Hard Up(3)

“Dec,” she said, nodding to the first of the three.

Dark hair, reddish beard, friendly chocolate eyes. Also, the only one who ever talked to her. To his right was Cor or Cory; she wasn’t exactly sure, though they’d been her regular customers for months. Dark hair, razor-sharp cheekbones, beautiful blue eyes that screamed tragic past.

And then, all the way at the end was… Callum.

She flushed, not even glancing at him. She didn’t have to, after all. His dark blond hair, bright green eyes, and amazing physique were featured in her damned dreams far too often.

Not to mention her fantasies…

“What’ll it be?” Dec said to the other two.

Dead silence. Vi busied herself pulling out three chilled glasses. She risked a glance up, and found all three men staring at her. Dec just looked kind of thoughtful, and Cor looked… intense, bordering on scary murderer.

Callum, though… she swore she saw his lips lift for a second, his eyes light… just a little.

Remembering, perhaps, exactly what she looked like without a scrap of clothing?

The cries that poured from her throat as she rode him, brazen and wild? The taste of sweet whisky on her lips as she’d kissed him just before she fell asleep?

And then woke up alone, she reminded herself, trying not to turn totally red.

“So… tap okay?” she managed to ask Dec, who shrugged.

“Sure.”

She turned to fill their glasses, feeling like a silly schoolgirl.

It was one night, one silly mistake. He’d stayed past last call, long after Dec and Cor left. Sipping his beer, watching her with those emerald eyes.

Vi didn’t have one-night stands. She didn’t sleep with anyone, actually. She kept to herself, kept her head down. But that night the bar had been so packed, and she’d gotten her ass kicked. At the end of it, once the money was in the safe and the other patrons were gone…

When Callum asked for a shot of Maker’s on the rocks, it sounded too good to resist.

So Vi had poured them both a shot, sat down next to him, and they’d quietly watched each other drink.

Not ten minutes after she sat down, they were upstairs in her cramped two-room apartment, ripping the clothes off each other. Callum was smooth as hell, for all that he was a stranger.

And in bed… damn. Vi had never done anything like that, never been so wild.

Or been with a guy so… big, someone who knew how to use his assets the way Callum did.

So what if he was gone in the morning? she thought for the thousandth time.

Carefully juggling all three beers, she turned around and set them before each man, belatedly remembering coasters.

“Cool,” she said. “Enjoy, guys.”

Dec lifted his beer and gave her a nod. The other two stared at her like they weren’t sure if they wanted to bang her or kill her, so she hurried off to the other end of the bar.

“Real nice, the pair of you,” she heard Dec say before she was out of earshot.

A few other customers came up for refills at once, and then she had to change the keg out. Her least favorite duty, since she was only five-foot-four and the keg weighed almost what she did.

Still, she always wrestled the new kegs into place with a steely kind of determination. She didn’t want to look weak. Not to the customers at Snake’s, not to anybody.

Head hard as a damn rock, her father would have said.

Gritting her teeth, she shoved the keg into place and hooked up the lines, then poured a couple beers to siphon off the foam. Sighing, she brushed back that same lock of hair that kept escaping her bun.

Old Tom came up to the bar. He was a cantankerous old coot, friends with the absentee owners of Snake’s. That meant he drank cheap and sometimes gave Vi a hand if she needed it.

“Hey,” she said as she refilled Old Tom’s beer. “Do you think you can watch bar for like… three minutes? I’ve been standing up for nine hours, I need to take a break.”

Old Tom gave her a look, his wild white eyebrows rising. “How long?”

“Five minutes, max,” she said.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, waving her off. “Go on.”

“Thanks,” she said, ignoring his mumbled complaints about the appropriateness of women working in bars.

She tried not to look at the three men as she stopped at the beer cooler for a bottle of water. Really, she did.

Only, Dec’s hand tattoos caught her eye. He was gesturing, palms hovering over the bar, and she managed to finally read the markings. She’d been trying to decipher them for ages, and curiosity got the better of her now.

Black, written in a fine script on his left hand. On the right, Saints.

Black Saints, she thought. It must be the name of their crew. Well, if you wanted to know whether they were officially mobbed up… there’s your sign, Vi.