Getting Lucky (45 page)

   "Is this a help-yourself bar or is there a bartender somewhere out there?" He motioned toward the dance floor. He thought about asking her for a dance, maybe as an apology for knocking her down. Anything to touch her again and see if the jolt that shot through him was something other than a free fall to the dance floor.

   She hopped off the bar stool. "Guess that would be me. I was on my way back to the bar when we collided." Her heart kept up a steady beat in her ears like the drums in Garth Brooks's band.

   Jarod drew his heavy dark brows down in disbelief. Surely she was teasing. That exquisite woman couldn't be the bartender. She looked as though she might be the newest up-and-coming country singer taking a break from the stage. He looked around the room and saw only two juke boxes—no stage in sight.

   As she made her way behind the bar that was the whole length of the back wall of the Honky Tonk, she shook her head hard enough to send her dark brown pony tail swinging. It didn't work. She was still picturing him naked, except for scuffed up cowboy boots—and maybe the hat.

   Good grief, she had to get control of her thoughts. She had a bar to run and he was most likely one of those rare strangers who was just passing by and stopped for a cold beer on a scalding hot night.

   The juke box rattled the walls with Toby Keith's booming voice singing "I Love This Bar." It was Daisy's theme song. She had loved the Honky Tonk since the day she'd walked into the joint. Twenty-one years old, broken down car in the parking lot of the Smokestack restaurant not even a mile from the Honky Tonk, and barely enough gas money to get back to Mena, Arkansas, she'd been looking for a phone and some help. What she found was Ruby Lee, a salty old girl full of spit and vinegar who'd given her a job and a place to live and taken her under her wing. Since then not a single one of the drinkers, smokers, lookers, or even hustlers had taken her eye, until that cowboy collided with her and drove her mind straight into the gutter.

   
He's married and has six kids and a chain-smoking
mother who lives with him in a double wide trailer.

   "What'll it be?" Daisy asked.

   "Coors," he said. "Tap is fine. Is it good and cold?"

   Daisy nodded. His voice was so deep it gave her shivers. As if that wasn't enough, he had a dimple in his chin that begged her to lean forward and brush a kiss across. She felt like shutting the place down for a week and spending every moment of it in bed with him.

   She filled a Mason jar, the standard beer glass at the Honky Tonk, from the tap and carried it to the cowboy. "That one's on the house if you don't sue me. I'm the bartender that should have seen that puddle of beer."

   "Deal," he said curtly.

   Jarod McElroy hadn't come into the bar for conversa tion and he'd have run a country mile if he'd known his first walk across the dance floor was going to net him a fall on top of the bartender. God knew, he had enough to listen to from his eighty-six-year-old uncle, Emmett McElroy, who provided enough words in a day to make Jarod's ears hurt. And most of his words would fry the hair off a billy goat's ass.

   The family had known that Uncle Emmett was failing the past year, but a couple of months ago Jarod's mother had made a trip from Oklahoma to Texas to see him. When she found out that he'd been diagnosed with Alzheimer's in addition to a multitude of other ailments, she'd come home with the suggestion that Jarod move down there and help him run his ranch. He'd been more than willing, since he remembered Uncle Emmett and Aunt Mavis fondly and figured living on the ranch would be just as great as when he was a kid.

   He'd been wrong.

   Uncle Emmett had gone plumb crazy since his wife died the year before and refused to listen to a word or idea that Jarod had to say. After that day, Jarod was seriously considering throwing in the towel and going home to Oklahoma.

   He looked down the length of the shiny bar at the bartender who'd taken his order. When he'd raised his head up and seen exactly who'd broken his fall, he'd had the urge to kiss her. Looking at her, he wished he had. He could have blamed it on the moment. Now he'd never know what those full lips tasted like.

   
"She's a barmaid." Aunt Mavis' voice perched o
n his shoulder and whispered in his ear.
"Remember your
second fiancée?"

   Jarod's jaw muscles worked like he was chewing peanuts.

   
"Man don't get a good woman in a bar, Jarod. You
done proved that,"
she taunted in that gravelly voice of a fifty year smoker.

   "I hear you," he mumbled aloud.

   Sure, the barmaid at the Honky Tonk was a looker and there was something about those long legs and that tiny waist that made his mouth go dry, but a vow was a vow and Aunt Mavis would claw her way up from the grave and haunt him if he looked at a barmaid twice. Well, maybe he'd better make that three times, because he'd already had a very long second look at her.

   The woman had the body of a kick boxer, no spare fat cells anywhere. When her gaze met his, sparks lit up the room between them. Her steely-blue eyes dared him. The physical attraction was so strong that his first knee jerk reaction was to flirt; his second was to run. His third was to trip her, catch her when she fell, and kiss her just to see if those lips were as soft as they looked.

   Her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail that swished when she moved from one end of the bar to the other wiping up spills and filling orders. She wore a white tank top with sparkling jewels sewn into the front along the neckline and tight jeans hugging her hind end. Her eyes looked like they could cut a man apart like a laser gun but those lips were definitely made for kissing. Nice full lips that could have been on a commercial for lipstick.

   Daisy felt his stare. A sideways glance told her that he liked what he saw. The set of his jaw said he wouldn't act on it. Tending bar didn't make her an immoral person and it was her own damn business. Not his. Now she wouldn't let him buy her a dime paper cup of lemonade from a school kid's stand if he asked. Not after that condescending sidling look he'd shot her way.

At two a.m. Daisy shoved the Walker triplets and Chigger out the front door. The Honky Tonk was their home away from home on the weekends. They were good natured fellows for the most part except when Billy Bob started that nonsense about marrying her. She picked up a long neck Coors from the ice chest, wiped it off, and pulled out a chair at the nearest table like she did every night at closing. She propped her long legs up on the table and crossed them at the ankles. After a lengthy draw on the beer she looked around at the damages. Not bad for a Friday night. Few beer bottles left on the tables but Tinker had racked the pool balls and left them ready for the next night. There was one cue stick still on the nearest pool table he'd forgotten to put back in the cabinet. Floor needed sweeping and she noticed a circle on the wood where she and Jarod collided.

   She'd clean it all up the next day. That was one thing Ruby taught her from the beginning. Shut the doors and go to bed. Clean up the next morning when she wasn't dead tired from running up and down the bar refilling Mason jars or mixing drinks.

   Daisy finished off her beer and put some coins into the juke box. She pushed the right buttons and Toby's voice filled the room as he sang, "I Love This Bar." To sing that song with conviction like he did, he had to have spent some time in a bar in his lifetime, just like Daisy had.

   "Some time, hell," she muttered.

   She set the beer on the table and danced alone in the middle of the floor as Toby sang. Daisy pretended she was dancing with Jarod McElroy on the banks of a river after a steak dinner at a fancy restaurant and giggled at her own silliness.

   How had he gotten into the bar without her seeing him in the first place?

   She made her way around the pool tables and the bar to the door leading back into her living quarters in the dark.

   Ruby had built the Honky Tonk back in the early 60s and it looked like an old time saloon with weathered wood on the outside. It had a wide wraparound porch around three sides. Rocking chairs for those who'd gotten too hot dancing or needed a breath of fresh air were scattered on the porch. Big neon sign on the roof flashed HONKY TONK.

   Double doors led from the porch into a large room with a bar across the backside, pool tables to the right and half a dozen wooden tables with chairs on the left. Two antique juke boxes provided music.

   Through the locked door at the back lay a modern one bedroom apartment that had been Daisy's home for more than seven years. She headed across the living room floor to the galley kitchen and made a ham and cheese sandwich. She carried it to the table in the corner of the tiny living room and pulled out a chair.

   Was Jarod McElroy married? How long did he intend to stay with Emmett? Why in the hell had he come to Texas anyway?

   "Damn," she swore. "This is ridiculous."

   She showered, dried off and headed for her bedroom where she crawled naked between the sheets. Her cell phone rang just as she shut her eyes. She checked the caller ID before she answered it.

   "Hello, Merle," she said.

   "It's Rack. He's got a terrible cough and he's hacking like he's about to die. Can I bring him over?"

   "Sure you can. I'll get the hair ball medicine out and be ready for you," Daisy said.

   In ten minutes Merle carried her enormous orange and white cat through the doors of the Honky Tonk. She had him wrapped in a blanket and he had another hacking attack when she laid him on the bar.

"It's not his heart, is it?" Merle asked nervously.

   Daisy pulled a stethoscope from her black bag and listened to the cat's heart. "No, his heart sounds pretty good for a cat that's three times the size he ought to be. You really should stop giving him scraps."

   "But I can't stand it when he looks at me if I'm eating steak or cheese. He loves his food. So it's just a hair ball?"

   "That'd be my guess," Daisy said as she squeezed toothpaste-looking substance from a tube onto a tongue depressor.

   "He'd scratch my eyeballs out if I put that in his mouth," Merle said.

   "Rack has got your number. He knows I've got the stuff in that bag to fix it so he'd never have another chunk of your ribeye steak, don't you boy? Open your fat little jaws and there we go." Daisy rubbed his neck and the medicine went down in a couple of swallows.

   "Now it's back home so he can puke it up on my carpet," Merle said.

   "Or your bed," Daisy laughed.

   "You are a doll to get out of bed and help me at this hour," Merle laid a bill on the bar. "The day Ruby found you was the best day this county ever saw."

   "Merle, I'm not a real vet."

   "Shhhh, don't tell Rack. He thinks you are a high dollar specialist. Vet. Vet tech. Ain't no difference in my books. See you tonight." Merle picked up her cat and carried him out the doors into the hot night.

   Daisy turned out the lights for the second time and went back to bed.