When I looked to my left to see who’d spoken, I saw John Dalton himself had returned and was sneering at me. Only an hour before, I’d served him with papers. I missed the woman who’d done that. She’d been confident, sexy, so sure of herself.
Truly, I was not the same Stella Stark as before.
With a deep sigh I gave him the meanest stare I could muster. “Dude, I am insulted and injured enough for both of us. Now go kick rocks.”
“You heard the woman,” the bartender said as she placed an Old-Fashioned on the cocktail napkin in front of me. “Move along.”
Her eyes didn’t leave him until he walked out the door. Then she cocked her head to one side to study me. “What the hell happened to you?”
Bourbon was required to answer that question. It burned its way down my throat and pushed my heart back to where it belonged. “I touched a boob.”
Her mouth twitched. “Is that all?”
“The boob belonged to a naked woman sleeping next to my partner. On my side of the bed.”
She whistled. “That’s a hard one. I’m going to guess the champagne was originally for him? Or her?”
“Him. He’d bet me I’d never be able to find that bozo I served with papers earlier.”
She wiped at a spot on the bar. “You run on spite. I like that. Heck, I resemble it.”
I took a sip of my drink. Gradually, bar chatter overtook the buzzing in my ears, as did the gravity of my situation. I wasn’t just without a partner; I would soon be without a home and without a job. “Too bad spite doesn’t pay the bills.”
“Huh. I’ve been running this place on spite for over twenty years,” she said with a shrug before moving down the bar to tend to a new customer.
After another sip, color joined sound. Sure, the interior of Finnegan’s was a bit dark, but enough bric-a-brac lined the walls to distract me from my current situation. Several Santas nestled in among the liquor bottles along with tiki mugs, action figures, and a creepy baby doll that had to be haunted. Above me hung a sign for a tire shop that was so old it actually used the word “emporium.”
I sat with my back to the door, a rookie mistake I wouldn’t make again. On the wall to my right hung soccer flags and signs for Irish beers. Apparently, the team of choice for this bar was Liverpool. The quaff of choice? Guinness, Harp, Smithwick’s, Strongbow—you could pick your poison there.
The place reminded me of a Southern Cheers, but no one knew my name.
Yet.
A presence on the other side of the bar had me looking up. My bartender was back.
“What’s your name, kid?”
Kid? I was turning forty in less than a year. “Stella Stark.”
She held out a hand. “Nice to meet you, Stark. You can call me Havisham.”
Chapter 3
Six months later
Finnegan’s was a surprisingly good place to do my homework. I’d found a new seat, of course, because I had that private investigator urge to sit in a corner where I could see all the comings and goings. In this case, I took the last stool at the bar, a spot in the corner that gave me a clear view of the entrance, the other side of the room that held booths and soccer memorabilia, and, of course, everyone who’d bellied up to the bar.
“You a paralegal yet?”
“No, Havisham. I’m about halfway through all the classes I need,” I said without looking up from my laptop. “But Attorney Lawless has me doing odds and ends and is holding a spot for me.”
“Well, hurry up. I can’t believe I’ve made it this far without legal trouble.”
I could.
She might’ve been petite, but anyone who wasn’t at least a little scared of Havisham didn’t have any sense in this world. The woman could stop a bar fight by raising her left eyebrow one millimeter.
I’d incurred her wrath once by asking her if she’d been named for the Dickens character inGreat Expectations. No answer but a hard stare and intense eye contact while she put the cheap bourbon in my Old-Fashioned. Considering how rare the last name was, I wondered if she’dlegally changed her name at some point, possibly out of the spite that had bonded us.
