Page 14 of The Bar Next Door
I do my best to ignore his charming bearded grin and the cadence of his accent. He’s clearly from France or somewhere close to it, but there’s an extra note to the way he speaks English I can’t quite place. It’s more than a little distracting. “I was just thinking that. Is there any reason you’re moving heavy boxes alone at night, or are you going to tell me that’s the secret to your success?”
“I am a self-made man, Monroe.”
I snort. His shoes say otherwise. No one wears shoes like that in a Canadian winter. It’s just asking for salt stains and frozen toes. My woolly Sorrel’s might make me look like an arctic explorer, but dammit if they aren’t as good as having a cozy woodstove blasting on my feet all the time. They’re also much better suited to manual labour than what Julien’s got on.
“You seem to be doubting me,” he announces.
It feels safer to doubt him than it does to doubt myself, which is what his perfect facial hair and come-to-bed-with-moiaccent seem to be able to do. He’s luring me in, making me want to take him somewhere quiet and read his story like I do with the books on my shelves. My fingers are twitching with the need to trace the words on his pages, to find out if there’s more to him than a nice jacket and a hefty bank account, but that’s not on the saving Taverne Toulouse agenda.
I have to crush my curiosity, my need to know more. I have to wrestle my inquisitive scholar’s brain into seeing him as an obstacle and nothing more.
“Really, though, why are you here all by yourself?” I ask, pushing for a subject change.
“These tiles weren’t supposed to be delivered until next week,” he explains, throwing a dirty look at the box beside him, “but I got a shipment notification two hours ago saying they were about to drop them off in the middle of the evening. There are several thousand dollars of tiles here. I couldn’t leave them sitting on the sidewalk all night.”
“I think you’ve already proved they’d be pretty difficult to steal.”
He smiles at me again. I’m going to be forced to tell him to stop doing that if I want to maintain my resolve.
“You didn’t call anyone to help you?”
“Strangely enough, no one jumped on a last-minute opportunity to spend their Saturday evening lifting heavy boxes with me.”
He shrugs and grins like he’s made a joke, but I hear the note of heaviness in his voice.
My mom tells me I was born with something she likes to call a baby bird instinct. I can’t walk past someone in need without being overcome by this to intense, soul-searing need do something for them. It overrides all sense of self-preservation. Other people see a scary stranger lurking in an alleyway; I see a baby bird lying helpless on the pavement, pitifully chirping for help. My mom was always terrified of me getting abducted. I wasn’t allowed to walk to school alone until I was fifteen years-old.
So I might be doing my best to convince myself that this guy is a threat to everything I’ve spent my professional life working to build, but right now, alone in the dark with a bruised foot and a near-impossible task no one could be bothered to help him with, he’s just one more baby bird I have to put back in its nest.
“There’s a dolly next door. I’ll go get it.”
He gives me a quizzical look. “They’ll let you take their dolly?”
I’m about to ask him why I wouldn’t be allowed to use the dolly at my own bar when I remember.
He still doesn’t know I’m the manager.
The knowledge is like a final ace clutched in my hand, and I know I’m currently at risk of showing all my other cards. If I can keep this one a secret, I’ll have at least one advantage over him. He might be willing to tell me things he’d keep tight-lipped on if he knew who I was.
What I’ll even be able tousethat advantage for, I haven’t the slightest idea, but still, any sense of leverage is comforting. Plus, it feels cool and badass to have a secret identity
I am Lady Midnight, a cold-blooded assassin trained from birth to infiltrate even the most elite of defensive forces.
So cool. So badass. Not embarrassing at all.
“Yeah,” I tell Julien, “they trust me.”
He shakes his head. “Just how often are you at that bar? Should I be concerned?”
I cross my arms in front of me. “What I think you should be is a little more grateful.”
“Of course. Where are my manners?” He places a hand on his chest and stares off into the distance, like an actor performing a melodramatic soliloquy on stage. “MademoiselleMonroe,I can make no answer but thanks, and thanks, and ever thanks—and oft good turns are shuffled off with such uncurrent pay.”
Be still my beating, treacherous heart.
“Did you just...quote Shakespeare at me?”
“Twelfth Night. Act one, scene five.” He pauses to assess the way my jaw is now in danger of colliding with the sidewalk and chuckles to himself. “I’m kidding. I don’t know the act and scene. I don’t even know who says it. That line just always impressed me. English can be so...inelegant, but there’s an honesty to it that French doesn’t have. Shakespeare captured it better than anyone.”
