So, yeah, it would have to be the blonde’s place.
Sherry’s place.
Someone edged into their space, and as he was about to tell the interloper to watch it, he heard a familiar voice.
“Cameron!”
“Jane?” What the hell?
Her eyes were suspiciously bright.
“Thought you could ditch me, did you?” she trilled in a voice he recognized as distinctly fake even though he’d only known her for nine hours. She turned to Sherry, who was watching them with wide eyes. Sherry snatched her hand from the bar, where it had been cradling Cam’s open palm. “Cameron,” Jane drawled, “aren’t you going to introduce me to your…new friend?”
Goddamn her. But what could he do? He was a jerk in some ways, but he was a jerk with good manners. His mother had drilled them into him, and for some reason, even though he’d disappointed her in every other way, the manners had stuck. “Jane, this is…” Shit. “Sherry!” He remembered just in time. “Sherry, Jane.”
“You know what?” Sherry said, flashing him an annoyed look, “I think I’m going to get going.”
He wanted to protest, to exhort her not to leave. But what would he say? That Jane was nothing to him? That, in fact, he’d only met her this morning? Such a protest would sound smarmy even to his own ears. Jane had made sure of it with her little performance, hadn’t she? So he smiled and bade Sherry a wistful good-bye.
Then he wiped the smile off his face and turned to Jane. “What the hell?”
“What the hell what?” she said, plopping onto the stool vacated by Sherry and flagging down the bartender. When the horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing hipster arrived, she said, “I’ll have a B-22. I’ve already had two, and they are delish!”
“You mean a B-52?” the bartender countered, settling his elbows on the bar in front of her and leaning in with a rakish smile that seemed to delight Jane. He, all pale and literary-looking, would be her type.
She did that nose-scrunching thing of hers, and Cam attempted not to find it cute. “Maybe? The Kahlua thing that is a shot of pure deliciousness?”
“That’s the one.”
“Hey, if I wanted a double, could I ask for a B-104? Ha!” She threw back her head and laughed at her own lame joke.
But the bartender did, too, the prick.
“Wait.” She scrunched again. “Is that math right?”
She was drunk. Or at least well on her way. He recognized the signs from his years behind the bar. “I think you’d better stick to the double-digits,” Cam said, not sure if he was talking to her or to the bartender.
She swiveled on her stool. “And what are you? My father? Oh, no, wait. My father is dead.”
“You just seem like maybe you should slow down.”
“I tell you what. Let’s start with a single, and we’ll take it from there,” said the bartender, assembling the layered shot. “See how the evening unfolds.” He winked.
“He’s actually right,” she said, stage-whispering to the bartender and cocking her head at Cam in a way that was the opposite of subtle. “I’m not usually much of a drinker.”
The bartender set the drink in front of her. “On the house.”
Cam rolled his eyes. Well, hell, if Jane could cock-block him, she was about to get a taste of her own medicine. He slung an arm around her shoulders. “I’m just looking out for you. Sweetie.” He let the last word unspool slowly, drawing out the endearment.
The bartender’s megawatt smile dimmed. Jane tried to shrug off Cam’s arm, but the drink-slinging poseur was gone. Mission accomplished.
Jane started to turn to him, her mouth open like she was about to let loose a torrent of words, but she stumbled in her seat a little. He tightened his arm around her to steady her and suppressed a grin. “So, not much of a drinker, eh?”
“I drink occasionally,” she said, turning thoughtful. Ah, it was so delightfully easy to redirect drunk people—at least a certain kind of non-belligerent drunk person. “I usually only drink with my girlfriends, though, and even then I only have one glass of wine.” She grinned. “Or one mug of spiked Earl Grey tea.”
“I know you’re going to have a hard time believing this,” he said, “but first-day-back-from-war aside, I’m usually with you on that.” He paused, not sure why he was compelled to say more. But she was drunk, and she was nearly finished with B-52 number three, so she probably wouldn’t even remember anything he said. “There was a lot of alcoholism in our neighborhood growing up. It wasn’t pretty.”
She whipped her head around and met his eyes for an instant before looking away again.
Ding, ding, ding.
Maybe they had something in common, after all. Cam had never met his father, but according to Jay, Angus MacKinnon had been prone to drunken rages, which is why his relationship with their mother had been so short-lived. She had kicked him out when she was still pregnant with Cam, in fact. And he was pretty sure Angus was partly responsible for making Jay so driven, for inspiring him to escape their shitty life. “I drank a lot when I was a teenager and into my early twenties,” he told Jane. Hell, there probably wasn’t a substance out there that he wouldn’t have gleefully ingested in the post-Alicia years.
“But you stopped?” she asked. “You just decided to stop and you…were able to?”
“Pretty much.” It was true. Part of his self-overhaul had been to cut way back on the booze, and even though the self-overhaul had failed, he was pretty sure he was going to keep cooling it on the booze. His years behind the bar cutting off mean drunks and consoling weepy drunks had pretty much sealed that deal. “When you see alcoholism in your family and your community…well, I didn’t like who I was becoming.”
“It’s not so much that I’m afraid I’ll turn into an alcoholic,” she said, but he noticed she hadn’t denied that there was alcoholism in her family. “It’s more that I’m…not into drawing attention to myself. I like things to be orderly.”
“You’re a control freak.” He wasn’t surprised.
“I like to think of life like writing a book,” she declared. “You can’t just sit down and ‘write a book.’” She made air quotes with her fingers. “You have to plan things. Be methodical. Disciplined. If you want things to happen a certain way—if you want people to behave a certain way—it requires specific behavior on your part. You know that saying? For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction? It’s true in books, and it’s true in life. You have to be careful.”
Well. That was quite the worldview. He wondered if Jane had been born so wound up or if something—or someone—had made her that way.
She waved at the bartender, and Cam sighed. She was now drunk enough that he could not in good conscience leave her alone. She had succeeded in ruining his plans for the evening, and there was nothing he could do about it short of leaving her in the clutches of Hipster Boy Bartender. And that was not happening.
She slid her empty shot glass toward the bartender. “May I please have another?”
“One more,” Cam said, and the bartender, apparently no longer interested in flirting now that he believed Jane was taken, nodded and set to work.
She pouted. “I thought we established that you’re not my father.”
“No. More like your babysitter. And not doing a very good job of it, either, because that fourth drink is going to put you over the edge.” If she really never had more than one drink, she probably had no idea how drunk she was. Those shots might taste like candy, but they were one hundred percent booze.
“Hey! I’m supposed to be babysitting you!”
“Busted!”
“What?” There was that damned nose scrunch again.
“You’ve only spent the entire day protesting that you’re not babysitting me, and—” Oh, shit, she was tipping toward him, as if in slow motion. He hopped off his stool, steadied her, and propped her up—the stools were backless—by leaning her back against his chest. She exhaled a sweet little sigh and burrowed back against him, as if his chest were a fluffy pillow. It put his nose level with her neck, and he gave her a sniff, purely for comparative purposes. There was none of Sherry’s heavy, musky scent. Just a clean, bright smell he was pretty sure was Eau du Ivory Soap. It was…surprisingly nice.
He shook himself out of his reverie. “Hey, so we should get you home. Let’s get a cab.”
She said nothing.
“Jane?” He twisted so he could see her face while still holding her up.
She was asleep.
He sighed. All right. He could always try again tomorrow night. Note to self: find a bar far, far away from Jay’s place.
Because come hell or high water, he was getting laid tomorrow night.
Chapter Four
THURSDAY—NINE DAYS BEFORE THE WEDDING
When Jane woke up, she immediately knew two things.
First, she wasn’t in her own bed. The mattress beneath her was too soft—soft beds like this one weren’t good for your back. Her own mattress had been carefully selected for its spine-supporting properties.
The second thing Jane knew with instantaneous certainty was that she was hung over.