Page 64 of Sirens
“Let me tell you,until you’ve had to empty three gallons of urine out of a shop vac at the end of the Lieutenant John J. McCorkle fishing pier at three a.m. on a Sunday morning, you just haven’tlived.” Darby shot the rest of her whiskey and set her glass down with a satisfying thunk that punctuated the end of yet another killer story, this one about stage-managing Boston’s annual Bondage Ball.
Maggie held a hand to her aching stomach with one hand, dabbing her eyes with the corner of her apron with the other. “How on earth did we never run into each other in Boston?”
“You know those Kelly boys,” Darby said, swiping a knuckle at the corners of her thick lashes. “Notoriously territorial. They don’t like to share, even with each other.”
A smile tugged at the corner of Maggie’s lips. “Especially with each other.”
At the bail bonds office where they’d met, a friendship with the notoriously OCD and frequently demanding Mark Kellywould have been the last thing she have predicted. Especially since he’d tried to get her fired so frequently.
But that had been before they’d bonded over a shared love ofLove Island.
“Another?” Maggie asked, lifting the bottle of bourbon.
“Why not?” Darby asked, her dark eyebrow lifting toward her crown of cotton-candy-pink hair. “I’m not driving.”
“That’s a relief,” Kurt, who’d been oh-so-inconspicuously hovering near the garnish tray, muttered.
“Someone tie a tire iron to your testicles, or just being extra salty today for fun?” Darby asked, shooting him a pointed look.
“As delighted as I am that you’ve found someone who seems to share your penchant for stories involving mafiosi and bodily fluids, do you think you might be able to take a break from thehot gossto make the drink order I put in about a fucking year ago?”
Under normal circumstances, this would be about the time when Maggie considered the merits of braining Kurt with a swizzle stick.
But for some reason she didn’t quite understand, she felt…calm? Relaxed? No. Serene.
Hell, even the eardrum-bloodying cacophony of voices, silverware scraping on ceramic, and the goddamn accordion player who’d set up shop on the beach below the restaurant’s third-floor balcony and begun working his way through Weird Al’s catalog hadn’t managed to ruin her mood.
And that was evenaftera seagull had mayo-bombed the most perfect martini she’d made yet.
“And what are you thinking about that’s got you smiling like the cat who deep-throated the canary?” Darby asked, a sly grin twisting her hot-pink pout.
“Oh my God,” Kurt sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I literally cannot with you two.”
“Easy there,” Maggie said. “Don’t get your man-panties in a twist. I’ll make your drinks now.”
And to Maggie’s great delight and Kurt’s utter shock, she did just that. Quickly, and without even having to look up the recipes.
Kurt eyed them like they might sprout arms and pull a switchblade on him. “You’ve been practicing?” he asked.
“Something like that,” she said.
And oh, how fucking delicious that something had been.
Flashes returned to her in lurid detail. Gasped breaths and hot words. Teeth, and tongues, and?—
“So you and McGarvey, huh?” Darby waggled her eyebrows suggestively.
Maggie blinked at her, feeling heat bake the surface of her cheeks.
“And before you ask, Judy in dispatch is already putting the word out that you two are an item. And by item, I mean informing anyone who happens to call in to the station that Sherriff Forrester busted you two doing it in the basement of this very building.”
“How did she— I mean… Where the hell would she get that idea?” Maggie sputtered, turning to the bar under the guise of returning the bourbon to its rightful slot.
Darby waited her out, her expression patient and amused when Maggie turned back around.
“Listen,” she said, stretching a hand across the bar’s scarred surface. “As a fairly recent transplant who’s also been on the receiving end of Townsend Harbor’s rumor mill where a certain former sheriff is concerned, there’s a couple things you really ought to know.” Lifting the glass, Darby let the amber liquid kiss her lips.
“Such as?” Maggie asked, picking up a damp bar mop and swiping away a small flurry of margarita salt.
