Page 191 of Charming Deception

Near the bottom of the weathered and faded wall mural with the admittedly terrible likeness of Cole, words are painted by a sloppy hand.

Colton Hudson

Right Winger - Dallas Heat

The Heat was Cole’s college hockey team.

“Why don’t they list his other teams?”

Megan shrugs. “No budget to update it? The guy who painted it doesn’t live here anymore? Someone complained about it? It’s a small town with no money, Jameson. Things move slower than molasses, and they generally don’t get updated or repaired. They just drift into obsolescence.”

“Oh.”

We continue past Cole’s wall of glory—which I take a photo of and am definitely going to send to him with some kind of amusing remark later—and reach the shabby entrance of the bar.

As I draw open the weather-ravaged door beneath the spotlight, I recognize the song that pours out into the night. It’s “Boots or Hearts” by The Tragically Hip. A song I only know because I grew up in Canada and, you know, radio.

“You know you’re in Canada when…” I remark.

Megan snickers. “Let’s get a beer, eh?”

I take Daisy’s leash and hand it off to Rurik, so we can head into the bar with Locke; surprise contorts Rurik’s features for an instant before they resettle into a scowl. I know he loves dogs. He used to walk Sunny for me all the time, voluntarily.

“What year is this?” I inquire as we step inside the time warp. Not only is the music from decades past, so is literally everything else. Ancient pool tables that have never been upgraded. Glowing Molson Canadian beer signs that are just plain old rather than retro cool.

You can smell the decades of spilled liquor that’s seeped into the floors and the cigarette smoke embedded in the walls from like twenty years ago, before they banned smoking inside public places here.

“Come on now,” Megan says. “There’s nothing wrong with living in the past. We love the past here in Crooks Creek.” She takes my hand and leads me toward the bar. I try to ignore the way it sticks in my gut like a shard of rusty metal when she says “we.” Like she still lives here. Or will again, inevitably.

Instead, I focus on the relic television sets that hang precariously over the bar, playing commercials and some old movie. There’s hockey paraphernalia everywhere, though that, too, is outdated. Some of it might even be so old, it now has value. “My granddad would’ve loved this place.”

“Really?”

“He started out in bars. His very first business was a small bar he bought in Vancouver, when he was twenty-eight. Kind of a dive.”

“Huh. I turn twenty-eight next year. So you’re saying… I could still launch my empire?” She smiles at me as we lean on the bar.

I smile back easily. “You have to start somewhere. I’m sure your fiancé would spot you some seed money.”

“I do like seed.” The filthy expression she flashes tells me she’s not referring to plants.

And now I’m hard.

In sweats. In public.

I turn my hips toward the bar.

She frowns thoughtfully. “So how did he take a dive bar and turn it into billions?”

“Decades of hard work. In the eighties, he owned a chain of upscale sports bars that he revamped and from there it expanded to restaurants, hotels, a winery, alcohol brands. He went from buying and selling to developing. Buying Vancouver’s hockey team wasn’t even his biggest acquisition but it was his biggest dream. My dad branched us out into luxury resorts and condo developments, and the rest is history.”

The bartender finally comes over; some regular has been hogging his attention.

“Gentlemen first,” Megan announces, smiling at me again. “What would you like, Jamie? I’m buying, and don’t even think of arguing with me. I’m your host here.”

I frown, but relent. It’s cuter than cute when she calls me Jamie.

It takes mere seconds to peruse the entire beer selection in the dirty little fridges behind the bar. “I’ll have a Grasshopper.” The bartender grabs my bottle of Big Rock wheat ale from the fridge and opens it while I tell Megan, “And you’ll have a bottled beer as well.”

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