Chapter Three
As Jay made his way to the bar, he watched Alyssa give a smile to her customer along with his change. Her attention shifted, and though it might have been his imagination, he thought her smile widened when she recognized him.
“So you’re the one,” he said to her.
“The one what?” she asked.
“My friend Kevin insisted that we come here tonight to check out the hot new bartender,” he explained.
She automatically glanced toward the table where his friends were seated, suggesting that she’d seen them enter the bar. “Setting aside the accuracy of that description for the moment, I hope he didn’t make the suggestion in front of your new girlfriend.”
“My—Oh.” He looked over his shoulder. “Which one did you think was my girlfriend?”
She shrugged. “Either. Both.”
“I’m flattered... I think. But no, Nat and Hayley are friends and employees.”
“Is the boss buying the first round tonight?” she prompted.
Although there were servers who circulated around the floor, taking orders and delivering drinks, it wasn’t unusual for customers to order directly from the bartender.
“I am,” Jay confirmed. “Two bottles of Icky, one Wild Horse, a gin and tonic, one Maker’s Mark, neat, and a Coke.”
She turned to reach into the beer fridge for the bottles he’d requested, providing him with a nice view of her perfectly shaped backside.
“So what made you take up bartending?” he asked, his attention focusing on the chunky, lopsided heart-shaped pendant that dangled between her breasts when she turned back again.
“Too much time on my hands,” she confided, deftly uncapping the bottles.
He lifted his eyes to her face again. “Did you lose your teaching job?”
“Of course not.”
“Then what you really meant to say was too many lonely nights,” he teased.
“I’m not lonely,” she denied, scooping ice into a tall glass. “But I spend a lot of time alone and I thought this would be a good way to meet people.”
“How’s that working out so far?”
She smiled as she filled the glass from the soda gun. “The tips are good.”
He chuckled.
“Aside from that,” she continued as she poured the bourbon into an old-fashioned glass, “I’ve learned there are three types of guys who come into a bar.”
“What are those types?” he asked curiously.
“Type one are the regulars who might be genuinely nice guys, but their closest and longest relationships are with the bottle,” she explained as she scooped more ice into a highball.
“Type two comes in looking to meet a woman, but he doesn’t have any interest in getting to know her beyond the most basic exchange of information for the sole purpose of getting her into bed.” She added a shot of gin, then squeezed a wedge of lime into the glass.
“Type three is almost worse.” She added the tonic, another wedge of lime and a stir stick. “He seems like a good guy, and he’s usually with a girl who thinks so, too, but the whole time he’s with her, he’s scoping out the area for other females.”
“I’d suggest that there’s also a fourth type,” Jay said. “The guy who comes in for a drink with his friends and maybe to flirt with a pretty girl.”
“Maybe,” she acknowledged, a little dubiously.
“And then there’s Carter,” he said as his friend joined him at the bar—ostensibly to help him carry the drinks back to their table.
“Hello, Carter,” she said, greeting the other man with a friendly smile.
“For once in his life, Kevin was right,” Carter remarked, winking boldly at Alyssa.
Jay shook his head. “Type two,” he told her. “Not beyond reform, but risky.”
Alyssa nodded as she punched the drinks into the register. “Got it.”
Carter scowled. “What does that mean? What’s a type two?”
“It means that you’re not going to hit on the bartender—who also happens to be my neighbor,” he said firmly.
His friend’s gaze shifted from him to Alyssa and back again. “You live next to this stunning creature and you’ve never invited me over to meet her?”
“And this is him pretending that he’s not hitting on you,” Jay remarked as he passed some bills across the counter to Alyssa.
She laughed. “Well, I’m flattered,” she said.
“Let me know when you want to be not pretend hit on,” Carter told her, picking up several of the drinks to take them back to their table.
Jay shook his head to decline the change she offered.
Her smile slipped, replaced by an expression of concern. “Ohmygod.”
He craned his neck, looking behind him. “What happened?”
“That’s what I was going to ask you,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
She lifted a hand to touch his face, her fingers brushing lightly over the stubble on his jaw—and the bruise that throbbed beneath the skin.
“Oh, that,” he said, wondering how it was that her cautious touch was so unexpectedly arousing. “Matt caught me with my shield up.”
“Huh?”
“Paintball,” he explained.
“Boys and their toys,” she mused, letting her hand drop away.
His skin continued to tingle where she’d touched him.
Or maybe that was just the bruise.
Yeah, it was definitely the bruise, he decided as he picked up the remaining drinks and walked away from the bar. Because he definitely wasn’t letting himself get involved with the girl next door.
* * *
“You calling dibs?” Carter asked when Jay rejoined his friends at their table.
“Dibs on what?” Matt Hutchinson wanted to know.
“Of course I’m not calling dibs,” Jay said.
“The bartender,” Natalya Vasilek answered Matt’s question.
“If anyone’s calling dibs, it’s me,” Kevin Dawson declared. “I saw her first.”
“No, you didn’t,” Carter told him. “Because the ‘hot new bartender’ is a friend and neighbor of our CEO.”
Kevin swore.
“But he’s not calling dibs,” Matt reminded them all.
“Maybe because he likes and respects the woman too much to talk about her as if she was an object up for grabs,” Hayley MacDowell said sharply.
“Whatever Jay’s reasons,” Kevin insisted, “if he’s not calling dibs, I am.”
“No one is calling dibs on Alyssa,” Jay said in a tone that brooked no argument.
Carter tipped his bottle to his lips but kept his gaze on his friend, silently assessing.
Conversation moved on to other topics, including a rehashing of all the highlights of their recent game. As they talked, their glasses and bottles emptied.
“I think Alyssa’s the real reason you broke up with Renee,” Carter said to Jay when the play-by-play had begun to lag.
“I broke up with Renee because she ranked below my business and my friends on my list of priorities,” he replied.
“That might be true,” Nat allowed. “But that doesn’t explain why you keep looking at the bartender.”
He dragged his gaze away from Alyssa.
“And the Master Assassin strikes again,” Hayley noted.
“Who’s got the next round?” Jay asked, holding up his empty glass.
“I think it’s my turn,” Hayley said, pushing away from the table.
“I’m out,” Matt said. “I’ve gotta get home to Carrie.”
Kevin made a sound like a whip being cracked.
Their soon-to-be-married friend was unperturbed. “Yeah, it’s a real drag, being engaged to a gorgeous woman with whom I share mutual interests, stimulating conversation and really hot sex.”
“I’ll give you a hand,” Nat said to Hayley, no doubt eager for an excuse to leave the three remaining men at the table.
When they returned with the next round of drinks, conversation shifted again to more neutral topics.
A short while later, Kevin left with Hayley, because they were headed in the same direction. Then Carter and Nat headed out together. Jay knew that he should make his way home, too. Weekends were the busiest time at Adventure Village, and he had the early-morning shift the next day—including two birthday parties on-site.
But he stayed where he was, sipping his Coke and wondering about the discovery that his neighbor and the hot new bartender were one and the same.
* * *
Though pouring drinks kept her hands busy, Alyssa’s gaze kept shifting between the clock and the door—and, occasionally, the table where Jason was sitting with his friends. Where he remained after his friends had gone.
Sky bumped her hip. “Should we update our earlier conversation?”
“About what?” Alyssa looked at the clock again.
“Your claim that you have yet to meet someone with whom you want to get naked. Because while you’re acting as if you’re not watching Jason Channing, he’s acting as if he’s not watching you.”
She shook her head. “Jason’s my neighbor.”
“That could be convenient,” her friend said.
“Have you heard anything from Liam?” she asked, eager to change the topic of conversation—and for Sky’s brother to make his promised appearance.
Now Sky glanced at the clock and frowned. “No, I haven’t. And I didn’t expect him to be this late.”
The only consolation for Alyssa was that Diego was late, too. Or maybe he wasn’t coming. She mentally crossed her fingers that she could get so lucky.
“I’ll see if I can reach him on his cell,” Sky said.
“Thanks.”
She looked at the clock again.
Nine twenty-eight.
Sky shook her head as she tucked her phone back into her pocket before heading to the other end of the bar to refill Gavin Virga’s drink.
Alyssa sighed.
“Is something wrong?”
She jolted at the sound of his voice so close, then laughed as she pressed a hand to the heart that was hammering inside her chest.
“I seem to have a habit of startling you,” Jason apologized.
“It’s okay,” she said. “My mind was just somewhere else.”
“I can’t imagine anywhere more interesting than here,” he deadpanned.
She laughed again. “Did you want something to drink?”
He shook his head. “I noticed that you’ve been watching the door.”
“I guess I have been,” she admitted.
“Waiting for someone?” He straddled an empty stool.
“Sort of.”
“How can you ‘sort of’ be waiting for someone?”
“Well, there’s one person I’m hoping will come through the door and another I’m hoping won’t,” she explained.
“Now I’m intrigued,” he said.
Over his shoulder, she saw a familiar figure walk into the bar and swore under her breath.
Or maybe the curse wasn’t as restrained as she thought, because Jason’s brows lifted—a silent question that she didn’t have time to answer. Because Diego had spotted her, too, and was moving purposefully toward her.
And though Jason hadn’t been her first choice, she decided that if she could have a fantasy romance with any man of her choosing, there wasn’t anyone more fantasy worthy than her handsome upstairs neighbor.
“I’ll explain later,” she promised as growing desperation pushed aside both rational thought and common sense. “For now, will you please just go with it?”
“Go with—”
She didn’t let him finish the question before she leaned across the bar and kissed him.
* * *
If this was “it,” Jason decided as Alyssa’s mouth moved over his, he could definitely go with it. For now and as long as she wanted, because her lips were soft and warm and seductively persuasive.
He’d be lying if he said that he hadn’t thought about kissing her, because she was the type of woman that any red-blooded man would be attracted to. But he also knew that it wasn’t always a good idea to act on an attraction—such as when the woman who stirred his blood was a friend, coworker or neighbor. Alyssa checked off two of those boxes, so no matter how much his hormones sat up and begged for attention whenever she was around—and there was no denying that they did—he’d mostly managed to ignore them.
There was no hope of ignoring them now.
She smelled so good...tasted even better.
And he wished there wasn’t eighteen inches of polished walnut between them, so that he could put his arms around her and haul her against his body. He settled for circling her wrists with his hands. His thumbs rubbed over her pulse points, finding evidence that her heart was racing as fast as his own.
“I think that should do it.” She whispered the words against his lips before she eased away.
Do what? he wondered, noting that her mouth was moist and swollen from their kiss, her cheeks flushed.
But before he could catch his breath to ask the question aloud, someone spoke from behind him.
“I heard this was a friendly establishment,” the male voice remarked. “Do all customers get that kind of attention?”
The color in her cheeks deepened. “Diego...um...hi.” Then she seemed to gather her thoughts to respond to his question. “And, uh, no.”
“You must be someone special, then,” the man she’d referred to as Diego remarked, his narrowed gaze focused on Jay.
“Very special,” Alyssa chimed in quickly. “Jason is...my boyfriend.”
Though Jay instinctively chafed against the word, the silent plea in her eyes begged him not to contradict her claim. Recalling her promise of an explanation later, he decided to go with it—at least for now.
“And you would be?” Jay prompted the other man.
Alyssa jumped in again. “This is Diego Garcia, a family friend from California.”
“Well, any friend of Alyssa’s is a friend of mine,” he said.
Diego shook his proffered hand, squeezing more firmly than was warranted.
“You’re a long way from home,” Jay commented.
“I’m visiting a cousin in Elko,” Diego said. “And since I was going to be so close, Renata suggested that I stop in to say hi to her daughter.”
“And now you have,” he said pointedly.
Diego nodded and turned his attention back to Alyssa. “If you’re not working tomorrow night, maybe we could have dinner together,” he suggested.
“I’m not working,” she admitted, glancing at Jay, those melted chocolate eyes pleading. “But—”
“But we already have plans for tomorrow night,” he finished for her.
“Plans that can’t be changed to accommodate a friend from back home?” Diego directed the question at Alyssa.
“Unfortunately, yes,” Jay responded. “You see, it’s our three-month anniversary tomorrow and I have a very special evening planned.”
“How about lunch, then?” the other man offered as an alternative.
“Sorry,” he interjected, though the invitation clearly hadn’t been directed at—or even intended to include—him. “But we’re tied up for the whole weekend.”
“And I’m heading back Sunday morning,” Diego admitted.
“Well, I hope you enjoy your visit with your cousin and have a safe trip back,” Alyssa said, clearly eager for the man to be on his way.
Jay knew that would probably be for the best, but he couldn’t deny a certain curiosity about Diego’s connection to his neighbor. And since Alyssa herself was rather tight-lipped whenever he asked her about her previous life in California, he decided that this was too good an opportunity to pass up.
“But since you’re here now,” he said to the other man, “why don’t you let me buy you a drink?”