Page 7 of So Bad It Must Be Good

Damn Aiden to hell and back for making him do this.

“Hi, Kayla.”

“Um, hi,” she greeted him, craning her head around, clearly looking for any sign of Aiden. Or maybe just an escape route. “I was expecting—”

“Aiden called me earlier. He got caught up and couldn’t get away, and he asked me to come tell you that.”

Kayla’s pale red eyebrows drew together. “He couldn’t have called me?”

“I guess he thought it would be better if the message was delivered in person.”

She outright frowned at that. “He’d be wrong,” she muttered.

Liam shouldn’t be shocked by her reaction. Hell, he’d had that reaction when Aiden had asked him to do this. Still, something about it twisted one of those knots in his gut tighter.

“I know that it doesn’t make much sense, but Aiden asked me for a favor, and I couldn’t . . .”

She studied him with that same furrowed brow, and it felt uncomfortably like she could see through him a little too easily. He shifted on his feet.

“You couldn’t say no,” she supplied for him. “You know, I made it my mission about six months ago to say no, as much as I possibly could.”

“How’s that going for you?”

She huffed out a breath, almost a laugh but not jovial enough to constitute one. “Not great. Maybe I should’ve made yes my mission. Or . . .” She shook her head, shimmering red waves of hair brushing across her shoulder blades.

Damn mesmerizing.

“You don’t want to hear me yammer on about my problems,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Thanks for being the messenger, really. I don’t want to keep you.”

Liam could see two choices very clearly ahead of him. On the one hand, he could say no he didn’t. He could tell her he’d walk her to her car, and that would be the extent of that.

But she looked so sad, so vulnerable, and hell if he’d ever been able to walk away from offering someone help. “I don’t mind,” he said, awkwardly sliding into the bar stool next to her. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

At her shocked expression, he looked away. He was not this stiff, awkward guy, and he wasn’t going to let her keep making him into that. He was offering an ear, a shoulder. Something he’d offered to his parents, his friends—hell, half the clients of Patrick & Son unloaded their problems on him, if only for a sounding board.

But Kayla just kept staring at him, and he couldn’t stop himself from another awkward fidget. He cleared his throat. “If you want, that is.”

She took a deep breath, her gaze going to the shelves of liquor bottles behind the bar, before it returned to him.

“You know what I really want?” she asked, leaning toward him and looking intent and serious. Her blue eyes were darker than his, so dark it almost looked like there was black in them, but her lashes were some fairy dust gold.

And he’d officially lost his mind. He cleared his throat. “Uh, what?”

“I want to get drunk in a bar. I have never done that before. The only time I’ve been drunk is sharing a bottle of wine with Dinah on my couch, or hers.”

Drunk. Kayla wanted to get drunk. In a bar.

With him? He doubted it.

“If you want to call Dinah instead, I won’t be offended. Obviously, you probably shouldn’t get drunk alone with no way to get home.”

She cocked her head, and he’d seen that look from his brother.

“And maybe I should mind my own business because I’m not your keeper,” he said, before she could.

Her pretty mouth, painted a deep shade of mesmerizing red, curved into a smile. “I wouldn’t mind a keeper.” Her cheeks flushed pink. “I mean, that is, I’d like company and I can’t call Dinah and . . .” Everything about her dimmed, smile gone, blush gone. She looked pale and sad and lonely.

It wasn’t hard to recognize those emotions on someone else. Not hard at all.

---