“No passionate writhing around with employees, got it – so why don’t you have a non-employee boyfriend?”
“Since when is that any of your business? And we were talking about your girlfriend, remember? You claim not to have one, but you’re also claiming no bimbo patrol shadows your every move – and I’d bet my beer bill you’re not gay, or a monk, or secretly a woman. So which is it you’re lying about? Guys who look like you are never wanting for company, so do you have a girlfriend, or an endless parade of silicone-enhanced trophy sluts?”
Dave leaned back in his chair. He crossed his arms, he looked at me, and I could hear the wheels in his head turning. He glanced down to tug at the hem of the grey t-shirt I’d picked up for him at Goodwill, and then he brushed a non-existent crumb off the sleeve of the also-Goodwill red flannel shirt he wore over it. My body informed me this man knew how to rock the layered look like nobody else, and I informed my body that those shirts, his jeans, and everything else from today’s shopping expedition was coming out of Mr. Hot Stuff’s first paycheck, so there.
He looked up, tilted his head to one side, and pulled me in with those you-can’t-look-away-can-you green eyes. Then the man put both hands over his heart, and I couldn’t help but believe him when he beamed that glorious smile at me.
“Boss, I swear on my honor as a fry cook that I do not have a girlfriend. No girlfriend, no bimbos, not even a dog or a goldfish or a parakeet – I do have a hosta plant dying in my apartment back home, but that’s it. Now, I get to ask another question – which one of you is the real Cassie?”
“Excuse me?”
“You know what I mean – is Cassie the girl who tried to tear the head off a guy twice her size in Walmart, or is she the one who feeds stray cats and takes care of runaway Chicago college boys? Is Cassie the tough-as-nails woman who shouts down drunk bikers who want to start trouble, or is she the softie I saw sneaking chicken fingers to a dog in the back of a customer’s truck the other night? Does Cassie take no bullshit from any man or woman alive, or is she the bar owner who runs herself into the ground operating a bar she doesn’t even want?”
Some people cut right to the heart of the matter without even trying, huh?
“Look, um … I have to survive, all right? That’s the bottom line, and I’ll be whoever I have to be to get through each day and on to the next. So if I have to –”
“So how does spending what little extra money you have on feeding homeless cats help you survive? Why waste your time and your dollars helping me? You don’t know me from a stranger on the corner, but here you are feeding and clothing me, when you can’t afford to – what’s the deal with that?”
You are not getting personal with me, I don’t care how pretty you are.
“What’s the deal with you running away? Who or what are you running from? What’s your real name? Are the cops looking for you?”
There, take that.
My questions did not faze the man. Instead, he scrunched down in his seat, wrinkled up his nose, made a weird face, and pitched his voice all high and breathy, just like …
“Many things you wish to know, young one – but assure you I can that the Empire searches not for me, though think I do that Sheriff Jabba to the Jedi High Council would report me, if a box of Krispy Kreme glazed doughnuts they offered him.”
The guy held up a freakishly long fry and waved it through the air while making light-saber noises, and I missed what he did after that because I was busy laughing like a hyena.
But even with my face planted flat on the table and my arms wrapped around my head to hold in the giggles, I still heard that Yoda voice.
“Alas, wisdom in the ways of the Force buys one little in these dark days – but perhaps a date with his lovely round boss this humble scholar might wish for?”
I looked up and snorted more laughter when I saw that gorgeous goofball waving at the table’s salt shaker with one hand, while pretending to levitate it with the other hand.
He wasn’t the only one, either – somewhere he’d gotten an audience of three little boys who now stood next to his chair shoving each other, laughing like manic little chipmunks, and copying his awesome hand gestures. Staying in character like a champ, Dave handed each kid his own personal light-saber fry, and within seconds all four of them were dueling with the things like the fate of the Empire depended on it.
And hey – did my cook just ask me out?
5
My hypothetical date with Yoda had to wait on the Jayhawk Tavern, of course.
Like everything else in Cassie World, my nonexistent social life had to get in line behind Priority One: doing whatever it took to keep the bar’s doors open. Since I was the only person I trusted to manage the nightly chaos, I had to be on hand Monday through Saturday, from before opening to well after close – and since Dave was my only kitchen guy for the moment, he was there with me each night, frying and grilling and mopping and dishwashing.
In the kitchen, he stayed quiet and busy, improving his cooking skills and cutting back on his nightly screwups; during his breaks he stepped outside, so did I, and – hey, we just talked, okay?
We talked about why he didn’t have a girlfriend. He claimed women tended to dump him a few dates into any potential relationship; according to Dave, once he started opening up to them about his dreams for the future and the buildings he wanted to design, that was it – their eyes glazed over and they changed the subject back to themselves as soon as possible. I told him he was just lousy at picking girls, and that a woman who got all hot listening to ideas about futuristic cities had to be out there somewhere.
Dave grilled me about my lack of a boyfriend. He still seemed not to believe me about that, and it took work to convince him that once the few hundred people in your hometown have you pegged as ‘that big girl who tends bar,’ that’s it – that’s your role, and no amount of trying will get any man worth bothering with to see you as a potential girlfriend. Besides, most of the single guys from Eli Springs took off for the big city the second they turned eighteen anyway – so I told Dave I had a great chance of staying alone until I was old and grey, with only a hundred or so cats named after Lord of the Rings characters for company.
I insisted that was how things were for me, and no amount of wishing would change the hard facts of my life.
My cook just smiled.
Dave smiled a lot during his first full week as my employee. He broke into his mile-wide grin when I said it was time to sweep out the dining area and slosh a mop over the floor, he smiled like he’d won the lottery when I ordered him to haul bags of trash out to the dumpster, and he grinned and bowed like my own personal oddball butler when I told him to wipe down the tables at closing time.
He didn’t grin for Shana, though. She launched herself at pretty much every man that wasn’t covered with hideous boils, and starting on Monday night, she used every weapon in her arsenal on our sexy-as-sin new cook: she batted her mascara-caked eyelashes, she brushed up against him accidentally-on-purpose, she told her dirtiest jokes while wearing her tightest shirts, and she couldn’t say two words to the guy without putting her hand on his arm or his chest. She didn’t strip down to her skin and dance naked on the bar, but if I hadn’t been watching, I so would not have put it past her.
Dave was polite to her, but nothing more. He listened and nodded, he answered her questions with two or maybe even three words, but he never made eye contact. He resisted the gravity of those enormous fake breasts jiggling at him, he ignored her hip bumps, and he responded to her babbling and grabbiness by sliding away to come over and talk to me about the weather or baseball or what I wanted him to mop next, while she stared daggers at his back and burned with frustration.
On Thursday, she gave up.
That night she came in on time for once, walked right past Dave without a glance, and cornered me while I was wiping down the bar.
She jerked her head at Dave, who was heading out the door to pick up trash in the parking lot. �
�Cassie, you know that man is sweet on you, right?”
I shrugged, and Miss I-Can’t-Believe-A-Human-Male-Turned-Me-Down rolled her eyes. “Well, don’t let him get away, I’m just saying – the guy’s hotter than the sun, he isn’t a creepy weirdo, and he’s yours for the taking. What’s his deal, anyway?”
And with that, our own little prairie slut flounced away to consider who was next on her sexual hit list, and she never again laid a hand on Dave or said a single word to him that wasn’t work-related.
My other two part-time bartenders, Sharon and her daughter Celeste, agreed that our strapping blond god of a cook would be all over me the moment I said the word, and the regular customers wouldn’t stop ragging me about my ‘new boyfriend,’ no matter how many times I insisted that he was no such thing.
But big-city-college-boy Dave warmed right up to my country-folk regulars, which did give him major points in my book. He showed old Mr. Darnell from the grocery store how to use his new iPhone, and he earned a round of applause when he gave the cigarette machine a thump with his fist and made it cough up the quarters it stole from Julie Stanley. Men pulled him into their endless discussions of sports and hunting and how the government needed to keep its sweaty paws off beef prices, and he pretended to know what they were talking about; women flirted with him, and he turned them down without pissing them off.
The man listened with the patience of a saint. He nodded as if he believed every word when the Jarratt brothers assured him that yep, professional wrestling surely was real. He did an Oscar-worthy job of looking serious and thoughtful when Mel Painter got that wild look in his eye and started spewing his conspiracy theories about chemical contrails, the mind-control chips the government would implant in our brains soon, and, God help us all, the lizard people in Congress. A rancher from over in Logan County cornered Dave while he was sweeping dust and assorted crud out from behind the jukebox on Wednesday night, and talked his ear off about how Tim McGraw was God’s gift to music – and Dave agreed in a heartbeat, even though it was plain enough from his puzzled face that he’d never heard of the guy.
Dave fried and grilled and mopped and swept and listened his heart out that first week, and he showed every sign of becoming one of the better employees in the history of the Jayhawk Tavern – he even endured the toxic horror that was cleaning the men’s room without complaint. He was a little pale afterwards, but who wouldn’t be? Seriously, have you ever cleaned a men’s room in a country bar on a wild weekend? Or a men’s room anywhere, anytime? I shouldn’t condemn every owner of an X and a Y chromosome, I know, but the fact of the matter is that men are disgusting Neanderthal pigs.
Not Dave, though. Well, mostly not.
He kept himself clean, sure. He lathered and hosed down that magnificent Norse-god body every day – and no, I did not watch him do that, or at least only for a minute or three that one time – he washed his Goodwill wardrobe, and he used an iron he found in the storage shed to keep his limited array of outfits wrinkle-free. As for the shed, he policed it like a professional maid, keeping it spic and span enough to make any mother proud.
No, Dave’s caveman tendencies came out when strange guys full of testosterone and stupid made the mistake of thinking they could push me around.
My regulars knew better than to get on my bad side. They also knew I was not a woman to be messed with, that the rules were the rules and only a fool would try to defy me – but people from out of town didn’t always know, and it was part of my nightly routine to face off against asshole strangers who thought they could bully me or grope me or show off their manliness by hollering at a girl who barely came up to their shoulder.
Saturday night, one full week and a day after Dave showed up naked in my truck, a pack of bikers I’d never seen before showed up in my bar. All ten of them were full of somebody else’s beer and looking for trouble, and one of them assumed that since I was female and behind the bar, I must be a whore who was available for his grabbing pleasure.
His pals got busy being all loud and obnoxious over by the pool tables, while Chunky Asshole Biker settled his three hundred pounds or so of lard on a barstool and crooked a finger at me.
“Over here, sweetness – I’m parched from the road and I am so ready to order, it ain’t even funny.”
I pasted on my standard I’ll-pretend-to-care-about-you smile, and walked over to the loser of the moment. “What are you thirsty for tonight? We’ve got Bud Light on special, or I can get you a –”
“I’m thirsty as a dying man in the desert, honey, and the only thing that’ll save me is a taste of those sweet titties.”
Just like that, he reached over the bar and made a grab for my left breast. His fingertips brushed against my skin as I jumped back, the heat from his hand and the stink of his breath made me sick, and in an instant I was fighting mad and ready to let this clown have it.
“Listen, you filthy sack of shit, you need to –”
I never saw Dave coming.
One second, he was back in the kitchen, standing over the sink and washing the latest batch of dishes – in the next second he was in front of me, planting both hands on the bar as he leaned into Sexist Pig Biker’s face.
“You need to respect the lady and you need to apologize. Now.”
Soapy water trickled down the corded muscles of Dave’s arms. His jaw clenched tight. I saw his pulse pounding in a vein at his temple. His face was carved from granite and looked like it had never smiled in all of recorded history. The broad span of his shoulders was wider somehow, he seemed about a foot taller than usual, and murder was in his green eyes as he glared at Piggy Boy from inches away.
Who was this mountain of anger behind my bar, and what did he do with Dave?
His opponent tried to gut it out. “I’ll grab some whore’s titty if I feel like it, and maybe fuck her too – what are you gonna do about it, pretty boy?”
“This.”
Dave lashed out with his right hand and clamped it around the biker’s neck. The guy lurched back, trying to wrench free of the death grip on his throat, but nothing doing – Dave sank his fingers deeper into the grimy flab, cutting off air and blood and nerve signals as if he strangled bikers every day for laughs.
Whoever this guy was, he needed to give me my mild-mannered cook back and also not kill customers, particularly ones with a biker posse to back them up.
“Dave, you need to let him go before his –”
“Actually, I need to keep compressing his airway and his carotid artery until he apologizes for treating you like that. How about it, Sparky?”
Neanderthal Biker answered by continuing to choke, while his face turned an interesting shade of purple.
“He can’t apologize if he can’t breathe.”
“Good point.” Dave relaxed his right hand a fraction of a millimeter.
My least favorite biker ever spluttered and coughed before wheezing out some actual words. “Fuck it, I didn’t know the bitch was your old lady! Christ, I’m sorry, I –”
He started to add some additional comments, but his voice cut off in a gasping squawk as Dave tightened his grip again.
“And now you’ve called her a bitch. New apology, please.”
While Dave’s victim gurgled and probably wondered just how his evening of drinking and tit-grabbing had suddenly run right off the rails, I wondered how Bikers One through Nine, currently hanging out by the pool tables, were likely to react to their buddy being throttled by a stranger.
I doubted the answer would be good news.
I looked past all the choking and strangling and intimidation going on in front of me, and saw that my regulars had lost interest in their beers, their salty finger food, and the preseason baseball game blaring on the TV. Ranch hands and storekeepers and mechanics looked back and forth between the scene at the bar, the bikers gathered around the pool tables, and me – me, as in the one who needed to deal with this situation before it disintegrated into a free-for-all battle between Harley-riding
gang members and cowboys eager to liven up their Saturday night by breaking a few noses and chairs.
Past the tables and booths full of customers waiting for the next act of tonight’s little drama, the bikers stood around the pool tables on the far side of the room. Their jackets proclaimed them to be the Hellspawn Soldiers out of Wichita, and anybody could tell they were wandering into the deep end of drunk by their wavering steps and slurred growls as they put their heads together to confer about whether to head over to the bar and rip my suicidal cook apart.
Speak up, Cassie – talk them out of this before they kill Dave, break some customer heads, and turn your bar into a smoking heap of rubble. Sure, they outnumber you nine times over and they’re twice your size and they probably carve bartenders into lots of tiny bits just to get warmed up on a Saturday night – but everybody’s staring at you, waiting for YOU to deal with this nightmare, so do it.
I stepped up to the bar, I pulled in a deep breath, I told my brain to come up with some words to defuse the situation and right now, and then Dave happened.
“Gentlemen, your friend here seems a little hesitant about apologizing.” Dave gave the would-be groper a casual shake, like a Rottweiler mauling a rawhide bone. With his Hand of Doom still clamped onto his struggling victim’s throat, he continued, “I have to say, I think his behavior reflects poorly on your organization –”
“Dave, are you insane?” I punched him in his biker-strangling arm, but he ignored me.
“– but if he apologizes for calling my girlfriend a bitch –”
“I am NOT your –”
“– I’ll hand him over to you guys, and we can call this even. Keep him away from this bar, make him understand he’s to keep his hands to himself and his foul mouth shut around decent people, and we can all get back to enjoying the evening. Fair enough?”
No Dreams Allowed: A Billionaire Romance Page 5