jake Ferry is a distant, irritating memory.
Chapter 48
Jake
The wall outside Red Hall meets my fist in a brief conflict that it easily wins, but the pain serves to clear my head. My hand starts to throb almost immediately, and I’m reminded that I need to stop doing shit without thinking of the consequences first.
I’m an asshole. That’s not really a surprise to me—my apple didn’t fall more than a few feet from my father’s tree— but every time I have the opportunity to tell him no, I just fall in line instead. What kind of man does that?
And what kind of man tells a woman like Janie Hall that he wants to date her for the PR benefits?
Nobody in this town opens a business of any kind without having Reginald Ferry’s hard eye on them. That means my eyes are on them as well. I know what Janie’s been through. It wasn’t easy for her to get Red Hall started. She begged, borrowed, and stole to get that place off the ground, and when she finally opened the doors it was epic.
It’s stayed that way for over a year and opening Ferry Lights literally across the street only barely made a dent in their regular business. Fact is, Red Hall has something that Ferry Lights doesn’t: a modern day heroine for an owner.
My father had given me the background on my… target. Janie Hall comes from practically nothing. She’s self-made, not just the hobbyist housewife of one of the local boys’ club. And she’s a good girl. Precisely the kind of girl I avoid when I have an itch that needs scratching.
It doesn’t help that Janie is unbearably hot. That just isn’t a fair game. Plenty of girls are beautiful; they have to be to get through the glass ceiling that guys like my father and me are standing on. All the women, in fact, are so drop-dead gorgeous that they all look the same. Might as well be wallpaper.
Janie, though… I’ve been with so many beautiful women that one may as well be another. Not her. She has spirit, and poise, and a lot to prove. Hell, she’s already proven herself.
And she’ll keep doing it, too, won’t she? The way she looked at me when I suggested we make good for the tabloids, like she didn’t want or need my help... why did that turn me on so much?
