It Takes Two

by Judith Arnold

  A waitress came over and Will ordered for them both: two lobster rolls, a glass of white wine for her and a draft beer for him. The waitress nodded, scooped up their menus, and departed, leaving Brianna with nothing to do but look at Will.

  There were worse fates in life than to gaze at such a handsome, apparently happy man. She admired the lean sculpture of his face, the breadth of his shoulders, the snug fit of his sweater over his chest. He had the lanky physique of a long-distance runner—the kind of build she found most attractive in a man.

  Maybe he was a long-distance runner. He must jog a mile or two every evening he worked behind the bar, racing from one end to the other while he fixed drinks.

  She wanted to ask him about the Faulk Street Tavern—or, more specifically, about the tavern’s jukebox. But she didn’t want to come across as nosy, and she definitely didn’t want to come across as nutty. Why that ancient rock song had had such a peculiar effect on her—how could she possibly mention that without sounding like a head case?

  She also wanted to ask him what he’d thought of her presentation and Rollie’s at the town meeting, but that might seem manipulative. Best to keep things simple, and sane. “How long have you worked at the Faulk Street Tavern?” she asked.

  “I don’t work there.” He grinned. “I’m just helping out. I’m…between jobs.”

  Unemployed, she thought with a pang of sympathy. She’d been unemployed for a few months—thank you, Rollie –and she’d had to scramble for odd jobs at a temp agency until Michael had come through with an invitation to join him at North Shore Design. “Lucky for you, you know how to tend bar.”

  “I grew up in that bar,” he explained. “My mother owns the place. By the time I was in high school, she had me helping out, sweeping the floor and wiping down tables for spending money. Once I turned eighteen, I could serve drinks, even if I couldn’t drink them myself, at least not legally,” he added, his smile carving dimples into his cheeks.

  The waitress—who looked significantly older than eighteen—arrived at their table, carrying Brianna’s wine and Will’s beer. Will lifted his glass in a silent toast to Brianna before taking a sip. She tasted her wine. About the best thing she could say for it was that it was chilled almost to the point of being frozen solid. She hoped her lobster roll was better than her beverage.

  “So what do you do when you’re not tending bar?” she asked. The question, she assured herself, qualified as small talk, not prying.

  “I’m a computer geek,” he told her. “A software engineer.”

  “Then I assume you’re between jobs by choice.” There had to be thousands of jobs for computer scientists in the Boston area.

  “I’ve got a job waiting for me in Seattle,” he said. “I decided to take some time off before I headed out there. The job is great, but I like Massachusetts. I didn’t want to just drop everything and race across the country. They said they’d wait for me.”

  “That’s very kind of them.” She wished she’d had a job waiting for her when she’d left Cahill and Associates.

  “Well…” He shrugged. “They really want me.”

  It occurred to her that if he was a computer scientist, he could probably afford to treat her to a lobster roll without breaking a sweat. But if he paid for her meal, it would imply things she wasn’t sure she was ready for. She scarcely knew him, after all. She shouldn’t feel as comfortable with him as she did, let alone permit him to buy her things.

  “And you’re an architect,” he said, turning the spotlight on her.

  Her profession was public knowledge, at least in Brogan’s Point. “I am.”

  “And you’re, what? That Davenport dude’s ex?”

  Apparently, Will didn’t mind coming across as nosy. Fortunately, Brianna had a minute to contemplate her answer as the waitress appeared at their table once more, this time carrying a tray loaded with two long, fat rolls overflowing with juicy chunks of pink lobster meat, as well as two paper-lined plastic baskets heaped high with French fries. “Ketchup’s on the table,” she said. “Anything else I can get you?”

  “No, we’re good,” Will answered for Brianna as well as himself. He waited until they were alone once more before gesturing toward her sandwich. “Go ahead,” he dared her. “Tell me that’s not the best lobster roll you’ve ever eaten.”

  She lifted the sandwich from its plate, cringing as pieces of lobster spilled out of the bread. She could barely open her mouth wide enough to bite into it. The lobster was warm and buttery, the bread featuring a crisp crust and soft innards. The meat was so fresh, she could almost taste the ocean in it, a little briny, a little peppery, firm but not at all chewy.

  “Delicious,” she said once she’d swallowed.

  He smiled as proudly as if he’d caught the lobster himself, cooked it, and assembled the sandwich. “The fries here are pretty damned good, too,” he warned her before pulling one from his basket and popping it into his mouth. “So, Davenport… What did he do? Break your heart?”

  The question definitely qualified as nosy. But Will’s smile was so easy, his green-gray eyes so earnest, she couldn’t take offense. “My heart is unbroken,” she assured him, which was true. It had been bruised and battered, but it had healed. She was eager to win the commission for the Brogan’s Point Town Hall because she needed to prove herself indispensable to North Shore Design, not because she wanted to fill Rollie with remorse—although that would be a nice bonus.

  “Maybe you broke his heart,” Will suggested. “When you arrived at the meeting, he treated you like a long lost lover, not a competitor for a contract.”

  “Emphasis on lost,” she said, then took a sip of wine. Having warmed up slightly, it now had a faintly discernible taste. “We dated a while, and then we stopped dating. So,” she plowed ahead, before he could question her further about her relationship with Rollie, “whose presentation did you think was stronger, his or mine?”

  Will leaned back in his chair, assessing her with his gaze as he drank some beer. “The truth?”

  She braced herself and nodded.

  “Both presentations were good. Both proposals have their pluses and minuses. But on the ‘wow’ scale, he won.”

  She sighed. Of course Rollie had won. His proposal was daring. Thrilling. Wow-worthy.

  Will must have read her disappointment in her face. “Give folks a chance to think things over,” he said. “Ultimately, most people resist change. They also resist a big bump in their local property tax. There’s a good chance the decision will go your way.”

  She reminded herself that winning the commission was more important than having people swoon in awe over her design. North Shore Design could win this deal. She could win it.

  The fries were almost as tasty as the lobster roll—crisp, salty, and not at all oily—but given how huge the sandwich was, she couldn’t possibly devour everything in front of her. “Here,” she said, tipping her basket of fries to add some of hers to Will’s portion. “I can’t eat it all.”

  His smile flashed wide, then faded. Was sharing her food with him presumptuous? Had she overstepped?

  Yes, she had. But it didn’t seem like overstepping, because…

  The song.

  “At the bar earlier this evening,” she said, deciding she no longer cared if she sounded like a head case, “that jukebox played a song.”

  He paused in mid-chew, his eyes narrowing slightly. Once he swallowed, he gave a slight nod. “‘It Takes Two,’” he said.

  If she was a head case, so was he. He knew exactly what song she was talking about. Whatever had happened to her when the song had played had also happened to him. She hadn’t just imagined her odd response to the music. “You were staring at me.”

  “You were staring at me, too.” He popped a fry into his mouth, then washed it down with a sip of beer.

  “I know. And I don’t know why.” Other than the fact that he was a remarkably good-looking guy.

 
“There’s a myth about the jukebox,” he said, shrugging as if to imply that he didn’t think much of it. “That it’s haunted or something.”

  “Haunted?” She laughed.

  “I know. It’s crazy. The thing has been there since before I was born. My mother says it’s always been there.”

  “Always?”

  “It was there when my dad bought the place. The bar was an old, seedy joint then, and he scraped the money together and bought it. Then he married my mother, and they fixed the place up, turned it around, made it profitable. But the jukebox was always there. They just left it where it was.”

  “It works.”

  “More or less. You can’t choose a song for it to play. You can only stick in a quarter, and it plays whatever it wants. Only old rock-and-roll songs.”

  That made no sense. But then, the fact that what had come out earlier that evening had affected both her and Will so strangely made no sense, either.

  “People love their myths. I’m a science guy, so I think the myth is a lot of crap. But—” another shrug “—there’s no harm in it. A little magic, a little hocus-pocus. Why not? You may not know this, but back in colonial times—before some rich dude named Brogan who owned a fleet of whaling ships named the town after himself—a few women from Salem fled here to avoid being charged with witchcraft. We were a safe haven for them. No witch trials in Brogan’s Point. I always assumed that was because, right from the start, the original settlers here believed in logic and fact. But who knows? Maybe those refugees really were witches, and they cast a spell on that jukebox.”

  “I doubt the jukebox dates back to colonial times,” Brianna said, even though she found Will’s tale captivating. She’d done some research on the town when she and Michael were working on her design for the Town Hall, but she hadn’t stumbled over any information on the town’s granting accused witches asylum.

  Will chuckled. “No, I don’t think they had jukeboxes then. If they did, people would have been dancing, and that would have proved they were witches.” He popped a stray chunk of lobster into his mouth. “But maybe the witches cast a spell on that particular piece of land, the spot that later became Faulk Street.”

  “I take it Faulk was another wealthy owner of whaling ships?”

  “No idea who Faulk was. I bet he liked music, though.”

  “Or maybe she liked music.”

  His smile was slightly lopsided. Appreciative and daring, both sweet and spicy, it was the sexiest smile Brianna had ever seen. The spiral of heat that curled through her body as she gazed across the table at him unnerved her. It was one thing to admire Will, but quite another to be so turned on by him. He was still practically a stranger. A temporary bartender with a job waiting for him on the other side of the continent. A man who had honestly answered her question by claiming that Rollie’s proposal had wowed him more than hers had.

  She didn’t want to feel this attraction. Didn’t want to be sucked into something dark and intriguing and a little bit scary, the way she had been when she’d been sitting in his mother’s bar, listening to a catchy pop song that had likely been recorded decades before she was born.

  She’d come to Brogan’s Point to make a case, present a proposal, win a commission. She’d come with the hope of earning a generous payday for North Shore Design. She’d come to show Michael he hadn’t made a mistake when he’d hired her.

  She hadn’t come for this. She didn’t even know what this was. All she knew was that she felt as imperiled as those girls accused of witchcraft must have felt in the seventeenth century. They’d fled to Brogan’s Point for safety. But right now, seated in this restaurant with Will, eating what she conceded was, at the very least, a contender for the best lobster roll in the region, she didn’t feel safe at all.

  Chapter Four

  The bar was packed by the time Brianna dropped Will off and drove away. Well, she didn’t just drive away. She thanked him for dinner, agreed that the Lobster Shack’s lobster roll had been excellent, and said good night. There had been a moment, a pause, when they’d sat side by side in her sturdy Subaru, the engine idling quietly, the neon “Open” sign above the Faulk Street Tavern’s front door casting a rosy glow across Brianna’s face through the windshield… A moment when Will had contemplated leaning across the console and kissing her. He’d kissed her cheek earlier, after all. Why not kiss her again?

  Because that kiss in the Town Hall had been part of a charade, a performance staged for Davenport’s benefit. This kiss would have been real.

  And Will hardly knew her.

  And she wasn’t his type.

  Yeah, right. She wasn’t his type the way gin wasn’t tonic’s type.

  Nowadays, of course, a guy couldn’t just kiss a woman for no reason. If he did, he might end up in handcuffs, his name splashed across the front page of the Boston Globe. He might wind up registered as a sex offender.

  But the way Brianna looked at him in the dim light, in the warmth of her car… He’d very nearly started singing, “It takes two, me and you.” A song he’d never heard before that evening, a song he’d been unaware existed—and yet he’d wanted to take two. Him and Brianna.

  Instead, he’d thanked her for the lift and climbed out of the car.

  Not a minute too soon, as it happened. When he entered the tavern, he spotted Manny Lopez next to Will’s mother behind the bar, mixing and serving drinks. The wait staff raced back and forth in a blur. Every table was filled, and customers were stacked three-deep along the bar. Will recognized many of them from the Town Hall meeting. They must have migrated to the bar after the meeting to debate which vision of a new Town Hall building was the preferable one.

  He wove through the crowd to the bar, lifted the hinged panel in its surface, and crossed to the other side, joining his mother and Manny. Manny let out a sigh of relief, slapped him on the shoulder, and said, “I got stuff to do in the kitchen.” Will gave him a quick nod, then busied himself filling the order one of the servers had shouted to him. Two Heineken drafts, a glass of pinot noir, a Cosmo. Apparently, no one had requested a Dark-and-Stormy.

  Moving smoothly, he assembled the order and simultaneously eavesdropped on a conversation among two male-female couples at the bar, the women seated on stools and the men chivalrously standing behind them. “Twenty million?” one of the men muttered. “You know what that’s going to do to our tax rate?”

  “But that building was so pretty,” one of the women argued. “All that glass. You could just feel the sunlight pouring into the building.”

  “What about when it rains?” the other woman said.

  “Or snows,” the first man added. “The place’ll feel like an igloo inside.”

  “Snow melts,” the first woman argued.

  Will arranged the drinks he’d prepared on the server’s tray, and she lifted it and sprinted away. Another order came in—two rum and diet-colas—and he eavesdropped some more as he mixed those drinks. The price tag on Davenport’s design had a lot of people concerned, if the chatter among the patrons lining the bar was anything to go by. Some people praised its beauty. Others spoke nostalgically about the classic colonial lines of the old building.

  “Sounds like I missed an exciting meeting,” Will’s mother called to him as they crossed paths, she carrying two empty pitchers in need of refills while he gathered a couple of bowls of peanuts. “What was your take?”

  “Both proposals had pros and cons,” he called back. He had to admit Davenport’s dramatic design appealed to him. The biggest pro of Brianna Crawford’s proposal was Brianna herself.

  Which wasn’t a reason to support her design, he told himself.

  “The meeting wasn’t that exciting,” Will told his mother. “Both architects gave their pitches and answered some questions.”

  “So after the meeting, you decided to disappear for a while?”

  Will tossed a scoop of ice into a stainless-steel blending jar, then added generous splashe
s of lime juice and rum. He pressed the blender, which made enough noise that he didn’t have to answer his mother right away. He felt his eyes on her, though. As always, she knew something was up.

  He shut off the blender and filled a glass with the daiquiri mixture. “I didn’t know this place would be so busy on a weeknight.”

  “We’re always busy after seven o’clock,” his mother said.

  “Maybe you need to hire another bartender.”

  “Maybe I do. Right now, I’ve got you—when you show up.”

  He knew she wasn’t angry with him. It wasn’t as if she’d hired him formally. He was just helping out because he happened to be in Brogan’s Point. If he was available, that was what he did. If he wasn’t available, she would come up with a different solution. She’d drag Manny out of the kitchen or the basement and have him fill orders. Or pull one of the servers to the business side of the bar. You didn’t need an advanced degree in mixology to know how to draw a pitcher of draft or fill a couple of glasses with wine.

  If Will had known that the tavern would get so busy after the town meeting, he would have come straight back here to help out.

  No, he wouldn’t. He would have done exactly what he had done: spent some time with Brianna.

  Why? She was pretty, sure, but so what? Beauty had never been at the top of his list of female attributes. Brains were, and she seemed smart, but still—he wasn’t looking for romance. He wasn’t planning to stick around Brogan’s Point long enough for even a quick affair. One night stands didn’t appeal to him. Not that she’d given any indication she was interested in hooking up for fun and games.

  But her deep, dark eyes had drawn him, and her long hair had tempted him to run his fingers through it. Her voice had been sweet, but with just a hint of roughness in it, and her lips… Watching her chew her lobster roll had turned him on in unexpected ways.

  True, he didn’t know her, but he wanted to. He wanted to know her a hell of a lot better. He wanted to know if the skin on her exposed throat was as soft as the skin on her cheek, if it would feel as silky against his lips. He wanted to know if she found old Monty Python skits as funny as he did. He wanted to see her laugh until her eyes teared up and she had to hold her sides. He wanted to see some of the other building renovations she’d designed, and learn whether designing buildings was at all similar to designing software, if writing specs was at all like writing code.