Page 492 of Summer Heat
She rolled her eyes, this time, not even bothering to hide it. “Mister, that’s an old line.”
“No way!” he protested, but the laughing eyes betrayed him.
Honestly, she felt a real laugh almost break the surface over that. It was impossible to mind being hustled when it was so blatantly offered as exactly that. She put a hand on her hip. “You’ve yet to come up with a single original line, as a matter of fact.”
He looked at the salesman. “Is she always this tough?”
The salesman who’d never uttered more than the required words to get his beer now rubbed his chin. “No nonsense, more like.”
“Goes with the territory,” Tamara said in her defense.
The golden man let go of a low chuckle. Tamara found her eyes on his mouth, on the white teeth and long brown throat. A faint, almost forgotten sensation of awareness moved in her.
“Well, it gives you a nice aura of mystery,” he said. His voice was not deep or rough, as might have suited him, but a pleasant tenor that was surprisingly easy to listen to. “And you know men—we like women who have a few mysteries.”
“Well,” she countered, “you know women. We like men with a little bit of sense.”
Again, he let go of a delighted laugh. “One of the great conundrums of life, don’t you think?”
Tamara was surprised at his use of the word—it didn’t strike her as part of the ordinary vocabulary of the kind of man he seemed to be. The assumption that he would be stupid stung her conscience for a moment and she smiled. “I guess it is.”
An odd stir in the atmosphere of the bar made her nerves prickle. Tamara looked up, alert and frowning. She’d tended bar long enough to recognize that kind of warning—and her instincts were right.
The restless construction workers from the back room had drifted out, one or two at a time, until they were spread throughout the room. One stood at the pass-out bar, two by th
e front door, another dead center of the room. The last, a burly, dark-haired finisher named Gus, with a beer gut straining the front of his old white T-shirt, swaggered over to stand beside the man at the bar.
Trouble. Damn.
Tamara pushed away from the bar and backed up slowly toward the door that led to the empty restaurant.
“Tamara,” said the sun-gilded man at the bar, reaching into his pocket for money as if Gus and the others were invisible, “I think I’m ready for another beer.”
He stood up, took some bills out of the front pocket of his jeans and sat back down. Tamara turned, ready to run for the other room. He might be stupid enough not to recognize the hatred bristling through the room, but she didn’t intend to be in the middle of a fight when it broke out.
The construction worker who’d been at the pass-out bar stepped back three paces, blocking Tamara’s way to the restaurant.
She narrowed her eyes and thought of the phone. As if he read her mind, he backed up another foot and leaned his considerable shoulders against the receiver. He gave her an apologetic glance. “Sorry, honey. Old Gus has been waiting for this a long time. That man stole his girl.”
Gus bellied up to the man at the bar now. “Well, well, well,” he said with false joviality. “Lance Forrest. ‘Bout time you brought yourself back here.”
The name hit Tamara hard. She narrowed her eyes. Lance Forrest, the legendary wild man of Red Creek, by all accounts a hell-raiser that put even his father to shame. Her heart sped up.
She’d been on duty the night Olan Forrest had dropped dead of a heart attack. She’d been on duty a hundred nights before that when she had to call him a cab, or have a bouncer toss him out, or knock his wandering hands aside when she served him.
Hard to believe this gorgeous creature, who seemed made of sunlight, could be in anyway related to that bad-tempered womanizer.
It also explained a lot. Tamara felt her mouth go tight. Lance Forrest. It was about time. He wasn’t exactly what she’d expected after all these years, but that freewheeling nature would fit neatly into her plans.
Revenge. That was what she wanted. And she’d waited four long years for this chance.
But at the moment, there were more important problems to consider. Like how to get out of here before the whole place turned into a melee.
Tamara glanced at the salesman. He caught her eye steadily, and she put as much pleading as she could into the glance. He stood up and backed away. No one paid him any attention.
Lance looked up, a lock of that bright hair falling over his eye. There wasn’t an iota of fear his face, she noted with a little panic. Was he that stupid?
“Hey, Gus,” he drawled, and Tamara would have sworn there was a twinkle in those blue eyes.
