Cold Dark Heart by Julie Kriss

Thirty-Two

Andie

Two weeks later

I lowered myself onto a barstool and scrubbed my hands over my face. I was bone tired. “Jimmy,” I said. “I think I’d like a beer.”

From his position behind the bar, where he was breaking up a bag of ice, Jimmy paused. “Huh. Are you sure about that?”

I thought it over. “Yeah, I think I am.”

Why not? I owned a bar, after all. Granted, it was a bar that had been closed for two weeks because it was the center of a drug trafficking investigation. I’d been questioned repeatedly by various levels of local and federal police, as had my employees. I’d almost lost my liquor license, though with the help of Aldous Peters, I had pulled that particular iron out of the fire. I’d also dealt with the fallout of my ex-husband being arrested on drug trafficking charges. The CEO of one of my suppliers, Shaffer Whiskey, had also been arrested, and tax evasion charges were starting to land on top of the criminal ones. My bar had been all over the news in Salt Springs for the worst possible reasons. I’d hardly had a few hours’ sleep in the past two weeks.

So, yeah, maybe just this once I could have a drink.

“A beer, huh?” Jimmy still sounded skeptical. We were preparing for the bar to finally reopen tomorrow. Calling the staff back in for paid work was one of the few high points of the last little while.

The other ray of goodness, strangely enough, was Miles. Considering his father was now a federal criminal, my son was taking it well. He was going to see his new therapist. He was spending time with his friends—the good ones—playing video games and soccer. His teachers were understanding about the shit he was going through. And best of all, he was leaning on me—just a little, and reluctantly, but enough. Enough for me to know that he’d tell me if he felt like he was drowning instead of hiding things from me.

In return, I gave him space and privacy. We navigated it fresh every day, but we were navigating it.

I was proud of that. Then I remembered that I hadn’t seen or heard from Damon Blake for two weeks, and I wanted that beer.

“What kind of beer do you like?” Jimmy asked, surveying our taps.

“I don’t know. You pick one.”

“Hmm. I think an IPA will be too strong. Too hoppy.”

“Is that an IPA?” I pointed at one of the taps. “It has an owl logo. I like it.”

“That’s a stout. You’re not ready for stout.” Jimmy shook his head. “You own a bar, and you’re choosing your drink by the logo. Please don’t ever drink without my assistance.”

“You have a deal. Pick something for me. I want to get nice and drunk.”

Jimmy’s gray eyebrows went up and down in surprise, but this time he didn’t comment. He poured me exactly half a pint of beer and slid it toward me.

“This isn’t going to get me drunk,” I complained.

“With your tolerance, it might. Drink it and I might give you more.”

“This isn’t fair,” I said. The women in movies, TV, and books always got drunk when they were unhappy. They also ate ice cream straight from the tub, which I wasn’t ready for yet. I would start with drinking, but instead of a sophisticated martini or something, I had to drink half a pint of pale, watery beer.

I lifted the glass and took a deep swig. It tasted all right, I supposed. Still, I was going to have to drink a lot of it if I wanted to get drunk into oblivion.

I was still psyching myself up when Jimmy said, “Call him.”

I sagged, putting my forehead in my hands and my elbows on the bar. I had a sharp pang of missing Damon, a pang I felt a hundred times per day. “Is he even in town?” I asked.

“He’s in town. He hasn’t gone anywhere. I talk to him almost every day. He’s as miserable as a mangy dog, by the way.”

This didn’t make me feel better. Damon was miserable because of me. He was also in the middle of a drug trafficking investigation, indirectly because of me. If he hadn’t met me, Damon would be much better off.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” Jimmy said carefully, “what did you do to him?”

It was so hard to explain. “I didn’t trust him,” I said. “I should have, but—I don’t know. It was a really low moment. And I let him go.”

Jimmy was silent so long I raised my head and looked at him. He was standing with his arms crossed, a look that was both sad and thoughtful on his face.

“If you tell him to go, he’ll go,” he said. “If you tell him to stay, he’ll stay. He’s like a trained Doberman, that guy. Dangerous, but he only has one master. That’s you. He’d do literally anything you say.”

The words hit me like punches. I remembered standing at the side of the house, listening to Damon negotiate so easily with Terry. Listening to him say he was interested in the drugs. Listening to him agree to dump me because I wasn’t any fun.

He was acting. I knew that. I did. And still, every word had hit the most tender parts of me, the parts that Terry had spent years tearing down. Those were the parts Damon had slipped past my defenses to touch. I had needed space and time not to feel anything. Just for a little while.

In doing that, I had no idea if I’d wrecked my chances with the best man I’d ever met.

“It was so stupid of me,” I said to Jimmy. “The only thing I want is Damon back. And I don’t know how to fix it.”

“You can fix it by calling him and telling him to come over here,” Jimmy said.

I kept my head in my hands, my gaze trained down at the bar top. “And then what? Tell him how pathetic I am?”

“You sure don’t look pathetic to me,” Jimmy replied. “You know you turned this place around, right? Anyone else would have closed it down and we all would have lost our jobs. Last time I checked, you didn’t have anyone doing all that for you. You did it yourself.”

He was right. As much as I missed Damon—and I missed him horribly, all the time—I had to admit that in some ways, these weeks had been good for me. It had gone a long way to rebuilding my confidence when I solved problem after problem on my own. I’d had to take out loans to float the bar, which meant bank meetings and paperwork. Now the Wild was in debt, but unlike Terry, I’d made a payment plan. It wasn’t easy, but I could handle this. I had handled it. On my own.

Still, I had liked those days when Damon drove me to meetings and I bounced my ideas off him. I liked those hours we’d spent in the car, and the hours we’d spent coming up with improvements for the Wild. And the hours we’d spent in bed.

I really missed the hours we’d spent in bed. I was a competent woman now, but I was back to being a sexless one. A woman who did nothing but work and take care of others, including her son, her dad, and her employees. I was back to having no one to take care of me.

And Damon, I assumed, was back to having no one to take care of him, either. Was he eating enough? Was he still off cigarettes, or had he gone back to them? Had he gone back to any of his other vices? Was he going to AA meetings? Did he need a job? He was supposed to be my consultant, but he hadn’t sent me an invoice. Did he need money?

Was he going to find someone else? Some woman who would look after him and let him look after her? Someone who wasn’t me?

I took another deep swig of my beer, draining the glass. Jimmy was right. I should call Damon. Just woman up and say I was sorry and I wanted him back if he would have me. I wondered if I should apologize while wearing the black lace teddy, or if that was too much. Shit, I had no idea how to do any of this. I’d call Ginny for an emergency lunch and take her advice. She’d know what to do.

I looked up from my cloud of gloom to see Jimmy putting his phone in the worn back pocket of his jeans. “Welp,” he said, “we’re all set for tomorrow. Want me to lock up?”

“No, I’ll do it.” We’d had the back door replaced. The alarm system Damon had set up worked perfectly. So perfectly, in fact, that it had caught footage of the two men who had broken down the door and taken the heroin hidden in my storage room. They’d worn baseball caps and hoodies, but the camera still caught one man’s face as he used his crowbar on my door. He was a disgruntled employee who had worked for Terry when he was the owner. He’d known just a little too much about Terry’s side business, and after he was fired, he’d decided he wanted in. He’d been arrested, and it had taken him about thirty seconds to turn on his friend.

So they weren’t coming back. There was no reason to anymore, since there wasn’t much to steal at the Wild now except for the nice whiskey on the top shelf. Whiskey that was definitely not Shaffer brand.

There would always be some undesirables in this part of town, but it wasn’t late and I was safe here. “Go home,” I said to Jimmy. “Thanks for the help. And for the therapy session. You’re a good listener.”

“It’s in my bartender DNA,” Jimmy said with a wink. He put on a jean jacket that was almost older than he was. “Don’t hit that lager too hard if you’re going to drive home.”

“Okay,” I said.

“But if you’re getting a ride, you can have as much as you want.”

I frowned. “Why would I have a ride?”

He shrugged. “No particular reason I can think of. Keep the front door open for a few more minutes, okay?”

“What? Why?”

He smiled. “For a smart lady, you need a little help sometimes. G’night.”

I watched him go, the back of my neck tingling. Something was up. The bar was quiet; I was the last one here. I wandered to the back and checked that the back door was locked—a habit. But I didn’t lock the front door, just as Jimmy had asked. I couldn’t have said why.

I came back to the front room and walked behind the bar, grabbing my empty glass. If my project for tonight was to get drunk like a heroine in the movies, maybe I should get going.

There was a soft click as the bar’s front door opened and closed.

I looked up to see Damon standing in the doorway. He was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved dark gray Henley that made his eyes the most beautiful man’s eyes I’d ever seen. He leaned against the doorframe, not coming further into the room.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hi,” I said, momentarily stupid with surprise and lust and pure happiness to see him. It pulsed over me like someone had doused me with water. He was here.

“Jimmy texted me,” Damon said when I did nothing but stare at him like an idiot. “He said you were drowning your sorrows and you might need a ride home.” His gaze moved down to the glass in my hand, which I’d just filled with beer. “You’re drowning your sorrows in stout?”

I looked down. I’d pulled the handle with the owl on it when I filled the glass, and now some kind of pitch-black liquid was in my beer glass. “I don’t know,” I said. “Apparently.” I took a tiny sip and nearly gagged. “Dear God, what is this? Do we actually sell it?”

The corner of his mouth twitched, but he didn’t smile. He also stayed in his spot in the doorway. My Doberman, who never assumed. “Stout is an acquired taste,” he said.

“Acquired by people who are clinically insane.” I dumped the beer down the bar sink and rinsed the glass. “So much for that experiment.”

“Any particular reason you’re trying to get drunk?” Damon asked.

You, I thought. I miss you and I don’t know how to handle it. “It’s been a rough few weeks,” I said lamely instead.

“You seem to be doing okay. I like the new name.”

I brightened at that. I’d officially changed the name of the Wild Wild West to just the Wild. I’d had a new sign put up, one that didn’t look like a holdover from the eighties. I was getting a new website and new marketing materials made—thank you, bank loan—and there was a banner beneath the new sign that said Under New Management. “Do you honestly like it?” I asked Damon. “Please tell me the truth.”

“Yes, I like it,” he replied softly. “You’ve done a great job. And I always tell you the truth.”

Oh, that hit me in the gut. I bit my lip. “About that. We need to talk.”

Damon reached one of his gorgeous, masculine hands up—I missed those hands—and scratched his temple uncomfortably. “No, I don’t really think we do.”

“We do. About that night—”

“There’s nothing to say.”

“There’s plenty to say. I’m really sorry—”

“I don’t need to hear it, Andie. You don’t owe me anything.”

He was shutting me out. It was probably a reflex, just like it had been when I did it. Except with Damon, it was born of so many years being lonely.

Even though I’d been married, I’d been lonely, too. And I was suddenly tired of it. So tired I didn’t want to be that way for one more day.

“I owe you everything,” I told him. “You changed my life.”

“You changed your life.”

Were we going to argue about this? “Fine, I changed it. But I leaned on you, and that felt good.” Now I sounded like I needed him as a prop. So I swallowed and womaned up. “I miss you.”

Damon rubbed a hand over his face, and for the first time I noticed a trace of exhaustion in the line of his body, the way he leaned on the doorframe. I’d been blinded by how good he looked. But Jimmy had said he was miserable. Because of me.

“You miss me, too,” I said. “Jimmy told me you do. You like me.”

“I’m no good at this,” he said.

That made me laugh. “Neither am I.” I rounded the bar and approached him slowly. I didn’t want him to back out that door and out of my life again.

Damon didn’t flee, so I came even closer. I couldn’t go another minute without touching him, so I took one of his hands in mine. It was warm and strong. How had I missed his hands this much? How had I missed all of him this much?

I curled his hand around mine, watched how it dwarfed mine. He gripped me lightly. He didn’t pull me closer, but he didn’t back away.

I dropped a kiss to the warm skin on the back of his hand. “I’m very sorry,” I whispered. “Can you forgive me?”

His hand flexed in mine, and he pulled free. For a second I panicked, and then his hands were cradling my face, warm and strong and familiar. When I breathed, I breathed him in.

“I just want to take care of you,” he said, his voice low and ragged. “I did all of it for you, and I didn’t mean to hurt you. I would never hurt you. Never. Do you understand that?”

I nodded. Tears spilled from my eyes and down my cheeks. “I shouldn’t have doubted you.”

“I’m not mad about that,” Damon said. “I’m not mad about anything. I just want you to be safe and to have the life you deserve. Even if it doesn’t include me.”

I sniffed. “It has to include you. I’m not happy if my life doesn’t have you in it.”

He made a sound of pain and leaned in. I felt the touch of his scruff on my skin, and he placed a lingering kiss to my neck, as if he couldn’t help himself. I grabbed him, twisting my hands into his shirt. I was not going to let him go. Not now, not ever.

“What do you want?” he asked me.

“I want to go back to that day at the house, when we were in bed,” I said. “When I asked you to be my boyfriend and you said yes. I want there to be an us. I want you to meet my son and be part of his life. I want you to be mine every day, and I want to be yours. That’s what I want.”

“Andie.” His voice was rough. “I’m not a good bet.”

“You’re the best bet,” I told him. “I should know. Do you know what I see when I look at you?” I didn’t let him answer. “I see a man who fights his demons every day. Just gets up and fights, over and over again, no matter how many times he has to. You’re the bravest person I’ve ever known.”

He was quiet for a moment. I listened to him breathing.

“I don’t deserve you,” he said at last. “You think I don’t know it? I fucking know it. And yet I’m not leaving.”

“Good,” I said, because despite the moment, those words made me giddy. Damon was here, and he wasn’t leaving. I tilted my face up to his as I leaned in, pressing my body against his.

He was warm against me, and I felt my body thrum when it touched his. He dropped his hands and I parted my lips to say something, perhaps to protest or to keep trying to convince him, but I didn’t get the chance to speak. Damon kissed me.

I leaned into it, kissing him back. Around us, the bar was dim and quiet. There was no one here but me, kissing Damon, claiming him as mine. For good this time.

He broke the kiss, raising his hands to my face again as if it was precious. “This is not going to be easy, Andie,” he said. “We both have rough edges. But I’m in.”

“So am I.” I put my hands on his waist, curling them into the warm fabric of his shirt again. “Take me home?”

He smiled a little, that smile that made my knees weak. “You sure? We’re alone here. I’ve never had sex on a bar, have you?”

I smiled back at him as my blood warmed. “You put a camera behind the bar, you pervert.”

“I can turn it off. I set up the security system, remember?”

I rose up and brushed my lips along his jawline, feeling his body get tight beneath my hands.

“Just kiss me, please,” I said, “and take me home. I’m finally going to cook you dinner.”