The Halloween Bet

by Knox, Abby

  The Halloween Bet

  Abby Knox

  Copyright © 2019 by Abby Knox

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Edited by Aquila Editing

  Proofread by Red Pen Princess

  Cover Designer: Perfect Pear Cover Designs

  Created with Vellum

  This book is dedicated to Luke Danes. If you know who that is, then we can be friends.

  The Halloween Bet

  By Abby Knox

  Dive bartender Blake Pritchard has zero interest in joining in the silliness of his town's Fall Festival, including a new ghost tour of a house that's definitely not haunted.

  Blake’s ex girlfriend and local historian Dahlia Jordan is determined to get Blake into the spirit, and bets him that he won't last one night at the haunted house without getting properly spooked.

  This is a very quick and sexy stand alone short read with a second chance theme, an HEA, and no cheating. Also contains a dunk tank, some pound cake, a possibly haunted house, dubious points of interest, and other shenanigans along the way as these two crazy kids work things out and finally get back together!

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Abby Knox

  Chapter One

  Blake

  Here she comes, her festive orange pumps clip-clopping down the sidewalk, headed straight into my bar.

  Shit.

  Any notion I had of escaping participation in the town-wide Halloween-gasm that is this year’s Harvest Festival blows out the door as soon as Dahlia Jordan, Tourism Director, blows in.

  Her golden eyes sparkle and her perpetual smile broadens when she spots me behind the bar. It’s a smile so genuine, I almost feel an old, familiar twinge.

  But then I remember she’s not coming in for a friendly drink after work. It’s noon on Halloween and her office is closed today. But under her relentless guidance, downtown is decked out in black cats and spiderwebs, and every food establishment is serving something pumpkin flavored.

  The way she’s walking, I can tell she needs something.

  Oh, Dahlia doesn’t need me personally; she needs something from me as the proprietor of the Southpaw Tavern. She’d better not be coming in here trying to convince me to serve pumpkin ale, because it ain’t happening.

  Along with the gust of October air she pulls in with her comes her warm caramel apple pie scent, heavy on the cinnamon. Same as it was back when I had permission to take a whiff of her hair freely and on the regular. Same damn sweet energy as always, as if life has never broken her down.

  In the two years since Dahlia and I broke up, she’s grown into herself. Me, I’ve been knocked around a bit. I lost my Gramps who raised me, inherited his bar, had to pay off his back taxes, and I’m still working on paying down a mountain of the business’s debt. Unlike me, the old man was a sweetheart who let a bunch of local barflies run up ridiculous tabs. Even if Gramps had known he would die of a sudden heart attack at the age of 65, I doubt he would have tried to collect the money some of those patrons owed him.

  What is Dahlia doing back in this town, anyway? I’ve been asking myself that for the past six months, ever since she moved back home to take over the tourism office. I thought she’d be busy slaying every eligible bachelor in the big city by now.

  Any man without his wits about him would fall all over himself to please this auburn-haired bombshell with the glowing skin and glossy lips.

  But I do have my wits about me. I’m Blake Fuckin’ Pritchard, after all—the only bartender still serving cheap domestic beer in this up-and-coming little town. My bar doesn’t have Wi-Fi. I program the jukebox myself and fuck you if you don’t like it. Bouncing unruly customers with my own hands gives me joy. People fear me, and I like it that way.

  So, I feel confidently immune to Dahlia’s charms. This gorgeous creature cannot distract me from the fact that she carries something under her arm—something that can only mean one thing for me: extra work.

  “Happy Halloween, Blake! Here’s your jack-o’-lantern!” How can someone’s voice be both perky and sexy? Doesn’t matter. Has no effect on me.

  “I didn’t order one,” I say, focusing on wiping down the oak bar in front of me and not the orange and purple blob she’s lifting onto the bar.

  She laughs, unaffected by my rotten attitude. “Every downtown business gets a painted jack-o’-lantern. It’s part of the game.” Dahlia plops the thing down onto the spot I just polished.

  I eye her suspiciously as I hand dry a rack of lowball glasses Kenny just pulled from the dishwasher. Dahlia talks with her hands, just like she used to do back when we were an item. The difference now is those hands are professionally manicured, with pictures of tiny ghosts festively adorning her fingernails. In fact, her entire look these days is deliberate and polished. I always liked her makeup-free face and air-dried hair back then. But I have to admit, I’m liking this current look just as much. Not going to say that out loud, though.

  “I don’t know about any game; ergo, I’m not participating.”

  Undeterred, she chirps, “Everybody’s participating. It’s a social media trick-or-treat game, but for grown-ups.”

  I grunt and say to her, “If it involves me pretending I like tourists, then you can just skedaddle with that pumpkin.”

  “Blake, come on. You don’t have to pretend you like people. It’s part of your charm.”

  I stop wiping down glasses and look at her hard. There’s a whole lot more she’s not telling me.

  I can see I’m not getting rid of her soon so I pour her the usual—an amaretto sour with a cherry—and set it down in front of her.

  She thanks me and sips it. Her lip quirks.

  “This is watered down,” she says.

  I sigh heavily and let my head loll back on my neck, as if the tacky stained-glass Bud Light pendant lamp hanging above the bar will tell me how to win this argument—the same argument we’ve been having since she moved back here to her hometown. “We’ve been through this before, Dahlia. No, it’s not.”

  She shrugs. “Tastes watered down.”

  I huff. “It’s on the house, then. I don’t know what to tell you, D. It’s amaretto, simple syrup, and lemon juice—that’s it. If you don’t like it, why don’t you order a beer instead of a sorority sister drink?”

  She frowns, but still manages not to look offended. “I wasn’t in a sorority.”

  I snort. “You order drinks like you are.”

  “Is this abuse necessary?” she says with a wink.

  I come around to the front of the bar
to polish the brass rail. I don’t want to get closer to her but some of the people who drink here are slobs, and I don’t want their fingerprints on the rail. I’m pretty particular about this whole new handcrafted set-up. As I should be; it was my hands that did the work after my Gramps died and left the bar to me. Gramps, who was one of the most famous left-handed pitchers ever in the American League, retired to this town and lived out the rest of his days slinging drinks. Why? Because he loved talking to people and people loved hearing stories from his glory days. I didn’t inherit that extrovert gene. But this place meant a lot to him, so it means everything to me.

  “Abuse? You’re the one who accused me of watering down my drinks, which I do not do. Maybe your tastes are changing.”

  “Excuse me?”

  I don’t really feel like elaborating, but she brings it out of me. “I read an article that says every seven years your taste buds change. Foods that tasted bad to you when you were younger, maybe you like them now. Maybe your favorite thing isn’t your favorite anymore.”

  She leans forward against the bar, engaging us in an odd game of chicken. As I polish the brass rail with a rag, I keep getting closer to her, but she fails to move her body out of my way.

  “Excuse me,” I say and she moves back, but I’m in such a rush and she’s not quick enough, so my bicep grazes her boob.

  “Whoops. Sorry,” I grunt.

  I finish the job while she stares at me, speechless for once in her life.

  Neither of us say anything for a few painfully long seconds. Finally, I move on to cleaning the tables that don’t need cleaning while she recovers her composure.

  Dahlia says, “You do realize you’re saying this to someone who is extremely loyal to her own tastes and sensibilities. My taste buds are exactly the same as always.”

  After whipping the towel into a laundry bin behind the bar and grabbing a clean one from the fresh pile that Kenny brought down from the dryer in my upstairs apartment, I say, “That sounds like a personal problem.”

  She takes another sip and shrugs. I guess free drinks taste better.

  “Back to the subject at hand. You just have to stand there and be your usual self.”

  I could bounce her for beating around the bush. I’ve tossed plenty of dude bros out of my bar for lesser offenses, such as wearing Axe body spray. “What are you up to?”

  She downs the drink, and her eyes focus on the ceiling to avoid meeting my gaze for a moment as she gathers up her courage.

  “Dahlia.”

  Her shoulders drop. “Ugh. Fine. You just have to stand there while people take a selfie with you and/or Kenny.”

  “The fuck are you talking about? I don’t do selfies.”

  But she’s in tourism director mode. Winning personality, dauntless enthusiasm. “Everyone who attends the Fall Festival gets a map of all the downtown businesses that have a painted jack-o’-lantern somewhere in their stores. They take a selfie with the proprietor and then post it on social media with the hashtag—”

  “Nobody is allowed to say the ‘H’ word in here. Also I don’t have Wi-Fi.”

  She ignores me and continues. “…With the hashtags printed on the map and they’re entered in a drawing. It was Amanda Hall’s idea. She’s one of my volunteers today so this definitely has to happen.”

  Fidgeting, I twist my towel around my hand. Mentioning the mayor’s wife’s name isn’t going to help bring me around. The last time the Halls were in my bar, it was to drop weird, indirect hints that I should stop putting in my low-cost construction bids for small parks projects. Screw the Halls.

  “Lot of rigmarole to enter a drawing. I’ll make it easy for you. Have everyone put their business card in a fishbowl, shake it up…”

  “Bo-ring!” she chuckles and dismisses me with a wave of her hand.

  That smile of hers could win over an angry Shrek. But it’s not working on me. “I like boring. Boring, same old customers pay my light bill. One-time visitors and transient millennial newcomers do not.”

  “But that’s kind of the point. We attract new people, and those people come back and become regulars, improving your bottom line. Also, you are a millennial as much as I am.” She points at me, not letting me get away with my rant.

  I shake my head. “This bar’s bottom line hasn’t improved in years and I don’t need it to. I didn’t inherit this fine establishment and its elite clientele from Gramps,” I say, waving my arm toward Sleepy Ernie, passed out in a booth in the corner, “expecting to get rich.”

  “Is he OK?” Dahlia asks, switching from a winning smile to genuine concern, leaning forward to get a better look at the man in the corner booth.

  Nobody ever asks about Sleepy Ernie, but of course Dahlia does.

  I wave in his direction. “He works a rotating shift at the plant, and it fucks with his circadian rhythm. This is his after-work drink. He’ll wake up in an hour and I’ll have a donut for him, then he’ll shuffle home to sleep for real.”

  Dahlia smiles at me with her mouth closed. It’s a knowing smile accompanied by a series of rapid blinks. Her face is an emoji with heart eyes.

  “What?” I ask.

  She squeaks. “You do like people. You take care of Ernie.”

  “Let’s not get carried away.”

  She continues, “And who said anything about getting rich? Come on, where’s your Halloween spirit?”

  “I have plenty of Halloween spirit,” I say, flailing my arms. I’m losing my patience. “This is the only bar that hands out candy to the downtown trick-or-treaters, and I hand out full-size Reese’s. I don’t fuck around with fun size.”

  Dahlia cocks her head and gives me big doe eyes. “I’m so glad you have a heart for kids. Because, in other news…” She bites her lip in hesitation.

  Shit. I knew I shouldn’t have said all that. “Oh god. What now?” I ask, pausing my table polishing to face her, because I can’t believe she’s asking me for even more help.

  “Well…that brings me to my other scheme…”

  I nod and cross my arms over my chest. “At least you admit it’s a scheme. Go on.”

  Dahlia ignores my jab and goes on. “Since you’re so full of Halloween spirit then you should have no problem whatsoever filling in for Doctor Howard at the dunk tank in five minutes. He usually does it but he has an emergency appendectomy.”

  I go from nodding to shaking my head in defiance. “No. No fucking way.”

  Dahlia presses her palms together pleadingly. “Come on, Blake, the town is counting on you.”

  I turn away and get back to wiping down the table tops. “No, they count on Doctor Howard. Everybody loves him. Nobody is going to pay money to throw a baseball to dunk me”—I thump my chest with my towel-wrapped fist for emphasis”—into a tank full of water.”

  The cackle that bursts out of her is so loud it’s uncalled for. “Plenty—and I mean plenty—of people would love to dunk you. And it’s for charity.”

  I rub the scruff on my chin. For what charity would I allow myself to be humiliated, not to mention risk hypothermia?

  “How cold is the water?” I ask.

  As soon as I say this I know I should not have. “What kind of a man asks that question?” she says, brow furrowed in disappointment.

  Not that her opinion of my manhood matters, but I won’t have my masculinity called into question. I stare her down with a look that usually sends dude’s nuts shrinking up into their body cavities. Dahlia, however, doesn’t seem fazed at all.

  I scratch my fingertips across my scalp, sending my hair flopping to the side. “If you tell me it’s to raise money for the tourism bureau, you can forget it.”

  She rolls back her shoulders in a huffy, prissy, and adorable way. “As a matter of fact, it’s for the children’s library. As you know, the city overshot its budget with the construction of the new clock tower, so they had to hold off on renovations to the children’s wing of the library. A very generous anonymous donor will match whatever funds we rai
se to help renovate it.”

  Well now she’s got me. Our little town’s library is in dire need of everything. And that stupid clock tower, in my personal opinion, was nothing but a boondoggle.

  I slap my towel on a table and gruffly tell Kenny to take over for me.

  “Fine. Show me where to go.”

  Dahlia slips her hand into the crook of my arm—the arm that I hadn’t offered.

  I don’t pull away from her. I should pull away, but I kind of don’t want to. We’re not a couple. We haven’t even discussed our terrible breakup since she moved back here six months ago. All she’s done is pester me at my bar and all I’ve done is give her a superficially hard time while I serve her drinks.

  At the moment, though, my body doesn’t listen to my mind. My blood pressure and my mutinous cock have at this moment decided they still like her. My body would very much like to give her a different kind of hard time…up against the bar. But that would be a bad idea.

  It’s just a chemical thing, I tell myself. Or a muscle memory thing. Not a heart thing. If she wants to walk arm in arm, whether just to be friendly or to ward off other dudes, then I’m all about that. Or, maybe she’s afraid I might run away. That’s not out of the realm of possibility.

  As we make our way down the street on this sunny afternoon, I practice my scowl while she chatters away. A few people waiting in line for their corn dogs are staring at us. If Dahlia’s not careful, she’s going to make people think we’re an item again, walking around arm in arm in front of everyone in town.

  Then again, she does this to everybody, as I recall. Dahlia is not only the town cheerleader but she’s very touchy with people she’s close with. She’s one of those comfortable, born-and-raised-here locals who shakes hands for a really long time. Who gently grasps a friend by the shoulder when they make her laugh. So I shouldn’t read anything at all into the fact that we’re traipsing around with our arms locked together.