Page 65 of On His Knees
D snickered, stretched his long legs out in front of him and crossed his boot-shod feet at the ankles. “Guess that explains the look.”
“What look?” She looked to Tony, then to Skeet. “I don’t have a look.”
“Yeah, you do,” Tony said. “Kind of like you’ve held a fart in too long and are gonna throat punch the next person who keeps you from getting somewhere private so you can let it out.”
“You got a shitty poker face, doll.” Skeet fired up a cigarette he wasn’t supposed to have lit in the building and exhaled a healthy amount of smoke on a chuckle. “You startin’ to see why someone with interpersonal skills might come in handy for us?”
“I’m starting to think the person I’m going to throat punch tonight is you.” She tried to make it come out like the badass she pretended to be on stage, but one corner of her mouth curled up in a smile she couldn’t hold back. Strolling past him, she punched him in the shoulder with an equally lame delivery. “If I’m not back in fifteen minutes, come see if I’m being hauled off in a cop car for attempted murder.”
All of three steps past the doorway, their laughter was swallowed up by the chaos of the lingering crowd and the requisite end-of-the-night strains of “Sweet Home Alabama.” As bars went, The Crow wasn’t the worst Lizzy had played. The single-story was a free-standing structure and big enough to hold a decent crowd—a necessity when a good chunk of your pay came from a cut of the door. That said, it was also the kind of place where the bouncers didn’t intervene unless more than two sets of fists were involved, and you definitely didn’t want to see the place with the house lights on. The scarred tables and floor stains highlighted by the neon beer signs showed plenty as it was, thank you very much.
Lizzy sidestepped a three-woman posse that’d circled a lone man left unprotected by his wing man—and almost tripped in her four-inch-heel boots.
Standing with his feet braced in a casual yet confident stance behind one of the many black pub tables was a man who turned the rest of the room’s predictability on its head. Dressed in tailored tan pants and a crisp white button-down with sleeves rolled up to show corded forearms, he looked like he’d just escaped long negotiations in a board room, and as tall and built as he was in the shoulders, every thread on him was probably custom-made. But where his clothes were the refined flip side to the rest of the room’s occupants, his long auburn hair and beard completely bucked the businessman stereotype, and his sharp features spoke of life experience learned
the hardest way possible.
A powerful man. One who commanded attention with nothing more than a look.
And every ounce of his attention was locked on her.
A whole different buzz fired beneath her skin, and her steps slowed, a sexual awareness she hadn’t felt in years fueling the sway in her hips as she worked her way through the people between her and the bar.
“The crowd’s light tonight.” Vic’s gruff yet petulant voice ripped her attention from the stranger just in time to keep her from slamming into a table directly in her path. It took her a second to tag him behind the bar, half hidden in the shadows of one corner and counting out twenties. “Didn’t help you were late starting up the last set. We lost five big tables waiting on you and your guys to get back to work.”
Light crowd her ass. Every single table had been full right up through their last song, and the waitresses had been hustling nonstop since Lizzy first fired up her amp. Then again, Vic was a sour fucker of the first order and always acted like the whole damned world was lined up and eager to screw him when, in fact, it was him plotting to screw everyone else.
She pushed the insanely hot guy out of her mind and closed what was left of the distance to the bar in what she hoped looked like a laid-back stride. “The only thing you lost tonight was about a hundred bucks worth of Fireballs.”
Vic paused in his counting and eyeballed her with one eyebrow cocked high.
For a second, Lizzy considered sliding onto a barstool in that ready-for-conversation way Rex always used, then remembered Skeet’s comment about her shitty poker face and ditched the idea. “Oh, come on. You slid any woman who talked to you for more than five minutes tonight a free one.”
One thing about Vic and his fragile ego—watching him puff up his chest like a disgruntled baboon while he huffed and puffed and grappled for a witty comeback was mighty entertaining. “Keeping women here is good for business. When my band can’t hold a crowd, I do what I’ve got to do.”
“Man, you can say a lot about tonight, but us holding a crowd isn’t one of ’em. Every table was full until after we walked off stage.”
Vic grunted and tossed a messy stack of twenties in front of her on the bar. “There’s your base.”
The too-thin pile of crumpled bills practically mocked her from the black Formica countertop. “The deal’s base plus thirty percent of the door.”
“Thirty percent of the door for a full house. Full house means the people stay. Not get up and leave before the night’s over. If I have to resort to Fireballs to hang on to what you and your band can’t, the cut’s null and void.”
See? This was why she didn’t deal with Vic the Dick. Or humans. Rex would’ve known better than to prod his delicate male ego. Hell, the little girl that lived with the single mom in the apartment next to Lizzy’s would have known better. “That’s bullshit, and you know it. We’ve never had a clause like that in our bookings and, even if we did, the crowd stayed.”
“Now you’re calling me a slime and a liar?”
Fuck.
Lizzy forced herself not to fidget and ground her teeth together to bite back a good old-fashioned directive to tell the asshole where he could stick his accusations. In hindsight, maybe Skeet would’ve been a better person to pick up the cash because right now she was thinking a throat punch would be highly enjoyable even if she’d never shown an act of violence her whole life.
With no clue how to dig herself out of a hole and not end up one more bar short of places to play, she opened her mouth to start on damage control—but froze at the prickling awareness that swept down her spine.
“At a quarter to one, your man on the door was still tracking headcount coming in and out.” The deep masculine voice tinged with the barest Scottish accent registered all of a second before the ruggedly GQ man she’d ogled on her trek across the room moved in beside her. He clinked his empty tumbler onto the countertop. While he aimed an affable smile at Vic and his posture was outwardly relaxed, there was a heightened edge to his presence. A lethal dare barely masked by his easygoing facade. When he spoke again, his tone was just as poised and calm as before, but there was no mistaking the warning behind his words. “No reason to track counts unless you’re worried about being over occupancy, now is there?”
“Who the fuck are you?” Typical Vicente. Clueless and classless.
Though, considering the mystery guy had all but waltzed up and firmly inserted himself in the middle of her business without so much as a hi-how-are-ya, she couldn’t say she hadn’t thought the same thing.