Page 50 of Hers for the Weekend

“Why does his face look like that?” she asked Hannah. “It can’t be good for him.”

Hannah held her finger up to her lips. “He knows he’s beautiful, but he doesn’t actually know how beautiful, and we choose not to tell him. He’s already insufferable enough.”

“I don’t think he’s that handsome,” Noelle said, and they all stared at her. She shrugged. “He has too much hair. And his smirk is asymmetrical.”

“Have you met your soon-to-be-wife?” Hannah asked. “Because if anyone on this earth has too much hair…”

“Okay. What are you all eating?” Holly interrupted, and began taking orders.

She was dropping off drink tickets with Sawyer when he caught her hand. “Thank you.”

“It’s fine. Y’all needed a waitress. I’m a waitress. This saves me from awkwardly making small talk with a bunch of people I barely know.”

Sawyer shook his head, the curls on the ends of his mustache turning up as he smiled slightly. “That’s not what I meant, although Lord knows it’s appreciated. Thank you for making Tara more comfortable this week. It was critical to Cole that she be here. He doesn’t ask for much from the people he loves, but he needs them.”

While he said this, he released her hand to do a complicated bottle flip, then measured whiskey into a shaker, never taking his eyes off Holly. He’d obviously been bartending long enough that it was ingrained in his muscle memory, and she felt a kinship with him. He would never judge her for her job, and Cole obviously didn’t judge him for his. Maybe Cole could work on Tara, get her to see that being involved with a waitress wasn’t shameful.

Holly bit her lip. “But who’s taking care of Tara, while she takes care of Cole, and the rest of the world?”

Sawyer pointed at her. Oof. Even he, who knew they were faking it, seemed to have been convinced that she would be good for that job, and she didn’t know how to tell him she wasn’t available. She wanted to be, but she couldn’t. He handed her the drinks she’d come for, and she went to deliver them to the table.

Then she stuck her head in the passthrough. “I need fries, Matthews!” she shouted.

“Order up!” He smiled at her, dropping a platter of various fried foods in front of her. “I don’t suck at this, remember? Culinary school?”

“I bet culinary school didn’t prepare you to cook a perfect plate of poutine,” she argued, “or how to run a packed bar kitchen.”

He shrugged. “That’s why I spent four years cooking around the world. But you shouldn’t knock what you haven’t tried—have you ever thought about pastry school?”

She glared at him. “Did Tara put you up to this?”

“I don’t take orders from Tara,” he corrected her.

“Ah, Hannah put you up to it.” She nodded. “You should all stop meddling.”

She walked off with the plates, some of the high she’d been riding wearing off. Cole might not judge Sawyer for being a bartender, but he was, after all, also the mayor of this little town. Collin and Ernie both owned their businesses. No one in this group was ever going to accept someone who didn’t have a real career and didn’t want one.

Of course, she reminded herself, she didn’t need to be accepted by this group. After this weekend, she would never see these people again.

While she was delivering Fried Everything Platters, Cass Style (a secret menu item where everything was kosher), Ernie stood up on a chair and yelled for everyone’s attention.

“All right, you hooligans! Miriam over here is obsessed with pub quiz,” she said, and Miriam whooped. “That means, while all of her friends and family are gathered, you’re going to fulfill one of her life dreams and let her beat you all at trivia.”

“Hey!” Miriam shouted. “They’re not going to let me beat them! I’m going to beat them fair and square!” Then she turned to Tara and said, “You’re on my team.”

Tara smiled a smug smile. “Oh, we’re going to kick everyone’s ass so hard.”

They high-fived each other. And then proceeded to absolutely destroy everyone in the bar at trivia—the winning question was about women’s basketball.

Elijah Green, who appeared to take trivia as seriously as Miriam, looked at Tara with an appraising eye. Holly watched them all play, laughing and throwing straw wrappers at each other and arguing playfully over answers. She watched Noelle step in to settle disputes like she was breaking up squabbling siblings, and laugh until she cried when Tara said something hilarious.

Holly hadn’t even known Tara could be hilarious, and honestly it was really hot. This version of Tara, that let her shoulders down from around her ears and unclenched her jaw and played, was like a magnet whose pull Holly couldn’t resist.

A couple of hours later, when everyone was packing up so they could explore the rest of Advent, Ernie flagged her to stay back. Tara hung back, too.

Ernie handed her a cup of coffee and tried to hand her tips.

“I’m not taking these,” Holly said, pushing them back across the table.

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