Hill Country Home
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Kit Hawthorne
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Will her deepest secret… Destroy her chance at happiness? It's hard to keep a secret in Limestone Springs, Texas, especially when you work for a trustworthy, unshakable man like Tito Mendoza. But Jenna Hamlin is determined to hide her child's past no matter the temptation. So when an unwelcome visitor reveals the truth and Jenna needs help to keep her daughter safe, can she finally let down her guard to trust — and love — again?
CHAPTER ONE
LALO’S KITCHEN WAS really hopping tonight, with every booth and table full and the back patio crammed to capacity. A crowd stood closely packed just inside the glass front of the old downtown building, waiting to be seated. Seemed as though the entire town of Limestone Springs had unanimously selected that evening to dine at Lalo’s. Beyond the pass-through, Tito’s Bar was doing a brisk business as well.
Jenna Hamlin balanced a loaded tray high above her head as she threaded her way through the crowded room. One of her servers had called in sick that afternoon. Luke, the other manager, had come in on his evening off to pitch in and was now busily bussing tables, but the wait staff was still spread way too thin.
She reached the guy sitting alone at the two-top over by the exposed brick wall and brought her tray down to waist level.
“Here you are, sir,” she said, setting the glass in front of him. “One sweet tea. And your loaded nachos should be out in a few minutes.”
Her mind was already racing two or three steps ahead. She had two entrées and a basket of cheese curds to deliver to the couple at the next table, and drink orders to take from the party of four that had just been seated in the corner booth. So when the guy asked her a question, it threw her off her rhythm.
She stopped in midstep and turned back around. “I’m sorry?” she asked.
He spoke up, louder this time. “I said, did you stick your finger in my tea?”
Then he sat back and smirked.
Slowly his meaning broke over her. He looked so pleased with himself, with his round blue eyes and toothy grin—as if he’d said something clever, as if Jenna ought to be flattered by the suggestion that she could sweeten tea with the touch of her finger.
Jenna had seen this guy before in Lalo’s Kitchen. He had one of those names made of initials—C.J. or T.J. or something. He liked to talk, especially to the female wait staff. Only a few days earlier, Jenna had watched Veronica, one of her part-timers, trying desperately to get away from him, a forced smile pasted on her face, as he droned on and on.
I didn’t want to be rude, Veronica had told Jenna after finally making her escape. He is a customer, after all.
That’s why he thinks he can get away with it, Jenna had replied. He’s taking advantage of that customer-is-always-right crap and using the power imbalance to gratify his ego. Don’t let him get away with that. Be polite but firm, and if that doesn’t work, come get me or Luke, or even Tito from next door. We’ll back you up.
Veronica had looked doubtful. She was young yet, only a senior in high school. Jenna was thirty-two, with years of experience waiting tables and tending bar during college, as well as other experience with men who abused power.
Now was her time to shine, to put all that wisdom into practice.
She gave Sweet Tea Guy a quick, cool smile, just enough to show that she got the joke without implying that she thought it was funny. “No, sir,” she said. “Our sweet tea is sweetened with a simple syrup made from cane sugar.”
His grin widened. “But why go to all that trouble when you can sweeten it yourself?” He waited a beat, then added, “You know. Because you’re so sweet.”
Either he was too obtuse to take a hint, or he simply didn’t care. It amounted to the same thing.
Jenna pushed down the rising wave of annoyance. She didn’t want to appease the guy, but she also didn’t want to lose her cool. Getting mad would just give him power over her. She would be polite, unruffled, firm.
“No, sir,” she said again. “That wouldn’t work, and it wouldn’t be sanitary. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Well, you can sit down here with me, and smile at me while I drink it,” said Sweet Tea Guy. “Make it go down easier.”
Jenna didn’t dignify this with a reply.
“Enjoy your drink,” she said, then turned and walked away.
She delivered the entrées and cheese curds to the other table, took the drink orders at the booth, cleared some dirty dishes and took them to the washing station, narrowly avoiding a collision with Lalo Mendoza, the restaurant’s owner. Lalo was the cousin of Tito Mendoza, who owned the bar next door. Like Luke, Lalo had come in this evening to help, but unlike Luke, he was merely getting in the way without contributing anything, standing around with his hands on his hips and a worried expression on his face. Jenna finessed her way past him, then headed back to the break room to check on Halley.
Any time Jenna was at Lalo’s Kitchen, Halley was there too—which meant Halley was there for roughly half her waking hours in any given week. Between rush times, when the dining room was mostly empty, Halley sat out front, reading, doing her schoolwork, wiping down tables, wrapping silverware. But whenever the dining room started to fill up, Jenna sent her to the break room, which not only freed up valuable table space but also kept Halley away from obnoxious customers like Sweet Tea Guy.
The situation wasn’t ideal, but there were worse alternatives. At age twelve, Halley was legally old enough to stay home by herself while Jenna worked, but there was no way on God’s green earth that Jenna was letting Halley get farther away from her than sprinting distance. That was how it had been for the past year and a half, and how it would continue for the foreseeable future.
The building that now housed Lalo’s Kitchen had once been a law office, but that had been eight years ago, well before Jenna’s time. She’d only ever known it in its present form, beautifully renovated in a pleasant blend of modern comfort and retro style. The exposed brick wall on the left side of the big open dining room continued down a long hallway that made a straight shot to the back of the building, with doorways on the right. Jenna went down the hallway, backing against the wall to make way for Clint, another part-time server, who was carrying a loaded tray to the dining room. She passed the kitchen, where Abel, the cook, was lifting a metal basket of fragrant, glistening sweet potato fries out of the deep fryer. Next came the two restrooms, followed by a third door, topped by a sign that said Employees Only. This led to a passageway connecting Lalo’s Kitchen to Tito’s Bar, with access to two break rooms, two offices, and a closet of cleaning supplies shared by both businesses.
Jenna entered the passageway, then opened the door to the break room belonging to Lalo’s Kitchen.
It was a small but comfortable space, with a narrow fridge shoehorned in at the end of a wall of efficient cabinetry. Leftover cake from Clint’s birthday stood on the counter next to a stack of disposable plates. Another wall was taken up by two rows of cubbies with employees’ names written on labels in Veronica’s pretty hand-lettering script. There was even a cubby for Halley, filled with schoolbooks, notebooks, sketchbooks and leisure reading.
But Halley herself was nowhere in sight.
Jenna backed up through the Employees Only door, which hadn’t yet shut behind her. The restroom doors were both slightly ajar, and the lights were off.
She turned the other way, looking down the remainder of the hallway to the glass back door. She’d never liked that door. It led to the patio, the space of which was divided by vine-covered columns and trellises into lots of cozy little room-like areas. Anyone could slip in from there while Jenna was occupied in the front and reach the break room without her ever knowing.
A sound from the passageway made her jump. There was Halley, coming out of the break room of Tito’s Bar, holding a canned soda in one hand and a paperback book in the other, with one finger marking her place.
Jenna hadn’t had time to build up much of a panic, but her knees went weak with relief and she had to lean against a wall.
“What were you doing in there?” she asked, fear sharpening her voice.
Halley tossed back her straight blond hair. “Tito told me he got me some of those sodas I like, so I went to his break room to get one.”
A quiver of irritation ran down Jenna’s spine. She didn’t like for Halley to go into areas that properly belonged to the bar, at least during business hours. Besides the safety issues, she felt sensitive about bringing up a child so close to a bar.
Of course, Tito’s wasn’t really a bar bar. Yes, it did have the word bar right there in the name—Tito’s Bar. But it stood right next to Lalo’s Kitchen, with a big pass-through doorway connecting the two businesses about halfway down the connecting wall, which gave it the vibe of a bar and grill, or even a European tavern, rather than a straight-up bar. You could bring your craft beer from Tito’s over to your table at Lalo’s, or take your burger from Lalo’s to your spot at Tito’s, and pay for your purchases at either cash register. And as Tito himself often said, people who were willing to pay eight dollars for a beer generally weren’t looking to get drunk. Still, the place did sell hard liquor, and have the occasional three-sheets-to-the-wind customer.
“You know, we have a full selection of craft sodas on tap right here in the restaurant that you can drink for free,” Jenna said.
Halley shrugged. “I like these ones from H-E-B. Tito got them just for me. But the box they come in is too deep to fit in our break room fridge. So he put them in his break room fridge and said I could come get one anytime I want.”
“Take a few out at a time and keep them in our fridge,” said Jenna. “I don’t want you going back and forth between the restaurant and the bar.”
“But Tito’s fridge is, like, twelve feet away from ours!”
“It’s in a different building. Anyway, I don’t want you leaving the break room at all without asking me first.”
They were rash words, and she knew she’d made a mistake the instant she heard them coming out of her mouth. Halley stared at her in disbelief. “Seriously? You want me to ask permission every time I go to the restroom? That doesn’t even make sense. I’d have to leave the break room to begin with before I could find you in the dining room to ask permission. And that’s if you’re even in the dining room. Sometimes you fill in at bartending, which means I’d have to go to the bar to track you down—and you don’t want me to go into the bar.”
Jenna’s head swam. She didn’t have time to quibble over semantics; she had to get back to work. But she couldn’t walk away without fixing this.
“You don’t have to ask permission to go to the restroom,” she said. “But for everything else, find me and ask first.”
“What do you mean, everything else? You just told me to stay out of Tito’s break room. Where else am I going to go?”
Jenna sighed. “Look, I know it doesn’t seem fair for you to be stuck in the break room for hours on end. But that’s how it has to be right now.”
“Why?” Halley asked.
“What do you mean, why? You know why. You can’t be too careful.”
“Yes, you can.”
Halley wasn’t whining or cajoling. She was as cool and composed as Jenna had been with Sweet Tea Guy.
“What did you say?” Jenna asked, putting some starch in her tone, in a last-ditch hope that Halley would back down.
Halley did not back down.
“I said yes, you can. You can be too careful. If you’re so afraid of crowds that you never leave your house, or so scared of doctors that you refuse to go to the hospital when you’re hurt, or so worried about food poisoning that you never eat food and end up starving to death, then you’re too careful. I’m just saying.”
She was right, of course. It was exactly the sort of thing Jenna would have said to her own mother at that age, in pretty much the exact same words.
Jenna stared at Halley, and Halley stared right back. When had Halley gotten so tall? She was almost eye to eye with Jenna now. It was almost like looking in a mirror. That hair, those cheekbones, that hard set to her chin, were eerily like Jenna’s own.
The unflinching gaze of the bright blue eyes, though—that was all Chase.
Jenna drew herself up as tall as she could. “This isn’t that and you know it. I just want you safe, Kara. Okay?”
“Halley.”
“What?”
“I’m not Kara, I’m Halley.”
Jenna shut her eyes. She wanted to scream. What was happening? How had this situation gotten so far outside of her control?
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. Just be safe, okay, Halley?”
“Okay, Mother,” Halley said with a tiny sigh.
She managed to pack a lot of subtext into that sentence, foremost of which was, You’re not my mother. Halley had never said those words to Jenna, not out loud, but Jenna could feel them in the air.
Halley had started calling Jenna Mother when she was four years old, long before either of them could have possibly suspected that Jenna would one day be her legal guardian. Halley had gone on calling Kara Mom, but by some odd child logic, she’d found this other word that meant the same thing and decided to use it for Jenna. Kara hadn’t liked it much, but she hadn’t been able to stop Halley from doing it, and eight years later Halley was still calling Jenna Mother. Sometimes the name had a warm, affectionate feel to it. Other times, like now, it sounded formal and stiff.
Halley went to the correct, Jenna-approved break room and closed the door behind her. The whole thing was surreal, as if Jenna were watching herself at that age, shutting her bedroom door in her own mother’s face.
Somehow she’d never envisioned Halley going through a back-talking, authority-challenging stage. Halley was supposed to be immune to all that. She’d seen so many ugly things at such an early age that she was supposed to be grateful just to be in a stable environment, and happy to follow the rules because they were there for her protection.
She used to cling to Jenna whenever Kara came to pick her up, her voice shrill with desperation. No, please! Don’t let her take me away. I want to stay with you!
It had been like ripping her heart out to let Kara pry off those clinging little arms and take Halley back to the house the two of them had shared with Chase—a dank, disorderly, comfortless house full of brooding silences and ugly outbursts.
Halley didn’t cling to Jenna anymore. There was no need now that the two of them were together all the time. The stable, peaceful home life with a predictable schedule, no yelling and plenty of food in the fridge was now the everyday life. Maybe it had lost its value now that there was no horrible alternative to compare it to. Maybe it was confining and dull.
That could spell trouble. Halley wasn’t even a teenager yet, but she would be soon. And sometimes teenagers did terrible things.
Jenna shook her head hard. What mattered was that she’d gotten Halley far away from the bad stuff. She’d changed their names, covered their tracks and started a whole new life for them several states away. If Halley started giving her a little lip, well, Jenna could deal with that.
She got back to the dining room just in time to see Clint bring Sweet Tea Guy his order of nachos. Sweet Tea Guy didn’t look pleased about exchanging Jenna with Clint, but there was nothing he could do about it. In another twenty minutes—half an hour, tops—he’d be gone.
But he didn’t leave. And as the evening passed and the crowd thinned, he moved on from sweet tea to beer.
Never mind, Jenna thought as she served and bussed tables. You can’t stay here forever. I can wait you out.
One of the big TVs was rebroadcasting the Monaco Grand Prix. Jenna’s dad used to watch Formula 1 racing, and when she was little she’d watch with him sometimes, curled up next to him in his big armchair. The Monaco Grand Prix was a notorious street circuit race, with very little room for passing, and no room at all for driver error. Jenna watched a red Alfa Romeo careening through the streets, skimming walls and buildings with mere millimeters to spare.
The sight flooded her with memories of another Alfa Romeo, also red, driven by a broodingly handsome boy with his left hand resting carelessly on the steering wheel and his right arm stretched out along the seat back, warm against Jenna’s shoulders. That one had been a street car, not a race car, but with enough power in its engine to reach glorious adrenaline-spiking speeds with no trouble at all, hugging the turns of narrow country roads through the Blue Ridge foothills. She’d loved those drives—windows down, music cranked up, the world rushing by as the boy at the wheel gave her that heart-melting James Dean smile. Now the memory made her sick.
She closed out a party of seven, and after they left she saw Luke wiping down Sweet Tea Guy’s table. Yay! Gone at last.
“Looks like things are finally calming down,” Luke told her. He was tough-looking, with his strong build and full beard, but with the kindest eyes Jenna had ever seen. “I’m going to head home.”
“Okay. Thanks for coming in.”
“No problem. Have you finished making out next week’s schedule?”
“Not yet. I’ll get it sent out tomorrow.”
“All right.” He started to go, then turned back. “Almost forgot. The chalkboard got messed up tonight. I think someone spilled a beer on it. I know Veronica usually does the chalkboard art, but she’s gone home. Do you think Halley might want to give it a go? She’s always drawing, and she’s really good.”
Jenna smiled. “I’ll ask her. I’m sure she’ll be happy to try her hand.”
“Great. See you next week.”
As she watched him leave, she sent up a quick prayer of thanksgiving that this most excellent of bosses was back on the job. Some months earlier, Luke had gotten fed up with Lalo’s constant micromanaging and undermining and had actually quit without notice, just taken off his apron and walked out the door, right in the middle of a dinner rush. It had been a pretty dramatic thing for mild-mannered Luke to do, but as it turned out, he’d also been dumped by his girl and was at the end of his rope.
That had been the beginning of a busy and stressful time in Jenna’s work life. To Lalo’s credit, he’d pitched in, doing his best to take over Luke’s duties, but he hadn’t done them very well. He’d have done better to give Jenna more responsibility to help, which as it turned out was one of the many things Luke had wanted him to do all along, but he hadn’t. It was as if Lalo had to prove that he knew best.
Lalo did not know best.
It was sorely trying for Jenna, being lectured on how to do her job by someone who knew far less than she did about what that job actually entailed. The part-time employees weren’t being managed properly; they slacked off, playing fast and loose with the schedule. Afraid to hold them accountable, Lalo tried instead to make them all happy by demanding more from his reliable employees. It was a case of the squeaky wheels getting all the grease, and the smooth-running, reliable wheels having their bearings ground down under excess strain.
Lalo’s Kitchen had gone noticeably downhill. Food quality suffered, service got slower and sloppier, and the place always seemed to look dirty. Every day, Jenna heard from longtime customers complaining about the decline. They missed Luke, and his dog, Porter, and the way things had been under his management, and they weren’t shy about saying so. Slowly, those longtime customers started dropping away.
Jenna liked to think that the final straw had been when she’d given Lalo her two weeks’ notice. She hadn’t wanted to leave the place that had been a major factor in bringing her to Limestone Springs to begin with, but it wasn’t the same place anymore, and she’d said so. Lalo had replied, Hold that thought, and taken out his cell phone and called Luke right then and there, and begged him to come back. Luke had agreed to return only if certain demands were met, one of which was that Jenna get moved up to management. Lalo had complied. Since then, he’d mostly kept out of the way and let his managers manage. The customers had come back as well, revenue went up, and everything was better.
By closing time, Lalo’s Kitchen had cleared out completely, and Tito’s Bar was mostly empty. Standard policy for both restaurant and bar was to not rush customers out right at closing time. As long as they were behaving themselves, they could stay while the workers cleaned around them, and as long as they weren’t drunk, Tito would go on serving them.
Jenna stood in the pass-through between the bar and the restaurant, leaning her shoulder against the casing as she faced the bar. It was quieter now, quiet enough to hear the music being piped into both spaces—a carefully crafted mix of hits and lesser-known favorites from the past few decades. Tito was in charge of playlists, and he took the responsibility very seriously. He knew exactly what to play to foster whichever mood he wanted to cultivate in the customers.
He was standing behind the bar now, slender and straight in his snowy white shirt and black vest, his perfect posture making him appear taller than he was. He always wore black and white at work. Jenna didn’t know if he even had any other clothes. Light from the overhead pendant fixture shone on his hair, making it look impossibly glossy, like polished ebony.
His dark eyes swept over his domain. Long tables and benches ran almost the full length of the room. They were empty now except for one stein of beer on the table closest to the pass-through.
Jenna liked Tito’s face, with its high forehead and cheekbones tapering to a long chin covered by a neatly trimmed beard, its thick black eyebrows and deep-set dark eyes, its wide, sensitive mouth. It was a thoughtful, intelligent, inquisitive face, with a look of query and searching about it—a responsive, mobile face, capable of being quirked into a rich variety of comical expressions. He was graceful and deliberate in movement, whether pouring a drink or running a damp cloth across the sparkling-clean surface of the bar top. At the end of the night, when he was counting money, he always put on a pair of old-fashioned gold-rimmed spectacles that perched unevenly on the end of his long bony nose, and looked at Jenna over the tops of them with his forehead all wrinkled up.
Everyone liked and trusted Tito. Customers confided in him, spilling out their troubles over their drinks. It was a stereotype, the sympathetic bartender, but justified in his case. There was something about him that inspired confidence, something deeply compassionate but also thoroughly rational, a razor-sharp intellect softened by self-deprecating humor and a sincere interest in other people.
Jenna understood the draw. She felt it herself. It would be so easy to confide in Tito, pouring out the whole messy history of how she and Halley had come to Limestone Springs, sharing the doubts that wracked her day and night, appealing to him for the wisdom and insight she knew he’d be happy to share, if only she’d ask.
But that could never happen. Her secrets had to stay secrets. She had to keep her new life, and Halley’s, airtight. She couldn’t afford to slip up.
Tito’s eyes met Jenna’s, and he smiled at her. It was the easy, casual smile of a good friend, but it sent a peculiar flutter through her heart. She smiled back.
She was about to turn around and head back to her own duties when someone appeared just beyond Tito, out of the hallway that ran along the far wall to the restrooms. It was Sweet Tea Guy. He crossed in front of the bar to the table closest to where Jenna was standing, picked up the beer stein and raised it to her, his grin as goofy as ever.
Jenna felt her own smile wilt.
Ordinarily, Jenna liked working closing shifts. She and Halley were both night owls, and homeschooling gave them the freedom to set their own hours. Her favorite time of day was after the last customer had left and the doors had been locked—especially on nights when Tito was closing, too.
And now here was Sweet Tea Guy, refusing to leave, ruining everything, the way inebriated guys always did.
Minutes passed. The part-timers did their end-of-shift cleaning tasks and went home. Luke left for the night, and so did Lalo. And still Sweet Tea Guy sat stubbornly in his spot, clutching his drink, refusing to budge.
Jenna went back to the break room. Halley was sitting on the tiny sofa with a book, her coltish legs bent at sharp angles. She looked up expectantly as the door opened.
“Sorry, you can’t come out yet,” Jenna said. “Some diehard is out here taking his time. He got a little inappropriate with me earlier, and I don’t want you in the dining room until he leaves.”
Halley scowled. “Can’t you throw him out?”
“Not yet. We’ll clean around him for as long as we can and hope he takes the hint and leaves on his own before it comes to that.”
Halley let out a long, exasperated sigh—whether at Sweet Tea Guy for being so inconsiderate, or at Jenna for not throwing him out, or at Jenna for being so protective, was impossible to tell.
“It shouldn’t be much longer,” Jenna said with an optimism she did not feel. “Tito just switched the playlist over to indie pop.”
Indie pop, according to Tito, was the genre to play when you wanted lingering customers to wind down and clear out. Ordinarily it worked like a charm, but Jenna suspected Sweet Tea Guy might be a tougher nut to crack.
“Lock the door behind me,” she said.
Halley gave her an incredulous look.
“Do it,” said Jenna. “I’ll come get you when he’s gone.”
Halley clomped over to the door and pushed it shut.
As soon as she heard the dry click of the lock, Jenna shut her eyes and leaned her forehead against the door, suddenly exhausted.
Then she opened the door to the supply closet and started loading her cleaning cart. A clipboard hung from a hook on the side, with a checklist for all the tasks to be done at closing, and spaces for the closer to initial as each item was completed. Everything was right there, perfectly spelled out with no ambiguity. Luke had designed those checklists, and Jenna loved them.
Her back was to the doorway, but she saw the shadow fall from behind her. She turned. There was Sweet Tea Guy, blocking the exit. His grin was as wide as ever, but its goofiness had been replaced by something else.
“There you are, sweet thing,” he said softly. “Let’s have a little alone time, you and me.”
As come-ons went, this one was pretty bald. It was insulting that he could possibly believe that Jenna or any other woman would take him up on it.
Her heart pounded hard, not with fear but with anger—against him and every other man who’d ever tried to take what wasn’t his.
Jenna grabbed the push broom. She was ready to rumble. Sweet Tea Guy was messing with the wrong woman. He had no idea how thrilled she would be to take out her frustrations on someone who so thoroughly deserved it.
But before either of them could make a move, a calm voice spoke from the passageway.
“Sir, this is an employees-only area. We don’t allow customers back here.”
Jenna couldn’t see who’d spoken, but she didn’t have to. She would know that voice anywhere. It was rich in timbre, with a smooth, rolling cadence—the kind of voice used by advertisers to sell fine wines or luxury cars.
Sweet Tea Guy didn’t even turn his head, just waved a dismissive hand. “It’s all right, Tito,” he said. “I know this girl. We’re having us a little visit. Go on back behind your bar.”
“No,” Tito said. His voice was still calm, but the pitch had deepened, and he’d dropped the sir. “Come on, R.J. We’re closed for business now. It’s time for you to go home.”
R.J. did turn then, shooting a scowl in Tito’s direction. He was a big, tall man, probably a good fifty pounds heavier than Tito.
“I’ll leave when I’m good and ready,” he said. “Now go back to the bar and mind your own business.”
“You’ll leave now,” said Tito.
R.J.’s hands curled into fists, and he lumbered off to the left, out of Jenna’s field of vision. She heard the sound of a scuffle, followed by a yelp of surprise. She hurried through the doorway of the closet in time to see R.J. with his arm bent behind him, being frog-marched by the bartender down the passageway and around the corner.
“Hey!” R.J. barked. “What do you think you’re doing?”
The break room door opened, and Halley’s shocked face peeked out.
“Close the door!” Jenna shouted. “I told you to stay put and keep the door locked!”
Halley did not shut the door. She came out and crept close to Jenna, almost touching but not quite. Together, they followed Tito into the dining room.
“Get your hands off me!” said R.J. “Who do you think you are? Let go!”
He kept hurling abuse at Tito all the way across the dining room to the glass door, finishing up with how he was never going to spend another dime in Tito’s Bar or Lalo’s Kitchen again.
“Funny, I was just about to suggest that very thing myself,” Tito said.
He tossed R.J. outside, shut the door behind him and turned the bolt.
R.J. stood on the sidewalk, rumpled and indignant, glaring at Tito through the glass. There was no trace of a grin now, goofy or otherwise. His face was red and twisted with rage.
Unfazed, Tito took out his phone and snapped R.J.’s picture, then tapped his screen a few times. “I’m adding R.J. to the do not serve group text,” he said.
He didn’t look the least bit rattled or shaken. He certainly didn’t look as if he’d just bounced a much larger man out of a bar. He didn’t even appear capable of doing such a thing, which was probably part of the reason why he was so successful at it. Customers at Tito’s Bar were generally well-behaved, but whenever one of them did need to be removed from the premises, Tito was up to the task. People underestimated him at their peril.
R.J. straightened his shirt in an exaggerated way and walked off down the sidewalk, his steps weaving a bit from side to side.
Tito flipped the sign on the door to the Closed side and turned to face Jenna and Halley. “Sorry about all that,” he said, picking up the abandoned beer stein and carrying it behind the bar. “R.J.’s always been a little on the obnoxious side, but tonight’s the first time I’ve seen him cross the line. You all right?”
“I’m fine,” said Jenna, but her voice shook a little, and a wave of weakness washed over her. She was still clutching the push broom. She leaned it against the back of a booth, steadied herself and said, “You didn’t have to do that, you know. I could have handled it.”
The words sounded ungracious in her own ears, but Tito didn’t seem to mind. He glanced at her over the bar top as he poured out the last of R.J.’s drink and said, “Okay.”
Then he picked up the dedicated cell phone used for streaming music and started tapping. The strains of indie pop that had been coming through the speakers instantly ceased.
Tito looked at Jenna and smiled. “It’s closing time,” he said. “And you know what that means.”
Jenna knew, all right. The best part of the night was about to begin.
