The Bartender's Secret
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Caro Carson
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Chapter One
The first time he saw her, she was reading a book.
Connor McClaine’s customers often read books in his pub. The Tipsy Musketeer was located roughly twenty yards from the edge of Masterson University’s campus, so it wasn’t unusual to serve a hand-drawn Guinness to a student who was studying Socrates or sociology.
This reader was...different.
In the quiet of the Tuesday afternoon lull, Connor took his time polishing the pub’s antique brass taps as the woman turned another page. There was an intriguing grace to the motion of her index finger, a simple touch of light pressure on the paper, a slide to the left to reveal two more pages full of black type.
She fell still once more. Only her eyes moved as she devoured the fresh lines. Her hand didn’t waver as she held the book with its pages tilted toward the window. The Texas sunshine was constant, golden, steadily illuminating the deep brown of her hair, the dark wood of his pub’s floor. The ivory pages of her book reflected the light up to her throat, so the picture she made had the kind of otherworldly illumination one saw in paintings. She made a beautiful picture.
Traditionally, Irish pubs were dark shelters from a harsher outside world, and the Tipsy Musketeer, despite being located in Central Texas, was as traditional as an Irish pub could be. For relief from the often desertlike heat, the Victorian-era building’s heavy shutters had kept out the sunlight for over 130 years. But its proprietor now was Connor McClaine, and he’d once been forced to live for precisely 180 days in a building with no windows, so the Tipsy Musketeer’s green shutters were now fastened open—permanently.
Their shade was no longer necessary. The building might be historic, but its air-conditioning units were modern and efficient. It had taken most of the past ten years, virtually his entire adult life, but Connor had brought this building to a place where he was assured there would always be windows and light and breathable air. He had everything he needed, as long as everything stayed as it was—his pub, his life, unchanging.
The reading woman stayed just as she was. Unchanging. A work of art.
Connor moved from the brass taps to the mahogany bar, polishing as he drank in the shades of whiskey in her hair. One hundred shades of brown—that was how many different colors Rembrandt had used to paint a woman’s hair. Connor had read that in an art history book he’d found on the wrong shelf of a prison library. He’d wanted to see a Rembrandt in real life ever since.
Here she was.
With one graceful fingertip, she turned the page, read another line.
She laughed, a single squeak of surprise.
Connor stopped in mid-stroke, startled that a work of art had made a sound. She continued coming to life, setting the book down, resting her elbow on the table, her chin on her hand. Her smile lingered over something she’d read, a humorous twist she’d hadn’t expected. Connor had a burning desire to know...
To know...
Not her, of course. He already knew women like her—educated, peaceful, lovely. Women who lived calm lives. Women who’d never been denied windows and daylight. Women who were out of his league, fortunately for them.
He didn’t begrudge them their lovely lives. They’d done nothing to hurt him, after all, and the world would be a grim place if everyone had to come from the same darkness he had. There was only one common denominator between Connor and this woman: he could read whatever she read. He could share that one piece of a lovelier, lighter life.
What was she reading?
She was in his establishment. He could step out from behind the bar, walk over to that table and ask her if she needed anything. He’d see the book cover. He’d know something about her. If he read that same book later, he’d know a lot more about her. He’d try to guess exactly which page, which paragraph had made her laugh out loud.
Her smile faded. With one finger, she pushed the book a few inches away from herself.
Ah, he knew more about her already. He understood that feeling. A book could carry him away to another place, putting him in a different mood—a better place, a better mood. But always, the book would end, and life would resume. Depending on how bad life was at the moment, the return to reality could feel like a hangover, the price one paid for a brief escape. When books had let him escape a windowless prison, the hangover had been vicious.
Connor turned away from the picture-perfect woman and pitched his polishing cloth in the laundry bin with last night’s bar towels. She was not a painting for him to analyze. She wasn’t here for his viewing pleasure. But her hair was whiskey and her throat was lovely, and he could ask her that most basic question of bartenders everywhere: What’s your pleasure?
He wanted to know.
He rested his forearms on the bar and waited, savoring the moment as he watched his living Rembrandt, imagining he understood how she felt. She’d glance his way any second now. What’s your pleasure?
“Connor, save me.” A different woman stuck her head in his line of sight, a teenager who read books only when required to by her teachers. For the ten years he’d known her, Bridget Murphy had read only school assignments, and for ten years, Connor had been pushing her to do her schoolwork. She’d been nine when the previous owner, Mr. Murphy, had hired Connor, who’d been a miserable nineteen. Bridget had always gotten in the way when Connor had been learning the ropes, but she was the niece of Mr. Murphy. Connor had always figured she had more of a right to be at Murphy’s Tipsy Musketeer than he did. In any case, Connor would never say a bad word against a Murphy.
“Just shoot me,” she said.
“Tempting, but I can’t do both. Shoot you or save you? You have to decide.”
Bridget plopped herself onto a barstool, the one directly between himself and the intriguing woman, blocking his view. That was Bridget. She would have made a perfect pest of a little sister, had Connor had a family. With a dramatic groan, she plunked her red head on the bar.
He spoke to the top of her head. “A word of advice. When you turn twenty-one, two years from now, and you can legally drink, be sure to avoid cheap booze at wild college parties, or else you’ll get a hangover that feels exactly the way you’re feeling right now.”
“Devil take ye and yer best dog,” she muttered into the burnished wood, in a fine approximation of her great-uncle’s Irish brogue. “If you’re so sure this is a hangover, you could make me one of your hangover cures.”
With Bridget’s head out of his way, Connor could see the woman again. She was entirely back in this world now, tucking her book into a cloth book bag. Any second, she’d look at him.
What’s your pleasure?
“Pretty please?” Bridget popped her head up, blocking his view again.
Connor came just that close to growling in annoyance.
“What? What I’d do?”
“Nothing.” Connor began making a hangover cure, glancing toward the woman in the window as he did. She’d stood and was heading toward the restrooms, book bag on her shoulder. Her chiffon skirt swished around her knees with each step. Connor scooped ice into a glass and watched as her hair turned from glowing mahogany to nearly ebony as she moved out of the sunlight.
“Who was that?” Bridget asked.
“Who?”
“That woman whose butt you’re checking out instead of saving me.”
Connor poured tomato juice into the glass and shrugged. “A customer. I’m not checking out her butt.” I’m checking out the swing of her hair.
Bridget turned around to check out the now empty table. “Yeah?”
And her legs.
“Your customer doesn’t have a drink or anything.”
“I haven’t asked her what she wants yet. She’s been reading.”
Bridget rolled her eyes as only a college drama major could. “People can drink and read at the same time. You could’ve interrupted her. She might have appreciated it.”
“She was reading intently, the way your professors want you to.” He added three dashes of Tabasco to the glass.
“Intently? You were watching her read intently? That’s so weird.”
And a fourth dash.
“You were watching her walk away pretty intently, too.”
“I said she was reading intently. I wasn’t watching her intently as she read. Syntax, Bridget. It matters.”
“Syntax, Bridget,” she repeated, in an admittedly fine approximation of his patronizing tone. “You should be an English teacher, not a bar owner. You’d meet more women who read intently, instead of the kind that get drunk and try to jump your bones. How does a bookworm proposition you? ‘Hey, hottie. Let’s get naked and talk about literature.’ Does size matter when it comes to books?”
Connor tossed Bridget a lemon wedge. “Suck on that.”
“Hey—”
“It’s good for you. Vitamin C.” He squeezed two more lemon wedges into the glass, gave it a stir, then slid it across the bar with just enough force that it stopped in front of Bridget.
She glared at it. “You forgot the vodka.”
“That’s for alcohol-induced hangovers. Since you’re underage, I know you weren’t drinking alcohol last night, so you don’t need it this afternoon.”
“Uncle Murphy says you need the hair of the dog that bit you.”
“I’m not losing my liquor license by serving vodka to a college sophomore. Drink your juice.”
The woman who’d been reading walked back into the main pub area. She’d look his way any second now, maybe even stop at the bar to get a drink to carry back to her table.
What’s your pl—
“Hey, boss.” This time a young man stuck his head in Connor’s way, speaking with all the energy and volume of a college student who was not hungover. “Everyone’s on their way. A few texted they’d be late, but they’re still coming.”
Kristopher Newell was a junior at Masterson and one of Connor’s bartenders. The state of Texas didn’t require bartenders to be twenty-one—employees could serve alcohol at eighteen, as long as they didn’t drink any—but Connor required it. Kristopher had bused tables for a full semester, an eternity for a college student, until he’d turned twenty-one and Connor had let him move behind the bar. Like Mr. Murphy before him, Connor appreciated good employees and took care of them. No revolving door here, even in a college town. Not until they graduated and moved on to the rest of their lives, diplomas in their hands.
“How’d your test go?” Connor asked. Taking care of his employees meant being sure they had their priorities straight.
Kristopher’s buoyancy dropped a notch. “Pretty well. Not as well as I’d hoped. But hey, if I ace this Shakespeare thing, it’ll balance out.”
There was a small stage in one corner of the pub, used by countless musicians since before Connor had been born. This afternoon, it would be used by students to rehearse a theater course assignment. Connor had offered it up, because it was one way he could ensure Kristopher and Bridget actually practiced for their Shakespeare project. The pub was usually empty between the lunch crowd and happy hour on a Tuesday in March, anyway.
But not this Tuesday. The woman by the window had come here to read. Maybe Miss Rembrandt had hoped the pub would be an oasis away from the students who thronged every other business on Athos Avenue. Generally, it was; the Tipsy Musketeer checked IDs. It was common knowledge around campus that this pub would serve the bread but not the beer to those under twenty-one, so the Musketeer drew an older clientele: the professors rather than the students, the coaches rather than the athletes, the university president rather than the fraternity president.
She didn’t strike him as a college student. She was young, but not nineteen. Ms. Rembrandt, then. College students could be any age, but Masterson University was a traditional campus, with a football stadium and red-bricked dormitories. Most Musketeers were kids who entered straight from high school and graduated four years later at an outdoor cap-and-gown affair. It was very likely this woman had come into the pub seeking a student-free zone.
She stopped at the same table and pulled her book out once more. When Connor took her drink order, he’d warn her that a dozen college kids were about to arrive and start emoting in sixteenth-century English.
If you’re brave enough to stay, your drink is on the house. What’s your pleasure?
“I’ve got this.” Kristopher jogged over to Ms. Rembrandt. “What can I get you?”
Great. Connor had hired the most conscientious, eager twenty-one-year-old in town. Kristopher wasn’t even on the clock until five.
Kristopher’s enthusiastic What can I get you? was less evocative of an earlier time period than What’s your pleasure? which Connor had picked up from Mr. Murphy, along with the man’s string of Irish curses that all began with “the devil.” Mr. Murphy had a long and creative list of things he wanted the devil to do.
Connor had every excuse to gaze at Ms. Rembrandt now, because he was waiting for Kristopher to turn and relay her drink order. Any second now. If Kris stopped monopolizing the woman’s attention.
She had an energy about her. Her navy sweater and that light blue skirt were not as sedate as she’d probably intended them to be. When she reached back to the table and slid her book behind herself, her sweater hugged her curves.
Her smile was more than polite; it was genuine. Then she laughed, a bright sound that filled the space between them. He saw the light in her face, heard bright light in her voice. Connor sucked in a breath. He wanted to know...
To know...
He didn’t want to know what book she’d read. He wanted to know her. He wanted to know where she was from, what she was doing, where she was going.
He could make small talk as easily as he made cocktails. He could find out all about her.
It would lead to nothing.
This pub was a fantasy world. An Irish pub needed a publican, an owner who treated everyone as if they’d arrived as welcome guests to his own home. It was the role Connor had taken over from Mr. Murphy when he’d bought the business.
It was a role he never stopped playing, even after the pub was closed. If he accepted the invitation of a woman who’d lingered until quitting time, he knew she expected him to be the same man in her bed as the man she’d flirted with among the mirrors and mahogany. It was better for him to be that man, best to keep the fantasy intact.
The real him wouldn’t be so welcomed by women, nor so successful in business. Connor kept his secrets. Nothing exotic or intriguing, merely that he was an ex-con, a common dropout who’d gotten caught riding in a stolen car at nineteen. Joyriding was a felony in Texas. He’d stood in handcuffs before a judge and pled guilty.
That felony conviction still affected his life. It always would. He hadn’t been able to get a driver’s license for almost two years. He hadn’t been able to take over for Mr. Murphy until enough years had passed that the government would allow him to apply for a liquor license. He’d had to publish his intent to get the license in the newspaper twice, to give the public time to object to a convicted felon operating a bar in their town.
Nobody had objected. Connor doubted many had read the single sentence in the local newspaper. That was best for business. Nothing about his past suited the image he needed to maintain as the proprietor of the Tipsy Musketeer.
Nothing about the real him would be interesting to a woman who looked like a Rembrandt and smiled like the girl next door. He could get to know her, but the most that might come of it was a warm night in her bed as her charming bartender.
Bridget polished off her juice, gave Connor one more dirty look, in case he wasn’t aware how she felt about its lack of vodka, and headed toward the stage. The main door was close to it, and the cluster of guys who walked in were unmistakably students, thinking nothing of hollering Yo, Kristopher across the room.
Connor kept an eye on Ms. Rembrandt to see how she’d react to the student invasion. The second Kristopher looked toward his friends, she groped around the table behind herself until she grabbed her book and stuffed it into her bag. She asked Kristopher something. He gestured toward the door, and she headed for the exit.
That was it. She was leaving.
Connor tapped a stainless-steel keg with the toe of his boot. It sounded like there was next to nothing left in it. He ducked beneath the bar to disconnect the line to the empty keg. He heard the door open and close, more raucous students coming in as she went out. Customers came and went all the time. It didn’t matter.
But it felt like it did.
Connor pulled out the keg, then tilted it on its edge to roll it out from behind the long bar, stopping under the ornate iron chandelier that had been converted from candles to kerosene to gas to electricity. It still amazed him that he lived here now, surrounded by beauty that had lasted more than a century. When he finished a book, the hangover was no longer terrible, because Connor didn’t dread returning to this world.
But Ms. Rembrandt had not enjoyed returning to hers. She’d smiled at Kristopher. She’d laughed—God, that bright laugh—but Connor had seen that moment of sadness. He should have talked to her. He was a bartender, after all. Hangover cures were part of the repertoire.
Doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t have led to anything, anyway.
No, but he could have discovered the title of the book with the blue cover, the one she’d stuffed into her bag like she’d stolen it. He would have known her, then, in his own way.
Devil take it to hell and back. Twice.
Connor hefted the keg to chest height and headed for the storeroom, leaving his fantasy of a beautiful world behind.
