DASH: A Secret Billionaire Romance

by Lucy Lambert

  “Coors,” I said, picking what I saw as the lesser of two evils. I pulled a ten dollar bill out of my pocket and dropped it on the bar beside the tray of peanuts.

  If the sheriff hadn’t shown up, Ellie and I’d be sitting down at her little kitchen table having breakfast, I thought with some bitterness. I wanted to go back there, back to her.

  “Bit early, isn’t it?” He said, glancing back at the clock over the bar that said it still wasn’t quite eleven in the morning.

  “You want the money or not?” I asked, reaching for the banknote. I could use it if he couldn’t. There weren’t many like it left in my reserve.

  He reached it first, covering it with one huge paw and making it disappear behind the bar.

  I watched him grab a glass, watched the weak, amber-colored beer fill and foam.

  He let the head settle for a moment, topped it off again, then placed the glass on a square white serviette in front of me.

  He didn’t offer change, and I didn’t ask for it. I usually found that a decent tip went a long ways. And around these parts I didn’t think he got many decent tips.

  I took a gulp of the stuff. At least it’s cold.

  “Don’t get many strangers in town,” he said. He leaned against the bar.

  The song on the jukebox ended, and then it began wheezing out another just as I took another gulp from the glass. It tasted better after a couple swallows.

  “Doesn’t seem like there’s much of anything in this town anymore,” I replied.

  “It’s quiet. I like quiet. What are you riding?” He said, nodding at my helmet. I could see a few of the liquor bottles along the back of the bar reflected in the smoked visor.

  “’72 Sportster,” I said.

  He gave an approving nod. “Nothing wrong with a classic Harley. Seems a bit old for someone your age, though.”

  I drained the rest of my beer before replying. I hadn’t realized how empty my stomach was. That little tiff with the sheriff tightened everything up inside of me, and it was all only then beginning to loosen.

  “They don’t make them like they used to. You ride?” I asked. I took a closer look at him and realized that the leather vest he wore was in fact some sort of biker cut.

  “Back when they made them like they used to,” he said. He smiled at his own joke. “My back won’t take it anymore. Can’t ride, can’t be in the chapter. What can you do?”

  I nodded. It seemed like everyone in this town had lost something. Then I thought, He probably rubs shoulders with everyone in town. He probably knows someone who’s renting. Maybe even a place to pick up a few extra bucks.

  I decided to try my luck.

  “Hey, I’m looking for…”

  Before I could finish, my luck for the day ran out.

  The door opened, squeaking on its hinges and letting some of the daylight stream into the shadowy bar.

  “See boys, told you I recognized that bike!” Bobby said. He shifted the toothpick in his mouth from one corner to the other and then smiled around it.

  “That’s him, all right!” the tall, thin guy on Bobby’s right said.

  I recognized his two friends as the ones from outside the laundromat. I grabbed my glass and started lifting it before I remembered I’d already drained it. I set it down on the bar with some reluctance.

  The big bartender looked from me to the trio at the door.

  “Hey, what’d you say your name was again?” Bobby said.

  “I didn’t,” I replied. I slipped off the bar stool to my feet and faced them.

  “Hey, Bobby,” the shorter goon said, “no body armor this time!”

  I was just thinking the same thing. A heavy weight began lowering into my stomach. At the laundromat I’d taken them by surprise. This time they were ready.

  And if the bartender decided to stick with his townie buddies, it was going to get real ugly real fast.

  “I told your dad there’d be trouble if anyone bothered us,” I said.

  Bobby made a show of looking around. He shifted his toothpick to the other side of his mouth. “I don’t see my dad anywhere around here. Boys, you see him?”

  “Nope,” his two goons said in unison. They broke off from him and circled around to the sides.

  I swallowed hard. My heart quickened with the first shot of adrenaline dumped into my body.

  Bobby took a few steps forward, closing the net around me. “Ellie’s mine. You need to get that through your head.”

  I bristled. “She doesn’t belong to anyone. Especially not you.”

  But you want her to be yours, I thought. I pushed it aside. This wasn’t the time for introspection.

  “That’s what she thinks,” Bobby said. He took another step. This time he spat his toothpick out and showed his teeth in another grin. “She’s strong-willed. Means she just needs a stronger hand to hold her steady and break her in.”

  “She’s not a horse,” I said, incredulous that anyone could still think that way.

  Bobby’s grin widened. I wanted to punch it off his face, and I intended on doing just that before his boys could get to me.

  He leaned closer, “No, but I’m going to ride her anyway.”

  Something broke inside me. Everything went hot. My face twisted. My expression made the grin drop from Bobby’s mouth.

  Someone grabbed my arm just as I swung. They slowed my swing just enough that Bobby could step back out of the way.

  It was the guy who’d been circling around my right.

  Then the other guy grabbed my left arm. They started twisting them behind my back, like they were cops subduing an unruly arrest.

  “Does this mean you’re going to pay your tab down, Bobby?” the bartender said. He’d been watching the whole thing from behind the bar.

  Bobby frowned, “What are you talking about?”

  “This is my bar. I don’t appreciate you coming in and laying hands on paying customers. Especially since you haven’t paid for any of that beer you and these two have been drinking yet this month.”

  Bobby swallowed. I could tell the bartender intimidated him. Which wasn’t surprising; the bartender was a giant. And even with all that muscle gone to fat he was still formidable.

  But Bobby couldn’t look like a coward in front of his boys, who held onto my arms a little less certainly.

  “Mind your own business,” Bobby said. “Unless you want my daddy to start minding yours.”

  “You have it backwards, son. Your daddy doesn’t want the people I know minding his business, which is what’s going to happen with one phone call unless you get the hell out of my bar right now.”

  I wondered then just which biker club the bartender had been a member of.

  Whichever it was, it made Bobby’s face go white. He regained his composure quickly, though. “Let’s go, guys.”

  “Bobby…” the guy holding my right arm said.

  “Don’t call me that! It’s Robert, remember! Now let go of him.”

  They let go of me. I kept my fists balled tight, waiting. But the trio left.

  I didn’t turn around until I heard the gentle hiss of the beer tap. The bartender was refilling my glass.

  “Why?” I asked.

  He put the refilled glass down on the serviette again. “You paid for a refill.”

  “That’s not the question I asked,” I said.

  “It wasn’t a fair fight. You’re the one knocked ‘em all cold in front of the laundromat few days back, aren’t you? They deserved it, I say.”

  I could tell that wasn’t all there was to it, but I could also tell that it was all I was going to get. Well, that and the beer. I sat down again.

  I offered my hand. “Dash,” I said.

  The bartender engulfed my not-at-all small hand with his own enormous paw. “Brutus.”

  My mind flashed back to the sign above the door. The one that said, And You? It was a line from Julius Caesar, a play I hadn’t read since high school.

  “The name of the bar… S
hakespeare fan?”

  “You know, I think you’re the first one to figure that out since, well, ever,” he said. “A young guy on an old bike who knows his classics. Not many like you around.”

  He released my hand, “I guess not.”

  We talked for a while longer before Brutus asked what I’d been wanting to know about before Bobby crashed our party.

  I told him I was looking for a place that didn’t ask many questions and didn’t want any paperwork. And that I was also looking for some way to pick up some rent money.

  He leaned back and crossed his meaty, ink-drenched forearms. “I know someone offering a cheap place. No questions. Maybe even some work.”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Me,” he grinned back at me.

  The place in question was a couple of rooms in the apartment over the bar. Brutus owned the whole building and he lived up in a separate apartment.

  The job was a bar back position. “Maybe occasionally mixing some drinks or drawing some beers,” Brutus added. Cash under the table.

  I smiled. Imagine if the press found out about this, found me busing tables and grabbing kegs. “Billionaire Bar Back Dashiell Beaumont,” that would be the headline. They love their alliteration.

  “Something funny?” Brutus asked.

  “Just life. It’s a deal.”

  We shook on it again.

  I glanced back over my shoulder at the door, half expecting Bobby to burst in again. Him or his dad or both.

  They were trouble. I just hoped I could find what I came here to find before they could be too much trouble.

  I couldn’t even consider leaving town anymore. Not with Ellie here. Ellie, who refused to leave.

  She was trouble for me, too.

  Chapter 18

  ELLIE

  For the first time in a long time, things were going well.

  About as well as they could go anyway, given the circumstances.

  Dash called me and told me what happened downtown. When he told me about the job, I called him the “Billionaire Bar Back” and he went quiet for a few moments.

  It was a forebodingly quiet interlude in his time in Pleasant. It lasted about three weeks.

  Three weeks of spending time down at the Pine St. Park, down at the old house he used to live at. And time at the bar.

  It wasn’t the only bar in town. There was another dive not far from the diner where I worked. But Brutus kept the And You? cleaner by comparison and his drinks marginally cheaper, so that was where people flocked after they got off work or when they got their checks from the state.

  Bobby and his boys didn’t show their faces around the bar during that time. It should have been a comforting fact. It wasn’t.

  Bobby thought he owned this town. If he wasn’t showing himself, it meant he was only biding his time. The same with the sheriff.

  I woke up early one morning for no reason I could think of. But being awake, I got up to pay the washroom a visit and maybe have a sip of water.

  It was only when I glanced out my window that I saw it. I did a double take. The sheriff’s Crown Vic cruiser sat quiet and dark by the curb.

  A small orange light flared inside the car and my heart almost leapt from my throat. It took me a second to realize that Robert Sr. had taken a drag on a cigarette.

  I went back to bed feeling like a little kid afraid of monsters, resisting the urge to pull the covers up over my face and keep my arms and legs on the mattress.

  When I woke up Sheriff Robert and his cruiser weren’t there.

  I wished Dash had been there that night. Not just to make me feel safe. I missed the warmth of him in my bed.

  I missed the warmth of him there with me, the way the sheets tangled around our naked legs while our naked bodies twined together.

  I could tell that he wanted the same thing. That he wanted me. And there were times when we were together, truly together.

  But he held back, stayed guarded.

  So after my shifts I usually found myself at the bar, waiting for Dash to get off so that we could stay in or go out.

  About a week and a half in, Dash and Brutus closed the place down for the night. It smelled hoppy from the beer, and peanut shells crunched under our feet. The light couldn't penetrate the shadows in the rafters, and the neon green glow of the jukebox gave the place an almost supernatural cast.

  The two of them wiped the bar down and swept the floor. They came and sat with me when they finished.

  “You look good in an apron,” I said, watching Dash sit down. The apron was an old thing, black to better cover the smudges and stains that he wore over some blue jeans and a tee.

  “Not something I really pictured myself wearing,” he replied.

  Brutus lowered himself into a chair far too tiny for him, grunting as he went. He leafed through some folded bills, divided them in half, and slid one half over to Dash, who put them in his pocket.

  “Ever since you started, all the women tip more,” Brutus said.

  My hackles rose. Jealous? When is the last time I was jealous? It was true though, I was. And it was also true that the female clientele of Brutus’s bar appreciated the way Dash cleared their drinks away for them.

  Dash shrugged. “Are you complaining? We split the tips evenly. A rising tide floats all boats.”

  I smiled. I liked sharing in Dash’s secret. There was something deeply amusing in listening to him talking about tip money and getting paid in cash.

  I also knew that Brutus knew that something was up. That Dash was more than what he appeared to be. Perhaps owing to his own uncertain past, though, he never really pushed the issue.

  Those late nights together, after a long day, are some of my most comforting memories.

  There were also nights where Brutus decided to cut his own shift short and let Dash handle things, leaving just the two of us there.

  “You can’t possibly like it here. Or like doing what you’re doing,” I said to him when he sat down with me.

  “I do, though. It’s comforting and satisfying and I can’t remember when I last made so little money, and I don’t even care anymore.”

  I leaned forward. I liked these times with him, late at night, the whole world so quiet it was almost as though we were the only two people still alive.

  “What’s it like, having all that money and power?” I asked. I tried not to ask him about that sort of thing, tried to pretend it didn’t hold any interest for me. But who doesn’t want to know what it’s like to live where the grass is as green as it can possibly get?

  Dash leaned back in his chair and pulled a deep breath in so that his chest expanded and his shoulders rose. He let that breath out slowly, and I regretted asking.

  He was still a man divided, and asking him things like that did nothing but widen that gap.

  He looked at me, and in the semi dark of the bar his green eyes were almost black, like the depths of some old forest where the light no longer penetrated.

  “Back when I was young, really young, when my mom and I still moved around a lot, I had this old suitcase. My dad bought it for me before he split. It was used, but he’d found one that had my initials somehow.

  “It was a big one, too big really. I could fit everything I owned in it, which wasn’t much I guess. My dad said I’d grow into it. I remember thinking that if only I could grow up a bit faster, a bit taller. If I could make enough money… I could fill that suitcase and that would be that. I’d have ‘grown into it,’ like he said I would and that would be enough.

  I’ve had pretty much everything a person can have in life. I could buy anything I wanted, go anywhere I wanted…” He looked at me, then away. “Be with and have anyone I wanted. It’s freeing, but all that freedom and money and power was also empty and trapping.

  “I thought I filled the suitcase, but I didn’t. The damn thing kept getting bigger, and the bigger it became, the emptier. No matter how hard I tried to fill it. So to answer your question, it’s incredible. But it’
s also mostly empty. Just like my old monogrammed suitcase.”

  We sat there quietly. So quietly I could hear the hum of electricity rushing through the lights overhead.

  Dash set his hands on the table, palms up, and looked into them as though the lines worn into them might hold the answers to his questions.

  “Do you still have it?” I said. My voice, despite my attempt at quietness, was still loud.

  “The suitcase?” Dash replied. He started to slide his hands back below the table, but I grabbed one before it could slip away. His fingers, so hot, closed around mine.

  I nodded.

  “It’s in storage somewhere.”

  “What about your father? Did you ever try and find him?” I knew that his mother had died, but the subject of his father never really came up. I couldn’t help asking. I wanted to know more about him.

  I always wanted to know more about him.

  “He’s gone, too,” Dash said, “From what my detectives could gather, it was a bar fight in New Orleans fifteen years back or so.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, squeezing his hand harder.

  “I hardly knew the guy,” Dash said. His voice said he didn’t care, but the way his fingers squeezed mine a little harder said he did. Some part of him, anyway.

  “Do you know why he left?” I said.

  “That answer went with him,” Dash replied. Then he looked at me. “Your parents?”

  It was my turn to face the past. I took a deep breath and let out a deep sigh of my own. “My dad died a few years ago, you know that. My mom went when I was little. There was a car accident. She’d run out to get some tomatoes for our sandwiches for lunch. A guy in a truck ran a stop sign.”

  “Sorry,” Dash said.

  “It was a long time ago, like I said. Years before you and your mom moved to town.”

  “What happened to your dad?” he asked.

  A lump of hot emotion caught between my chest and throat. I shook my head. It still felt too raw.

  He nodded, accepting my non-answer.