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

by Caro Carson

  He looked right at her.

  She dropped her book.

  He paused, then finished cuffing up the sleeve. “You’re still here.”

  Delphinia really, really wished she knew if she could trust her radar, because she could swear he sounded surprised, but not disappointed. He didn’t smile at her, but she imagined there was warmth in his calm expression. Even heat.

  In your dreams, Delphinia Acanthia Beatrix. In your dreams.

  The door opened behind him, and Bridget came back in, walking backward as she spoke rapidly to another young woman whom she had in tow. “It’s not illegal to serve alcohol, so if he says that’s a problem, it really isn’t, no matter what he—jeez!” She turned around just as she was about to back into the bartender. Her nose nearly smashed into his shoulder. “What are you doing here?”

  Delphinia did not imagine the way he looked up to the ceiling briefly, as if divine patience were available up there.

  “I own the place,” he said. “I’m here all the time.”

  “Duh. What are you doing by the front door?”

  “I own the front door, too.” His deadpan reply was said with a twist to his lips that meant he was trying not to smile. He and Bridget were obviously family. Bridget had said her great-uncle was the Murphy on the door’s sign. If this bartender was the owner, then he must be a Murphy, too.

  Bridget looked like she wanted to tell off the bartender—brother?—owner, but she forced a bright, fake smile. “I’m glad you’re standing here. I wanted you to meet my friend, Allison.”

  “Hi,” Allison said breathlessly, then her gaze skittered away as she blushed bright red.

  Delphinia couldn’t blame her. She was probably ten years older than Allison, yet she felt flushed every time she saw the bartender, too. The owner. Yes, being the owner suited him.

  “Hey, there’s Dr. Ray,” Bridget exclaimed. “Hi!”

  Delphinia was suddenly the focus of the three she’d been observing. Bridget couldn’t be surprised she was here. They’d finished only fifteen minutes ago. Something was up—so Delphinia sat up and swung her feet to the floor.

  Bridget turned to her friend. “Do you know Dr. Ray? She’s amazing at Shakespeare. I took her class at BCC. You should take her classes if you can. She’s really, really nice about being available for extra tutoring.” Bridget turned back to Delphinia. “Like today. Thank you so much.”

  This was said as Bridget stole some anxious looks at the man who owned her great-uncle’s place. Delphinia was being thanked for a reason that had nothing to do with gratitude, and she knew it. Her radar when it came to student-teacher dynamics wasn’t broken.

  “It’s not necessary to keep thanking me. If I hadn’t wanted to come to the pub, I wouldn’t have.”

  That earned her a long look from a hot bartender.

  “To tutor you,” she clarified, because her inner wolf was a wimpy puppy.

  Bridget smiled brightly at the bartender, who was not amused with her. “Hey, since you’re standing right here, let’s sit down for a second. Allison and I were just talking about something, and we wanted to talk to you.”

  Delphinia found herself in the middle of things as Bridget grabbed Allison by the arm and herded everyone into the snug. Delphinia had to slide over to make room for Bridget on the bench. Allison was pulled in after her to sit on one of the chairs. The bartender pulled out the other chair with a sigh. Her knee nearly brushed against his as they sat around the little table with her books in the center. Only two of her books—she’d dropped her paperback.

  “My book.” She sounded panicked as she dived for the floor.

  Bridget reached down. “I can get it for you.”

  “No. Don’t.” She snatched it up and pressed it against her thigh, her hand covering as much of the cover as possible.

  The bartender was watching her too closely. She fumbled with the opening of her book bag, then gave up and just laid it over the paperback as if she were laying a napkin across her lap. She smiled at Bridget with as bright and fake a smile as Bridget had used. “What are we all here to talk about?”

  Bridget encouraged her friend. “Go ahead, Allison.”

  Allison braved eye contact with the bartender once more, since their chairs were opposite one another. Delphinia and Bridget sat on the bench and looked between them like they were watching a ping-pong match.

  Allison served first. “Well, I just was thinking, this is such a nice place. I was thinking that I need somewhere to work weekends and nights, you know, when I don’t have classes, but a lot of the bars aren’t really the best place for a girl to work, but this is such a nice place. It’s pretty. Bridget says the people don’t get totally crazy here and nobody throws beers and things.”

  Almost there. You have to actually make the request to work here. It’s not the boss’s job to guess what you want. You can do it.

  But Allison fell silent. She just looked at the owner as if he ought to take it from there.

  Delphinia and Bridget looked at him. After a moment, he took pity on the girl and picked up her awkward attempt at a job request. “Are you twenty-one or older, Allison?”

  “I’m nineteen. Same as Bridget.”

  “Then I appreciate your interest, but you have to be twenty-one to work here.”

  “That’s not true,” Bridget said, exasperated all out of proportion to his calm statement. “That’s not the law. You have to be twenty-one to drink alcohol, not to serve it.”

  “At the Tipsy Musketeer, you have to be twenty-one to serve it.”

  “You let Kristopher work here before he turned twenty-one.”

  “As a busboy and dishwasher only.” His expression was no longer entirely neutral. They must be related, because Delphinia would never have been so pushy with a person who looked at her as sternly as the owner looked at Bridget.

  He redirected the conversation to Allison. “Would you be interested in washing dishes and busing tables? I can use an extra person weekend nights.”

  “She won’t make any tips that way,” Bridget said. “There’s no money in busing tables.”

  “The waitstaff give ten percent of their tips to the busboy.”

  “But still—”

  He pointedly turned back to Allison. “Kristopher bused tables here for a long time. He’s here now, at the bar. Why don’t you go ask him what the job entails? It’s not an easy one. If you’re still interested, come back and talk to me.”

  “Kristopher?” Allison looked at Bridget. “Kristopher Newell works here?”

  Delphinia wanted to laugh at the way Allison perked up at Kristopher’s name a hundred times more than she’d perked up at the possibility of working here as a busboy. Delphinia exchanged a look with the bartender. He was as amused as she was, but neither one of them let themselves smile and embarrass the students. It was weepy Othello all over again.

  Allison left for the bar with alacrity.

  “Now, you can apologize,” the man said to Bridget.

  “For what? For bringing you somebody who would make a great waitress?”

  “For dragging Dr. Ray into this. She’s a guest. You made her sit through this excuse for a job interview for no reason.”

  “Yeah, but I got you to sit,” Bridget bragged. “That lasted longer than the last friend I brought in here. She wasn’t twenty-one, poof, goodbye.”

  “Now that you’ve admitted you manipulated a guest, you can apologize.”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Dee. And thank you for helping Allison get more than a one-sentence interview.”

  From the direction of the bar, Allison’s trilling laugh was joined by Kristopher’s lower, amused chuckle. Bridget leaned over to see the bar beyond the wood partition. Way over. She frowned. “I’m just going to go see...”

  And then, it was just Delphinia sitting in a cozy alcove with an alph
a male who had the sleeves of his dress shirt cuffed up.

  It was magic.

  Chapter Ten

  Connor couldn’t just get up and run away like Allison and Bridget had. It would make Delphinia feel like nobody wanted to talk to her.

  That couldn’t be further from the truth. He did want to talk to Rembrandt. Only talk. But definitely, talk.

  The two girls laughed simultaneously beyond the wood partition. Connor knew that type of laugh. Women were competing to show a fortunate man that each got his jokes better than the other. Connor only needed to glance at Delphinia’s amused expression to know that she was aware of the situation, too.

  “The course of true love seems to be running as smoothly as ever,” he said.

  “Running straight into a green-eyed monster,” Delphinia answered.

  He smiled at her joke, or she was smiling at his. Either way, Connor knew that the green-eyed monster was a Shakespearean phrase. “Play, act, scene?”

  “You want me to do my bar trick?”

  “We are in a bar.”

  “Othello, act three, scene three.”

  “Much better than a cherry stem.”

  He could leave now. They’d made polite small talk. He’d thank her again for her tolerance and tutoring of Bridget, then he’d get himself back behind the bar, where he’d have two feet of mahogany as a buffer between him and a woman who looked as touchable in her burgundy sweater as she had in her navy one.

  He lingered too long; she started a new conversation. “Is Bridget your sister?”

  “No.”

  “Your cousin?”

  It was odd for her to think they were related. They didn’t look alike. Bridget was a redhead. Connor was a basic brown-haired, brown-eyed guy. “No, she’s a Murphy.”

  “But you’re Mr. Murphy. Aren’t you?”

  “Not even close. Most people would say he either looks like a very large leprechaun or a small Santa. He put the Irish in this Irish pub. I’m a McClaine, which is Scottish. Mr. Murphy would be the first one to make that distinction. He sold me the pub two years ago, but I didn’t change its name.”

  She tilted her head and smiled a little. “What’s in a name? A pub by any other name would still be as sweet.”

  “What’s in a name here is marketing. ‘McClaine’s Scottish Pub’ doesn’t really have a ring to it. But ‘Murphy’s Irish Pub?’” He winked at her. “That’s catchy.”

  Maybe he was giving himself away by remembering every word of their Tuesday conversation, but that smile of hers made him reckless—that smile, and the fact that she wouldn’t have gotten his joke if she didn’t also remember Tuesday as clearly as he did.

  Keep your wits about you, lad. He’d planned to treat her like any other customer. That meant he’d now stand, offer her a drink and leave her to her pleasure. But first, she had that book hidden in her lap. He’d told himself that he would find out the title, if she ever returned to his pub. That much, he’d allow himself.

  “What are you reading?”

  Her fingers tightened on the bag in her lap. With her other hand, she turned the hardcover books on the table toward him.

  “Shakespeare for Bridget and Kristopher. Selections of Victorian Prose and Essays for everyone else I teach.”

  The Selections book on top had an eye-catching watercolor on its cover. It reminded him of his art history book, the one he’d found in the prison library, thick with dust on the outside, brilliant with color photos of paintings on the inside.

  Connor touched the shiny, new textbook that had never seen a speck of dust. “May I?”

  “Sure. It’s the new edition for next year.”

  He leafed through it, bold titles catching his eye: Venice, Heroes, Impassioned Truth. The pages of close-written text were almost tissue-thin. They were punctuated every so often by thick, glossy pages printed with full-color reproductions of landscape paintings. His hands looked too rough, his knuckles too bruised, to hold such a pristine book.

  He kept flipping through the book, anyway. He recognized a few of the paintings from his own books, but he paused at the painting of a woman who was standing in a circle of tiny people who held glowing plants and globes. The forest behind her was dark. The light on her face and throat was otherworldly, lit only by the fairy lights.

  “Ah, Hughes,” Delphinia said. “The nephew, not the uncle.”

  Connor had no idea what she was talking about, but she’d angled her body to see the book. Her head was tilted to see the photo from his angle, to see it at the same moment he was seeing it.

  It was disconcerting. He read alone. During high school and the GED classes, he’d never liked it when a teacher would stop by his desk to see what page he was on. He’d even hated being expected to share a program or a hymnal during the prison’s religious services. They’d been another good way to get out of the violence of the common areas for an hour a week, but if he was supposed to hold half of a hymnal while another inmate held the other half, he’d rather sit there with his arms crossed over his chest and read nothing at all.

  “A Midsummer Night’s Eve,” she said. “Hughes didn’t explicitly say the painting was inspired by Shakespeare’s play, but that’s its common title. I’m glad they left it in this edition.”

  Connor was too aware of her closeness. It wasn’t like the physical closeness in the back hallway. Reading the same page at the same time was not sexual in the least, yet it felt utterly intimate.

  “She looks too sweet to get teased by all those fairies,” Delphinia said, her eyes touching the page his fingertips were touching. “But I guess there wouldn’t be much of a play if the course of true love ran smoothly. Bridget doesn’t need any meddling fairies. I think Allison’s throwing her for enough of a loop.”

  Connor kept his eyes on the page. “This woman has Bridget’s hair color.” But the lighting reminded him of Delphinia, of the way the sunlight had reflected from her book’s pages up to her throat and face.

  “She does,” Delphinia agreed. “Maybe she’s just as mischievous as those fairies, like Bridget would be, and they don’t know it yet. I’ll never look at that painting quite the same way now.”

  Connor turned the page, then another, quickly, until Delphinia sat up and no longer tried to see the pages he was seeing.

  His relief was very real. Closeness, connection—these were not feelings he needed to have with Bridget’s professor. They were not feelings he needed, period.

  Another illustration stopped him for a second, a watercolor by Turner. He knew this one, knew its storm clouds over the sea, a thing of beauty created out of turmoil.

  “It’s yours, if you want it,” she said.

  He didn’t look up from the page.

  “The book, I mean. If you think it looks interesting, you’re welcome to keep it.”

  She meant well. She couldn’t know—but an old fury roiled through him. Rich people so easily gave away their possessions. They had so many, it didn’t matter. The college student who’d picked him up as a hitchhiker—You want a can of Coke? There’s a six-pack in that cooler at your feet. So many customers: Send a round of drinks to those pretty girls over there. When he’d been nineteen, with the taste of a stale sourdough roll still in his mouth, a man wearing a sports jersey and a Rolex had smacked his team’s ball cap onto the bar. Another loss. I hate this hat. Keep it or trash it, I don’t care.

  None of them had ever saved ten pudding cups from a month’s worth of state-provided meals in order to barter for a worn paperback copy of a twenty-year-old Tom Clancy thriller. Their generosity cost them nothing.

  Connor couldn’t look at Delphinia.

  She sounded happy. “You gave me a free drink. This would pay it back.”

  Again—again, again—he was reminded of the disparity between them. The professor with her lovely life, the ex-con with the dark past. The
y had no connection.

  He closed the book. He was one of the rich people now, and he knew it. He also knew he would never truly feel like he was. “You’re being too generous. Textbooks like this cost more than a hundred dollars.”

  “I’m not being generous at all. That bourbon and Coke cost you more than this book cost me. We receive free sample books all the time. If a professor likes one, then hundreds of students will need to buy it as part of the course, so you can see why the publishers try to tempt us.”

  “This doesn’t tempt you?” He ran his fingertips down the colorful cover, because if he looked at her, he’d be tempted by something that had nothing to do with books. He loved her hair, her face. He could look but not touch—but he remembered the feel of her sweater under his hand, the warmth of her body in the close hallway. “Then what’s your pleasure?”

  “Shakespeare is my first love.” She smoothed one fingertip along the spine of the book lying underneath the Selections. “This is my own textbook from my undergrad years.”

  She’d nearly touched his hand. The scrapes on his knuckles reminded him of the fistfight he’d had with himself on the roof, so he folded his arms on the table and leaned forward to hide his hands. It was a dangerous trade-off, though. The last time he’d leaned into this woman, he’d been ready to give up everything to have her.

  It was impossible not to think highly of her. She was his Rembrandt. But if he could frame her differently in his mind, so that she was just an intelligent woman, very pretty, sitting here in his snug, then he should be able to enjoy a conversation with her, before everyone came in to enjoy their Friday paychecks.

  He smiled at her. “The harder you try to hide that book in your lap, the more curious I get.”

  “Oh, that. It’s nothing. Just something for pleasure.”

  “But that’s exactly what I’m asking the one and only Delphinia. Shakespeare is always good, but that’s not what you’re hiding. What’s your pleasure?”

  “What’s yours?”

  Seeing you.

  He said nothing.

  “You must have a favorite book that you read over and over.” She looked at him with eyes that held as many shades of brown as her hair. It would be too easy to fall into that spell between them again.