Page 52 of Sunset Beach
Her shoulders slumped. “No. If I could just get inside…”
“Forget it,” he advised. “I want to buy my fiancée a drink at the tiki bar.”
21
“Hi, handsome. What’ll you have?” The bartender batted her eyelashes at Corey and completely ignored Drue.
“Just an unsweet iced tea,” Corey said.
“Got it.” She turned to go.
“And I’ll have a margarita, no salt,” Drue called after her.
She studied Corey. “So you really don’t drink at all?”
“No. I figured out not long ago that I make poor choices when I do, so now I don’t.”
“Um, yeah,” she muttered. “Poor choices. Big-time.”
The server brought their drinks and set a bowl of popcorn in front of them. Drue noticed that she had a lanyard around her neck with a key card dangling from it.
“That’s what I need, damn it,” she whispered to Corey.
“What? Fake eyelashes?”
“No,” she said, nodding at the server, who was now measuring rum into a blender. “One of those lanyards. With the keys to the kingdom.”
The bartender scooped ice into the blender and added chunks of pineapple. As she did so, Drue noticed a server at the far end of the bar move behind the first woman. “Okay, bye,” their bartender said. “Are you working tomorrow?”
“No,” the other woman said. “I’m off ’til Tuesday.” She lifted a hatch in the bar top, and just before exiting, hung her own lanyard on a nearby peg.
“I need to get my hands on that key card,” Drue said.
Corey gave her the side-eye. “And just how do you propose to get it?”
She crammed a handful of popcorn in her mouth and eyed the lanyard, so temptingly near but just out of arm’s reach.
“Steal it.”
He pushed his bar stool away and stared at her in mock horror. “Whoareyou?”
“Just a girl with a shady past,” Drue said. “But don’t worry, I haven’t stolen anything in years and years.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged. “The thrill is gone, I guess. My shrink, at the time, said I was only doing it to get my father’s attention. And to further alienate my stepmother.”
Corey drained half his iced-tea glass. He propped his elbow on the bar and rested his chin on his knuckles. “And was his theory correct?”
“She, not he. Yeah, she was partly right.”
“Dare I ask what kinds of things you stole?”
Drue thought back. “Let’s see. There was my stepbrother’s weed. Money out of my dad’s wallet. My stepmother’s pearl earrings. Her sterling silver Tiffany cigarette lighter. And her cigarettes. My dad’s booze. And my stepmother’s birth control pills. Also her sleeping pills. But not all at the same time. Sometime I’d go weeks and months without stealing anything.”
Corey gave an uneasy chuckle. “If you had authority issues I get why you’d steal liquor and drugs and money and jewelry. But why take the poor woman’s birth control?”
“The therapist said I was trying to gaslight her. Make her think she was losing her mind. Which I one hundred percent was doing. Like, the jewelry,after she’d searched the house and my dad yelled at her for losing it, I’d put it back, weeks later.”
