Chapter Five
Killian
“I hired a new bartender,” I informed Louis as I one-handedly stocked a shelf of vodka.
“Back up. I’ve been gone two days. And you fired a bartender and hired a new one?”
“Uh huh.” I put my cell phone on speaker and set it on the shelf to work more efficiently. We had a system, and it worked. Nothing worse than a messy supply room when it was time to take inventory or you needed a bottle in a hurry.
“Do I get a vote in this?” Louis asked.
“You hired Chad, the thief. So, no. Your bullshit detector is warped.”
Louis muttered something I didn’t catch. It sounded a lot like, “Killian, you’re an asshole.”
“It needed to be done,” I reminded him.
“Chad’s my cousin.”
“You don’t like that side of the family.”
Louis chuckled. “True.”
Chad was pocketing the cash instead of ringing up the drinks, and I’d suspected he’d been doing it for a while. It wasn’t adding up. The drawer sales didn’t match the inventory on the nights he worked. Last night, I’d caught him red-handed, and he’d lied to me. Zeke saw it too, so I had a witness. Two out of three rules broken in one night. The rules were my idea. Louis is a good bartender, a good people person, and my best friend, but sometimes he’s too nice and people take advantage of that. Now he leaves the dirty work to me. I don’t seek out confrontation, but I don’t shy away from it either.
Louis had always dreamed of opening a bar. Why, I had no idea. Running a bar was the last thing I’d wanted to do. But eighteen months ago, when he was ready to open this bar, he asked me to invest in it. I had the money, and I wanted to help him out, so I did. Business was good—Trinity Bar was one of the hottest bars in Williamsburg—but it took years to turn a profit, and I knew that going into it. I’d signed on as a silent partner. But I couldn’t afford to be silent anymore. I had a lot of money tied up in this venture, and I had no other source of income now.
“Who did you hire?” Louis asked. In the background, I heard the high-pitched voices of kids screaming. Louis was down in Virginia Beach with his mom, two of his sisters, and their five kids. It was the first real vacation he’d taken since he opened the bar, and I had a feeling it would be his last.
“Uncle Louis,” a little girl yelled. “Jordan pulled my hair.”
“She kicked me,” a boy said.
“You’re a big fat baby,” she said.
I chuckled as Louis let out a weary sigh. “Hey, Uncle Louis. See you Saturday.”
“Saturday can’t get here fast enough,” Louis muttered. “Who’s the bartender?”
“If she’s still here by Saturday, you’ll meet her.”
“She? Did I hear you right? What happened to your ‘no women behind the bar’ policy?”
Another one of my rules, and I’d broken it myself. “Gotta run,” I said, cutting the call.
Shit. I forgot to tell him about the quotes for the new roof. I texted him the bad news. He responded with a string of curses and a threat to return early.
Won’t change anything. Stay and enjoy your family, I texted back.
“Zeke is in the house!”
I opened the liquor supply room door. “Liquor room,” I said, unpacking a box of whiskey.
Zeke stopped in the doorway. “What’s up? Do you need help?”
“No.” Louis and I were the only ones with keys to the liquor room, and the only ones allowed to venture in here. If the bartenders needed a bottle during service, they had to ask one of us. It was a pain, but we’d had too many problems with theft to relax that policy. “I hired a new bartender. Her name’s Eden. She starts tomorrow.”
“Is she hot?” Zeke asked.
Is she hot? I couldn’t think straight when she was near me. I wanted to keep her talking so I could listen to her sexy, husky voice and watch her lush, pink lips move. Long waves of golden-blonde hair tumbled down her back, and I imagined fisting it in my hand. Vivid green eyes like a cat…I never noticed eye color, but I noticed everything about Eden. Her slim, toned body, legs that went on for miles, perfect round breasts, and the sway of her hips as she crossed the street. The set of her shoulders, and the way she held her head high like she needed to prove she was confident. It worked, until she fell in that fucking pothole.
What possessed me to pick her up and carry her? It was my undoing. If sunshine had a scent, it would smell like Eden.
If it had just been a physical attraction, I’d understand that. But I wanted to know everything about her—who hurt her in the past and made her feel like fairytales couldn’t come true. She looked like a girl who should believe in fairytales—the kind of girl who could live in one. After she’d left, I’d Googled Picasso, focusing on his blue period. Then moved on to Rodin and scrolled through photos of his sculptures before I shut the screen, cursing myself.
What the fuck was wrong with me? I never let women mess with my head.
“She’s off limits. I don’t care who you screw outside of work. But keep it professional with the new bartender. She’s permanently friend-zoned. Got it?”
Zeke grinned. His smiles came easy and often. He was one of my hires, and I’d seen enough to know good from bad within minutes of talking to a person. Zeke was one of the good ones, but he was working his way through every hot girl in the Tri-State area. I had no room to judge, but I didn’t want him to hone in on Eden.
“She’s hot,” Zeke said, and I glared at him. He held up his hands and backed into the hallway. “But she’s off limits. Got it.”
I gave him a curt nod.
“Does the same rule apply to you?” he asked with a smirk. I wanted to punch him. But I wouldn’t. I didn’t let my fists do the talking anymore. I’d put that life behind me. New and improved Killian. I used my words now, although they were in short supply. Not a lot came out of my mouth.
Instead of punching him, I closed the door in his face and heard him laughing on the other side. “I still love you, man. You’re da bomb.”
God knew what I had done to earn his praise. Nothing I said or did ever offended Zeke. He was like Teflon. Everything bounced right off him. Ping. Ping. Ping. I’d love to walk a mile in his shoes and see what that felt like. Zeke was a rich boy from Connecticut. His parents loved him, and they just wanted him to be happy. He’d told me that in our interview when I’d asked him why he wanted to be a bartender instead of using his fancy college degree. “Why would bartending make you happy?”
“I’m a people person. Clearly,” he’d said, giving me one of his shit-eating grins. “The thought of getting stuck in an office for the rest of my life makes me feel like I’m suffocating. And the way I look at it, your twenties are the time to explore yourself and figure out who you are and what you want out of life. When I leave work, I don’t want the aggravation of thinking about it, you know? I just want to kick back and enjoy myself.”
Well, good for him. If Eden was looking for Prince Charming, which she claimed she wasn’t, Zeke was her man—a pretty-boy who used his charms and corny pick-up lines on all the women he served at the bar. He was a player, and he loved the game. Exactly the reason she was off limits to him. She was off limits to me for an entirely different reason.
The door swung open, and Ava poked her head in. “You’re an asshole,” she said, confirming something I already knew. She leaned against the doorframe, holding a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos bigger than she was. Ava was a foot shorter than me, tiny and delicate-looking. But appearances were deceptive. She was stronger than she looked. “Did you just slam the door in Zeke’s face?”
I broke down the empty boxes, not bothering to answer.
“Good thing I love you so much,” Ava said.
It was a good thing. Ava was a loyal friend and put up with my shitty moods and all my baggage. When she was fourteen and I was eighteen, I’d rescued her from getting bullied, and she’d been my most loyal supporter since. Even when I fucked up or hurt her feelings by shutting her out, she stood by me. Unfortunately, she sometimes took it too far. Ava was a social media whizz and took it upon herself to be the virtual Killian Vincent. She skyrocketed me to fame and built a huge following. On my insistence, she shut down those accounts, but you couldn’t erase virtual history. In a moment of weakness, I Googled myself about nine months ago, and drowned my self-loathing in a bottle of Jameson.
“Have you heard from Connor?” Ava asked, ripping open the bag of Doritos. She asked the same question every day.
I rolled out my shoulders. “No.” My job was to protect Connor and take care of him, but somehow, I failed him. Again. And now I didn’t know where in the hell he was.
“He’ll be back soon.” Another thing she repeated daily, but her voice lacked conviction. Once upon a time, Ava was Connor’s girl. He’d claimed she was his whole world, but the Vincent men had a knack for ruining everything good.
Two months and not a word from Connor. Three days after he got out of rehab, clean and sober, he disappeared. Five days later, he left me a voicemail from an unknown number. “I’m going to find a way to make things better. Thanks for everything you’ve done for me. I’ll make it up to you. Promise. Catch you later.”
Ava held out the bag of Doritos to me, but I waved it away. I hadn’t touched junk food in years, but she always offered. For some reason, it annoyed her that I always refused.
“You’re not training anymore,” she huffed, stuffing a handful of Doritos in her mouth. She crushed them between her teeth like they deserved punishment for my refusal.
My diet wasn’t as strict as it used to be, and my current workout sessions were a joke compared to the grueling hours I’d put in before, but I still didn’t see the need to fill my body with junk.
“I saw Seamus earlier,” she said, and winced like it physically pained her to mention his name. “He asked if I’d heard from Connor.”
Seamus Vincent. My father’s name didn’t strike fear in me. Not anymore. But if he got to Connor before I did, that would be bad. Connor wasn’t built like me, and I didn’t mean size and bulk. He wasn’t made to get his hands dirty. Connor was smart and sensitive. An artist. Sometimes I still thought of him as a sweet little kid with an innocence I tried to protect at any cost. But growing up in our house was a bad dream you couldn’t escape no matter how hard you tried. Even though Connor rarely had a hand laid on him, it was no less soul-destroying. I wore his designs on my arm and my back. He used to keep his sketchbooks hidden under the mattress. Otherwise, they would have been ridiculed and torn to shreds. The name-calling didn’t roll off Connor’s back like he’d pretended it did. He’d internalized it, took it to heart, and believed every word.
His opiate addiction began when he was seventeen, but I’d been too busy chasing my dreams to notice the signs. When I was twenty, I made my UFC debut and dedicated all my time and energy to becoming the best, but it came with a price. I’d gotten Connor out of my father’s house, but I was rarely home, so he’d been left to his own devices. By the time I’d found out he was in trouble, he’d moved on to heroin, and the shitty part was Ava had needed to clue me in. How the fuck had I missed something so obvious? To say I failed him was the understatement of the century.
Ava tucked her pale purple hair behind her ear. “Tell me about this girl you hired.”
“Did you book that band?” I couldn’t remember their name. Ava dealt with all of that.
“All taken care of. It’s on our website, Twitter, Facebook…all the stuff you never look at.”
“The building reg—”
“The file’s on your desk. What’s the deal with Eden?” she prompted, tapping away on her phone while she spoke.
“No deal. She needed a job. We needed a bartender.”
Ava smirked and kept typing. Tap. Tap. Tap. Most likely, she was promoting the bar, making it sound like the place everyone needed to be even if they didn’t know it yet. “Did Eden play the damsel in distress card? You’re a sucker for that.”
I wasn’t a sucker for it, unless it was genuine. Eden didn’t do it intentionally, but it had happened. I chuckled at the memory, and Ava’s brows hitched up like the sound was foreign to her. “Are you planning to be her white knight?”
I was nobody’s white knight, but when Eden crashed into my life, all my protective instincts had kicked into overdrive. Her eyes were clear and bright. Her face was unguarded, giving away all her emotions. If she had lied to me, I would have been able to read it on her face in an instant. But she wanted a fresh start, and I’d do my best to see that she got it. The best thing I could do for her was keep her safe from guys like me, and all the other wolves who would be hounding her.
Christ. What was I thinking? Did I need another person to worry about? Hell no.