“No.”
“You don’t seem to get how this works,” she said, throwing his words back at him with a sunny grin that made his left eye twitch. “I’m not asking for permission. I’m telling you I’m not working next weekend. James and I are going out of town.”
Sadie and James had become an official couple not long after Kane kicked Sadie and Charlotte out of his apartment last fall. They lived together. Why did they have to go out of town?
“You have to work.” He kept his tone calm. No sense losing his temper or his control. Though dealing with Sadie Nixon would be enough to make the most patient man lose his cool. “I already gave Mary Susan the weekend off so she could drive down to see her granddaughter in some school play.”
Sadie patted his arm, all faux conciliatory, as if the headache he’d developed wasn’t entirely her fault. “You’ll figure something out.”
“Do I have any other choice?”
Frowning, she pursed her mouth as if she seriously considered his question. “You could always close the bar. Hey, you could take a little vacation yourself. You haven’t had a day off since I started working here.”
He finished his water, tossed the empty bottle into the recycling bin. “You take enough days off for both of us.”
“So fire me.”
It was one of her favorite rejoinders, one she used mostly because she knew damn well he had no intention of doing it. He hated having anyone read him so clearly. If people knew you too well, they had the power to use that knowledge against you.
“Don’t think I’m not considering it.”
She laughed loudly, the sound somehow rising above the bar’s din. Several people—mostly men because, hey, pretty blonde in a tight, low-cut dress—glanced their way. “Oh, you slay me. You really do.”
“What’s so funny?” Bryce Gow, a heavyset elderly man with red cheeks and a bulbous nose, asked as he hefted himself onto a stool.
Sadie fixed his usual—rum and Coke—and set it on the bar, then leaned forward to tip her head conspiratorially toward Bryce. “Kane said he’s going to fire me,” she told the retired electrician.
Bryce’s expression brightened, but that could’ve been due to the fact that Sadie’s pose gave him an excellent view of her cleavage. “Fired shmired.” He sipped his drink, then patted Sadie’s hand. “Quit this dump—”
“Funny how this being a dump hasn’t stopped you from parking yourself on that stool every Saturday night for the past one hundred years,” Kane said.
Bryce, eighty if he was a day, and a regular long before Kane had ever set foot inside O’Riley’s—hell, before Kane, or even his father, had been born—glared, then turned back to Sadie. “You can work for my grandson,” he told her. “He’s a good boy. Respectful of his elders and his paying customers.”
Kane pulled yet another beer. “Last week you said he was lazy, ungrateful and running the company you’d built into the ground. You called him an idiot who’d touched one live wire too many and fried his brain.”
Bryce lowered his eyebrows. “At least he’s smart enough to appreciate good employees.”
“I am undervalued and underappreciated,” Sadie agreed with a sigh that was pure heartfelt drama. “I would quit in a heartbeat, but if I wasn’t around, poor Kane would miss me—”
“Poor Kane?” he mumbled, seriously considering sticking her head under the beer tap and giving her a good dousing. “Jesus Christ.”
She batted her eyelashes at him. “And I’d hate to see a grown man as pretty as him cry.”
“You’re a pain in the ass.”
“So I’ve been told,” she said cheerfully. She blew him a kiss. “You know you adore me.”
The worst part? It was true.
“I’m heading to the back of the bar,” he said. “Give you and that big head of yours more room.”
He really should fire her, he thought, as he made his way to the other end of the bar. She was flighty and unreliable, showed up for most of her shifts late, and took too many breaks when she was working.
She was also a great bartender, cheerful and chatty, always ready with a joke, a compliment or a sympathetic ear.
As much as he hated to admit it, he liked her. Hell, if he believed men and women could be friends without sex getting in the way, he might just say she was the closest thing he’d had to a friend in years.
If she ever suspected, she’d never let him hear the end of it.
“Slow night,” Sadie commented, joining him.
“Not too bad,” he said. “The birthday ladies alone are making us a lot of money.”
“Only because every guy under the age of fifty keeps buying them drinks. Men. Always so hopeful they’ll get lucky.”
“It’s what gets us through each day. Any of them getting pushy?”
“If they do, Julie will let you know.”
He expected that. Was glad his employees knew to come to him if there was a problem. He kept an eye out for everyone in his place. Took care of them.
He’d been in Shady Grove less than a year and already he was turning into a damned Boy Scout.
For another thirty minutes, Kane filled drink orders, yakking with those who wanted to chat, leaving the ones who didn’t alone with their thoughts and alcohol. The song on the jukebox ended and the familiar opening riff of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—a Saturday night mainstay at O’Riley’s, along with Guns n’ Roses’ “Sweet Child o’ Mine” and Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer”—started.
It was a good song. A classic. At one time it had been one of Kane’s favorites.
Until he’d seen people dance to it.
It wasn’t a tune made for smooth moves, but that didn’t stop a small portion of his customers. All that twitching and hopping and head-banging—most of the time simultaneously—could put off even the most die-hard Nirvana fan.
Averting his gaze from the dance floor, he opened a bottle of water and took a long drink. Scanned his domain from his position behind the bar. The booths along the back wall were filled, as were a few of the tables, late diners finishing their meals or enjoying a nightcap before heading home. The in-between stage of the evening meant those who’d come in for good food at reasonable prices mixed and mingled with the drinking crowd.
Shady Grove was a long way from Houston, but if there was one thing Kane had learned it was that people—whether at a honky-tonk stomping their cowboy boots to classic Hank Williams or in an exclusive club shaking their designer-clad asses to the latest techno hit—were the same everywhere. When Saturday night rolled around, they wanted a good time. To forget their problems, lose their inhibitions and seek out the mystical happy place where their pain magically disappeared, their checkbook wasn’t overdrawn and their boss/spouse/parent/kid wasn’t such a douche bag.
Only to wake up Sunday morning hungover and right back where they’d started.
Nothing sucked the life out of a good time like the real world. But, for a few hours he gave them a reprieve from their lives. That the reprieve came with copious amounts of alcohol caused him some guilt. Not so much he seriously considered turning O’Riley’s into a coffee shop or bookstore, but enough that he wanted it to be more than a bar where the locals got hammered every weekend.
He’d come up with the idea of serving meals. Full dinners instead of bar fare—though they