Page 10 of Silver-Tongued Devil
She wasn’t sure whether to laugh or sigh. “On that vote of confidence… I’ll see you later. I won’t be out late.”
“Yeah,” she heard as she left the house. “Probably not.”
She picked up Evan along the way, and he didn’t help much either. He just swung up into the pickup without a word. She drove the ten blocks or so into downtown, then said, “Russell said I shouldn’t have worn these jeans.”
“Oh,” Evan said. “You looked OK to me. I mean, you cleaned up and everything.”
Well, great.
He looked good himself. Dark Levi’s, blue plaid shirt that showed off his broad shoulders, cowboy boots. His ruthlessly short reddish-brown hair was still damp from the shower, and he’d scrubbed all the paint off his hands. He looked like what he was. A strong, solid, hard-working guy. And she probably looked like what she was, too, she thought glumly. A working woman who’d taken a shower and changed her clothes to go out to dinner.
“Do I actually repel men?” she asked before she could stop herself.
“What? No. I don’t think so. You’re good-looking.”
“Let me guess, though. More like the woman who’s going to paint your ceiling or gut your fish than the one you promise to love and cherish.”
He didn’t say anything for a second, then said, “There’s a space on the left.”
She pulled a U-Turn in the middle of Main, parallel-parked the old truck with a bunch of hauling on the wheel, and said, “Well, thanks anyway. You may have to drive home, because I plan to have at least two glasses of wine. Looks like I’m going to need them. I wore mycontacts.Doesn’t that count for anything?”
“Oh,” Evan said, sounding surprised. “I told you. You’re good-looking. I’m just used to looking at you. I wasn’t thinking about it. Get out of the truck so I can see, and I’ll tell you.”
She rolled the window down so she could grab the handle from the outside, since it was stuck from the inside, then cranked the window up again, put the keys under the floor mat, and climbed down.
Downtown Wild Horse wasn’t exactly hopping, but the Tervan, the bar across the street where some prankster had switched the letters on the sign twenty years earlier and nobody had ever switched them back again, was satisfactorily noisy. Sheila’s Steakhouse was doing a good business, too. Dakota stalked around the front of the old white pickup in her unaccustomed platform heels and told Evan, “Encourage me. Go.”
“Your hair’s nice,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t notice the contacts.”
“That’s what you’ve got?”
“What do you want? Am I supposed to talk about your body? I’m not classy, but I’m not going to say ‘Nice ass’ or something.”
“How about my outfit?”
“I already said you looked good.”
She sighed. “All right. Never mind. Let’s go.”
She perked up on heading into Heart of the Lake. The historic building had been painted a soft gray—not by M & O, unfortunately—with darker gray accents, and inside, discreet lighting shone on clubby groups of black leather chairs, a back wall made of weathered brick, and a long, curved mahogany bar. It looked upscale, warm, and welcoming. Maybe this whole resort idea was going to work after all.
“Primo chairs over in the corner,” she told Evan. “Let’s grab them.”
Even as she said it, two men detached themselves from the bar and converged on the inviting seating group. She was already turning away when she heard, “Well, well. Looks like you lose.”
She could have walked away. Sheshouldhave walked away. Instead, as always, her feet were taking her in the other direction. Jerry Richards and Steve Sawyer were planting themselves into that black leather and looking up at Evan and her with what could only be described as smirks. Two men separated by twenty years, but separated-at-birth twins in every other way that counted.
“You could say I pick my battles,” she said. “Like the ones that come with a paycheck?”
Steve’s good-looking face twisted beneath blonde hair that was cut short and neat, like the Homecoming King he’d been and the successful contractor he still was, thanks to stepping into the family business. “You bite the hand that feeds you,” he said, “and you might just find that you’re the one who gets bit.”
“Your hand doesn’t feed me, and I already got bit,” she said, unable to keep the fury out of her voice. “And Russell stayed bit. I wish you could see him trying to get out of bed in the morning. I don’t know how you sleep at night. I know I’m not losing any sleep over you.”
“I knew somebody had to’ve run around behind my back.” Steve’s expression was hard now. Frightening. She remembered that face, and everything inside her wanted to cringe, but she wasn’t going to let that show. “Somebody with a grudge. I guess I’ve figured out who that could be.”
“I’m not the one who lost the job,” she fired back. She wasn’t sixteen anymore. She wasn’t weak, and she was nobody’s victim. “You did that all by yourself. I’m the one who cleaned up your mess. And when they told me they wanted somebody going along behind with a roller on every wall, I made sure wedidit. It’s called satisfying the client. You should try it sometime. I didn’t need to rat you out. You cut a corner, and this time,youpaid for it. Look at it this way. At least nobody fell. At least nobody broke his back.”
“Because I don’t hire old guys who are past it anymore,” Steve said. “Or drunks or women, either. I hire guys who can handle the job.”
