One Last Shot (Cupid's Conquests)

by Danielle La Paglia

  “How are y’all doing tonight?” she asked the group, flashing her fakest smile. Justin was sure the others didn’t notice, but he’d seen the real thing too many times not to notice when it was forced.

  “Hi, Shelby.” He stood and wrapped his hand around her waist, pressing his lips to her cheek. The soft scent of her lavender lotion took him back to being that scared high school boy and he pulled her closer, wishing he could drown in her.

  “Justin,” she said and moved back a step, forcing him to drop his hand.

  “It’s been a long time, Shel. I’m surprised you recognize me.” Her eyes narrowed and he knew his barb struck home. Good. Acting like a love-sick teenager wasn’t going to help anyone, least of all him.

  “How could I forget? You’re all this town talks about.” She cocked an eyebrow, daring him to toss another jab, but he’d made his point and he wasn’t in the mood for those games tonight.

  “Is that the only reason you remember?” He stared unblinking into her eyes, willing some bit of truth from behind her façade.

  Her glare finally softened and her shoulders relaxed. “No, of course not.”

  “You look good,” he said, running his eyes down the length of her body and then across the bar. “And so does this place.”

  “Thanks, Jay.” She winced and he knew she hadn’t meant to call him by his nickname. “So, what can I get you boys?” she asked, folding her arms under her breasts, putting them on perfect display. He doubted she’d done it on purpose until he noticed Sean salivating and the girls glaring. Oh, yeah. She’d definitely done it on purpose.

  “Shelby, this is Cynthia and Melody, and this is Sean, my agent.”

  Sean stood, presumably to get a hug, but Shelby thrust out her hand and he was forced to take it.

  “I was just telling Sean how tough Texas girls are and we placed a little bet.”

  “You want me to get the gloves? Three rounds. Of course, you didn’t fair too well last time if I recall.” A smile quirked the corner of her mouth.

  “You cheated.” It was an old argument and damn it felt good to relive it.

  “Keep telling yourself that. So what’s the bet?”

  “The girls,”—Sean gestured to the two pairs of bulbous implants, rather than the women themselves—“well, they’re a little anxious to get the after party started, if you know what I mean,” Sean said with a wink. “If I win, we bid adieu to your lovely establishment. If you win, we stay another hour.”

  “Huh, tough call, but what if I want you to go? You’re a little distracting to the crowd if you know what I mean?” Justin hid his smile behind his beer. He could see in her eyes she was ready to put Sean in his place. She just wanted to have a little fun with him first.

  “If anything, we’ve drawn a bigger crowd,” Sean said.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Take off your jacket,” Shelby said, like she wanted to evaluate the competition, but Justin could see her mind was already made up.

  Sean smiled and tossed his jacket to Melody.

  Shelby eyed his muscles and Justin’s hand curled into a fist. He knew she was only sizing him up, but it pissed him off all the same.

  “He works out,” Shelby said to Justin.

  Justin shrugged, trying not to let her see his confidence had slipped. “One minute,” he said. “Sean said you wouldn’t last one minute against him. You hold him for sixty seconds and I’ll buy the house a round, for the inconvenience.”

  Shelby looked across the dance floor like she was taking a head count, but he couldn’t read her enough to tell which way she was leaning.

  “It’s cool, Justin. She’s not up for it,” Sean said.

  “You scared about losing to a girl?” Shelby snapped.

  “You scared about losing your reputation in front of your patrons?” Sean asked.

  Her hand curled into a fist and Justin knew he had her.

  “Move, Jay.”

  Justin jumped up and slid his chair toward her. She tossed the towel to Justin, dropped into the chair, and planted her elbow on the table.

  A wicked grin spread across Sean’s face. He pushed up his sleeve and flexed, blowing a kiss at Shelby, then propped his arm next to hers. She spread her left hand across the glossy wood. A gold band shined from her ring finger and Justin’s heart plummeted, the blood draining from his face.

  “Call it, Justin,” Sean said, gripping Shelby’s hand.

  They’d drawn a crowd by this time. Leah pushed to the front and smacked her watch down onto the table. Justin took a deep breath and counted off, feeling all the more sick by the look in Sean’s eye. He wanted Sean humiliated, but he looked like he was going to enjoy this way too much no matter which way it went.

  “Go!” Justin shouted.

  Shelby locked her fingers around Sean’s thumb and pushed. The shock on Sean’s face was worth buying the bar three rounds. He hadn’t expected her to move his hand an inch and she already had him halfway to the table. She blew him a kiss and his eyes narrowed as he slowly raised his hand, moving their fists back to the center. The crowd cheered for Shelby. She gritted her teeth and her bicep flexed, holding their hands in place. Beads of sweat broke out across Sean’s forehead. It could have been from his fear of being embarrassed in front of the girls, but Justin knew how strong Shelby was; his crooked nose was proof of it.

  The vein in her head pulsed and her cheeks were flushed an enticing pink. Their hands teetered, Sean slowly gaining ground as the crowd counted off the last fifteen seconds. Shelby’s fingertips on the table turned white as she braced and held her arm in place.

  “Five! Four! Three! Two! One!”

  The crowd whooped and hollered as Shelby pushed back from the table. Neither had won, but Shelby had held her own for the promised sixty seconds.

  “You owe these folks a round,” Shelby said and made her way back to the bar, accepting high fives and pats on the back as she went.

  Damn she’s sexier than ever.

  #

  Shelby wiped her forehead and shook out her arm as she wove her way back to the bar. She’d imagined their first meeting a thousand times, but the strength of his presence still shocked her. When he’d wrapped his arm around her she’d all but come undone. The smell of his cologne lingered, clinging to her like his ghost. It must of have rubbed off on her t-shirt when they’d hugged and now she’d be smelling it all damn night. Of course, there were better ways to guarantee his scent would last all night. She told the voice in her head to shut the hell up and dove in to help the girls serve another round to the crowd. By the time they were done, she was spent. Thank God there was only one more hour to closing. She hadn’t been this tired since her first night slinging drinks a little over a year ago. Glancing across the room at the already thinning crowd, she couldn’t stop the dart of disappointment at not seeing Justin among them.

  “I saw your car outside,” Nate Samuels said, snapping her revere. “You’re breaking my heart, Shelby.” He clutched his chest with one hand and slid his credit card across the bar with the other.

  “Hey, I told you to stop three beers back,” she said, deliberately misunderstanding his reference to her car. “It’s not my fault you choose to drink your paycheck every weekend.”

  “I don’t give a shit about my bar tab. I’m talking about the Mustang. Come on, when are you gonna make me a deal on that thing? You know I’m good for it.”

  “The day you’ve got a spare eighty grand in your pocket, you give me a call.” Not that she’d ever let go of the classic Mustang, especially not to a drunk like Nate, regardless of how charming he was.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Leah said, grabbing a beer from the fridge below the bar. “She’ll never sell her dad’s car. Hell, she was named after the damn thing.”

  “Exactly!” Nate slammed his hand down on the bar. “Why would you want to keep that thing around? There’s gotta be a jealousy factor there. I mean, that was the first Shelby in your dad’s life. He named you after a fucking car.” />
  “I know, Nate. A very rare and beautiful car.” Shelby laughed to cover the ache in her chest. Losing her dad still hurt every day, but it was bad for business to let the customers see her cry. “Cassie,” she said to his girlfriend who’d just walked up behind him, “take your man home.”

  “Come on, baby,” Cassie said. “We’ll see you next weekend, Shelby.”

  Shelby leaned against the bar and watched them walk out. There were only a few groups left at the tables and the band was already breaking down their equipment. She’d owe the cleaning crew an apology in the morning, but she didn’t have the energy to do a thorough job tonight.

  “You look like you could use a drink.” A balding man sat alone at the end of the bar, a shot of whiskey sitting on a napkin in front of him. She didn’t remember serving him, but she was the only one left behind the bar and it had been a hell of an hour.

  “I don’t drink on the clock,” she said, the answer coming out automatically as she wiped down the bar.

  “One shot never hurt anyone.” He smiled and she swore she saw a sparkle in his eye. It had been a long night and a shot sounded like a pretty damn perfect way to take the edge off seeing Justin again.

  “All right.”

  He nodded and reached over the bar, grabbing a glass from the stack across from him. It was one of the etched tumblers with a pistol and an arrow forming an “X” on the side of the glass with “Shooters” stamped beneath it.

  She grabbed a bottle of Crown Royal from the shelf and filled the bottom of her glass.

  “To what should have been,” the man said, lifting his tumbler.

  She cocked her head then thought, What the hell. “To what should’ve been.”

  They clinked glasses and she threw back the shot, slamming the tumbler on the bar. Fire burned down her throat and lit inside her gut, sparking a relaxing heat in her belly that slowly filtered through her body. But her lip stung like she’d bitten it and she noticed a dark smudge on the glass.

  She tucked her lip between her teeth, running her tongue across the surface and tasted blood. Grabbing a napkin she pressed it to her lip and stared at the glass. The etched arrow shone gold in the dim bar lights and she did a double take at the drop of blood resting on it’s tip, as though it had been the cause of her pierced lip.

  “Thanks for the drink,” she said, looking up. The man was gone. She glanced across the room, but he was lost in the thinning crowd, nothing left but his glass with a twenty tucked beneath it.

  Chapter Two

  Bar cleaned and registers balanced, Shelby hugged the girls good night and locked up the bar. The bouncer leaned against the wall near the door, watching the waitresses make their way to their cars.

  “Thanks, John,” Shelby said.

  “Hell of a night. You okay?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  He gave her a pointed look and she knew he was talking about Justin. Her lip pulsed and she nodded. “I’m good, but thanks.”

  “Drive safe.”

  “Always.”

  She slid into the Mustang and waited for John to climb into his pickup before heading to the home she’d grown up in. Less than ten minutes and she was across town, pulling into the driveway. Spotlighted on the steps sat a familiar form. Her hand shook as she locked the Mustang and walked to the front door, keys fisted in her palm. Justin waited on the step, a six-pack of beer at his feet.

  “I was hoping you’d let me buy you a drink,” he said, raising a bottle toward her. The porch light shimmered off the golden streaks in his hair. It was longer than she’d last seen on T.V., but it made him look younger again, like when they were in school together.

  She swallowed the memory and asked, “Where are the Barbies?”

  “Sean took them off my hands for the night.” She was glad to see he didn’t look too disappointed about that.

  “How thoughtful.” Her lip throbbed as a desire pulsed between her thighs. Dammit! How could his sitting on the porch do that to me! “One drink.” She grabbed the bottle, twisted the cap off, and downed a third of it.

  “You always did hold your liquor better than me.”

  “Well I am a bar owner. It kinda comes with the territory.”

  “I guess so. Look, I was real sorry to hear about your dad. I would have been here for the services, but we were playing a double-header in L.A.”

  “I got the flowers, though. They were beautiful.” Most of that week had been a blur to her, and she’d had warring emotions about him coming home anyway. Part of her was glad his celebrity status hadn’t distracted from her father’s memory, but, more than anything, she’d wished he’d been there to hold her.

  “I wanted to do more, but…I didn’t know if it would be welcome.”

  She didn’t know what to say to that so she took another pull on her beer, swallowing her rising guilt. Walking away back then was the right thing to do, for both of them. That’s what she kept telling herself anyway, even if her heart never did agree.

  “Did I screw up? Did you realize you weren’t in love?”

  Suddenly the label on her beer bottle became intensely interesting.

  “Where’d you run off to, Shel? I came back from the All-Star Tournament and you were gone.”

  He deserved the truth or some version of it, but the words got stuck in her throat. How do you tell someone you let their parents pay you to leave? He was going to give up a scholarship and a possible career because she was staying home for school. By walking away, he’d gotten his shot at the Majors and she’d gotten the education her dad couldn’t afford.

  “I asked around,” he continued. “But even your dad wouldn’t tell me. I thought it’d be impossible to keep a secret from this town, but somehow you did it.”

  “Bullshit.” She may have walked away, but he damn sure could have tried harder to find her.

  “What?”

  “My dad talked about me all the time. Every time I came back to visit people were asking me about all the stories my dad told them. If you’d really wanted to know, you could have found out. You just didn’t ask the right people.” Her guilt only went so far. She turned her back, but he sure as hell hadn’t searched too far and that stung more than anything.

  He looked like he wanted to argue, but his shoulders slumped and he said, “Maybe you’re right,” and took another swig from his bottle. “So what have you been doing all this time?”

  She was glad for the change in topic; she didn’t have the energy to hang onto her anger tonight anyway. “I went to school, got a business degree, and worked in a high rise making money for someone else. And when things got really bad here, I came home.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Pretty much.” There wasn’t a lot more to tell without confessions being made and there was no way she was up for that tonight.

  “No friends? No travels? No lovers?”

  “You wanna tell me about your lovers over the last decade?”

  He chuckled. “Hell no.”

  “Good, cause I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Jealous?” That cocky grin of his twisted her insides and she was torn between climbing onto his lap or outright smacking him.

  “You wish. An endless stream of plastic girls is not that exciting. I’d probably die of boredom right here on the steps.” She winked, but the laughter had drained from his face.

  “It wasn’t like that, Shel. There were a lot of girls around, but you know me better than that.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” And she was. She’d always feared his memories of her had been washed away in a sea of peroxide and silicone. Those kind of girls had never been his type, but fame has a way of corrupting even the best people. She was damn glad to hear he hadn’t changed that much.

  He took a swig of his own beer then stared at the bottle dangling from her left hand. “I guess I should go now.”

  “I haven’t finished my drink yet.” She’d been scared and pissed when he’d waltzed into the bar earlier, bu
t an ache deep inside didn’t want him to walk away just yet. Not now that they were alone.

  “I don’t want to wake your husband,” he said, standing up. “I just wanted to see you without the audience.”

  “Husband?”

  He pointed at the ring on her finger.

  “Oh.” She smoothed her thumb across the gold band, twirling it around her finger. “It’s my mom’s,” she said softly.

  “Oh. I’m sorry, Shel. I just thought—”

  “It’s okay.”

  He grabbed her left hand and ran the band between his finger and thumb. Her mind screamed at her to pull away, but her body wanted to pull him closer. His touch sent shock waves across her nerves and her lip tingled like she’d just had half of a bottle of tequila, not half of a bottle of beer. It was all she could do not to close the space between them, but she didn’t have to. One small tug and she was in his arms, his hand clutching her belt as his lips crashed into hers.

  “Get a room!” someone yelled from a truck that flew down the road. They both chuckled and Shelby dropped her forehead to his chest.

  “You should probably—”

  “Keys,” he said. Her head snapped up. The look in his eye sent shivers across her skin. She hesitated only a second before handing them over. He unlocked the door and jerked her inside before she had time to protest. His mouth was on hers again as he kicked the door shut behind them. Their tongues entwined and she went weak with need, clutching his shirt as he slammed her against the wall, his cock grinding into her. God it had been awhile since a man had taken control like this.

  Suppressed frustrations churned into a desperate heat. It was like reliving their first time. They were young and so eager for the first taste of each other. She’d replayed that moment in her mind countless times and now he was finally here, in her arms again. His hands slid to her butt, lifting her up. She wrapped her legs around him as she found the spot she’d been searching for and thrust her hips up and down. He moved against her, heat blazed through her, but it still wasn’t enough. His tongue slid up her neck and his teeth grazed her earlobe and suddenly it was too much. Lacing her fingers in his hair, she pulled his head back. One more flick of his tongue across her ear and she just might come before they even got their clothes off.