After This Night

by Lauren Blakely

  That was the problem. She needed to pull back and analyze. To think. To consider. “Hey, can I ask you a question?”

  “Fire away.”

  “Has Craig ever lied to you about something because he thought it was for the best?”

  Kim shot her a quizzical look. “Well, how would I know?”

  “I mean something he eventually ‘fessed up to,” she added.

  “Ah, gotcha,” Kim said, scrunching up her forehead as she considered the question. Then she thrust her finger in the air. “Yes! He used to tell me he loved my pot roast when we were first dating, and it turned out he really thought it was dry and stringy.”

  Julia laughed. “Tell the truth, Kim. Is your pot roast dry and stringy?”

  Kim threw back her head and chuckled. “Evidently, I make the worst pot roast in the entire universe. It’s that bad. But you know what?”

  “What?”

  “Now if he ever bugs me by leaving his dirty socks on the floor, or failing to put the toilet seat down, I just threaten him with my pot roast. Keeps that man in line,” she said, straightening her spine like a drill sergeant issuing orders.

  A pair of young men in suits sidled up to the bar and Kim turned her attention to them. Julia’s mind stayed put on Kim’s story and how it had a happy ending. Wasn’t that what everyone wanted? A happy ending? But was a pot-roast fib the same as an omission of the truth?

  She didn’t know, and wasn’t sure how to arrive at an answer. Her brain had grown cloudier in the last twenty-four hours, fuzzier with the distance. Had she overreacted? Been too quick to anger? She was a hot-tempered woman. She knew that about herself. But she valued independence more than anything. Even more than love. If she were to give up her independence, her job, her bar, her home, her sister, even her hairdresser, she had to know with the same clarity she had about how to make a kick-ass cocktail that uprooting her whole damn life—like she were picking up a carpet and shaking everything off it, come what may—was as right as right could be.

  Come what may.

  That was the real risk, wasn’t it? Charging headfirst into the great unknown. Throwing away the self-protective armor she’d built since Dillon’s betrayal, and shedding all her fiery independence for a chance that could flame out and fade away. Living in close quarters could turn the two of them—two strong-willed, stubborn, controlling people—into a collision course for disaster.

  Or they could become better together, come what may.

  “Hey Kim,” Julia called out as her co-worker deposited the drinks to the customers. “I just thought of another name for a drink. Come What May.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Something risky. Something that makes you want to take a chance. What do you think?”

  “I think we need to break out our beakers and start mixing,” Kim said, bumping her hip against Julia’s.

  “Ouch, I think you whacked me with your gigantic belly.”

  “It’s a weapon of mass destruction. Beware,” Kim said, rubbing her hands over her beach ball-sized stomach as she reached for spirits to test. “Let’s start with— ”

  But Kim’s suggestion was cut short by the clearing of a throat. Julia swiveled around to the bar and spotted a familiar face. She couldn’t connect a name to the man, or why she knew him, but the older, dapper gentleman was giving her a serious case of déjà vu, and she hoped he’d alleviate it soon.

  “Good evening. I was hoping to find Julia Bell,” he said, and that didn’t help her one bit. In fact, all her instincts told her that he was working for Charlie, or looking for Dillon, or somehow that she was going to be in a heap of trouble again. A fleet of nerves launched inside her, and she could feel the inklings of flight or fight kick in.

  “That’s me,” she answered, calling on her best tough-chick-behind-the-saloon-bar persona.

  “We met briefly before,” he began, and something about his classy voice tickled her memory. He wasn’t one of Charlie’s men after all. Charlie’s men were rougher around the edges. This man was proper and finished, like a gentlemanly professor. “And you made me the most fantastic drink I’ve ever had.”

  Her lips curved up, a smile threatening to break across her face. “Was it my Purple Snow Globe?”

  “Indeed it was.” He extended a hand to shake. “I’m Glen Mills, and my magazine has been running a search for the best cocktail ever.”

  Julia took his hand. “And I trust you found that cocktail here at Cubic Z?”

  * * *

  Clay sank down onto Michele’s couch. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  She flashed a small, sad smile. “Why didn’t you ever notice?”

  He held out his hands, showing they were empty. “I don’t know.”

  “Did you? Notice, finally?” she asked, and her voice rose, touching some kind of hopeful note as she sat down across from him in a dove gray chair in her apartment.

  He shook his head. “No. But then, lately, I haven’t been so astute at connecting the dots, in the right time or the right fashion.”

  “Then how did you figure it out?” she asked, cocking her head curiously.

  “I didn’t. Julia did. She mentioned it when we went outside during the game.”

  Michele winced, then dropped her head in her hands. “She must hate me,” she muttered.

  “No,” he said quickly, needing to reassure her. “She doesn’t hate you at all. She’s not like that. She thinks you are lovely, and smart, and funny,” he said, repeating Julia’s words from Saturday. “And I happen to agree with her.”

  Michele raised her face, and rolled her eyes in self-deprecation. “Some good that did.”

  “Michele,” he said gently.

  She shook her head several times. “I feel like an idiot.”

  “Please don’t. You’re the farthest thing from that. If anyone’s the idiot, it’s me. I didn’t have a clue.”

  She managed a small laugh. “I wish I could say that’s because I was so good at hiding how I felt, but seeing as Julia noticed it instantly and you didn’t have an inkling for ten years, I’m going to have to go with you being completely blind to what’s in front of you sometimes. I just have to wonder, though, Clay, how could you not tell?”

  He raised both shoulders, shrugging. “I’ve been trying to figure out how I missed it and all I can conclude is this—I care about you so deeply as a friend, and you’re Davis’s sister, and I feel like the three of us are kind of in the trenches together. Like we’ve risen up together in our jobs, and we’re this great threesome of friends somehow. I guess I only ever saw you that way.”

  “Let me ask you a question then,” she said, taking a deep breath, the look in her eyes one of fierce determination. “If you’d have known how I felt, would it have made a difference anyway?”

  He locked eyes with the woman he’d been friends with for so long. With his best friend’s sister. With the gal he had drinks with every Thursday night. The person he’d turned to for advice on the woman who had confused him. She was his friend, always had been, and that’s how he wanted to keep her. He shook his head, and sighed. “No,” he admitted. “I’m sorry.”

  She held up a hand. “Please,” she said firmly. “No pity for me.”

  “It’s not pity.”

  “I mean it, Clay,” she said. “I’m going to be fine. I’ve been in love with you for ten fucking years, and have managed it. Now it’s time I get out of love with you.”

  He sank deeper into the couch, and breathed out hard. “Why didn’t you say something, if you felt that way?”

  She closed her eyes briefly, then opened them. Her mouth was set in a firm line. Then she spoke. “I think, deep down, I knew it was unrequited. That even if I told you, I knew that it wouldn’t change a thing. That whatever that kiss was about in college was all it was ever going to be, but it did a number on me.”

  He tilted his head, stared at her as if she were a science project he was in the middle of constructing. “Why? From one kiss?”r />
  “It was the kiss, but most of all, it was you. I thought you were the most handsome man I’d ever met, and smart, and funny, and most of all, you had your act together. You have no idea what my days are like,” she said, with a light laugh. “I love my job. But I spend my days with a lot of messed-up people. And you’re the least fucked-up person I’ve ever known. You don’t have issues. You don’t have baggage. What you see is what you get. For someone who spends all day fixing people, I suppose I really have been longing for someone I didn’t have to fix.”

  “I take it Liam isn’t doing it for you?”

  “See, that’s not fair. How can you be so observant about my feelings for Liam, but so clueless about how I felt for you?”

  “Pretty amazing how I can have blinders on about certain things, isn’t it?”

  “I do like him . . .” she said, then let her voice trail off.

  “But?”

  “But, it’s hard to like someone when you’ve been focused on someone else.”

  “I can understand that,” he said, since Julia was his whole world.

  “You’re madly in love with Julia, aren’t you?”

  “Madly doesn’t even begin to cover it. But we really don’t have to talk about her,” he said softly.

  “I’m a big girl. I can handle it. Talk to me.”

  “I mean it, Michele. I don’t want you to be uncomfortable. You need to tell me if it upsets you if I talk about her.”

  “I survived six hours of poker with you having your hands all over her, and watching that dopey look of love in your eyes the whole time,” she said, both teasing and being truthful. “I can handle talking about her. And if I can’t, I’ll let you know.”

  He patted the couch. “Sit next to me.”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”

  “What, are you going to throw yourself at me? I’m strong. I’ll fight you off.”

  “Oh, gee. Thanks.”

  “C’mon. We’re friends, and hell if I’m letting you go over this.”

  She moved off the chair and sat next to him on the couch, tentative in the way she folded her legs up under her, keeping a bit of distance. He took her hand, clasped it in his. “I need plenty of fixing. Trust me on that.”

  “Okay,” she said playfully. “You need Dr. Milo again?”

  “I always need Dr. Milo, but I also need you to know I think you’re an amazing, beautiful person, and you are going to make some man the happiest man on the planet, and you probably won’t need to fix him either.”

  She squeezed his hand, and it felt good, comforting. Like something he didn’t want to lose. “But now you need me to fix something, don’t you?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “You just said you’re tired of fixing people all day. I’ll be okay.”

  “I said I don’t want to fix the man I’m going to be involved with. But I think we’ve established that we’re friends. And besides, I have a feeling—call me crazy—that you might really need my help. You screwed things up with Julia, didn’t you?”

  He nodded, guilt written all over his face.

  “Tell me everything,” she said.

  He didn’t tell her everything. He’d promised Julia to keep her secrets about her debt. But he told Michele enough about what he’d done. “So what do I do? Just wait for her to decide if she’ll move to New York for me?”

  Michele nodded. “I’m afraid in this situation, patience is going to be a virtue. But I also think you need to find a way to show her that you can fix things. That when a mistake has been made, you can do more than apologize. Show her through your actions, not just your words. Show her you can fix the things that matter to her.”

  And with blinding clarity, he knew what to do.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Julia’s jaw dropped at the mention of all the zeroes. “That’s the size of the prize?”

  Glen Mills nodded and said yes, again and again and again.

  “I won a contest I didn’t even know I was in AND you want to just give me that much money? No strings attached?”

  Glen chuckled, and even his laugh sounded proper. “Well, the string attached is we would very much like to offer you a contract to manufacture the drink in conjunction with Farrell Spirits,” he said, mentioning the name of one of the world’s largest premium drink makers that was home to many top-flight rums, vodkas, gins and whiskeys bottled around the world.

  “Oh my God, like those cosmo and mojito mixes you see in grocery stores,” Kim said with a shriek.

  Julia turned to Kim, and it was like looking in a mirror and seeing a grin as wide as the sea, eyes twinkling, surprise and shock etched across her face. She returned her gaze to the gray-haired gentleman, who’d become something of a Santa Claus. Dropping in unexpectedly, bringing only presents, and a ho, ho, ho. But Santa wasn’t real, and there had to be some loophole he’d spring on her. The devil lived in the details, and bathed himself in fine print. She rearranged her features, fixing a more serious look on her face. “There has to be some kind of catch? Do I have to give up my bar, or my firstborn, or an arm, maybe?”

  Glen laughed, and shook his head. “No, Ms. Bell. We simply want to be in business with you. Farrell Spirits contracted my magazine to embark on a nationwide hunt for the best cocktail and the string attached is that the company would very much like to make it and turn it into a mass-market available product.”

  Chills raced over her skin, goose bumps of sheer possibility. She didn’t know what to do or say. But this must be what it felt like to win the lottery: disbelief of the highest order. “So you want the recipe, of course?”

  “We are going to need the recipe if we agree to the terms, but I assure you it will not be printed in the magazine. It would become a trade secret of course, and Cubic Z can remain the only bar where the drink can be made or ordered fresh.”

  Julia grabbed Kim’s arm in excitement. “Do you have any idea what that would do for our business? It’d go through the roof,” she said, now shrieking. “And that’ll be so good for you and Craig and the baby.”

  “I know,” Kim said, her face glowing.

  “There is one small item though,” Glen said, interrupting, and Julia’s shoulders fell. This was the moment when the devil revealed himself. There was no such thing as a free lunch. Her life was not X-Factor with Cocktails. There would be a catch; there always was.

  “Yes?” she asked through a strangled gulp.

  “Even if you don’t accept the Farrell offer, I will still be writing about this drink in our magazine because it is divine,” he said. “And there are no strings attached to that recognition. I would simply be shirking my journalistic duties to do anything less.”

  Julia’s smile returned. “Far be it from me to turn you into a shirker of duties,” she said, and extended a hand to shake.

  Later that night, when she returned to her home, she couldn’t wipe the damn grin off her face if she’d tried. Because for the first time in a long time, she’d won something based on her skills. Sheer talent alone had made this happen. She wasn’t saving the world, and she certainly wasn’t curing cancer, but she could mix a damn fine drink, and build a damn fine bar, and no man could ever take that away from her.

  Funny that she hadn’t even known she was a contender, but that made this victory all the sweeter. It was her victory, her prize, and her success. Based on something intrinsic to her that no one, no mobster, no douche of an ex-boyfriend, could ever twist or manipulate.

  As she unlocked the door to her home, she was filled with a sense of pride over a job well done.

  The only trouble was there was someone she desperately wanted to share this moment with.

  She settled for her sister instead. McKenna had just returned from her honeymoon, so Julia called her to tell her the news.

  * * *

  Three days later, McCoy’s was bustling with the usual lunch crowd. This was Midtown Meeting Central, and everyone must have gotten the memo to wear a suit today
because the restaurant was packed with sharp-dressed men and women, angling for deals, pitching their wares, hoping to get the person across the table to sign on the dotted line. Clay recognized that hard and hungry look in many of their eyes; he had it himself. Only this time he was hunting out information, and the best purveyor of intel in all of Manhattan was digging into his steak right now.

  “Someday I’m gonna charge you, but for now, let me say this is delish, and I will happily take my payment in the form of a meal,” Cam said, as he stuffed a forkful into his mouth.

  “Like I wasn’t going to pick up the tab. And you know I’d pay you in a heartbeat for your services,” Clay said as he worked through his pasta dish. “But are you ever planning on telling me what you found out?”

  “No. I’m going to eat this steak and run,” Cam joked, with his mouth full. He chewed, and then took a long swallow of his dry martini. He subscribed to the notion that steak was meant to be enjoyed properly with spirits, the time of day be damned. It was one of the very many reasons Clay called this man a friend. He was steady, reliable, amusing as hell, and loved to share his special talent of finding anyone or anything with friends, asking only for the cost of a meal.

  Picking up the tab was nothing if he could deliver what Clay needed.

  Cam wiped his mouth with the cloth napkin, then set down his fork and knife for a break from the food. “I’ll put you out of your misery. My guys found him. All those stories Liam was telling about real estate in the Bahamas? You were onto something.”

  Clay’s eyes lit up, and a spark of anticipation ran through him. Could it be this simple? That he’d been found, coincidentally, in the very place where Liam had randomly been asked to buy a condo? “He’s in the Bahamas?”

  Cam scoffed, and waved a big hand. “No. That’d be too easy. What world do you live in? The land of coincidence? He’s not in the Bahamas, but you were right to put all those clues together from what this fucker did. He’s taking pictures of homes.”

  “Exactly what he was doing when he was in San Francisco,” Clay added, raising an eyebrow in question.