Page 3 of Never Dance with the Devils
I ignore him in favor of telling Riggs, “Didn’t realize you already had a friend.”
I turn to leave but freeze when he says, “Wait.” When I turn back, he’s rising from the bench seat. “Please, sit.” He holds an arm out, inviting me to sit on the inside of the booth, between the two men.
I glance between them thoughtfully, still deciding, and the other guy offers an easygoing smile meant to put me at ease. “We don’t bite.” He quirks a brow. “Unless you ask nicely.”
“You’re trouble,” I declare, deciding that Mr. Stupid-But-Fun may just have some tingle to him, after all.
At the same time, Riggs growls, “Don’t be an asshole, Maddox.”
I slide into the booth and glance between the two men, confirming, “Riggs. Maddox.” They nod and I offer, “I’m Kay—” I stop myself from giving them my full name, snapping my mouth closed and then smiling politely.
Maddox holds his hand out, but when I reach forward to shake, he catches my hand and turns it to press a kiss to the back. “Enchante,” he purrs, glancing up at me through his lashes. “That means ‘hey, beautiful’,” he informs me with a wink.
When he releases my hand, Riggs shakes it moreformally. “No, it doesn’t. And he speaks enough French to know that.”
“Parlez-vous Francais?” I ask Maddox, tilting my head. His face goes slack in shock, and I laugh. “Me neither.”
Riggs chuckles at us both.
RIGGS
How in the fuck did this happen?
I scare most people, especially women—who I don’t talk to, as a matter of fact. Not after Eliza. As the whisper of my ex-wife’s ghost walks across my mind, I actively slam that door closed. Not because she’s dead, though I secretly wish that were the case, but because I refuse to give her one second of thought.
The woman sitting to my left? I want to give her lots of thoughts and quite a few seconds, maybe hours. And that’s what confuses the hell out of me.
I don’t know what made me talk to her at the bar. Maybe the way she looked sad but then tucked it away in a single, quick blink, an action I’m all too familiar with? Or how she spoke so directly, completely unintimidated by me? Or, let’s be real here since it’s just me and myself, it’s likely that her being an absolute stunner is what had words spilling out of my mouth before I could swallow them down.
But she’d dismissed me outright. I’d liked that too. A woman who declares herselfclearly and without apology is attractive as hell. And a little ‘hard to get’ is a refreshing change of pace from the puck bunnies who throw themselves at me and Maddox, either individually or together.
“What brings you to this fine establishment?” Maddox asks Kay, gesturing widely like the club is a fancy three-star restaurant. He’s already ‘on’, his life of the party, social butterfly persona taking over and ending the private conversation we were having about our season with the Devils, the hockey team we both play for, me as a defenseman and him as a left-winger.
He’s the Yin to my Yang. For as quiet as I am, Maddox could talk all day, to anyone or nothing. When I go balls to the wall, leading with my fists, he thinks things through and can usually calm me down or physically hold me back. Where I’m cold and shut off from nearly everything, Maddox approaches every day with a smile and open arms. I’m basically the rabid Rottweiler he adopted and refuses to give back to the shelter for the euthanasia I deserve.
“Scotch. And as I told Riggs, a shitty day,” Kay answers, including me in the conversation with a glance my way.
“What happened?” I blurt out.
She stares at her glass for a moment, her thoughts so loud I can virtually hear them. Or maybe that’s just the expressions that flicker across her face one right after the other—anger, sadness, satisfaction, and finally, a smirk that can only be described as haughty. Maddox and I meet eyes quickly. It’s nothing more than a glance before we return our attention to Kay, but it said everything we needed to.
We’re both in if she’s in.
We don’t make it a habit to pick up women at bars. In fact, we haven’t done it in a long time, years probably. They come with complications we prefer to avoid. On the other hand, casual hook-ups with women who know exactly who and what we are, and what will and won’t happen between us, are our usual.
But there’s something about Kay. More than her beauty, though she is gorgeous. It’s like she’s the finest porcelain China and we’re bulls that want to rampage through her shop. She’s not fragile or delicate, though. Her confidence says that so loudly and clearly that even an idiot like me can hear it, and I think she can handle Maddox and me with ease. Not physically—we know how to manage that—but mentally and emotionally, which is a rarer trait in women, who usually tend to get attached more readily than men do. Or at least, than Maddox and I do.
Completely unaware of the entire conversation Maddox and I have had while she was silently staring at her drink, Kay lifts her gaze to mine, answering my question. “Work.”
All that thinking to get a one-syllable, one-word answer? Is this what Maddox feels like when he tries to interrogate me? I lift my pint glass in a classic toast. “Work sucks, then you die.”
Maddox hisses out a ‘fuck, man’, but Kay laughs as she clinks her glass against mine. “That it does.” But then she tilts her head, considering thoughtfully before correcting herself. “Sometimes. Usually, I love what I do,” she reveals, setting her glass down without taking a drink. “But days like today, I just want to quit in a fiery blaze of glory, telling stupid people to go ahead with the stupid shit they want to do, even though I know they’llcome crawling back, begging for my help when they realize their mistake too late.”
Well, damn, girl. Tell me what you really think, I think with an internal guffaw. Actually, given the strange look Maddox is shooting me, I think that rough sound was me actually laughing. I rush to cover it, asking, “And will you help them when they beg?”
Her brows wrinkle as if that’s a ridiculous question, and she shakes her head. “Of course not. One-time offer, one-time deal. If McCormick is too blinded by his own illusions of grandeur to see what’s right in front of him in black and white, that’s not my problem. I’m an angel investor, not a guardian angel.”
I want to ask who this McCormick asshole is because he obviously got under her skin, but she’s already clamping her lips together like she’s said too much. And maybe she has. One, she’s made it clear that she doesn’t put up with bullshit. And two, I know what an angel investor is. Essentially, it means Miss Thing has money, or at a minimum, works for someone who has money. I’m not surprised, given the watch on her wrist, the tasteful diamonds in her ears, and the designer cut of her clothes. I might not wear expensive things often, but I can recognize them after years of being married to a label-hound, and Kay is someone who likes the finer things in life.