“The one what?” she asked.
“My friend Kevin insisted that we come here tonight to check out the hot new bartender,” he explained.
She automatically glanced toward the table where his friends were seated, suggesting that she’d seen them enter the bar. “Setting aside the accuracy of that description for the moment, I hope he didn’t make the suggestion in front of your new girlfriend.”
“My—Oh.” He looked over his shoulder. “Which one did you think was my girlfriend?”
She shrugged. “Either. Both.”
“I’m flattered... I think. But no, Nat and Hayley are friends and employees.”
“Is the boss buying the first round tonight?” she prompted.
Although there were servers who circulated around the floor, taking orders and delivering drinks, it wasn’t unusual for customers to order directly from the bartender.
“I am,” Jay confirmed. “Two bottles of Icky, one Wild Horse, a gin and tonic, one Maker’s Mark, neat, and a Coke.”
She turned to reach into the beer fridge for the bottles he’d requested, providing him with a nice view of her perfectly shaped backside.
“So what made you take up bartending?” he asked, his attention focusing on the chunky, lopsided heart-shaped pendant that dangled between her breasts when she turned back again.
“Too much time on my hands,” she confided, deftly uncapping the bottles.
He lifted his eyes to her face again. “Did you lose your teaching job?”
“Of course not.”
“Then what you really meant to say was too many lonely nights,” he teased.
“I’m not lonely,” she denied, scooping ice into a tall glass. “But I spend a lot of time alone and I thought this would be a good way to meet people.”
“How’s that working out so far?”
She smiled as she filled the glass from the soda gun. “The tips are good.”
He chuckled.
“Aside from that,” she continued as she poured the bourbon into an old-fashioned glass, “I’ve learned there are three types of guys who come into a bar.”
“What are those types?” he asked curiously.
“Type one are the regulars who might be genuinely nice guys, but their closest and longest relationships are with the bottle,” she explained as she scooped more ice into a highball.
“Type two comes in looking to meet a woman, but he doesn’t have any interest in getting to know her beyond the most basic exchange of information for the sole purpose of getting her into bed.” She added a shot of gin, then squeezed a wedge of lime into the glass.
“Type three is almost worse.” She added the tonic, another wedge of lime and a stir stick. “He seems like a good guy, and he’s usually with a girl who thinks so, too, but the whole time he’s with her, he’s scoping out the area for other females.”
“I’d suggest that there’s also a fourth type,” Jay said. “The guy who comes in for a drink with his friends and maybe to flirt with a pretty girl.”
“Maybe,” she acknowledged, a little dubiously.
“And then there’s Carter,” he said as his friend joined him at the bar—ostensibly to help him carry the drinks back to their table.
“Hello, Carter,” she said, greeting the other man with a friendly smile.
“For once in his life, Kevin was right,” Carter remarked, winking boldly at Alyssa.
Jay shook his head. “Type two,” he told her. “Not beyond reform, but risky.”
Alyssa nodded as she punched the drinks into the register. “Got it.”
Carter scowled. “What does that mean? What’s a type two?”
“It means that you’re not going to hit on the bartender—who also happens to be my neighbor,” he said firmly.
His friend’s gaze shifted from him to Alyssa and back again. “You live next to this stunning creature and you’ve never invited me over to meet her?”
“And this is him pretending that he’s not hitting on you,” Jay remarked as he passed some bills across the counter to Alyssa.
She laughed. “Well, I’m flattered,” she said.
“Let me know when you want to be not pretend hit on,” Carter told her, picking up several of the drinks to take them back to their table.
Jay shook his head to decline the change she offered.
Her smile slipped, replaced by an expression of concern. “Ohmygod.”
He craned his neck, looking behind him. “What happened?”
“That’s what I was going to ask you,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
She lifted a hand to touch his face, her fingers brushing lightly over the stubble on his jaw—and the bruise that throbbed beneath the skin.
“Oh, that,” he said, wondering how it was that her cautious touch was so unexpectedly arousing. “Matt caught me with my shield up.”
“Huh?”
“Paintball,” he explained.
“Boys and their toys,” she mused, letting her hand drop away.
His skin continued to tingle where she’d touched him.
Or maybe that was just the bruise.
Yeah, it was definitely the bruise, he decided as he picked up the remaining drinks and walked away from the bar. Because he definitely wasn’t letting himself get involved with the girl next door.
* * *
“You calling dibs?” Carter asked when Jay rejoined his friends at their table.
“Dibs on what?” Matt Hutchinson wanted to know.
“Of course I’m not calling dibs,” Jay said.
“The bartender,” Natalya Vasilek answered Matt’s question.
“If anyone’s calling dibs, it’s me,” Kevin Dawson declared. “I saw her first.”
“No, you didn’t,” Carter told him. “Because the ‘hot new bartender’ is a friend and neighbor of our CEO.”
Kevin swore.
“But he’s not calling dibs,” Matt reminded them all.
“Maybe because he likes and respects the woman too much to talk about her as if she was an object up for grabs,” Hayley MacDowell said sharply.
“Whatever Jay’s reasons,” Kevin insisted, “if he’s not calling dibs, I am.”
“No one is calling dibs on Alyssa,” Jay said in a tone that brooked no argument.
Carter tipped his bottle to his lips but kept his gaze on his friend, silently assessing.
Conversation moved on to other topics, including a rehashing of all the highlights of their recent game. As they talked, their glasses and bottles emptied.
“I think Alyssa’s the real reason you broke up with Renee,” Carter said to Jay when the play-by-play had begun to lag.
“I broke up with Renee because she ranked below my business and my friends on my list of priorities,” he replied.
“That might be true,”