Page 10 of Beneath Your Beautiful

“Did that give you any satisfaction?”

“A little,” I admitted. “But now I have a cracked screen.”

She laughed. “How’s Brooklyn?”

“Great,” I said brightly. Fake it ‘til ya make it. But hey, I had an apartment. And a job. I was getting my life together. No more going off the deep end. No more crying in my beer. I wasn’t wasting any more time or energy on that. I’d moved on. New life. New me. And a world of possibility, all my own making. “I scored a bartending job today.”

“That’s great,” she said, but her cheer was forced, and that kind of hurt.

Cassidy and I had been friends since junior high. She had stayed in our hometown for college, but she used to visit me at Penn State all the time. Now she was working for an accounting firm and living at home to save money while working on her CPA. She had her whole life mapped out: get a job at a top accounting firm in Pittsburgh and marry a wealthy, handsome man. Someone a lot like Luke.

Despite the baby on the way, it didn’t derail Luke’s life or his future. In the fall, he’d be starting law school at Duquesne. He and Lexie were living with his doting parents, and I was sure the only thing required of her was to lounge by the pool and look after herself. And her unborn child. We couldn’t forget that.

Chapter Five

Killian

“Ihired 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.