“Is that who came to talk to you earlier? You look alike.”
“It is. Rhea.”
“I think it’s very sweet she works with you here.”
“She’s been here for decades,” he said. “I bought this bar a year ago hoping she’d slow down and retire. It’s not working out the way I hoped.”
“Awww,” she said.
“There my ego went splashing to the ground.”
She winked. “I think your ego is plenty strong enough to take a woman finding it sweet you did that for a loved one.”
“Few think I’m sweet,” he said.
“Then maybe they haven’t seen the real you.”
“Is that something you want to find out? Or just testing the waters? Because you know, speaking of water. It’s like mixing oil and water with the two of us.”
She angled her head. “Only you think that,” she said.
He narrowed one eye at her. “No. Many have in the past. You and me, we’ve got nothing in common.”
“Again, your assumption.”
He leaned closer to the bar. “Oh, I know a lot of things that we might have in common, but once we catch our breaths again, we’re back to square one.”
Chance was pushing it and wasn’t sure why.
He was slipping back into the same person he’d spent years trying to leave behind. Acting like a dick made it easier to keep people at a distance. If they never got close, they couldn’t find out more and decide to walk away. He’d rather be the one to control when and how they left.
She laughed at him though. As if she saw through his words.
“You’re thinking pretty highly of yourself, or not enough of me. I, for one, am in pretty damn good shape. It takes a lot for me to be out of breath.”
She downed the rest of her ginger ale, threw a twenty on the bar, then stood up and gave him the same salute he’d always done to her.
The one he’d done when he was watching her in his gear last week and had lifted his face shield.
He hadn’t expected her to get the last word, and damn, if it didn’t turn him on that she managed to slip one past him.
“Now that the chick is gone you’re flirting with, are you frustrated you’re going home alone?”
He turned to see his grandmother standing in the bar's doorway to the kitchen.
“What are you still doing here? I thought you'd left almost two hours ago.”
The last thing he would have done was talk or act like that to Jocelyn if he had thought his grandmother would witness it.
“I was going to but got a few things done I never have time to do otherwise. And you know, I needed to see if my grandson was still picking women up for the night even when he told me he stopped that.”
He looked around the bar and saw a few snickers to those words. Not people he knew. Or knew well enough by name.
“Jocelyn and I went to school together. We’ve run into each other a few times in the past couple of weeks.”
“She doesn’t look like the type of girl you would have hung around with in school.”
“We didn’t,” he said and turned back to the bar to clean up some.
