Page 29 of Luck of the Draw

No, the shoes hadn’t hurt, but this sure as hell did.

Still, she’d made her decision, and I wasn’t going to fight her on it. I’d gotten beyond the need to prove to someone I was worthy of their time.

Maybe she’d looked at me and seen an opportunity, not a person. Because it wouldn’t be the first time a woman had decided she wanted to go home with the “hot bartender,” only to realize in the morning that I was still just a bartender, with an apartment that had a water damage smiley face in the bedroom and a low balance in my bank account. I’d had a few one-night stands before, and they hadn’t gone down anything like this one, but maybe she did them differently. Or maybe she was so newly single she didn’t know how she did them.

Still, the shoes weren’t hers, and the polite thing—the Saint Dylan thing—was to get them back to her or the owner. But how was I supposed to do that when she’d left me a grand total of nothing to go on?

I had a flash of Dottie saying she knew Deeandra’s friend Sam. Deeandra knew Blue too, and Lee. But I barely knew Lee myself, and he wasn’t the kind of person I wanted to pull into my personal business.

Dottie, though…

The brewery was closed today, on account of a lot of the employees having attended the wedding last night, but I had Dottie’s phone number. She’d given it to me that first day and told me to contact her anytime, for any reason. Which had seemed overly friendly and flat-out weird to my friend Ray, but her immediate warmth had reminded me of my family—of the way my nonna could be rude as hell to my mother, then invite someone she’d met at the grocery store to spend Christmas with the family becauseOh, the poor dear, her cat was run over by the neighbor, who was driving off in a hurry because he’d stolen her mail,or some other crazy-ass story that sounded made-up…until the woman of your dreams rode off in your Celtics shirt in a getaway car.

I turned my phone back on to call Dottie, and to my shock there was only one further message from Tina:You got it. But if you need little sister support, I’m on call. Love you.

Love you too.I paused, then added,Thank you. I may take you up on that sometime.

I started to text Dottie, but the truth was I didn’t know what to say.

So I called her instead.

“I was hoping I’d hear from you, dear,” she said, answering on the first ring.

Discombobulated by how quickly she’d answered, I said, “Um, I have something that belongs to that woman you know, Sam. Well, her cousin, I guess.”

Suddenly, I didn’t want to tell her about Deeandra. It felt too raw. Besides, Dottie was my boss. Maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing to confirm that I’d gone home with someone from the wedding, especially a crasher. Given that she’d encouraged us, I doubted she’d care, but that wasn’t to say someone else in the Buchanan family wouldn’t.

“Come over to my house for a little while, Dylan,” she said. “There’s something we need to discuss. A couple of things, actually.”

Then she hung up, as if she was so sure I was going to come that there was no need for any further back-and-forth. Or maybe she just knew there was a chance I’d bail if she let me.

A few seconds later, my phone buzzed with her address.

Since it had been hammered into me never to go over to someone’s house as a guest without bringing something, I picked up some flowers from the grocery store and headed to Dottie’s house.

The turquoise paint job suited her, I decided. She looked like the kind of person whoshouldlive in a house like this. It would have been weirdly disappointing if her house had been beige or some kind of cookie-cutter deal.

When I knocked, she called out for me to come in. I found her in the kitchen, bustling around in a way that made me think of my nonna again.

She turned to me with a radiant smile, like she was genuinely glad to see me, and even though she was like that with a lot of people, it didn’t feel any less special for it.

“Oh good, you’re here. And you brought flowers!”

They were daisies, not particularly special, but she plucked them out of my hands and carried on about them as if I’d gathered them from the Garden of Eden.

She gestured to the table, where she’d laid out enough food for probably half a dozen people. “I hope you’re hungry.”

I wasn’t, but I just nodded and sat. After putting the daisies in a mason jar, she plunked a bottle of beer down in front of me, along with a pint glass etched with the brewery’s old logo, and then served herself the same. Hers was Serenity, an old-school Buchanan brew River had brought back, and mine was Home Sweet Home, a spring beer that had won a couple of awards.

“If you’re trying to convince me to stay, Dottie,” I said with a small smile, “you already did. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m here. Mission accomplished.”

“And I couldn’t be happier you accepted my invitation, dear boy. This is where you belong.”

I lifted my brows. “Why are you suddenly so worried I’m going to leave?”

Then it struck me. She’d seen me and Deeandra together last night; then I’d called saying I had her friend’s cousin’s shoes. Dottie had spent twenty years working in a tasting room, and she knew how to read between the lines better than anyone else I’d ever known. Even the guy in the Marines who’d always known when another guy was going to drop an unholy stink in the bathroom.

“If this is about the woman I was with last night…”

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