Playing with Fire (2 page)

He checked out the door and spotted her light brown hair and short frame halfway between the patio and the waves. Last night at the bar, there’d been a moment when he’d been glad to see her. Had perked up when she’d appeared. He’d tamped that down right away, though. He didn’t want to hurt Macey, but dammit, he’d come as far south as he could—while still being in Texas—to be by himself.

After throwing on clothes, he strode to the kitchen and turned on his cell phone. Ignoring the display that told him he had twelve messages, he punched in his mother’s number.

“Hello?”

“I don’t need a babysitter, Mom. I’m twenty-eight years old.”

“Derek, it’s good to hear your voice. You’ve been ignoring my calls.”

“Running a bar here. Tell Macey she can go back home. I don’t want her around.”

“I’m not going to tell Macey anything. I’m not—”

“Cut the crap, Mom. I know you put her up to it.” He paced through the condo blindly. “Look, I know you’re trying to help. What I need right now is to be alone.”

“You can’t mean that. Maybe Macey’s exactly what you need. She won’t push you—”

“Damn right, she won’t, because she can’t stay here.”

“You’ll have to take that up with her. She’s planned a six-week vacation for herself down there. Well-deserved after spending two years in Thailand, wouldn’t you say?”

Derek ground his teeth together. He loved his mom—he really did. But there was a reason he hadn’t returned her calls. Hell, there was a reason he’d jumped at the chance to move away and run Gus’s bar for him. This kind of call was that reason, clearly and emphatically.

“Gotta go, Mom. Goodbye.” He ended the call and set the phone down hard on the counter.

At an unobtrusive knock on the glass door, he whipped around, ready to blow. Of course, it was Macey. He couldn’t ignore her, as he would a stranger, and that just pissed him off more. He went to the door and slid it open, his frustration thinly veiled.

“I hope I didn’t wake you,” she said, eyeing him carefully.

“No. Look, Mace—”

“I just need to borrow your sink. Maybe a bandage if you have one.”

He followed her gaze downward and noticed she wasn’t putting any weight on her left foot. She lifted it to the side to reveal blood on the sand.

“What happened?” Grudgingly, he let her inside.

“Sliced it on a rock. I’m fine.” She hopped to the kitchen and looked around. “Paper towels?”

“Don’t have any. Here.” He picked her up—she weighed next to nothing—and put her on the counter next to the sink.

“Derek!”

“Let me look.” He grasped her slender calf and she stiffened.

“I can take care of it,” she said quietly but firmly. “All I need is some kind of…rag.”

“I’ll get you some toilet paper and a bandage if you sit still.”

Their eyes met in a standoff. After several seconds, she nodded in acquiescence and he went to the hall bath.

“Let me make sure there’s no sand rubbed into the cut.” He didn’t ask and he didn’t make eye contact; he just went for her leg again, and this time she let him.

“Well?” she asked.

“There’s sand. We’ll run water over it to clean it.”

The truth was she’d do just about anything to help him stop hurting so much.

She studied the angry set of his jaw as he carefully, tenderly rinsed her foot in the sink. His mom had cautioned her he would be difficult. Macey had tried to prepare herself for it, had come down here of her own accord in spite of Mrs. Severson’s warnings. She was beginning to understand now.

The man he’d been was still in there somewhere, though, buried deep. His insistence on seeing to her injury was all the proof she needed. Derek had always been one to watch out for her, to help anyone in need. Helping was his nature as much as hers was to bring order to things. The trick would be to get to that inner Derek, the one she’d known and loved for so many years. To pull him out.

“I’m sorry I stole your bed last night,” she said.

“No big deal.” He continued to scowl as he worked on her foot.

“I must have been exhausted to fall asleep like that.”

“Long drive,” he said shortly.

“Anyway, thanks for letting me stay there. I slept like the…like a baby.”

“You can say ‘dead.’ Avoiding the word doesn’t change that she is.”

“I’m…sorry, Dare,” Macey said quietly. “That she died. I never got to say that.”

He met her gaze finally, just for an instant, and in that moment she saw so much pain she reached out to him. Touched his shoulder.

He stood abruptly. “Wound is cleaned and bandaged. I’m going on a run before work.”

Before she could slide off the counter, he was gone.

After fifteen minutes Macey had hardly advanced, and wasn’t any closer to ordering. Derek still appeared to be calm, but he was starting to get impatient comments from people in line. The day was hot and humid already, and she could see sweat forming along his hairline.

He was never going to wait on everyone by him self.

Macey watched him for several more minutes before jumping into action. She slipped around the end of the counter and fumbled around until she found a pad of paper. She spotted a pen by the cash register, then went to the side opposite Derek and took an order.

As she reached into the beer cooler, Derek came up behind her.

“What are you doing?”

He sounded pissed off instead of grateful for her help.

“Saving your butt.” Sweet butt that it was.

She took out three bottles and walked away, not looking back to gauge his reaction. She snatched one of the flimsy paper menus as a price guide and went to the cash register to ring up the order. Thankfully, the machine was old and straightforward.

The second group ordered Bloody Marys and shrimp, which presented a double problem. Macey went to the back room and quickly took in the sight of the slender girl in her mid-twenties pressing burgers on the grill.

“Who’re you?” the leggy brunette asked.

“A friend of Derek’s. He’s getting slammed out there. Do I give you food orders?”

The girl took the piece of paper from Macey and set it on the counter in answer.
Ooo-kay.
She’d take that as a yes. Now she just needed to figure out how to make a Bloody Mary. She returned to the front.

She knew there was tomato juice in them, so she searched for a can of it. The place was a disaster area, as Derek flew around mixing, stirring, adding this and that. Macey stepped next to him.

“Bloody Marys,” she said, speaking loudly to be heard over the chatter.

Derek looked at her for several seconds, never pausing in what he was doing. She thought for sure he was going to send her away, which would be stupid. Finally she saw acquiescence in his eyes.

“Plastic cup,” he said, pointing to a stack. “Just about everything goes in a plastic cup here.” She grabbed three plastic cups. “Start with vodka.” He set a shot glass in front of her. “Fill that for each drink.”

She did as he said and noticed he was still working on his own cocktails.

“Add tomato juice.” He pointed at the recessed cooler.

She was clumsy and afraid of making a bigger mess than they already had. Carefully, she poured in the juice. Derek finished what he was doing and watched her slow progress for a few excruciating seconds. He handed his drinks to her.

“Guy in the bright blue shirt by the register. Already paid.”

She delivered them, and when she returned to Derek, he was adding a shrimp garnish on her Bloody Marys. She took them without a word and placed them in front of the customer, then went to the kitchen, hoping Miss Friendly had some shrimp for her. There were two cardboard containers of shrimp and cocktail sauce on the counter next to the doorway. Macey hesitated half a second, then grabbed them.

The next hour and a half flew by, the only conversation between her and Derek being directions for mixing drinks. How did these people imbibe this early in the day, anyway? It wasn’t even one o’clock yet.

The crowd finally thinned, everyone served for the moment, and Macey took a deep breath. Sweat curled the hair at her temples and ran between her breasts. She copied Derek and picked up a towel to start scrubbing all the surfaces.

“Place looks like a bomb went off,” said a gravelly voiced old man who had just taken the third stool over. He wore a light blue bucket hat over his wispy white hair, and a wild floral button-down shirt.

“You’re late,” Derek said to the guy.

“I’m not on the clock anymore, so I guess that doesn’t matter much.”

Macey’s confusion must’ve shown on her face because when Derek glanced at her, he explained. “My uncle. Gus. Former owner.”

Apparently the introduction ended there. Macey held out her hand. “Nice to meet you, Derek’s uncle Gus. I’m Derek’s friend Macey.”

Gus took her hand and held it longer than necessary, but not in a dirty-old-man way. He smiled and his eyes crinkled at the corners, as if he’d laughed a lot in his lifetime. “Pleased to meet you, Macey. Didn’t realize he had any friends.”

“Met him when I was five and didn’t know any better.”

Gus howled and nodded in appreciation as Derek set a drink in front of him.

“This straight?” Gus asked Derek.

“Pure whiskey.”

“I can taste if you watered it down.”

“That’s why I don’t. But you only get one.”

“We’ll see,” Gus said, and took a swallow. He grunted in self-righteous approval.

“We have this argument every single day,” Derek said to Macey as he went back to cleaning the counter.

“Boy tries to mother me,” Gus said. “It’s okay for a pretty lady to mother me but he’s not so pretty.” No,
pretty
wasn’t a word she’d use to describe Derek. Sexy as all get-out, maybe. And the fact that he tried to keep this gruff old man in line was endearing, especially as grumpy as Derek had been to her.

“That’s why you like it at the old folks’ home,” Derek said. “All those nurses waiting on you hand and foot. They’d have my hide if I put you on the bus tanked.”

Macey turned to the work area along the back wall and started putting lids on the containers of fruit slices in the cooler. The limes were gone and the lemons were low. “Do you have more fruit?”

“You don’t have to help,” Derek said as he organized the liquor bottles on the shelves above.

“You need help.” In more ways than one, but she wasn’t foolish enough to mention it. “Are you planning to hire someone?”

“I’m working on it.”

“Do you have any applicants?”

“I said I’m working on it.”

“I told him a month ago he needed to hire people,” Gus said.

The unsmiling girl from the back room appeared and filled her glass with ice and lemonade, watching Macey. “He doesn’t take suggestions well.”

“He never has,” Macey said, sensing that this other female might be an ally in spite of her chilly demeanor.

The girl had a rough edge to her. She wore a black, body-hugging tee, old, torn jeans and heavy combat boots. Her shiny dark hair looked baby soft, an interesting contrast to her otherwise hard facade. “He works open to close, seven days a week. Tell me that’s not insane.”

“I’m right here,” Derek snarled. “I can hear every word you say.”

“But you don’t
listen,
” the girl said.

“I’ll second that,” Gus muttered from the counter.

“I’m Macey. I grew up with the stubborn one.”

“Andie. You’re familiar with his hardheadedness then.”

“Very. Open to close…how many hours is that?” Macey asked.

“From 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m. You do the math.”

The math said he was about two steps away from exhaustion.

“No wonder you look so tired,” Macey said to Derek. “You can’t do that.”

“I’m used to twenty-four-hour shifts.”

“But at the fire department, you got several days off in a row.”

“Andie, could you show her where the limes are in back?”

Andie stared at him as she sipped her drink. “Firefighter? I’ve worked with you for four weeks and you’ve never said a word.”

“I’ve said as much about my past as you’ve said about yours,” Derek pointed out.

“Mine isn’t interesting. What’s a firefighter doing in a place like this?”

“Tending bar.”

“You must be hiding from someone,” Andie speculated, her head tilting as she sized him up. Or some
thing
, Macey thought to herself. That Derek hadn’t told Andie about what was such a basic part of him concerned her more than anything else. Firefighting had been more than just his job, it’d been his life. And it appeared he’d given it up completely.