For most of her life, she had heard she was too much. Too flirtatious, too outrageous, too much for most people to handle, so she had started to embrace it rather than make herself smaller to fit someone else’s idea of how she should behave.
Once, when she was in middle school, she’d stayed home sick and binge-watched a Marilyn Monroe movie marathon. She’d studied Marilyn’s mannerisms and her effect on men the way some people studied textbooks, fascinated by the power one little blond woman held.
Some women, like her mother, Annette, exuded a natural authority, and others like her sisters, had a calm, confident way about them.
Amber had Marilyn. Now, there was a woman who knew how to use what she had to make an impression. Well, minus the disastrous results toward the end of her life, but Amber didn’t focus on those. She channeled her inner bombshell when she needed an extra boost of confidence.
“What can I get you, boys?” Amber asked, leaning over the bar a smidge, knowing her tight white tank top dipped enticingly into her deep cleavage.
She was a firm believer in making an outfit her own, which is why she had cropped and shredded the boring white T-shirt Killian made them wear into a tank top, leaving a playful fringe that swung teasingly between her stomach and the waistband of her sparkly skirt.
She leaned down farther, watching their reactions withamusement. Not too much. The pub was a family establishment, after all. She just liked to tap dance on the line between outrageous and respectable.
“Can you do that thing with the cherry stem, Amber?” Ethan, another fire department rookie, asked hopefully, pushing his way closer to the bar.
Men. So predictable. She grinned.
“Now, why would you want me to do that, Ethan?” She winked and popped a maraschino cherry from the garnish tray into her mouth, eating the fruit, and leaving behind the stem.
“Ow-ow-ow.” Catcalls pierced the air as Amber worked the cherry stem with her tongue and looked at the court of eager faces crowded around her section of the bar.A mix of appreciation and lust looked back at her, just how she liked it.
She pursed her red-lipsticked lips and wiggled her tongue around, finally thrusting out the perfectly tied cherry stem to her audience.
She crooked her finger and gestured Ethan closer, curling her fingers around his scruffy jaw and drawing him toward her lips. His face turned eagerly, just in time to swipe the air as Amber snatched the twenty-dollar bill from his other hand and shouted around the stem, “Pay up, boys!”
The pub doors opened again, and Amber looked over automatically, her tongue still offered in triumph.
And met the cool blue eyes of Mayor Theo Clairmont.
He stood just inside the doorway with a tall, slender brunette on his arm, easily commanding the attention of the room he had just stepped into as people noticed his arrival.
The mayor’s dark hair swooped back from his forehead neatly, revealing a chiseled, smooth-shaven jaw and devastatingly handsome face. Even from behind the bar, she could see how his perfectly fitted, no doubt obscenely expensive suit molded to the talllines of his body.
Icy blue eyes held hers, and an unexpected shiver shot down her spine.
He didn’t look at her with interest. It wasn’t outright disdain. Theo Clairmont looked at her with a calm sort of assessment that left her feeling oddly, inexplicably, exposed. She was instantly annoyed.
Men like Mayor Theo Clairmont were born into privilege and power: wealthy, handsome, with a clear path laid out for them. They conducted their lives on golf courses and in boardrooms, spaces where she had never been invited or welcomed, unless she was taking notes or serving refreshments.
They had no concept of the struggle and sacrifice it took to survive in this world, while she worked two jobs just to make ends meet. She had worked for people like the Clairmonts her entire life—pouring their drinks, taking their orders, catering to their every whim behind the scenes.
Pure stubbornness made her hold his gaze until the crowd surged to greet him and, like a shock of icy cold water, she jerked back to reality.
“Can you do it again? Take all my money,” Ethan groaned. He slapped a crumpled pile of dollar bills on the bar toward her.
The warmth of the pub intensified as Theo, phone pressed to his ear, led his date through the crowd toward a table of people, looking every inch the confident, charismatic picture of success, while she picked the cherry stem from her mouth and eyed the damp dollar bills on the bar.
She was really, really tired of being the one behind the scenes.
Theo Clairmont was not amused.His eyes burned fromlack of sleep, and the music in the pub was reverberating in his skull while he waited on hold.
His assistant, Kelsey, had managed his life efficiently until last week when she eloped. Who eloped anymore? Why she didn’t just go down the hall from their office and have the judge marry her, he’d never understand. Now, he was left with a mountain of loose ends on top of his regular workload.
Ah, hell. With the grueling week of work he’d just had, he should have just canceled tonight and gone home to bed instead of coming out for a drink with his campaign staff.
“Welcome to the pub.” Amber Hart tossed four coasters onto the table. Theo glanced up for a brief second—long enough to notice her new hair, cotton candy pink mixed with blond curls. Outrageous, as usual.
She was looking directly at him, a faint smirk playing on her lips. “We’ve got ice cold beer on tap, or a selection of New York’s finest Finger Lakes wines. What’ll it be?”
