Page 12 of Rory Rides Her Fake Fiancé
He’s not even going to tease me about starting a conversation? Or call me his queen?
Instead, Morgan leans his elbows against the bar. “It was just announced this morning that the owners are gonna sell the lodge.”
My brows come together. “Not Hunter?”
“No, he’s the GM. The Schaefers are the owners and he runs it when they aren’t here.”
I lean forward, ignoring my beer.
“So someone else will be the boss? Will you lose your job?”
Morgan blows out his breath. Since we’re both leaning onto the bar, this might be the closest I’ve ever been to his eyes, which are a sky blue.
Except for last time. But I wasn’t making eye contact last time.
“It’s more than that,” he tells me. “This town has been struggling for some time now. The lodge brings good business in the winter, but a few years ago they shut down their adventure park, and summers dried right up.”
“But couldn’t someone else buy the lodge?”
He grimaces. “There are a few options and none of them are good. There’s this guy, Joseph Rance, who likes to buy up property and sit on it. Half the unused buildings in town are empty because of him. Who knows if he’d actually want to run things. Then there’s also one of the ski conglomerates up here. It’s not Vail, but who knows what changes they’d make.”
He breaks eye contact, looking around the room. “They’d probably shut the bar down to renovate, and it’d be easier to fire me than keep me on. Then they’d want someone with actual food and beverage experience, which I don’t have, other than this place.”
When his eyes come back to mine, they’re duller, missing that twinkle I associate with Morgan.
“That sucks.” Ugh. That’s something you tell people when they get stuck in traffic or something, not when their livelihood—the whole town’s livelihood—is in jeopardy.
He snorts. “Yeah it does suck. Because you know what? You belong here.” Morgan straightens, holding his arms out wide.
I roll my eyes, even though it doesn’t sound like a line. But line or not, it makes my heart flutter with the way he says it.
“I’m serious,” he continues. “That’s our town motto. You Belong Here. We may not be a happening place, and we’ve got our problems, but we live our motto. Everyone is welcome here. Especially you.” He winds down, settling his forearms on the worn wood of the bar.
I belong where my grandmother is, I tell myself firmly. I do not belong in Here, New York. Not with a dying town, not with a grandma who has no friends, and definitely not with a charming bartender.
Morgan
* * *
Hunter is being secretive. He made a new group text with a bunch of us, titled it Super Secret Meeting, and suggested we meet up at my place—most likely so everyone could play with Princess—but won’t tell us why. He’s in my living room now, leaning against the wall. There are eight of us here, my closest friends. These are people I see almost every day, people I’ve grown up with.
Herevians.
We’re just waiting on Kit. Hunter’s anxious, though. I’ve known him since first grade, and he’s peeling the label off his beer and barely listening to the conversation.
It’s Monday, so the bar is closed. It’s also the week between visits from Rory. Last week, she didn’t even have a second beer, she just ate her tots, drank the one beer, and left early.
Who can blame her? I wasn’t any fun to be around and, as much as Rory pretends, she likes the flirty, fun me.
And I just wasn’t in the mood last week.
Silas and Bailey, the only couple, are sharing the oversized armchair. Silas is a white guy with a hipster vibe—complete with the glasses. Bailey, Hunter’s sister, is curvy and has chestnut hair and freckles that are fading into her pale skin since summer’s over. Tuan, whose family is Vietnamese and owns the best restaurant in town, shares the love seat with me, running his hand over his closely cropped hair. Jared, a scruffy, dark-haired white dude and heir to the Golden Voice Brewery, perches on the arm next to me, his daughter at her grandmother’s house. Quinn, a lithe blond woman and the town’s best electrician, had pulled in a kitchen chair and is sitting on it backward.
Princess is on the couch in Leo’s and Jared’s laps. They’re talking about Leo’s latest construction project, each with a hand on Princess’s belly. She’s in doggy heaven. They’ve saved room for Kit, because they know wherever Kit sits is where Princess will be, and the couch is the only piece of furniture big enough for people and a seventy-pound dog.
At least, she was in doggy heaven. Princess gets up off the couch and darts to the window so fast that if you’d blinked, you’d have missed it. She knocks Leo’s beer over, and it’s on the couch and in his lap, so there’s a kerfuffle of cleaning up while my dog stares out the window, tail wagging once, then stopping, then wagging once again, and stopping again.
Then I hear a car door slam and I know Kit’s arrived. Princess knows too, and she goes bananas, barking and jumping and whining.
