Page 90 of When We Were Reckless
I had never paid much attention to what they said about me on social media or those moto forums. If the information hadn’t come directly from my mouth, I chalked it up to idle gossip and brushed it off. But now, someone had leaked information that had some truth to it, and I couldn’t help wondering who it had been. It wouldn’t have been the team owners. So it had to have been Nate. Or Alessia.
Trucker hat was typing something on his phone and nudged his friend’s arm, showing him the screen before looking over at me. “I’ll take care of it. Make sure they stop talking shit about you. The discussions get pretty heated. Like you said, there’s a lot of trolls talking shit.”
Too bad the shit they were saying about me was true.
Mason returned and joined me behind the bar, and we watched a very pissed-off Carly storm past. “Asshole,” she hissed, giving him the middle finger. “I quit.”
He winced and rubbed the back of his neck. Looked like his night wasn’t going much better than mine.
“You good?” I asked, knowing damn well he wasn’t.
“That was a mistake,” he muttered under his breath as Carly stormed past again. This time she was on her way out the door with her bag over her shoulder. “I thought she understood the deal. I made it clear as fucking day.”
“What exactly was the deal?”
“Sex. No strings attached.” He scrubbed his hands over his face and groaned. “Shit. Now I have to hire a new server.”
A laugh burst out of me. “That’s your main concern? That you have to hire a new server?”
He stroked his jaw, thinking about it for a moment before he responded. “Now I understand the saying, Don’t shit where you eat.”
“Nice.”
“Yeah. I’m an asshole.” Mason shook his head and sighed as he moved down the bar to wait on a few customers.
Shortly after, I was refilling the ice when Mason muttered, “Huh. I thought that was over. Guess not. You think that guy’s okay?”
“What guy?”
I followed his gaze to the front doors that were open onto the patio.The fuck? I thought it was over too.
My blood pressure spiked when he leaned down and said something in her ear. A little too close for comfort. Quinn had her back to me, so I couldn’t see her face, but the guy—Walker—had a smirk on his. My hands balled into fists when he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her against him.
Get the fuck away from my girl.
Quinn wasn’t my girl, but I couldn’t deny that I felt like she was mine.
The middle-aged couple I’d waited on earlier asked for another round.
Tearing my gaze away from Quinn, who was still talking to the fucking baller, I poured two beers from the tap and set them on the bar in front of them.
When I glanced outside, Quinn was nowhere in sight, and neither was Walker. With my back to the doors, I rang up two more beers at the register. “You think there’s a chance Quinn will stay in Texas?” Mason asked, coming to stand next to me.
I set the tab behind the bar next to the register. “Nope.”
“Yeah, guess it was a long shot. Thanks for trying, though.”
I didn’t try at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. I’d been encouraging her to go to California. “Not sure how much I helped.”
“You’re here, though, aren’t you? You don’t have to keep working at the bar. I know you have other things you’d rather be doing. But now that you’ll be out in Cali, I feel better about her going. I’m hoping you can keep an eye on her.”
Guilt slammed into me. He trusted me, and I was betraying that trust. I rubbed the back of my neck. “I’ll be on the road a lot. And I’ll be living eighty or ninety miles away. Not sure how much help I’ll be.”
“Yeah, but ninety miles is nothing to you. If she ever needs you, I know you’d drop everything to be there for her, wouldn’t you?”
I didn’t even have to think about it. “In a heartbeat.”
“That’s what I thought. You’re like family. And like you always said, she’s the little sister you never had.”
