by Carmen Faye
Her face fell, and her eyes turned back to her glass. “I had a rough morning,” she murmured as she spun the glass.
I imagined it had to be rough for her, but I wanted the details. “Do you want to talk about it?” I willed her to say yes. Women loved the Dr. Phil routine, the part where the man let them bare their souls. It made them easier to get into bed. I wasn’t sure why but if it ain’t broke…
“Not really.”
She wasn’t going to talk about it, at least not easily. This was going to be harder than I thought. I wasn’t going to give up, though. Besides the fact that I needed the information, I wasn’t one to back down from a fight, especially when I might end up with my cock inside of her. Challenge accepted.
“How about a joke, then?” I asked, turning on the charm.
She frowned and turned her eyes back to me. Woeful eyes. Curious eyes. Ocean eyes. God, they were lovely to look at. Lovely. If a knuckle-cracking son-of-a-bitch biker can use that word, you know it’s for real.
“A joke?” she asked, using the same tone she would probably use if I asked if she wanted to step in dog shit.
I nodded with a crooked grin. I’d been polite, and that hadn’t worked. Next was the fun and flirty routine.
She nodded, her face still somber, but her eyes were a little less anxious. “Okay. I don’t think anything you say can make me laugh, though.”
“That bad of a morning?” She didn’t answer me. It was answer enough. “I can make anyone laugh. It’s one of my talents.” It was turning into a junior high spiel but if that was what opened her up, who was I to complain?
“I don’t know…”
“What do I win if I make you laugh?”
She pursed her lips, and her face became defiant. It looked good on her and added a little bit of fire under her good-girl act. Nice. I shifted a little on my stool. She was starting to look more and more like a woman and not like a lost little girl.
“This isn’t a bet. I just said you couldn’t do it.”
I conceded. “Alright, then. What do you call that useless piece of skin on a dick?”
I waved Murray over and pointed at our two drinks. Her glass was nearly empty, and now that she was taking it slower she was warming up. This was just what I wanted. I watched her face. She frowned, studied my face. I kept it expressionless.
“I don’t know,” she finally admitted. “What?”
“The man.”
I watched her. The joke hit home as she digested it, smiled, tried not to laugh, and finally snorted.
“That was awful.”
I grinned. “Yeah, but that counted as a laugh. I win.”
She rolled her eyes. More of her fierceness was showing now that the alcohol swept away bits and pieces of her bad mood. She leaned on the bar, displaying her figure. I wasn’t sure if it was on purpose, but she was flirting.
“It wasn’t a bet, remember,” she repeated.
I shrugged. “True, but I would have won if it was.”
She leaned on the bar, body tipping in toward me. I put my hand on the small of her back for a moment and smiled. She didn’t move away from me or stiffen. She was accepting me. I’d moved to the “touch phase.” This was good.
“You’re competitive,” she said.
Oh, yeah. I was a hell of a sore loser. “I always get what I want.”
Her lips parted slightly as she looked at me with those big blue eyes. The atmosphere had suddenly turned from playful to lewd. She cleared her throat and looked at the drink Murray had placed in front of her. She took a sip and cleared her throat again.
“It’s time for me to go.”
I didn’t want her to leave yet. She was just starting to open up. “Don’t leave.” She looked at me with those eyes. I put my hand on her shoulder. “I didn’t mean to offend you.” Maybe I’d pushed too hard too soon. Whatever it was, I was trying like hell to reel her back in.
She shook her head. “You didn’t offend me. It’s just been a rough day and I… I think I should go home.”
For a moment she looked like she was going to cry. Please, God, no. I could handle a lot of things, but a crying woman wasn’t one of them. In fact, I was pretty sure that was the one thing that could sink me. She didn’t get up and leave like she said she would. Instead, she drank more.
My phone rang in my pocket. I pulled it out to see Butch’s name appear on the screen. I silenced it and looked at Leah. “I have to take this. I’ll be right back.” I answered the call. “Hold on a second.” I gulped down some of my whiskey and walked to the door instead of toward the restroom. I didn’t want anyone to hear my conversation, but I also didn’t want her to leave when I couldn’t see her or stop her. “Go.”
“What have you got for me?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Oh yeah? How?”
“I’m warming her up now. Just give me some time.”
“Pax, we don’t have any fucking time! If the Demon fucking Aviators are coming at us, I need to fucking know, and the way I’m going to fucking know is for you to find out if the fucking stiff is fucking Jonas.”
“What do you want me to do, goddammit? It’s only been what, three hours? Jesus Christ, Butch. Give me a fucking break!”
“I don’t give a slippery shit what you do! I need that info, and I need it right fucking now!” He was gone before I could reply.
“Fuck you, Butch!” I snarled into the phone and then dropped it back in my pocket before I turned and walked back inside. She was where I’d left her, and when she looked at me, she looked like she had herself more under control.
“Are you okay?” I asked her. She’d already finished the drink I’d bought her. She guzzled when I wasn’t there talking to her. God knew how wasted she would have been if I hadn’t followed her here and struck up a conversation.
“I’m all good.” She didn’t slur, but her words had lost some of their crispness and were starting to melt into each other a little. I was guessing she was past tipsy and heading toward drunk. Fast.
“What do you do?” I asked, trying to put the brakes on her getting smashed before I could find out what she knew.
I knew where she worked, but I didn’t know what she actually did, and I was interested. She ran a finger around the rim of her almost-empty tumbler. “I’m a hydrologist at the Oregon Institute for Marine Biology.”
“Wow. That’s different than the usual. What’s a hydrologist do?” I wasn’t just pretending to be interested. I really did want to know more about what she did. The standard answers were teachers, secretaries, waitresses—that kind of thing. This was exotic stuff.
“I study water.”
I blinked at her, trying to understand what she was saying. I couldn’t so I repeated it back to her as a question.
“Yes. I’m working on a study, at the moment, trying to determine if, and how, drilling in the Arctic Ocean is affecting the Pacific coastal region. I collect samples and analyze the water, tracking the level of pollution. I’m just part of a much larger study. My data will be combined with data from other labs up and down the coast, and that will give us a picture of the movement of any pollution and what’s its impact on the environment might be.”
“Okay,” I said, drawing the word out. “And that’s what they do at Oregon Institute for Marine Biology? I thought that place was where Marine Biologists work, swimming with whales, and all that.”
She smiled, and I could tell she was warming to the conversation. “Marine Biology is a field, not a job. I work in marine biology, but I’m a hydrologist. OIMB also employs biological technicians, ichthyologists, fishery biologists, marine mammologists, microbiologists, mathematicians, statisticians—
all kinds of disciplines. But we all are, or work in the field of, marine biology.”
“Yeah, well I graduated high school,” I said with a grin. I caught Murray’s eye and pointed at the two empty glasses. “You from around here?”
“I’m actually from Indiana. I came out h
ere to visit a friend a few years ago. I fell for Coquille so hard I changed my major from chemistry to hydrology and transferred to OIMB the next semester. I’ve been here ever since. It’s been almost five years, now.”
I didn’t see how she could fall in love with a dump like this, but she didn’t know the rough side of Coquille. She didn’t know the scum that hid in the shadows and came out at night after the wholesome people went to bed.
“A farm girl becomes a hydrologist, huh?” I smiled at her, letting myself be arrogant.
She looked at me with mock offense but then smiled as she nudged my arm. She’d reached out and touched me. This was working. It was small signs, but small things could get bigger. If there was nothing at all, it couldn’t grow. She looked at my arm, removed her hand, and blushed, but she kept on talking.
“Everyone thinks people from Indiana, Ohio or Kansas all live on farms. That’s just stereotyping. We have farming communities, sure, small towns where most of the people farm, or support the farmers, but that doesn’t mean we’re all farmers. We have cities too. You may have heard of this small race we hold in Indiana every year… the Indianapolis 500?”
I chuckled and held up my hands in defense. “Sorry. A farming community girl becomes a hydrologist. Better? What do your parents do?”
She smiled. Shy. A little flirty. Her dimples deepened. She was cute in a very sexy way. She was starting to relax now. The alcohol and the conversation had finally taken the edge off.
“My family owns a farm,” she said, ducking the direct question.
I couldn’t help myself, and I laughed, and she giggled with me. “I feel much more at home out here on the coast than I did in Mitchell or at State in Tera Haute. It’s something about the ocean…” Her voice trailed off, and her eyes became glassy. She disappeared somewhere in her mind.
“I know what you mean.” She looked at me and focused again, so I carried on. “I know I probably don’t look like the beachy type, but I love the ocean.”
Her eyes slid over my leather jacket and worn jeans, adding up my look to my confession. I could tell she wasn’t entirely sure, but her eyes were excited now, and there was a smile on her lips that hadn’t been there before. We were talking about something she really loved, and it brought her to life. When I watched her mouth, her lips were kissable. Kissing her was suddenly all I could think about.
She carried on talking about her love of the ocean, and I forced myself to concentrate on what she was saying as I picked up our drinks and led her over to a table.
Chapter Five
“The sea, it doesn’t give a fuck, you know? We humans, we have conquered the snow, the heat, the forest… we can live almost anywhere on earth that’s on land. But the sea is still wild, and she can create and destroy without a second thought. The power. It’s… it’s…” She stopped, trying to find the word, her thought process slowed by her intake of gin and tonics.
I knew exactly what she was talking about. “Raw?”
She smiled a beautiful smile, the gin crushing her inhibitions and numbing her pain. “Yeah, that’s it,” she said, placing her hand on my arm again. “Raw. Powerful. Primal.”
She looked at me, and I looked at her, and we were silent for a moment. Something passed between us, and she looked away and pulled her hand back as she blushed.
“Anyway, that’s why I love the ocean. It’s why I transferred. The ocean, it speaks to me.”
“I can tell.”
She gripped her glass again and drained the last of the liquid inside before her smile slipped away and she was the same picture of misery she’d been when I’d found her. She snorted.
“Hey, what’s wrong?”
She shook her head. “I know the ocean doesn’t care. I know it’s not personal. But today I feel like the ocean turned against me. For so long the water was a comfort. I could go out on the boat and feel free—alive. I could be me. But this morning…” She took a deep breath and tried to smile, but I could tell it wasn’t sincere. “I’m sorry. I’m not myself today.”
She looked like she was going to cry again. She held up her glass, calling for another. She was losing control of her emotions at this stage of her inebriation. If she didn’t have control, there was no way I would have it. Not for what I wanted. I took a deep breath and put a hand on hers.
“You don’t have to apologize. Everyone had bad days, and yours sounds like a really bad one.” I watched her, hoping she would take the gap and talk about it, but she just nodded. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”
“No.” Her voice was stern. She sighed and picked up the drink Murray had slid in front of her, then took a sip. For a moment she looked like she wanted to say something else and I waited, hoping she was going to open up. “No,” she said again, but softer this time, watching her glass on the table before taking a larger hit from the glass.
I nodded. That was it for me today. The one thing about extracting information from someone was knowing when to quit pushing. You push too hard, and people shutdown and became suspicious. When that happened, it was almost impossible to get them to talk. If I wanted to know anything more from Leah, I was going to have to see her again.
“Let me take you home.” I didn’t mean it as a come-on, and I hoped she didn’t take it that way. I wasn’t going to be sleeping with her in this state. That would just complicate things for me.
She shook her head. “I have a car.”
Murray put his hands on the bar; his fingers were fat sausages, and his knuckles had scrapes like he got into bar fights sometimes. “Honey, you ain’t driving nowhere. I’ll call you a cab.”
She frowned at Murray then downed the last of her drink in a defiant toss. He’d been ignoring us, but he knew exactly what went on in his bar.
“I agree. Let me take you home. It’ll save you having to come back for your car. No funny stuff.” I held up three fingers. “Scout’s Honor.”
She pulled a face. “You can’t have been no boy scout,” she said, her words soft and slurred around the edges.
I shrugged. “I used to beat them up for lunch money. Close enough, right?”
She shook her head but smiled. I glanced at Murray as I slid out of the table. Leah did the same then wobbled on her feet. I grabbed her elbow and steadied her. Damn, she was a slight thing. I towered over her. She was just over five feet, and I had nearly a foot on her. I put my arm around her shoulders to steady her more as we began to move toward the door. She looked up at me—all wide eyes and pouty lips—and it took a special kind of restraint not to just kiss her.
“I can drive,” she said as she took a deep breath and squared her shoulders.
“Looks like walking might be a challenge first,” I countered.
She nodded. “Maybe you’re right. I think I’ve had one too many.” Her words were glued to each other and had become soft and rounded; all the corners of the hard sounds worn blunt.
“I think you’ve had three too many, but I also bought them for you. That makes you my responsibility.” I smiled at her, and she smiled, too, those dimples appearing again. It only happened sometimes—when she was shy or embarrassed—from what I could tell. I liked seeing them.
She was a mess. She leaned into me as I led her out, and it felt like a strong wind would blow her away. It made sense that the alcohol had hit her so hard. She probably hadn’t eaten, and she was small, it wouldn’t take a lot for it to go to her head. She also seemed to swing between being happy and being sad. Right now she seemed to be spiraling into sadness again. I’ve never understood women’s mood swings. They were so damn unstable it was impossible to figure them out.
I walked her around the corner of the building to the parking lot. There was no way we were going anywhere on my bike. She probably wouldn’t make it fifty feet before she fell off and I didn’t need my only lead to this murder splattered on the pavement.
I glanced toward her Honda. I couldn’t let her know I knew which one was hers. “Where’s your car?”
I shook my head. “I’m here on a bike, doll face. You’re in no shape for riding today.”
She looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. Then she pointed to the Honda. I held out my hand, and a moment later she produced a set of keys with a whale keychain that was twice the size of all the keys put together.
I couldn’t help but grin. “Cute.” I walked to the car with her.
“You really don’t have to drive me.” She kept looking around like a better option would present itself if she looked hard enough.