The Bartender's Secret (Masterson, Texas Book 1)

by Caro Carson

  “But he says all these mushy lines about souls,” the drama dude said. “He can’t stand the ringing of a bell.”

  “The bell is the fire alarm, that’s all. Othello has shown up because... What is happening?”

  The clueless guy looked at his friends for help. Connor looked at the back of Bridget’s head.

  Come on, Bridget. You should know this. I made you read it in high school.

  “It’s a bar fight,” Bridget called from her seat.

  Yes.

  “Yes,” Rembrandt said, clapping her hands together with enthusiasm. “And who is fighting? His highest-ranking officers. Othello has to break it up because he’s the only person who outranks them. He was in bed with his new bride when the alarm went off. So, when he shows up at the bar, he’s not mushy and weepy. He’s...?”

  She waited. Connor waited, too, arms crossed. No way was he going upstairs.

  “He’s annoyed?” the clueless dude ventured.

  Rembrandt deflated a little at the tepid answer, but she didn’t give up. “He wasn’t having much of a honeymoon if he was only annoyed. The guy was having sex with his hot young wife, the one he married without permission.”

  The student laughed, but he looked away nervously. The others were snickering. They were all the age where they were close to obsessed with sex, but not mature enough to talk about it as anything but a dirty joke. Connor wouldn’t want to be that young again. Nineteen had sucked. Thirty was okay.

  “So, there’s sexual frustration on top of the officers-behaving-badly thing. Shakespeare is piling it on to make everything more dramatic. Forget fistfights. This is a sword fight. Deadly weapons. If it happened now, it would be like arriving at a bar and finding your own officers pointing guns at each other, right?”

  Connor couldn’t paint her. It wouldn’t do justice to her energy and enthusiasm. She was the furthest thing possible from a still life by a window.

  “When he says the next guy who moves doesn’t value his soul, he’s yelling ‘freeze.’ If anyone moves a muscle, he’ll finish him off personally.” She held her hands up like she was the Incredible Hulk or something, and repeated “Finish him” in the ominous tone of the Mortal Kombat video game.

  Everybody laughed, and Rembrandt headed back to her seat in a swirl of blue. She glanced Connor’s way. He gave her a salute, a touch of his fingers to his forehead. She smiled as she ducked behind the wood partition.

  Something crazy stirred in his chest. There went a woman of color and motion, a woman who read books intently and addressed a group comfortably and made everyone laugh while she made Shakespeare come alive.

  Damn.

  Connor might have fallen a little bit in love with her in the last two minutes.

  Kristopher got out of his chair, very Joe Cool, hands in his jean pockets. “I told y’all she was great.” He went to join her behind the wood partition.

  Damn again.

  Kristopher couldn’t be dating Rembrandt. He was not even close to being right for a woman like her, yet he’d just bragged about her as if he’d brought her here because he’d wanted to show her off to his buddies.

  Rembrandt and Kristopher? Completely wrong.

  But...

  They were students of the same subject. Kristopher was twenty-one, a more reliable young man than most, which was why Connor had hired him. She was probably older than Kristopher, but Connor doubted she was more than twenty-five. It wasn’t so outrageous of a possibility.

  Bridget got out of her chair as the next person took the stage. She came back to the bar to reclaim her barstool. Grouchy, peevish—was she just hungover, or was she upset that the guy she had a crush on was getting cozy with someone else?

  Connor walked down the bar to her seat. “How’s the hangover?”

  “I’m not happy.”

  Yes, but why? Do you have a reason to be jealous?

  Because if she did, then Connor had a reason to be jealous, too.

  That was as crazy a thought as he’d ever had. He threw open the lid to the ice bin and put an angry scoop in a water glass.

  There was nothing to be jealous about. He was a bartender. Ms. Rembrandt was a college student. She’d take her degree and move on to bigger things soon enough, just like Kristopher would. Just like they all did.

  He set the water glass in front of Bridget with a hard thunk. “Keep drinking.”

  In those first few tumultuous years in this bar, while Connor had struggled to change his mind-set from useless dropout to reliable employee, he’d learned that no matter how passionately a girl obsessed over him at the beginning, he’d become no more than part of her college experience in the end. She’d don her cap and gown and leave Masterson, same as the one before her, same as the one after her.

  Once he’d started fielding flirtations with his eyes wide open, he’d enjoyed dating women as they came and went. At some point, he’d started preferring the worldliness of a woman having a fling at forty, but in the end, the older women’s emotions followed the same pattern as the coeds’. Once flirting turned to sex, women wanted the bartender in their bed to be somebody he was not.

  They’d claim they never wanted him to leave, because they’d fallen in love with him. Connor appreciated that they were sincere in the moment. He also knew their feelings would burn themselves out in a couple of months, and they’d be on their way, whether they were twenty-one or forty-one. It was easy for Connor to let go, because he never held on in the first place.

  If Rembrandt was the object of Kristopher’s affection, what did it matter to Connor? Connor was already part of too many women’s fond memories of Masterson University.

  He didn’t want Bridget to be heartbroken, though. “What aren’t you happy about?”

  “Can’t a girl just have a headache?” She plunked her head on the bar again.

  Connor dug out a bottle of aspirin from under the bar. He shook the bottle by her ear gently, like it was a baby’s rattle, before he set it down by her head.

  He checked his watch. Kristopher should have clocked in already. Connor needed to get some dinner and change his clothes. The rehearsals had wrapped up, yet Kristopher was still sitting cozy behind a wood partition with Rembrandt, not that it mattered.

  It never mattered.

  But Connor didn’t like it, and Connor was the boss of this fantasy world. He walked out from behind his bar, crossed under his chandelier and went to check on his employee.

  * * *

  “Now everybody wants to sign up for your class next semester,” Kristopher said.

  Delphinia laughed at that. “They’ll all forget during spring break. If they don’t, you should warn them away. EN313? Not a fun class.”

  “But you’re a fun teacher. You’re great.”

  “Victorian prose is not a great subject. Don’t tell anyone I said that, except for everyone you like who is considering choosing it as their literature elective. If it’s someone you don’t like, go ahead and let them be suckers.”

  She’d expected Kristopher to laugh. Instead, he leaned in to speak seriously. “Then you’d end up with a lecture hall full of people I hate. I could never do that to someone like you.”

  That felt distinctly and uncomfortably like a romantic overture. Her radar couldn’t be that broken.

  “I’ve given a lot of lectures in a lot of lecture halls filled with all kinds of people at this point in my career. I lectured for years as a PhD candidate, and I’ve been on the faculty for three more years since then.” Was she being too obvious, emphasizing the difference in their ages? She was twenty-nine. He couldn’t be more than twenty-one.

  “I’m sure glad I took Shakespeare at BCC.” Kristopher smiled at her. “I wouldn’t have known what I was missing.”

  Had she imagined it, or had Kristopher pitched his voice lower to murmur that last sentence to her, as if he
were trying to sound seductive?

  She pulled her book bag into her lap and felt the familiar shape of the paperback novel. Its leading man could murmur anything to the heroine and make her melt into a puddle of sexual arousal. If Kristopher was trying to be like that, he was failing. Sexual charisma wasn’t something a man could try to sound like he had.

  The heroes in the paperbacks she’d read so far all seemed to have been born with it—and she’d read quite a few this year. The first one she’d started at the end of that awful first week of school, the same week her parents had laughed over her ignorance of Vincent’s intentions at the faculty dinner. That Friday, she’d taped the reading list for EN313 to the door of her classroom and had felt no excitement, no anticipation, no passion for her work or her life. Nothing.

  Alone in her classroom, she’d brooded until she could brood no more. She’d picked up her phone and accepted a date with Vincent. Next, she’d replied to an email from the BCC professor who needed someone to cover her Shakespeare course. Perhaps most radically of all, Delphinia had put herself on the waiting list for one of the studio apartments that were available on campus for junior faculty, a place that would be her own.

  Her classroom was in Hughes Hall, home of the English department, where one bookcase in the lobby was a take-one, leave-one place for students to swap books. As Delphinia had left that evening, heart pounding from the three changes she’d put in motion, she’d passed the bookcase. A paperback lying face up had stopped her dead in her tracks.

  The book cover had depicted a woman wearing red lingerie and a man wearing no shirt at all. The focus was on their torsos—their heads weren’t even on the cover—but all Delphinia had seen were hands, her hand gripping his biceps, his hand spanning her rib cage, wrinkling the red silk.

  Delphinia had stuffed the paperback into her book bag. That would be her fourth change: she’d read a modern, popular book to get in touch with passion in this century. That first romance novel had led to another. And another. And another dozen.

  The military officers, the billionaires, the cowboys: she’d loved them all, but they’d added to her worries. When she’d met Vincent, it had been bad enough that she hadn’t been blindsided by the instant attraction Juliet had felt for Romeo. Now, Delphinia worried that no sexual awareness had sizzled along her skin, either, not as it had for the heroine of the paperback she had hidden in her bag.

  Its hero was more than an alpha male or a lone wolf. He was a shape-shifter. Literally, he could become a wolf. So far, the hero had found his human mate, resisted her charms, then lost that battle in a rather spectacular kiss. Delphinia had read that scene as she’d waited by the window today, and she’d known there was nothing like that in her life. Nothing at all.

  Maybe sexual sizzles were a paranormal thing that one felt when they met a destined mate. Maybe Delphinia was the silliest of girls to expect sizzles in actual humans.

  Kristopher leaned his elbow on the back of the bench as he angled himself to face her fully. No sizzle.

  He tilted his head charmingly to rest his cheek upon his hand—oh, no. Not that.

  “I don’t remember how I got to calling you Dr. Dee last semester. I know it’s not your name. Now that the class is over, what should I call you?”

  She clenched the book bag in her lap so tightly, the spine of the paperback indented her inner thigh. “You may call me Dr. Ray or Professor Ray.”

  Kristopher blinked. He leaned closer to say something, but he was silenced by another man’s voice.

  “Kristopher.”

  Kristopher jerked in surprise. Delphinia turned, too. There, framed in the open side of the alcove, stood the man with the chiseled body, the Greek Ideal with the nicked eyebrow, the man who had given her a casual salute after her impromptu class on Othello.

  “A word with you?” The phrase might have been a question, but the man said it like a military officer’s command.

  Kristopher scrambled to his feet and checked his smartwatch. “Am I late? Yeah, you need to get out of here. My uniform’s in my car. Let me go grab it, and I’ll be dressed. Two minutes, I swear.”

  The man made a dismissive gesture, a billionaire’s magnanimous wave. “Take fifteen.” He hesitated briefly. “If you’re done here.”

  Delphinia realized what he really meant was if you’re done with her, because he looked at her, sweeping his gaze over her whole body, head to toe and back up again. Not one iota of their earlier shared amusement was evident in his expression. He was calm, impassive—and so very large, standing in the opening to the alcove. But the way he raked his gaze down her body—

  There were alpha males in the real world, after all.

  “Yeah, we’re done. Sorry.” Kristopher sidled past the man, leaving with nothing for Delphinia but an apologetic smile. “Thanks again for coming.”

  The man turned away, too, breaking the tension she’d imagined stretching between them. The relief that an awkward conversation with a student had ended was real enough. Delphinia huffed out her breath in gratitude.

  The man turned back to her and studied her face—not her body—for a second. Had she looked too obviously relieved when Kristopher left? Had her sigh been too loud?

  “I enjoyed your explanation of Othello’s bar fight.” The bass in his voice was gentle, not commanding when he spoke to her, more like a cowboy taming a horse.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome to stay as long as you like.” His gaze dropped to her stomach, her thighs, to places so very intimate. “This is a good place to enjoy a book.”

  He was looking at the book bag in her lap, not at her thighs. She was an idiot. “I like it in here. You’ve got nice, um, alcoves.”

  “The old word is a ‘snug.’ They were built to let women drink in a space where they wouldn’t be bothered.”

  “Nobody’s bothering me.” Duh. He can see that.

  He smiled briefly, then walked away.

  She watched him leave the snug. Those jeans were still snug.

  Stop staring.

  This was a nice place to read; she should read. She took her paperback out of her bag and smoothed her hand over the blue cover with its solo, shirtless male model. She glanced at the bartender, comparing perfection to perfection.

  Shake it off.

  There’d been a scene where the hero had shaken the water off himself after being submerged in a moonlit lake. He’d been in human form, but he’d shaken himself as a wolf would. It had been the heroine’s first clue that he was no ordinary man.

  The bartender stopped at the table where she’d been reading earlier. He looked out the window for a moment, a silhouette against the last of the late afternoon sun, a man who was trapped on the inside, looking out. A lone wolf or, more simply, a lonely man.

  You’re still staring. This sudden attraction was fanciful, fueled by fiction and utterly ridiculous. She opened her book, but she couldn’t focus on the black type.

  If that man was a lone wolf, then Delphinia would have to be the meekest, most domesticated puppy. She was her parents’ academic lapdog, at any rate. She knew what they wanted and how to please them, and she did so for a pat on the head. She’d never dare to adventure near an alpha male who looked at her as if he were a ravenous wolf. He could eat her in one bite.

  She closed her book in defeat and ran her hand over the bench’s carved rosette. Even the tamest lapdog had a little bit of an inner wolf, didn’t it? Hers was getting restless again, as it had at the start of the school year, when she’d been brooding alone in her classroom. She’d made changes then.

  She was cowering alone in a snug now. Something had to change.

  Delphinia took out her phone. There was an email she hadn’t answered for a week, but now she knew what she wanted to say. She hit Reply and began typing to the head of the English department—not her mother. The one at BCC.

>   I’m sorry to hear that your professor must have surgery. Yes, I will be able to teach Shakespeare II in his place when classes resume after spring break. Thank you for the offer.

  She jabbed the send button. There. She’d answered the call of the wild.

  Now what?

  She stared at the stage.

  At the balcony.

  O, that I might touch that cheek.

  Now, she wanted to stop resisting this pull she felt toward the bartender. It wasn’t every day that she ran into a man with the physique of a Greek god and the words of Shakespeare on his lips. He’d noticed her. He’d saluted her. When he’d come closer, that alpha aura had practically been a tangible force. It attracted her as if he were iron and she were a magnet.

  Nothing would come of it. He wasn’t her type, and she couldn’t possibly be his, but she wanted to see what it felt like to be near the kind of man she fell in love with in paperbacks. Besides, it would never be easier to approach a lone wolf without being in any danger of getting eaten. He was a bartender. She only had to walk up to the bar, set her glass down and talk.

  He was leaving soon, once Kristopher returned. Delphinia took her lip gloss and a travel-sized hairbrush out of her bag, hurrying before her time ran out. Look out, world—Dr. Dee was going to let her inner wolf free for fifteen whole minutes.

  Then she’d scamper back to her safe little doghouse on the second floor of her parents’ home, because she possessed all the inner wolf of a puppy.

  Arf, arf.

  Chapter Five

  Rembrandt walked up to Connor’s bar.

  This could be trouble.

  There were twenty barstools. Bridget was at seat fifteen, head still down, trying to sleep. Connor had a feeling Rembrandt wasn’t coming to check on Bridget.

  He was right. She took a seat on the barstool directly across from where he happened to be standing, seat seven. She took a breath, and without any other preamble, she said, “You know your Shakespeare.”

  “It’s entertaining enough.” He placed a coaster in front of her, a cardboard square with a Celtic love knot printed on it.