Cold Dark Heart by Julie Kriss

Two

Andie

The manin my bar didn’t move. He just stood there, surprise flickering behind his gray eyes.

“He left?” he asked.

“Sure he did,” I said, trying not to sound bitter—and failing. “Left me, left his son, left his business, left the state. If you’re his friend, you would know that.”

The man shifted his weight. He was tall, powerful without being bulky. He was wearing jeans, work boots, a navy blue flannel shirt layered over a T-shirt, and a brown leather jacket. He had a ball cap on his head, but he took it off and ran a hand through his hair, which was dark blond and worn long behind his ears. He was good-looking, if you liked men. Which, right now, I absolutely did not.

I had no use for men, especially good-looking ones. The only male I gave a shit about anymore was my son.

“I told you, I’m not his friend,” the man—Damon—said. “We worked together.”

So he was a Fed, then. He didn’t look it. Terry was clean-cut, his hair always trimmed short and his jaw freshly shaved. This guy looked like he didn’t even own a dress shirt, let alone a tie. “What did Terry tell you?” I asked him.

“That he needed someone to head up security at the bar he owned. Someone good.”

I felt Jimmy, the bartender, staring at my back from behind the bar. We’d had problems lately—rowdy assholes, drunk guys bothering women, guys pissing in the alley next door, even an attempted break-in. I only knew all of this because Jimmy filled me in. Until two weeks ago, I had never run a bar in my life. The business was Terry’s. Now, apparently, if I wanted to keep my head above water, I was the new boss.

Maybe we needed a security guy. I didn’t really know. I did know I didn’t want anything to do with this particular guy.

I shook my head. “He misled you, just like he misled all of us. Sorry you came all this way, but we don’t need anyone.”

“Don’t you?” Damon asked.

I narrowed my eyes at him. I already had an avalanche of problems today—just like every day for the past two weeks—and I didn’t need one more in the shape of a stranger with an attitude. “What is that supposed to mean?”

He looked around. “Can we talk in private?”

“Probably not.”

“Trust me, you’re going to want to hear what I have to say.” He stepped forward and reached out, maybe to touch my arm, but when he saw the look in my eyes, he backed up. “Fine.” Then he walked past me, around the bar as if he worked here every day, and disappeared into the back room.

What the hell? He was alone back there in my office—Terry’s old office—with all of my paperwork and my computer. And the bank statements. I hurried to follow him, giving Jimmy a look. “You couldn’t have stopped him?”

“Was he really a Fed?” Jimmy asked. “Maybe you should hear him out.”

It figured that the men, even though they’d just met, would stick together and gang up on me. I followed Damon into the office.

As soon as I was inside, he closed the door. That should have alarmed me, maybe. But I could walk back out if I wanted, and even though he outweighed me with muscle, Damon Blake didn’t scare me. I wondered if he should.

Damon sat down on the chair across from the desk and crossed an ankle over his other knee. “All right, let’s talk,” he said.

“You have some nerve.”

“Take a seat and give me some intel, starting with your name.”

I was pissed off. I’d also had the worst two weeks of my life—furious, lonely, painful, heartbroken weeks. The heartbreak wasn’t so much for Terry, who was an asshole, but for our son, Miles. At thirteen, he had already started to get in trouble, and his father leaving town wasn’t helping.

So maybe that was why I sat down. Because for a second, talking to a stranger didn’t sound so bad. “My name is Andie English.”

Damon folded his hands in his lap. He had long legs in those jeans, which I could appreciate in some distant part of me that wasn’t enraged. He was thin, though—maybe too thin, as if he’d been unwell recently. “You didn’t take Terry’s last name.”

I shook my head. “Best decision I ever made, considering my lawyer is working on the divorce papers.”

“So he lied to me when he said this bar was his. It’s actually yours.”

“Not exactly. This bar was Terry’s thing. He wanted to buy it, he wanted to run it. I had nothing to do with it until he skipped town. But it’s our main source of income, so if I want to keep eating, I have to keep it afloat myself.”

“Did you have a job before Terry left?”

“I was a part-time freelance bookkeeper, and I raised our son.”

He was watching me steadily. He had dark lashes around his gray eyes, but something about his look was cold and impersonal. “So until two weeks ago, you’d never run a bar before.”

“No!” I almost shouted. “Why are we talking about this? Are you trying to be my therapist?”

That made a smile touch his lips. “Believe me, no one needs a therapist more than I do. I just find it diverting to talk about your problems instead of mine.”

I leaned back in the old desk chair, making it creak. “What are your problems?”

“Like I say, we’ll talk about them later. Or never. Let’s get back to you, and the problems with this bar.”

“I didn’t say there were problems with the bar.”

“Terry messaged me,” he said, and his voice was low and chilled. For a second I could see the federal agent he’d been, dealing with very dangerous people on a regular basis. “We didn’t know each other that well and we didn’t particularly like each other all that much, but he still looked me up and asked me to come here. That wasn’t a whim. He had a reason.”

I bit my lip, then shrugged. “Sometimes it gets rowdy in here, I guess. Drunk guys. That’s what they tell me.”

“You haven’t seen it yourself?”

“I don’t hang out here in the evenings. I have a son at home to take care of. And I don’t drink.”

Damon’s gaze was flatly disbelieving. “You own a bar, and you don’t drink.”

“I didn’t ask to own a bar. I just ended up with one.”

“Okay. So other than rowdy assholes, what else has been going on?”

I dropped my gaze to the messy desktop, with its pile of papers and its clunky old PC. “There was an attempted break-in. Two guys with baseball bats going for a window in the middle of the night. Luckily someone spotted them and called the police before they could get inside, but they ran off when they heard sirens coming. The cops didn’t find them. I had to get the window replaced.”

“Did the witness see their faces?”

“No. And now I’ve paid for the window because the place wasn’t secure without it, and now the insurance company is giving me trouble with my claim. They say they’re going to raise my premiums.” I lifted one of the papers from the stack on the desk. “That’s this problem, here. The top one on the pile of problems. Below it are complaints from suppliers that haven’t been paid, a utility bill that’s inexplicably high, and a letter from a lawyer threatening to sue Terry for sexual harassment of a former waitress here. Do you want me to go on?”

He shook his head, his gaze on the pile of papers. There was a moment of quiet. This man didn’t feel the need to talk nonstop.

Then he said, “I’ve spent the last eight years on the DEA. Before that, I was a drug dealer and a budding addict. I went straight, got clean, and joined the force. I spent my time undercover, working to take down some of the biggest dealers in the country, before I got shot twice in a raid. Now I’m not on the force anymore.”

I felt my jaw drop as he spoke. When he finished, I was speechless.

“I’m telling you this so that you know who I am,” Damon went on. “You can do a background check. The Feds gave me a severance, so I’m not desperate for money, but I need something to do. It’s why I came here when Terry offered the job. I don’t want to sit around, feeling useless, when I’m not even forty. I don’t have a wife or kids, and right now I don’t even have a home. I’m not leaving Salt Springs, because I have nowhere else to go. So, you may as well make use of me.”

“Make use of you how?” I asked. That sounded vaguely dirty, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“There’s no security system in this place,” Damon said. “There are no cameras. I’m willing to bet there is no safe. This office has a shit lock on the door. Who else has access to it?” I opened my mouth, but he went on before I could answer. “I just walked in here with no problem, and no one stopped me. I saw a cash box behind the bar that looked like it came from a dollar store. And I haven’t looked at that computer, but I’ll bet money it doesn’t have a security password.”

A breath hushed out of my throat. I didn’t want to admit he was right. The computer didn’t have a password.

“Frankly, if I was looking to rob someone, this is the first place I’d pick,” Damon said. “It’s fucking perfect.”

I closed my eyes, willing the stress and panic down. I’m trying! I wanted to shout. I don’t know what I’m doing! This isn’t fair!

But guess what? Life wasn’t fair. It was a cliché, but it was true. I had a son to raise, and the Wild Wild West—as ridiculous as it was—was the only means to do it. At least, until I could think of something else.

“What are you suggesting?” I asked him, my voice hoarse.

“Hire me,” he said.

I opened my eyes. “Damon, I don’t even think I can afford to pay you.”

A flicker of something I couldn’t read crossed his eyes, and then they went cold again. “Give me four weeks,” he said. “Pay me at the end of it if you think I’ve earned it.”

I made a disbelieving sound. He had to be putting me on. “You’re offering to work for free?”

“I’m offering to defer my paycheck,” he shot back. “We can call it a trial period.”

I shook my head. “I don’t even know you. I just met you. I can’t decide this right now. Maybe it’s you who’s going to rob me blind.”

Instead of being offended, Damon nodded. “Now you’re using your brain.” He stood up, took a scrap of paper and a pen from the edge of the desk, and wrote a number on it. “Here’s my cell. I’ll be back here tomorrow at one. Use the time to look me up. I wouldn’t trust me, either.” He left the paper on the desk and turned to leave.

“Where are you going?” I asked him.

“To find an apartment,” he said. “I’m going to spend the next four weeks getting some mountain air.”