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imes, the connection alone, the need to feel as if she mattered to someone—even when he was a nameless guy she would never see again—was enough.
Most of the time, it wasn’t.
She poured out the jug and took it over to the table, not even bothering to smile as she set it down. Jason didn’t seem to mind. He grinned up at her.
“So, I hear you’re playing in the baseball tournament next weekend.”
The throb behind her right eye intensified at the thought. How in the hell had Duke ever gotten her to agree to play?
Oh. Right. She’d been drunk.
And practically begging him for a job. No wonder she’d decided to quit drinking.
She had to give it to him. Duke had circled her with cold, steely determination. He’d told her that she needed to get off the sauce. Then he’d told her that he would hire her even though he thought she’d make a crap bartender—which he’d been right about.
And then he’d told her that he would only do that, if she agreed to play in New Waterford’s Fifth Annual Celebrity All Star Mixed Ball Tournament. The tournament had been started as a way to raise funds for expensive medical treatments for a local child who needed a heart transplant. Since then, it had grown and every year there was a new beneficiary.
Good cause. Good times. Just not her thing.
Duke was a smart man. He’d known that even though she sucked at bartending, she would still pull in business. She was, after all, an ex-Sports Illustrated Swimsuit cover model.
An ex-Sports Illustrated Swimsuit cover model with a past more colorful than Joseph’s coat of many colors.
He’d also known her name on the tournament flyer and website would boost ticket sales.
But most of all, Duke had known that if she was drunk she was more likely to agree to anything, because everyone in the whole damn town knew she was almost broke.
So, Betty Jo Barker was all signed up and ready to go.
Betty glanced down at Jason. Had her life really come to this?
Yes, it has, a voice whispered inside her head.
And why the hell was she surprised?
“Betty?”
She turned around without another word and headed toward the bar, not really caring when one of Jason’s buddies called her a cold stuck up bitch. Hell, that was tame compared to some of the things she’d been called in the past.
But when one of them said—loudly enough for old man Davies, sitting at the bar to hear, “more like a slut. I hear she’ll screw anything with a dick.”
She winced.
The fourth guy, someone she’d never met before, laughed. “She won’t do it for free. Her kind never does. But if you offer her enough cash, I bet you could bend her over a table out back. Hell, I might just do that. Get a taste of some premium pussy before I head back home to the wife.”
There was a time when Betty Jo Barker would have dealt with an asshole like that. She would have marched her butt back over to the table and shredded him in one sentence.
But the old Betty Jo Barker was gone—replaced with a pathetic version who really didn’t give a shit. Except that maybe she did.
And maybe it was the hidden truths that made it hard to hear—hard to take.
Old man Davies, a retired history teacher who spent more time at the bar than at home since his wife passed over a year ago, turned around and glared at the men. He huffed and shook his head.
But it was the other man who had slid onto a stool near the slot machine at the opposite end of the bar who caught her attention.
Beau. Simon.
Just fucking great.
