In Like Flynn

by Dorien Kelly

  “Annie, I changed rooms this afternoon,” he said. “The cold water tap in mine wasn’t closing well. I went to tell you, but you weren’t there.” He shrugged. “It didn’t seem worth leaving a message when I knew I’d be seeing you tonight.”

  Finally, she met his eyes. “This afternoon? Not tonight?”

  “Not long after we’d checked in,” he confirmed.

  “But I heard…”

  “It wasn’t me, though I can be guessing what you heard.”

  Her laughter was muffled, but there nonetheless. “You might be in the ballpark, but trust me, you can’t guess.”

  He wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or insulted that she’d imagined him engaging in obviously other than the standard activities, and so soon after they’d arrived, too. No decision on the point seemed to best suit the bill. Nor did he have to talk, because Annie was now deep in discussion with herself.

  “Wow,” she said as she paced three strides away. “You weren’t even in there.” She tipped back her head and laughed. “Embarrassing. Major-league embarrassing.” Hands on hips, she looked at the night sky for a moment, then walked the three steps back to him.

  “I take it you won’t be giving me the gritty details of what you heard?”

  “No time soon,” she said, softening the words with a smile. “But I do owe you an apology. Even if it had been you in that room, really, it’s none of my business.” She paused for a moment, frowning. “You know, maybe it’s the stress of traveling. I’m not very good at it.”

  “You’re doing a grand job,” Daniel said, feeling charitable. Ms. Annie had apologized, and even to his skeptical ears it had sounded real.

  He tried to imagine how he’d feel had he heard Annie making love. The first word that came to him was no surprise—excited. Hard. One after another, the thoughts rolled.

  Hungry.

  Angry.

  Jealous.

  Damn, he hadn’t known her a week and he was acting as though she were his!

  Daniel took a mental step back and tried to grab hold of his common sense. Perhaps it wasn’t so much Annie who appealed, as it was the challenge she represented. He’d been seized by the goal of swaying a woman who could scarcely stand to look at him. Except he knew that wasn’t the full truth. If she hated him, she’d not care if he had women three-deep lining the hotel’s hallways.

  Then what was it about Annie? It occurred to him that for all the girlfriends he’d had, he really didn’t know feck-all about attraction. Just as quickly, he accepted that he was better off that way, too. He’d rather go with the moment than think it to bloody death.

  “So is my apology accepted?” she asked.

  “It is.” He took Annie’s hand and drew her back around the corner. “And now it’s time to have some fun.”

  Which was, he had begun to suspect, something that Annie Rutherford sorely needed.

  ANNIE HAD NEVER BEEN in anything resembling a real pub. As she looked around Mulvaney’s, with its expensive furnishings and fixtures, she suspected that her record still held. This was a pub on steroids, one whose owner had the cash for the best of everything. She knew she should be puzzling out why Flynn had chosen to bring her here in search of authenticity, but she was too giddy with relief to go beneath the surface.

  Thank God it hadn’t been Flynn on the receiving end of that “spank me!” command. She’d just begun to like him, to believe that he was possibly more than the sum of his good looks and glib tongue.

  “Let me give word we’re here,” Daniel said, edging with her to one of the few open spots in the busy pub.

  Annie surveyed the place, then snapped a few more pictures. She’d bet that the tables were wait-listed for a good hour or more. It didn’t look as though the people waiting especially minded—always a good sign. In the very front of the pub, a group of people sat on a combination of benches, bar stools and chairs in a circle. They were drinking and talking at the moment, but all had an instrument of one sort or another at rest.

  She glanced over at Flynn, who was smiling and laughing with the hostess.

  “Come on back to the service bar,” he said once the conversation was finished. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  The floor was noisy and crowded, but Flynn took her hand and ran interference for them, weaving through groups with such confidence that Annie felt as though she was witnessing the pub version of the parting of the Red Sea.

  At the far end of the long mahogany-colored bar was a small annex that she knew was used to tend to servers’ orders. On the edge of this area, Flynn stopped in front of a man wearing an emerald-green polo shirt with the Mulvaney’s logo. He was shorter than Flynn and had red hair that had begun to recede. He and Flynn engaged in that handshake/backslap ritual that was exclusively a male greeting. When they were done, both turned to her.

  “Annie,” Flynn said over the noise, “this is Brian Naughton, an old friend from university. Brian’s in charge of everything east of the Mississippi, unless he’s been overstating his importance.”

  “Only the Mulvaney’s Pubs,” Brian qualified. “Welcome, Annie. Any friend of Daniel’s is a woman to be pitied.”

  Flynn laughed. “Save the insults. Annie has a low enough opinion of me already.”

  Annie shook hands with Brian. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “And you,” Flynn’s friend said. “Daniel’s said he’s going to be working with you for a while.”

  “He’s helping get a project off the ground.”

  Brian nodded. “So he’s mentioned. Can I get you something to drink?”

  She’d learned on Friday night that alcohol and emotion were a toxic mix in her system. “Just some water, thanks.”

  “Daniel?”

  He eyed the bar. “A pint of stout, I’m thinking.”

  “Maura, water and a pint,” Brian called to the service bartender.

  The water appeared almost instantaneously. The pint, Annie noted, was a slower process, with the glass three-quarters poured, then left to settle.

  Annie thanked Brian for the water and sipped at it while the two guys caught up on common friends.

  “So, Annie, have you been with the Donovan family long?” Brian asked as he handed Flynn his now fully poured pint.

  “A little over five years,” she answered, scooting back a bit to let a waiter by, his tray heavy with drinks. She bumped into Flynn, who settled a calming hand on her shoulder. At least it should have been calming, except for the jump to her pulse.

  “Ah, that’s nothing, yet,” Brian said. “I’m nearing ten years with Mulvaney’s.”

  “Either sounds like torture to me,” Flynn commented.

  “And sometimes to me,” Brian replied, then raised a cautionary hand. “Don’t be getting me wrong, I have the perfect job for my particular talents.” He smiled at Annie, then added, “Daniel, here, has this way of making the rest of us poor work-a-day slobs wonder ‘what if?’ We don’t travel half the year and we never meet royalty.”

  “Royalty? At your family pub?” she asked Flynn.

  “No, unless you count Mad Johnny McMahon, the self-proclaimed King of Clifden. The royalty—and minor at that—was actually an interview for a magazine I write for. You won’t find it outside Europe.”

  “Ah. Small potatoes, then,” she said, slipping into his casual tone.

  “Exactly.”

  Brian laughed. “You see? He’s humble, too. He’s not even mentioning his novel.”

  Annie thought she might have caught Flynn glaring at his friend.

  “The one that earned me nearly enough for a sack of groceries?” he asked. “Why mention it at all?”

  “See, there’s no living with him,” Brian said to Annie.

  A server waiting in line at the service bar turned and joined the conversation. “You’re the infamous Daniel Flynn, right?” she asked.

  “I am.”

  “Why don’t you let us hear if you’re as awful at music as Brian has been saying
.”

  Flynn smiled, but didn’t budge. “Worse, I promise.”

  “One song,” she wheedled.

  “Go on,” Annie said. “I’ll talk business while you’re gone.”

  “I’d rather you did it in front of me,” he said, but allowed himself to be dragged off all the same.

  “So you’ve not heard Daniel play?” Brian asked.

  “No.” Between the writing and the university education, Annie wasn’t sure she was ready to, either. She’d had Flynn nicely pigeonholed, but he’d flown the coop.

  “Come on,” Brian said. “We’ll find a spot toward the front.” He signaled one of the staff over and asked him to bring some chairs. As Annie and Brian were cutting through the throng, he said over his shoulder, “Daniel told me that old Hal Donovan has decided to start a pub chain.”

  “That’s the general plan.”

  “And here I am consorting with the enemy.” Laughing, he shook his head. “Only for Daniel Flynn.”

  They had worked their way up to the musicians’ area. The waiter arrived, carrying two low stools over his head. He set them just outside of the circle, next to a table that held a clutter of the musicians’ drinks.

  Brian nodded his thanks to his employee. They sat, Annie facing the circle, and Brian, more angled away. She did her best to keep her attention trained on Brian, but it was a losing battle. She watched as Flynn took an offered fiddle, gave his thanks to the owner, then turned away from the circle of musicians and well, fiddled, she guessed, until satisfied that he knew the instrument.

  “‘Miss Monaghan’s Reel’,” he said to the others in the circle.

  Everybody readied. Daniel began to tap out a rhythm, then started to play. After a few moments, the other musicians joined in. Annie, who had quit piano lessons after three miserable years, was floored. Flynn wasn’t one of those cheesy fake-a-few-songs-to-get-the-girls-hot dabblers that she recalled from college. He could really play.

  Other than a short-lived phase at age fifteen, she had never considered “groupie” as a career path. As she watched Flynn—and watched the other women in the area watch Flynn…bitches—Annie did some serious rethinking. The pay wouldn’t be all that great, but she had a feeling that the fringe benefits would sweeten the deal. Considerably.

  “Annie?”

  She dragged her focus from just over Brian’s shoulder to his face. “Yes?”

  “I was asking how quickly you turn tables in one of Donovan’s restaurants.”

  “Oh…fifteen minutes, I think.”

  “Fifteen?”

  Annie winced when she realized what she’d said. She’d never acted this unprofessionally, not even during endless management meetings when she fantasized about using fat black binder clips to clamp shut Hal’s sons’ mouths.

  “Sorry, I misspoke. I meant fifty. And I should warn you, pubs and food service in general aren’t exactly my areas of expertise. I’m more about analyzing industry numbers and trends. I’ve kind of been drafted into this particular project.”

  “Ah, I see. Well, we’re a bit slower turning tables here, but with our drink revenues, we’re glad to let them sit and listen to the entertainment. Have you thought about bringing in some J1s?”

  She was pretty sure she’d read about that on another restaurant’s Web site while cyber-pub-surfing over the weekend. “Students on visas, right?”

  He nodded. “Exactly. Come summer, you can have half your staff Irish. There’s nothing like a bit of added color.”

  Annie’s gaze wandered back to Flynn. He’d segued from one song to the next. This one followed the same beat, yet was a little sharper, a little more wry. He glanced her way and their gazes locked.

  Yes, added color was a fine, fine thing.

  When she looked back to Brian, another pub employee was there, saying something to him in low tones. Brian stood.

  “Sorry, but I’ve got a bit of a situation to tend to,” he said to Annie. “Why don’t you and Daniel come by tomorrow around two? I’ll take you through the kitchen, and we can talk some more about what it is you’re wanting to do.”

  “That would be great,” Annie said. And hopefully by tomorrow she would have gotten hold of herself, since what she was “wanting to do” right now involved Flynn exclusively and would definitely fall under the category of “too much information” if she shared the news with Brian Naughton.

  The song ended. Flynn called out, “And that was ‘Ms. Annie’s Reel’.”

  The smile he then gave her was intimate, knowing, and scared the hell out of her. The truth was inescapable—when it came to Daniel Flynn, Annie was growing weak-kneed, up-against-the-wall easy.

  8

  IF IT WAS THURSDAY—and Annie wouldn’t bet the farm on it—this must be Seattle.

  Wednesday had been endless. Daniel had given her an o’dark in the morning wake-up call, then kept her running—and continually clueless about their plans—until three in the morning. He’d brought her to a rough south-side social club where beer, neighborhood gossip and city politics were the specials of the day. They had returned to Mulvaney’s, where she’d conducted a what-would-you-do-differently-if-you-had-designed-this-pub? interview with Brian Naughton, while Daniel had chatted up the bar customers.

  She’d visited an Irish dance school with harried moms waiting in one room and kids hammering away on hard shoes in the next. That night had been spent at two restaurants and three different bars, one of which was Korean, forcing Annie to accept that she would never find the common link in Flynn’s secret itinerary.

  In the course of their travels, she’d met a judge, sanitation workers, the manager of a five-star hotel, a woman Annie remained convinced was a high-priced call girl and a group of musicians just over from Ireland.

  When she’d returned to her hotel room for what rest their next day’s flight schedule would permit, she’d been relieved to see her missing suitcase, but too tired for real rejoicing. As she’d tossed around in bed waiting for sleep to come, two things had ground at her.

  Tops on the list was the way it seemed that Flynn had done everything short of duct-taping someone to his side to avoid being alone with her. Granted, she might simply be wallowing in a little stress-induced paranoia. It wasn’t often she felt like a stranger in her own damn country.

  And that was gripe number two. Daniel knew more people in a city thousands of miles from his home than she knew back in Ann Arbor. Her last waking thought had been that she really needed to get out of the office more.

  After a miserable night’s rest, she’d been semilucid on the trip to the airport and dead out—not to mention probably drooling in her sleep—on the plane. Now, as she and Daniel rode in the back of a cab to their downtown Seattle bed-and-breakfast, she thumbed through pages of a travel guide in hopes of creating the illusion of security in her surroundings.

  Really, though, she felt like a refugee—tired, poor and yearning to huddle somewhere. She half wondered whether he’d run her into the ground just so she couldn’t obsess over the flight. If so, she owed him major thanks. And he owed her about twelve hours of downtime.

  The cab slowed, then pulled to the curb. Annie looked out at a row of fairly worn-out looking retail spaces, dotted with the occasional gentrified gallery or shop.

  “Is this the right place?” she asked Daniel, since he’d told her earlier that he’d asked Mrs. D. to book them here.

  He checked a slip of paper. “It is. There’s the door,” he added, pointing to one inset between two shops. “The bed-and-breakfast is above the book store.”

  “Adult book store,” she clarified.

  Flynn was nearly whistling a happy tune. “Have faith, Annie.”

  It must be painful, being that optimistic all the time.

  Once the cabbie had been paid, Flynn hefted their suitcases from the trunk. With her new clothing purchases added to the packing scheme, she’d had to sit on both her carry-on and her regular bag to close them. She knew that she should probably have thro
wn out some of her old stuff, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. She grabbed the carry-on. In the spirit of letting Flynn feel macho—not that there seemed to be much evidence of risk to the contrary—she let him haul the bigger bags.

  The dimly lit and ancient elevator groaned under their collective weight, but survived the trip to the second floor. Once there, Annie saw the light—literally.

  Leaving her luggage just outside the elevator, she walked to a bank of windows that gave an incredible view over the rooftops and to Elliott Bay, just a few blocks west. To her left was the classic red Public Market sign for Pike Place Market, perched on the building’s roof. She smiled at the sight, remembering how she’d sighed over Sleepless in Seattle as a dateless, movie-addicted college freshman.

  “How’d you hear about this place?” she asked as she walked back toward Flynn, who she had to admit was looking a little worse for the wear, himself. His smile was marginally less cocky and his normally vivid blue eyes seemed somehow subdued.

  “A friend of a friend,” he said with a shrug.

  Annie sensed a sort of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game in the offing, but her brain was too mushy to get a handle on it.

  While Flynn kicked back on a sofa in the sitting area, she registered. Since it was before official check-in time, she tried to muzzle her sniveling when the innkeeper told her that their rooms wouldn’t be ready for another couple of hours.

  Once their luggage was safely stowed in the B and B’s little office, she wandered over to the blue corduroy sofa that Flynn had been occupying. He’d charmed the innkeeper into letting him check his e-mail on the office computer, which Annie figured would take hours, given the man’s popularity. At least she’d gained some nap time.

  She tested the sofa’s cushions with both palms. Content with its possibilities, she settled in. She had just wriggled into optimum comfort position when Flynn seized her ankles and swung her feet back to the ground.

  “No, you don’t,” he said, immediately sitting next to her and eliminating the possibility that she could stretch out again. “I let you sleep on the plane, and that was bad enough.”