Page 6 of My Casanova

“Chick wasn’t snooty from what I could tell,” Yarder shrugged.

“She did tell us she wasn’t a snitch when we were talking about the cops coming,” Fade laughed.

“I like her already,” Dove cackled.

“We’ll wait for shit to settle for a couple of days, and then we can hit her up,” Yarder said.

“Was her place damaged in the explosion?” Poppy asked.

“Didn’t seem like it, at least not from what we could see. I think she was far enough down from the explosion that it just rattled the hell out of her store.” Yarder pressed a kiss to the side of Poppy’s head. “We’ll check on that too when we talk to her.”

“We’re coming with!” Fallon, Adalee, Dove, and Sloane all called in unison.

Poppy perked up. “Me too.”

“Jesus,” Yarder grunted. “This isn’t some girls’ day out.”

“Uh, yeah it is. You really think you’re going to go to a wine and cheese place without us coming along? You get the information, and we can get some wine and cheese for girls’ night.”

Pirate poured four more shots and pushed two toward me. “I think we both need to get blackout drunk from the sound of the way that conversation is going.”

I grabbed the shot and tossed it back. The alcohol was finally working its magic, dulling the pain and fuzzing the edges of my thoughts. The room around me blurred into a comfortable haze, voices floating in and out without really sticking. I grabbed the other shot and knew I was just about ready to pass the hell out.

“It’s times like this we should be glad we don’t have ol’ ladies, Pirate. No one to tell us we can’t drink, and we don’t have to worry about no girls’ nights.”

Pirate saluted his drink to me and tossed it back. “A-fucking-men, brother.”

I felt the warmth of the booze spread through me, and the pain subsided to a distant throb. Laughter and conversation swirled around me, but I didn’t register much of it anymore. I pushed myself to my feet and swayed slightly. Yarder caught my gaze.

“You good?” he asked.

I nodded. “I will be in about two minutes when I pass out.”

Yarder chuckled and shook his head.

I stumbled my way down the hallway, stopped in front of my door, and fumbled with my key. After a few tries, I got the door open, stepped inside, and kicked it shut behind me. I barely managed to make it to the bed before flopping face-first onto it.

The drunken haze took over completely, and the day’s events floated around in my mind—the explosion, the goddamn cops, so much pain. But through it all, one face lingered longer than the rest.

Dani.

Her face was the last thing I saw before everything went black.

Chapter Three

Smoke

“You should have called me.”

I rolled my eyes and cradled the phone between my shoulder and ear. “By the time I called you, Stan, you’d have already seen it on the news.” I was standing at the stove, stirring a pot of Rice-A-Roni while sipping my favorite Pinot Noir. Yeah, I liked good wine, but I also liked comfort food. “I’m fine, and the shop is fine as far as I can tell.” A few bottles of wine had shattered, but everything else seemed just a little shaken up.

“You need to have Tim come in and check everything over.”

I groaned and took another sip of wine. “I don’t need Tim to come in. He’s already got enough on his plate with that giant hole in his building.” Tim owned the strip mall, and while he seemed like an okay guy, the last thing I wanted was him poking around my shop. If he found something wrong, I’d have to close while it was fixed, and shutting down Wine and Cheese Me was not an option.

Business was good—great, even—but not so good that I could afford to close the doors.

“I’ll come in tomorrow and look around,” Stan insisted. “If there’s anything wrong, I can be the one to fix it.”

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