Small-Town Redemption Read Online Free PDF Page A

fault. “You’ll figure something out.”
    “Do I have any other choice?”
    Frowning, she pursed her mouth as if she seriously considered his question. “You could always close the bar. Hey, you could take a little vacation yourself. You haven’t had a day off since I started working here.”
    He finished his water, tossed the empty bottle into the recycling bin. “You take enough days off for both of us.”
    “So fire me.”
    It was one of her favorite rejoinders, one she used mostly because she knew damn well he had no intention of doing it. He hated having anyone read him so clearly. If people knew you too well, they had the power to use that knowledge against you.
    “Don’t think I’m not considering it.”
    She laughed loudly, the sound somehow rising above the bar’s din. Several people—mostly men because, hey, pretty blonde in a tight, low-cut dress—glanced their way. “Oh, you slay me. You really do.”
    “What’s so funny?” Bryce Gow, a heavyset elderly man with red cheeks and a bulbous nose, asked as he hefted himself onto a stool.
    Sadie fixed his usual—rum and Coke—and set it on the bar, then leaned forward to tip her head conspiratorially toward Bryce. “Kane said he’s going to fire me,” she told the retired electrician.
    Bryce’s expression brightened, but that could’ve been due to the fact that Sadie’s pose gave him an excellent view of her cleavage. “Fired shmired.” He sipped his drink, then patted Sadie’s hand. “Quit this dump—”
    “Funny how this being a dump hasn’t stopped you from parking yourself on that stool every Saturday night for the past one hundred years,” Kane said.
    Bryce, eighty if he was a day, and a regular long before Kane had ever set foot inside O’Riley’s—hell, before Kane, or even his father, had been born—glared, then turned back to Sadie. “You can work for my grandson,” he told her. “He’s a good boy. Respectful of his elders and his paying customers.”
    Kane pulled yet another beer. “Last week you said he was lazy, ungrateful and running the company you’d built into the ground. You called him an idiot who’d touched one live wire too many and fried his brain.”
    Bryce lowered his eyebrows. “At least he’s smart enough to appreciate good employees.”
    “I am undervalued and underappreciated,” Sadie agreed with a sigh that was pure heartfelt drama. “I would quit in a heartbeat, but if I wasn’t around, poor Kane would miss me—”
    “Poor Kane?” he mumbled, seriously considering sticking her head under the beer tap and giving her a good dousing. “Jesus Christ.”
    She batted her eyelashes at him. “And I’d hate to see a grown man as pretty as him cry.”
    “You’re a pain in the ass.”
    “So I’ve been told,” she said cheerfully. She blew him a kiss. “You know you adore me.”
    The worst part? It was true.
    “I’m heading to the back of the bar,” he said. “Give you and that big head of yours more room.”
    He really should fire her, he thought, as he made his way to the other end of the bar. She was flighty and unreliable, showed up for most of her shifts late, and took too many breaks when she was working.
    She was also a great bartender, cheerful and chatty, always ready with a joke, a compliment or a sympathetic ear.
    As much as he hated to admit it, he liked her. Hell, if he believed men and women could be friends without sex getting in the way, he might just say she was the closest thing he’d had to a friend in years.
    If she ever suspected, she’d never let him hear the end of it.
    “Slow night,” Sadie commented, joining him.
    “Not too bad,” he said. “The birthday ladies alone are making us a lot of money.”
    “Only because every guy under the age of fifty keeps buying them drinks. Men. Always so hopeful they’ll get lucky.”
    “It’s what gets us through each day. Any of them getting pushy?”
    “If they do, Julie will let you know.”
    He expected that. Was