“Itistomorrow, silly,” Dean practically purred, having expected Sully’s argument and practiced his witty retort for half the long, lonely night.“Practically morning, sheesh.”
They stood face to face, Sully’s eyes roving over Dean in the dim light of a single bulb left on over a range oven.“You’re still dressed,” he noted.
“You’re not,” Dean teased.
Sully glanced down, subtly cinching his sash tighter as if only just now realizing what he was wearing.Then lower still, until he wriggled the toes in his fuzzy matching slippers.“I ...wasn’t expecting guests.”
“Clearly,” Dean snickered before shifting gently away, leaning against a stainless steel counter as if to hold himself up.“Is this how you always dress after a shift?”
Sully snorted, shaking his head and reaching in a nearby fridge for two Lucky Suds.“This is how I dress for sleep, kid.”
Dean took one of the beers.“So that makes this ...a nightcap?”
Sully rolled his eyes, leaning back against a butcher block table in the middle of the kitchen.“That makes this a really bad idea.”
Dean savored the crisp, cold beer on his hot, eager tongue.“I mean, itisspring break, right?”
“For you, maybe,” Sully huffed, quaffing a loud, eager swallow himself.“Some of us have to work for a living.”
Dean set the beer down beside him, nodding at Sully’s fluffy lavender robe and matching slippers.“This is you working?”
“This is me getting ready for bed.”
“At 3:00 in the morning?”
Sully shrugged.“Okay, yeah, I mean...I’ve been a little restless, okay?”
“So you decided to wander around your pub in a bathrobe?”
Sully finally snorted, shoulders visibly softening beneath the fuzzy terry cloth that covered them.“I live upstairs.”
“What?Here?”
Sully rolled his soft green eyes, the perfect complement to his rumpled brown curls.“Not here, here,” he harumphed, waving his hands around the small but tidy kitchen.“Upstairs, on the third floor.”
“What?”Dean clapped back.“Does anyone in your family have, like, a house?I mean, a house not attached to some store or pub or...”
Sully started to answer, then frowned, quietly nodding.“Come to think of it, no,” he confessed.“Not that there’s much of a family since Pappy passed, but the Graysons have always believed in sticking close to their investments.Buy the building, use the bottom floor for a store or pub or whatnot, why let the upstairs go to waste?”
“You could always rent out the rooms,” Dean suggested, as if they were at a business meeting and not still flirting the fuck out of each other in the middle of the dead ass night.
“Plenty times we do,” Sully insisted.“Like over the laundromat down the block, for instance.Or the dime store across the street from that.”
“Damn, cowboy,” Dean marveled, breath whistling across the top of his beer bottle.“What are you, some kind of low key, undercover, secret billionaire?”
“Hardly,” Sully scoffed, though the jut of his chiseled chin showed the slightest trace of family pride just the same.“Just the beneficiary of some fairly shrewd investors in the family, you know?All I did was ...be born?”
Dean gave a little grandmotherly “tut-tut” cluck of his tongue.“I saw you work the bar today, Sully.Seems like you were kind of born to run a small town, big empire, you know?”
He shrugged, avoiding Dean’s eyes.“What?”Dean pressed, suddenly on the offense after playing defense since the first minute Sully’s probing green eyes saw straight into his pure little virgin heart.“Not used to compliments?”
“Around here?”Sully groused, waving his beer bottle around the kitchen as if to encompass all of Pistol Creek itself.“With my customers.They all think the beer’s not cold enough, the food’s not hot enough, the barstool’s not soft enough, the pool cue’s not hard enough.Last time I got a compliment around these parts was, let’s see ...probably when Mrs.Chambers told me I had good penmanship back in third grade.”
Dean snorted, picturing a squirming, restless little Sully sticking his tongue out while practicing his Ps and Qs on straight lined notebook paper.
“Come on,” he insisted.“It can’t be that bad.”
Sully met his eyes, piercing in the dim kitchen light.“What would you know?”he teased in that syrupy country drawl of his.“You’ve probably been getting straight As since you could piss straight, you little goody two shoes.”
