by Ava Grace
The ghost of a smile crossed over Coop’s lips and he leaned back in his chair, putting his feet up to rest on the corner of the table again.
“I see that you two have already met.”
Oddly, I felt the need to explain myself. “I’ve rented the cabin next to Mason’s.”
Coop nodded in understanding then turned to Mason. “We’ve already been through this, Mace. She’s suitable. Besides, in about five minutes you’ll have no more say in who I hire, especially if you’ve come here to do what I hope you have.”
“Yeah,” Mason replied gruffly. “I’m here to sign. But until I do, this bar is still half mine.”
My eyebrows practically shot into my hairline. Mason was part owner? That meant he was also my new boss. Or one of them. Yikes.
“Noted,” Coop said. “But I need her. I fired Arlene.”
“’Bout time.”
“Yeah. It was.”
Their sentences followed along with the convention of polite conversation, but there was no warmth to their words. Not only did I get the impression that they didn’t like each other, but I got the feeling that they barely tolerated one other. Had they always been this way?
Was there anyone that Mason did get along with, anyone at all?
“Any other reason why you don’t want her working here?” Coop asked casually.
I looked up at Mason. I was interested in his reply too. What other reason could there possibly be? Mason met my gaze and there was a strange flicker of emotion in his eyes that I couldn’t quite recognize before he shuttered his expression and his face became so much of a blank mask it was impossible to read.
“No reason at all,” Mason said. “Now, let’s get these damn papers signed so I can get the hell out of here.”
Chapter Seven
As I walked into Buck’s Steakhouse, I scanned the tables for Andrea. This was my first night off from the Snack Shack in over a week and I was looking forward to it. But more than that, I needed it. I’d worked all the hours that Coop had asked me to including pulling a double shift on Friday and I was exhausted.
But it had been worth it.
Coop paid a fair wage and I’d made a good amount of tips—enough that I knew I’d be able to comfortably pay my rent on the cabin every month along with food and bills. I also had enough to be able to squirrel a nice little amount into my savings account every week to help me through the quieter, tourist-free winter months.
If things kept up, I might even be able to afford to change my car soon. But I didn’t want to get my hopes up on that front. I’d just have to keep plodding along and see how I did.
Still, it was good to have goals and I loved that I could make plans for the future without worrying about what that future might hold. I didn’t need to remind myself that not only did I have a roof over my head and food in my cupboards, but I was safe.
Finally.
Every day that I went to work or pottered around in the cabin, I felt truly thankful. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I wasn’t living in constant fear. I wasn’t looking over my shoulder every two minutes and expecting the worse. And now, I was about to have dinner with a few women who I hoped would become my friends.
Life was good.
Andrea waved at me from a table near the back of the room so I made my way over, winding around tables filled with happy looking diners. She’d made good on her promise of getting someone to come over and fix up the front of the cabin. She’d been right. A few pieces of wood and a lick of paint had been all that was required to make the place look as good as new. It was far more inviting now. Every day that I pulled into the front yard, I got a huge smile on my face and I couldn’t wait to get inside the cabin and out onto the back deck.
I’d been nervous about meeting Andrea’s friends at first, but I’d decided to be as honest and open as I could be with them. I didn’t want any friendships I might build to be born out of lies and deceit. If I wanted them to trust me and to open up to me, then I had to be open with them.
Andrea got up when I reached their table.
“Hi,” she said warmly, pulling me into a hug. “It’s great to see you again. This is Violet.”
She indicated a slim woman with long dark hair and big pouty lips. She was beautiful. The type of woman that I might have found slightly intimidating, but her warm, friendly smile put me instantly at ease.
“And this is Faith.”
Faith had long flame red curly hair and wore dark-rimmed glasses that framed eyes the color of the ocean. Her shy smile was as different to Violet’s as night was to day, but it was no less endearing.
“Hi, Y’all,” I said, taking my seat. “It’s great to meet you.”
I let out a relieved breath when I saw that Faith and Violet were dressed as casually as me in jeans, boots and a shirt.
Andrea was the only one who’d dressed up a little more. She wore a pair of heels that made my feet hurt in sympathy just by looking at them. She also had on a low cut top and a full face of make-up. I didn’t know if that was something she always did or if she’d made more of an effort for our night out. Or perhaps there was another reason.
Was she meeting someone later?
A man perhaps?
I realized then how little I actually knew about Andrea. I’d assumed from our conversation at my cabin and her longing glances at Mason that she was single, but I might have been wrong about that. I could have just asked her outright of course, but I didn’t want to pry into her personal life. God knows people had pried into mine on too many occasions to count and often the conversations had been awkward and had me answering questions I would much rather have avoided.
I decided right there and then that if Andrea, Violet or Faith wanted to tell me anything about themselves they would do so without me having to ask. There were ways and means of seeming interested in a person without asking them anything too personal.
When the waitress came over to take our drinks order, I scanned the menu and went with a generic beer brand that I’d ordered a hundred times before, but the looks I got from everyone at the table was enough to give me pause.
“Oh no, there’ll be no ordering beer tonight, honey,” Andrea said with a grin. “Sundays in Bucks is cocktail night.”
When I glanced around at the other diners in confusion, Violet let out a peal of laughter. Her giggles were sweet and melodic and made me warm to her even more.
“Not for everyone, silly,” she said. “Just for us. Every month or so when we meet for our girls night at Bucks, our rule is cocktails only.”
“Oh, I see,” I said, wondering how much cocktails at Bucks were going to set me back. “I wouldn’t want to let the side down then, would I?”
“You should try the Minty Mudslide,” Faith said. “It’s heavenly.”
I raised a brow at the waitress. “Minty Mudslide?”
She nodded. “Luke, the bartender here used to be a mixologist in the city so he’s always got something new on the menu to try.”
“His Cosmos are to die for,” Violet chirped in.
My tolerance for cocktails was on a par with my tolerance for wine, but I decided that after everything I’d been through, it wouldn’t hurt me to say ‘to hell with it,’ and throw caution to the wind for once.
“Sold.” I closed the menu and laid it down on the table with the others. “Cosmo it is.”
The waitress nodded then left to get our drinks.
“This is my first time here,” I said, taking a look around. “It seems nice.”
Andrea nodded. “The food’s pretty good. Not too dissimilar to the food at The Shack. We go there one Sunday a month too, just to switch things up. I’m sure you’ve discovered that there’s not much to do in a town as small as Creede.”
I huffed out a laugh. “Yes, but that’s one of the things I love about it here—it’s quiet and peaceful.”
Andrea snorted. “You want peaceful, you’ll get that in spades. You’re welcome to come with us next ti
me we eat at The Shack if you’re not working on that night, of course.”
I hadn’t told Andrea that Coop had given me the job in the Snack Shack—I’d planned on telling her during dinner, but I wasn’t surprised that she already knew.
Since I’d started working at the Snack Shack—or The Shack as the locals called it, I’d learned that Luke, one of the bikers who had been sitting with Coop that first day I’d gone there to ask for a job, was Andrea’s older brother. He and Coop had gone to high school together.
“That would be great, thanks for the invite.”
I was pretty sure that Coop wouldn’t mind me hanging out at the bar on my night off, but if I wanted to get some money saved up for a car, I needed to watch how much I spent. I needed a social life too, of course, but I’d just have to find some happy medium.
When Faith’s eyes widened and color rose in her cheeks, I turned on instinct to see just who had got her blushing so fiercely and saw Coop heading in our direction with a long, purposeful gait.
Huh.
Interesting.
“Hey Coop,” I said as he approached. “You checking out the competition?”
He flashed me a grin. “Just got some business to attend to. Should I be offended that you chose to eat at the competition?”
I chuckled. “Totally.”
The smile in his eyes contained the type of sensuous flame that under usual circumstances might have sent my pulse racing, so I couldn’t understand why I was the only one at the table who seemed impervious to his charm. Andrea, Faith, and Violet looked smitten, but whereas Andrea and Violet were openly beaming at him, Faith had let waves of her long, red hair fall over her face as if she was hiding. Coop’s eyes lingered on her for a few seconds longer than everyone else indicating that the attraction wasn’t one-sided.
Coop certainly wasn’t backward in coming forwards so why hadn’t he made a move?
The other night in work, Coop had informed me that he was letting his goatee grow out into a long beard because he couldn’t be bothered with the upkeep anymore and I struggled to imagine how it was going to look on him. I’d never been into facial hair on men before, but I guess it depended on the man who wore it.
When an image of Mason flitted through my mind’s eye, I scowled and tried to shake the image free.
“Hey ladies,” Coop greeted smoothly. “Glad to see you’re welcoming my girl to town.”
I blinked.
Excuse me?
His what?
There was a chorus of “Sure, Coop,” as if no one found anything wrong with what he’d just said.
If Coop had called me his employee or his new waitress or whatever, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but his choice of words seemed oddly possessive and I didn’t like the way they sounded. I didn’t want the girls to think that there was anything going on between Coop and me. He was my boss. End of story. Despite how much he’d been flirting with me in the past week, he was never going to be anything more.
Coop was a man’s man. I don’t know if I would have called him handsome necessarily, but he was rugged and successful, and there was definitely something about him that drew you in. He was pretty much everything a woman might have looked for in a man—everything I might have looked for in a man if I’d been seriously looking. He had a lot of good qualities, but I still wasn’t interested in pursuing anything with him.
When I pictured Coop, it was impossible to see him as anything other than my boss. I wasn’t sure if that was because my recent experiences had turned me off the idea of dating anyone or because I thought that Coop and I specifically had no chemistry.
Either way, it wasn’t going to happen.
“I’ll let you get back to it,” Coop said. “Enjoy your evening.”
Before he turned to leave, he winked at me and the action caused heat to rise in my cheeks. If anyone witnessed it, I hoped they didn’t get the wrong impression because the blush was nothing more than embarrassment.
“Sure,” I said mechanically, forcing a smile onto my lips. “You too.”
After he’d left, I turned to the girls and gave them an exaggerated roll of my eyes. “Is he always so flirty?”
Andrea nodded. “Pretty much, yeah.”
Violet seemed to think about the answer before nodding. “Yep.”
“Never,” Faith said quietly. “At least, not with me.”
I sighed.
Maybe if I’d have to have a little chat with Coop to set him straight on a few things. I mean, I wasn’t averse to a little fun and harmless flirting, but I didn’t want it to mean more to him than it did to me. I didn’t want to give him the wrong idea, either. I wasn’t the type of woman who liked to lead a man on.
After Brandon, I’d sworn off men for life, but I wasn’t so damaged by what had happened to me that I truly felt that way. I was more than comfortable in my own company, but I didn’t want to be on my own forever.
My upbringing and life experiences hadn’t killed the romantic in me—the woman who wanted someone to cuddle up to at night, someone who would listen to me vent when I’d had a bad day—someone I could grow old with.
I knew in my heart of hearts that that someone wasn’t Coop—even if there was a part of me that might want him to be just because I didn’t want to be on my own.
When another image of Mason flicked through my mind’s eye again, I didn’t try to shake it free. I let my thoughts linger on him. I couldn’t help but wonder what his story was. Had he always been so coarse and unfriendly? When I remembered his exchange with Coop on the day I started working at the Shack, my curiosity got the better of me.
“What’s the deal with Coop and Mason?” I asked. “I mean, I know they used to co-own The Shack, but they don’t seem to be on very good terms. Did something happen between them?”
Violet and Andrea shared a look that I couldn’t decipher and I wondered if they were each silently debating whether or not they should answer my question.
I let out a long sigh. “Sorry. I was being totally nosy then.”
Violet shook her head. “No, it’s just that it’s a long story and it doesn’t have a happy ending.”
“Oh.”
Just when I was about to tell them that it didn’t matter and they didn’t have to tell me anything, Violet said, “What is it that usually comes between two men—two friends, at that? A woman.”
My mouth fell open in surprise and all thoughts of being coy disappeared. “Really? A woman? Who was it?”
“Caroline,” Andrea said. “Mason’s wife.”
If I’d been surprised before, my jaw practically hit the floor at that revelation. When my shock quickly yielded to disappointment, I frowned, unsure where that last emotion had come from. Mason was rude and bad tempered and I was not attracted to him. Much.
“Mason is married?”
“Not anymore,” Faith said. “She died.”
“She didn’t die, Faith,” Andrea corrected softly. “She was murdered.”
When the waitress returned with our drinks, the word ‘murdered’ hung in the air like a bad smell. It took me a few moments to digest what I’d just heard. After the waitress had left again, all of the breath I’d been holding came out with a whispered word.
“Murdered?”
“Well, killed, anyway.” Violet tossed her long dark hair over her shoulder. “It was a few years ago now, but Mason has never gotten over it.”
“How do you get over something like that?” Faith asked.
Violet and Andrea both shrugged.
“You don’t,” I said quietly.
Faith nodded. “Mason never did, that’s for sure. Losing his wife changed him. He used to be so full of life and now, he’s practically a recluse. I hardly ever see him come down from that mountain.”
“And when he does come down, he’s grouchy and bad-tempered,” Andrea added. “He wasn’t always like that. He used to be a lot of fun to be around.”
The lump in my throat formed so quickly that I n
ever saw it coming. I took a sip of my cocktail and tried to swallow it down, but it took three more long sips before the lump disappeared completely.
The empathy I felt for Mason was sudden and all-encompassing and in that instant, I felt that I had a deeper understanding of what made him tick. Before I’d thought him rude and standoffish, now I saw him differently. Losing someone you loved could do terrible things to your psyche. Mason was evidently a man swimming in grief and sorrow who had a built a wall around himself that was so high, no one was getting in—certainly not through any action of his, like a kind word or a smile or a polite conversation.
I wasn’t sure I was prepared to hear the details of what had happened to his wife, but I needed to hear them anyway. I wanted to understand him even better.
“Can you tell me about it,” I asked. “About what happened to her?”
Andrea and Violet both shot a look across the room to the table where Coop was seated and Faith let out a quiet sigh of resignation. It was then I remembered that Coop was somehow involved in this story too.
“Mason, Coop and Caroline all went to high school together and were inseparable back then. The three of them did everything together. But when they got older, things started to change.”
“Caroline was like a ray of sunshine,” Violet said. “She was wild and spontaneous and sometimes downright crazy, but everyone loved her—including Mason and Coop.”
Hearing that was oddly uncomfortable, but I still found myself leaning forward in my seat to better hear the rest of the story.
“Mason and Caroline started dating when they were about fifteen,” Andrea said. Violet smiled sadly. “Coop used to pretend that it didn’t bother him, but anyone with two eyes could see how crazy in love with her he was.”
Andrea nodded in agreement. “Coop and my brother were friends in high school too so Coop used to spend a lot of time at our house—even more so after Mason and Caroline got together.” She lifted her shoulder in a shrug. “I used to hear him talking about her.”
I looked across the room at Coop who was deep in a conversation with a couple of men I’d seen in The Shack a time or two and wondered how difficult that situation must have been for him. It would be painful enough to be in love with someone who didn’t love you back, but when the people concerned were your best friends and you had to see them together all the time, it must have hurt like hell.