Page 6 of Don't Go
The bar dropped out from under me.
2.Beau
I held my hand out across the bar and watched her face.
Her mouth opened a quarter inch, and her deep eyes went wide. For half a second, she looked like a person catching a stair wrong, and then she shut it down. She picked up the glass she'd been wiping, set it back down, picked up a different glass, set that one down too, and ran the towel along the rim of the new one without looking at me.
The towel did three slow circles.
"Nice to meet you, Mr. Cross."
It was polite, flat, and professional. That's the voice you use with customers you want to get rid of.
I lowered my hand.
That was when I knew I was in real trouble.
She wasn't going to take it back.
I'd watched her realize who I was.The bartender who told me a jokehad become thebartender who'd just insulted her boss to his face.She wasn't going to walk it back, nervous-laugh, or apologize.
She just wiped a glass that didn't need wiping and let me sit with what I'd learned about her.
I likedher.
I shouldn't have because I didn't even know her name yet.
I saw her tag—SABRINA, in the black capitals the catering company used.
Sabrina…
Well, Sabrina just called me a trust-fund baby with my father's name on the wall and four hundred guests in the next room, and I liked her.
Christ.
She was beautiful.
Not in the soft way the women at this auction were beautiful. There was nothing soft about her. Curly dark hair piled on top of her head, with a pen tucked behind her left ear. A jaw that did things when she was annoyed. A figure the apron tried and failed to hide. She moved fast behind the bar. Her hands didn't stop moving. She talked to herself when she thought nobody was listening—I'd watched her do it earlier, mouthing something to a bottle she was rotating on the shelf.
She was the type of woman who'd destroyed more than one man, and always with a committee behind her.
I wondered, with a quiet, lingering curiosity I hadn’t felt about another person in years, if I was about to volunteer for the list.
“Sabrina.” I murmured her name, testing it on my tongue.
She looked at me without blinking. "Mr. Cross."
I grinned. Couldn't help myself. "I thought we were partners in crime a minute ago. You did ask me to keep your secret."
She didn't answer.
She turned her back to me and started arranging bottles on the shelf, slow and exact, like she was building a wall I was meant to look at.
I cleared my throat. "I'll take that drink. Come on, recommend something."
She turned around and pulled a bottle off the shelf—green glass, label too small to read from where I was sitting. She poured something into a mixing glass, added a second pour from a different bottle without measuring, dropped in two ice cubes, and stirred. She didn't look at it while stirring. Instead, she stared at the back wall while her wrist did the work. Then she strained the whole thing into a coupe, ran a piece of orange peel along the rim with what I'll call decisive prejudice, and set the glass down in front of me.
Well, not technically. The glasshitthe wood, notset.
