What the code meant was, put it on my tab and catch you later.
Lug nodded.
“You don’t have to pay,” Mabel told him.
“If I did, then I wouldn’t,” he told her.
She studied him a while before she mumbled, “You might be the most interesting guy I know.”
That felt good.
“And the most annoying,” she finished.
Lug guffawed loudly as he handed her the beer.
Hutch shot him a look that didn’t wipe the smile off his face, then he took Mabel’s elbow and led her through what amounted to a crowd at The Link and deposited her in a chair to the left of the aisle that had a scrawled sign that saidReservedScotch-taped to it.
He knew they all had eyes on him, on them.
He knew probably every person at that bar either knew him, and about Bree, or they’d heard about him (and Bree), and likely they knew Mabel was the first woman he’d been seen in public with outside Nadia, Lucinda, or Lillian.
Which was the plan.
Lars Enstrom had homed in on Mr.Flannery.
That meant he did his homework, decided his mark and went in for the kill.
Logically, that line could extend to Lars making it his business to know who was on his patch.
Hutch hadn’t had any trees felled.It was no secret what he did for a living, or what his career had been beforehand.
Whoever dropped that note saw him either come or go, but they might not have known who he was.
Enstrom would know.
If word got round that Hutch was hanging at the Art Center opening with Mabel and her friends, taking Mabel in her pretty dress and curled hair to The Link, and showing her and her friends around the sanctuary, she’d be claimed.
If Enstrom had it going on—and it would seem he did, building what he had on a possibly coerced inheritance, and keeping it for six years—knowing Hutch had claimed her, he wouldn’t get caught even looking at Mabel.
And if he was the leader, he’d make sure his men knew that too.
Make no mistake, Hutch knew this was a perilous game, because he knew he wanted her.He knew he liked her.It was not lost on him that she was not like any woman he’d ever met, and he liked that too.What he knew of her past, and what he’d lived in his own, she had no idea in some respect he’d trauma bonded with her.But he had.
And not least of all of this, he knew she was into him.
They’d connected through his music, and regardless of all the bickering and cross words (or maybe they were a result of it), that connection had never faded.
So he somehow had to juggle attaining his goal without wounding her, because he was playacting for the public, but he had to keep it friendly for just her since, in the end, it was going nowhere.And at the same time he was doing all of this, he was keeping her safe.
It was the most complicated, risky mission he’d ever been on.
But he’d survived others.
He’d best it.
Or he hoped like fuck he would.
He sat her in her seat then went to the stage.
