Page 46 of Break for Me

Two other men came from a hallway behind the bar. One roamed out into the open area and the other stopped in front of me to ask what he could get me.

“Something with bourbon, I suppose. That’s what you drink while in Kentucky, right?” I looked back toward the giant. “You want anything? On me.”

He smiled at me while the roaming third man appeared to slap him on the shoulder when he walked behind him to join the other behind the bar.

“Sorry, sweetheart. My wife is half your size, somehow twice the handful, and gave me a tiny version of herself with just as much attitude. The last thing I want is another difficult woman on my hands.”

The other two laughed, while the giant walked away from my corner of the bar.

“See you tomorrow, man,” he said to one of them on his way out the door. I didn’t know which one. Nobody responded to him.

The bartender turned to the third man. “She said something with bourbon. I’m heading out for my meeting. Be back in a couple hours.”

I probably hadn’t ever been more stunned in my life than when this other man placed a glass in front of me. What the hell could they be feeding these Kentuckians? How was it even possible for the men here to look this way? This one was significantly smaller than the other, but I couldn’t help but think if an orgasm had a face, it’d be his. Even the eyebrow scar and the slightly crooked nose worked for this man. Why had I spent so much of my life thinking Kentucky was full of backward rednecks? Who knew they were hiding all these beautiful men down here? I tried to force myself to focus again.

“His wife’s a lucky girl,” I said.

“Ew,” he said and moved down the bar a little ways to do something else.

I laughed at such a weird reaction. “What? I thought he was attract—.”

“His wife is my sister,” he interrupted.

I laughed. “Of course she is. Well, if she’s really that feisty, please don’t tell her about all that. I don’t need anyone else after me.”

His face stayed expressionless, but his shoulders stiffened. “Someone’s after you? And you’re hiding in a bar?”

I picked up the glass while he worked his way back to stand in front of me. I downed the entire thing in one giant gulp when he spread his arms out to lay his hands flat on either side of him to lean on the bar. His face didn’t look anything like Jersey’s, but the tattoos that covered both his arms brought deep blue eyes to the forefront of my brain.

“I’m not really hiding here,” I said when my throat finally stopped burning. “I hitched a ride with a truck driver. He dropped me off here. I just need a ride somewhere else. That,” I said motioning to the empty glass, “was fucking awful, by the way.”

Holy mother of God, he was painfully stunning when he smiled.

“Maybe don’t ask for bourbon next time.”

He turned around to grab something from the shelves behind him. He placed a can of Mountain Dew in front of me along with a little stack of business cards. I glanced down at the Mountain Dew tank top I was still wearing and laughed.

“Any of those services will pick you up out here. They won’t go out any further than this, but they’ll take you anywhere in the city limits,” he said and nodded to the stack of cards.

I stared at them for a second before I looked around the rest of the room. I didn’t see a landline readily available anywhere. And a fucked up soulless creature who went by the name of a fucked up state was still in possession of both my phone and the backup phone. The sigh from this odd, tattooed savior brought my attention back to him. He’d already laid his phone on the bar in front of me, unlocked and with the keypad pulled up. Then he just walked down to the other end of the bar to do something else. He definitely didn’t strike me as the gullible, too-trusting type, which probably made him the dangerous-beyond-reasonable-means type if he could hand me his phone and not be even the least bit concerned about me turning to run with it, or even opening his photos to see if he had nudes of himself on there.

I called the number on the first card in the stack and found myself looking like an absolute fool when they asked where I was.

“What’s the name of this place?” I asked.

He laughed and came back to my end of the bar to write on a napkin. I was a little disappointed by the sight of his left hand holding that napkin in place while he wrote. There was definitely a woman’s name tattooed around his ring finger.

Callie was a lucky girl, too.

“Some bar named Beck’s,” I said into the phone and rattled off the address that he’d written out for me.

thirty-five

JERSEY

This had to be hillbilly hell. It was like I was standing on the actual, physical line between the wilderness and what probably counted as civilization in Kentucky. I buttoned my jacket and made my way across the parking lot with Memphis in my ear.

“You’re sure this is the right place?” I asked quietly.

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