Danny watches me from the other end of the bar with the expression of a man who sees everything and has learned to wait for what's worth asking about.
"How was it?" he says finally.
I think about the dancing and the roses and the courtyard and the coin falling on the staircase and the train platform and the grey-green eyes through the glass and the coin that I will probably never get back and the masked Alpha whose name I will probably never know.
"Interesting," I say.
Danny nods, the nod of a man who has heard that word used to carry a great deal of weight and knows when not to push past it.
"Happy St. Patrick's Day," he says.
I raise my coffee mug.
"Happy St. Patrick's Day, Danny."
I drink the coffee.
Outside the bar's front window, the rain comes down in earnest over Oakridge Hollow, and the shift begins, and somewhere across town—or across cities, or across whatever distance now exists between me and a train platform at midnight—a pair of grey-green eyes is probably not thinking about me at all, which is completely fine and entirely expected and something I'm going to stop thinking about within the next several hours.
The hoping I can stop thinking about it is the first problem.
I get ready for my shift, hoping it will distract my heart from the nagging wish to see those grey-green eyes again.
CHAPTER 11
All Hands On Deck
~MILA~
The car is off and I'm still sitting in it.
Not because I'm reluctant—I mean, I am, but that's not the reason I'm still here. I'm still here because Danny is talking and I've learned not to interrupt Danny mid-sentence when he's building toward something, because the something is usually relevant and also because I still have half a minute of wipers and rain and the particular quiet of a parked car before I have to deal with whatever is on the other side of that door.
"Every Alpha in Oakridge Hollow," he's saying, with the fond exasperation of a man describing a natural disaster he's professionally obligated to host, "has apparently decided that St. Patrick's Day requires them to congregate in large numbers and be aggressively festive about it. Clancy's is short-staffed and I need your hands. Your specific hands, Mila. You know what you're doing in a way that?—"
"You want me at Clancy's."
"I need you at Clancy's."
"Danny. Clancy's is twenty minutes from Hannigan's in this rain. In a car that I'm not certain has good opinions about sustained travel."
"Triple pay."
The word lands cleanly and I sit with it for a moment, doing the arithmetic, which takes about two seconds because the arithmetic is straightforward: triple is a number that has opinions about debt.
"Repeat that," I say.
"Triple your usual rate. For tonight. I mean it."
"There's a but."
A pause. A very small, very specific pause.
"Danny. There is always a but. I've worked for you for two years. Triple pay does not exist without a but so please just tell me the but."
He exhales. "They look like a bunch of rich jocks. Private party, took over the back section. They were unhappy with the bar setup—said it didn't match what they were accustomed to, asked if there wasn't someone who knew their craft the way city bars do." A beat. "And apparently someone at the venue started talking about you."
Elvin.
