Page 63 of Cosmo

“Cosmo, Cosmo, Cosmo, Cosmo!”

Flipping both bottles at once, sending up a prayer that neither landed on the man’s face, he caught them both, spouts down, and he poured the guy a double shot of whiskey from the two bottles.

The crowd roared with delight and the man who’d taken the shot stood, both fists raised in the air, and Cosmo got to his feet, standing tall on the bar as more cheering came, pleading for him to dance.

He’d once gone to a concert with a couple of the guys that he used to boost cars with, and it wasn’t anyone he’d ever listened to before, and frankly, the music wasn’t his cup of tea. Still, the crowd alone, their enjoyment, their cheers had been contagious, and he enjoyed it despite his reservations.

The same thing happened that night. The cheers of the crowd and of his fellow bartenders made him feel like celebrating with them all. The music was loud, techno and pumping, and he couldn’t help it but to move with the beat.

Abs joined him on the bar and together they danced for the crowd, Abs lifting his shirt to show his stomach, so Cosmo did too, and then they shook their asses for the crowd, whipping them up into a fury.

After getting back to the floor behind the bar, the guys all shook his hand and clapped him on the back, but what was better, Taran had fought through the crowd to stand on the other side of the bar from him.

Emboldened, he leaned over and gave him a quick kiss, asking what he wanted to drink.

“You were amazing,” he yelled.

“I…I had fun!”

“Good! That looks good on you. Get me a lager and a shot of Hennesy.”

“You got it, on the house.”

Haze moved over to him as he poured the beer. “Listen, keep the kissing to a minimum. We get better tips if they think we’re single, which…well, most of us always are, anyway.”

“I…I am, kind of, I think.”

Haze’s dark eyes danced with mischief. “Oh, sure, sure. The way you looked at that guy, yeah, you’re single and I am about to grow a third arm out of my asshole.”

When he handed the drink over to Taran, he knew Haze was right. He was no longer single. He felt more for the fucking federal agent than he’d ever thought he could. “See you after?” Taran asked.

“Yeah. For sure.”

Twice more that night he got on the bar to do hundred-dollar shots, and several times he and Goldie did the “spike”, where he threw the bottle into the air for Goldie to catch and pour a drink. Still, after doing those and being quite proud of himself for them, he felt inadequate to the others, who could juggle the bottles, do tricks on their own and with one another.

Like Abs told him, and the others had, they all started somewhere.

He had almost eight hundred dollars in his pocket that night, with more on the receipts from the card machine. Why they needed to rob people he would never understand, but he was in for the penny and the pound at that point.

He met Taran at dawn, and they had a great couple of hours in bed before Liam dragged himself home and slept with Daiq. He woke just after three that afternoon, showered and ate in their little kitchen while Abs came in, whistling at him. “Fun last night?”

“It was. I think I might get the hang of this, eventually.”

“You were great.” Abs took a yogurt from the fridge and asked, “Are you ready for the other thing this week?”

“Murphy said we’d take the two cars I boosted already, so we’re set on my end. What about everyone else?”

Abs set by him while he ate his yogurt and Liam ate his eggs. “The security systems are tricky on this one. Mims found the receipt for the added security around the Parrish painting. It’s got a trip, so if it’s moved, the alarm sounds and the doors triple lock.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah,” he said with a shrug. “It’s the newest thing, and of course, if you can afford a painting that costs that much, you can afford good doors that can’t be jimmied or knocked down. No bullying this one.”

Suddenly, he was nervous as hell. “You guys…you can do this, right?”

“Oh, sure! See, all we need is to bypass the alarm for a few seconds. We get the one painting down and put the one Haze did up in its place. If we can’t do that, we jam the alarm and then let it go off once we leave. They’ll be more suspicious of the painting, but Haze is amazing. Even the experts have a hard time seeing the difference. If they take it to an appraiser, they’ll know for sure, mostly from the aging process, but we’ll be long gone, and the painting will already be somewhere far from Denver.”

“You make it sound so easy. It cannot be that easy.”

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