Page 22 of Shortcake
We waited a second. Then two. Then three. After twenty seconds, Conrad audibly sighed and dropped back into his seat, relieved. “No drugs detected,” he said, holding up the still white strip. “It would turn dark blue if any substance was found. Thank God. My daughter’s just a lightweight.”
A nervous laugh tittered from me and I pressed my palm to my sternum, where my pounding heart was nearly cracking a rib. “Being a lightweight is usually a good thing, in my experience.”
Conrad slid the bag toward me. “Here. Keep the rest. Pass them out to your patrons.”
“Thank you.” I took the bag and slid it beneath the bar. Then, I grabbed a clean mug, filling it to the brim with coffee. “Have a coffee while we wait. She might be in there for a while.”
I could feel Conrad’s serious stare on me for a long moment, clasped hands clenched beneath his chin, and a rigid line splitting between his brow. With a tilt of my head, I slid him the cup of coffee.
“Anita Cavitysearch,” he whispered. “Are you ever going to tell me your real name?”
“It’s Addy,” I said carefully.
A smile touched his crooked mouth. “Addy,” he repeated. “It suits you. More than Anita.”
“Is that so?”
We were silent for a long moment as he tapped his finger to the coffee mug. “I’ve thought about you a lot,” he admitted quietly. “Wondered where you were. Who you were. What you were doing.” Another quick pause. “Who you were dating.”
“And yet, you had my number. At any moment, you could have texted me and asked any of those things.”
His blue eyes darted up to meet mine. “We said two nights. And no names.”
“Well, you took thatveryliterally.”
And somehow, he ended up here. In my hometown. What the hell were the chances of that?
A loud sound of a puking echoed toward us from the bathroom, breaking up the moment. Conrad released a long sigh. “I swear I’ve earned every gray hair on my head because of that girl,” he said.
Admittedly, there weren’tthatmany gray hairs that I could see. He also seemed way too young to have a daughter in her early twenties, but what did I know?
“Oh, come on, I was way worse than Stephanie was when I was her age.”
“Her name’s Harper,” Conrad said, taking a sip of coffee.
I blinked, confused. “Her ID said—”
“I know what her ID said. But that wasn’t her real ID. She’s sixteen years old.”
Oh fuck.Fuck.
“You served a sixteen-year-old,” he accused me, his voice harsher as he grabbed Stephanie’s—Harper’s—whatever her name was— wallet out of her purse. “You really couldn’t tell that the brunette in that picture wasn’t the same person standing in front of you?”
He tossed the ID onto the counter between us. I kept my eyes fixed onto Conrad’s. I didn’t need to look at the ID again. And rechecking it would only peg me as guilty.
Instead of answering him right away, I studied the furrowed lines on his forehead, narrowing his brows. I wasn’t sure what to make of the intense personality shift. One second, he was being cute and flirty. The next, he seemed to be accusing me,blamingme, for what happened with his daughter tonight.
I pressed my palm onto the counter, leaning down to bring us nearly nose to nose. “First of all,Sheriff,” I spat the word as though the title itself was an insult. “Don’t get shitty with me becauseyourdaughter is running around this town out of control.”
His nostrils flared. I was pretty sure he wasn’t used to people challenging him. “It’s your job to make sure every person you serve in here is twenty-one or older!” His voice boomed with authority.
Oh,hellno. I was not taking the rap for this.
“I did my due diligence. I scanned her ID…” I paused, picking up the expensive scanner I’d bought and waved it in the air before placing it gently back down beside the register. “It wasn’t a fake. Nor was it expired. Second, she looked reasonably enough like the girl in the photo. Hair colors change all the time.” I pointed at my own bright red hair. “Case in point. My hair is blue in my driver’s license photo.”
I’d dyed it just before my driver’s ed test just to piss off my mom. It worked. And luckily it had washed out within four days… one of those temporary dyes.
I poked my finger into the ID laying face up on the counter between us and slid it back over to him to punctuate my point.
