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CHAPTER
7
Lucy summoned a ride because no way was she going to navigate parking on a mad-dash mission she wasn’t supposed to be taking time away from work to run anyway. Joanna said she would see her for lunch in an hour, and Lucy was ready to spend that hour doing just about anything to fix her problem.
She could not believe the things she had said to Jonathan, again, and she hoped Joanna really was going to take care of it.
And she hoped she wasn’t actually fired.
And she hoped the bartender would help her resolve the lying issue because, according to Joanna, they were still having lunch with Lily Chu, and she wasn’t about to walk into that with a curse weighing her down.
Her rideshare driver tried to make conversation along the way, awkward as it was, and for once, she plainly told him she wasn’t interested in talking. She wondered as she checked emails, scanned social media, and fielded a few more happy birthday texts why she’d never been so direct about her conversation preferences before. Maybe it had something to do with being alone and at the mercy of a strange man behind the wheel.
It struck her that ridesharing was inherently terrifying.
She compensated for her dark thoughts about her driver—who was probably a perfectly decent human—by leaving a 20 percent tip when they arrived.
As she approached the bar’s sunny front door, she wondered again if the honesty was growing in strength. If she’d lost the ability to resist it at all, and this confrontation with the bartender would be completely uncensored.
She shook the thought and swung open the door. The space looked almost the same as it had the night before: open, airy, except it was empty of mingling conversation and clinking glass. In fact, it was empty of everyone except the man behind the bar.
“We’re closed!” he called, not unkindly, as Lucy stomped inside. She marched straight up to the stool she sat on the night before and watched him squat down to reach for something under the bar. When he popped back up to see her right in front of him, his face split into a grin. “Oh, hey, Birthday Girl.”
“Hey, Hot Bartender—I mean ...”
She wanted to drown herself in the bottle of tequila in his big hands. His brows jumped as the rest of his face lifted in a pleasant smile.
“Sorry.” She tried to recover, though she was dying a slow, mortifying death. “I didn’t catch your name last night.”
He chuckled. “It’s Adam, but I’ll answer to Hot Bartender too.”
Her face was on fire, she was sure of it.
He wiped down the bottle of tequila and set it on the bar. His hazel eyes were warm and keen just like they had been the night before. He watched Lucy with great interest. “What can I get you?”
“I thought you were closed.”
“Right.”
He sounded disappointed. Like maybe he wanted the unhappy woman from the night before to return midday and demand he woo her with another life-changing cocktail.
No time for that.
“I’m not here for a drink,” Lucy said, harsher than she meant to. “I want to know what you put in my drink last night.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The purple fizzy thing you served me, what was in it?”
His full lips bent into a sly grin that Lucy could definitely see in a leading role. This guy had the stuff. It was probably all there when she had met him the night before; she just wasn’t being honest with herself about it. She bit her lip and tried to concentrate.
“Sorry, I can’t share,” he said. “That’s my proprietary birthday special.”
He was flirting with her, that much was clear, and on another day, she might have been in the mood. But not with her career hanging in the balance.
She stood up on the bar’s footrest, making herself a few inches taller in her flats. She spread her palms on the marble top. To avoid sounding completely nuts, she held back confessing about her wish and kept it vague. “Listen, something strange has happened to me, and I can only trace it back to here—to you. I don’t know what’s going on, but I think it started with that drink, so I need you to tell me what was in it.”
His face suddenly paled, and he looked ill. He leaned in. “Whoa, look, I don’t know what may have happened after you left here last night, but I didn’t put anything in your drink that would have... that might have made you...”
