A Late Thaw (2 page)

COLE WASN’T REALLY SURPRISED
to see Kiley; seeing her was the only reason he’d brought his date to the cheesiest bar in the tri-county area. Still, it shook him more than he’d ever admit. She looked great, prettier even than she’d been the last time he’d seen her. She looked good enough to make him reconsider his thoughts on the ridiculous, shiny German maid costumes the waitresses wore. A glance around the large, heavily drinking, and mostly male clientele gave him second thoughts about his second thoughts.

She
ought to be wearing a sweater, he decided, an ugly, baggy one that covered her from her little pointed chin all the way down past her knees.

Even seeing it with his own eyes, Cole
had a hard time believing Kiley was the newest waitress at Buddy’s Bierhaus. She undoubtedly considered it tacky, demeaning, and beneath her considerable talents. He agreed.

He ought to feel bad that he’d taken Andi out with such duplicitous motives
. But she seemed unconcerned as she chattered away about people he didn’t know and, frankly, didn’t care to if her repeated use of the word parole officer was any indication. He forced himself to look especially interested in the story she was telling when Kiley returned with two large frosty mugs of beer and a chipped bowl filled with stale pretzels. Locals knew better than to eat anything served at Buddy’s.

Andi turned and thanked her
. “You know, you’re prettier than I remember.”

He bit back a chuckle at Kiley’s pained expression.

“Umm…thanks?” Kiley tapped her pencil against her order pad.

“I mean it. Your skin is real nice. A little makeup and some highlights and you could look good.” Andi grinned. “You should come by the shop.”

“The shop?”

“The beauty shop. I got my license a few months back, so I’m a professional now.”

Kiley nodded. Her mouth opened and shut soundlessly like a fish. Cole was starting to imagine little bubbles popping out when she finally responded. “That’s nice.”

“So you’ll come by?”

“Maybe. I’m going to be working a lot, so…busy.”

“That’s exactly why you should do it,” Andi insisted. “Everyone knows blondes get better tips.”

Cole didn’t know if that was true, and he didn’t really care. He liked Kiley’s hair the way it was, dark and straight. He’d been imagining getting his hands in her silky, smooth hair for the better part of a decade. The thought of Andi screwing it up before he ever got a chance made him wince.

“I don’t know.
” Cole shrugged. “It seems like there are plenty of blonde waitresses here. When the waitresses have different colored hair it makes it easier to remember which one is yours.” And now he sounded like a douche-bag who only recognized women by their hair color. It was official: he actually lost IQ points when Kiley was around. Her scientist side would probably find that interesting. The rest of Kiley was less likely to be impressed.

Kiley
looked across the room. He followed her gaze. A table of rowdy tourists signaled her on the other side of the bar. Her lips curved up, but the smile didn’t quite reach her eyes.

“I’ll certainly keep that in mind. Enjoy your drinks and let me know if you need anything else.” She was off in an instant, leaving him to fake interest in Andi’s gossip and pretend he wasn’t following Kiley’s move
ments as she walked from table to table.

H
e’d lost track of the number of customers who’d had to switch their drinks around after Kiley served them while he was still nursing his first beer. Kiley was not a very good waitress. He grinned.

Andi sighed
and leaned across the table. “You could have told me this wasn’t a real date.”

Cole frowned. “What?”

“It’s pretty obvious we’re here so you can spy on your ex.”

“Who? Kiley? No! We’re…
She’s just an old friend.” It wasn’t exactly a lie; they’d never dated. But saying Kiley was just anything was not entirely sincere.

Andi laughed. “But she is the reason we’re here.”

“That’s not… I’m sorry if I’ve been distracted, I’ll—”

“I’m not mad, Cole. I didn’t think you were going to propose or anything.” She shrugged,
and her thin shoulder snuck up through the loose neckline of her blouse. “But if you’d told me all you needed was a cover I could have saved myself the trip home to shave my legs before we met up.”

Cole chuckled and nodded. He’d not given Andi enough credit. It took a cool woman to slam a man with the sex he’d no longer be welcome to.

“You do look great,” he offered genuinely.

“But not your type. Story of my life.”
She twisted a lock of hair around her finger and winked.

He doubted that. Andi was friendly and quite attractive in a bold in-your-face fashion. He was a man on a mission to figure out why the girl who’d run away was back in town, but he’d still
noticed that Andi’s high-heeled sandals and extremely short skirt showed off a nice pair of legs. He should have at least told her that, but she was right; his mind was somewhere else.

“You want me to take you home now.”

She laughed. It was a nice laugh, sort of throaty and sexy, but it wasn’t Kiley’s laugh. “Nope. You owe me at least another drink. Besides, this got me out of babysitting for my sister’s demon spawn, so I can’t get too mad.”

“Another beer it is then.”

“Make it a Long Island Iced Tea, Romeo.”

Cole grimaced and lifted his hand to wave at Kiley.

HE’D LEFT WITHOUT SAYING
goodbye. Cole and his entrepreneurial date had been leaning toward each other laughing when she’d walked by with table seventeen’s order and were simply gone when she’d headed back toward the kitchen.

Kiley ducked into the hall
leading to the restrooms to pull herself together. Knowing, intellectually, that Cole was probably sleeping with a pretty girl and actually seeing him leave with one were very different things. Her stomach knotted. At this rate, she’d have an ulcer before the summer solstice.

“Not paying you to hold up t
he wall, Missy.” Buddy frowned as he walked by.

Buddy
was more generous with his definition of pay than with the actual sum. After fighting hard for the position, Kiley’d been stunned to discover that unless patrons tipped generously she’d regularly fall short of making even minimum wage. The prospect of several months of abject poverty sent her back to her rounds.

The waitresses at Buddy’s fell into two categories. The first
half liked working there; they wore push-up bras and flirted with purpose as they delivered beers and shots of Jägermeister. The other half didn’t like anything. They were the lifers, recognizable by their perma-scowls and the cigarette smoke that clung dedicatedly to their uniforms.

Kiley didn’t fit in on either side. She was young enough that a couple of the flirts
had tried to welcome her to their circle. They’d shared a few tricks, like how to pin up the uniform skirt to make it shorter and how to increase tips by resting a hand on a guy’s shoulder when taking their order. Kiley had burned that bridge by wrinkling her nose and saying that touching seemed a little too “hookery” for her.

Now,
while trying to figure out how to deliver food to two tables at once, she realized making a friend would’ve been a good idea. Kiley tried smiling at one of the lifers. She may as well have been invisible. There was no other option; she simply had to be fast enough at the first table to get the second table’s food out before the cook yelled about it getting cold. Except she already had a tray full of drinks.
Shit.
So she had to deliver the round of beers first. Then she could get the food for the first table.
Yeah. Screwed.

Kiley
hurried across the room and instantly felt a hand on her ass. Squeaking in surprise, she jumped and lost her precarious hold on the tray. All five beers toppled, showering the family at the nearest booth in cheap pale ale. The mother shrieked and clutched at her smallest child as though he’d been covered in acid.

“
Oh my God! I’m so sorry. There was a hand…” Kiley grabbed a clump of paper napkins off a nearby table and started sopping up the mess. She could barely hear the cook yelling at her from the kitchen over the mother’s ranting. What were her kids doing in a tacky bar in the first place? There was nothing on the menu worth eating.

Buddy sent a dishwasher out to help clean up the mess and graciously explained to the family that payment for their dinner would come out of Kiley’s paycheck. She was officially in the red for the evening.

COLE DROPPED ANDI OFF
at her place shortly after ten. Watching Kiley smile and lug around drinks for two hours had answered none of his questions. All it had done was make him angry. Why was she back now? He’d almost stopped thinking about her, almost stopped picturing her when he made plans for his future.

They weren’t even friends anymore. Realizing
he had nothing left to lose led him right back to the bar.

He assumed she wouldn’t be off for another couple of hours
, since the bar served until midnight, and parked while he worked on a good excuse to go back inside. He could claim he lost something if he wanted to stoop to pathetically lame and obvious. Cole sighed and twisted the leather covering his steering wheel. He had nothing. No reason to be there.

Kiley
burst out the back door. Angrily, she brushed the back of her arm over her face. She was crying, but trying desperately to hide it. Cole frowned and climbed out of his truck.

“Hey.” The crunching of the gravel beneath his boots seemed especially loud amidst the thick quiet of the night.

She jerked as she looked up. Her pale blue eyes widened with surprise before she glared at him. “What are you doing here?”

He nearly sighed. It just didn’t feel like all that long ago that he and Kil
ey had been inseparable.

“What happened?”

“Nothing.” She turned and started stalking away.

He took two large steps toward her and grasped her shoulder. “You shouldn’t be walking home alone this late. It’s not safe.”

She snorted. “Not a problem I’ll have again since I was just fired.”

“What? How did you get fired?”

Kiley pulled her shoulder away. The humor in her eyes faded. He should have phrased the question differently. She was deploying her defenses.

“Don’t worry about it.” She stopped for a second and frowned. “Don’t you have a date tonight?”

“Not really. What happened, Ki?” he asked as gently as he could.

She looked down at her feet. “I just lost my temper. It’s fine. Buddy’s right. I wasn’t any good at
waitressing anyway.” Her sniffle belied her words, but when she looked back up at him, she was smiling just a little. “I dumped a mug of beer over this one jerkwad’s head.”

The icy tentacles of rage slithered up Cole’s spine. “He touch you?”

“Smacked my ass as I walked by and called me Sweet Cheeks. Not even the first guy to get grabsy tonight. Or even the first person I left wearing a beer. It’s a real classy place, huh?”

The world blurred at the edges of Cole’s line of sight. He grabbed her hand. “We’re gonna go have a little talk with Buddy.” He barely grated the words out from behind his clenched jaw.

She pulled back. “Stop. I mean it, Cole.”

He glared back at her, bewildered.
Why couldn’t she just let him help? When did she decide that caring about her made him the bad guy? “He can’t expect you to put up with that shit. I’d have given the bastard a broken nose.”

“Which also would have been an unprofessional way of handling it. I should have told Buddy and gotten the asshole sent home.”

“He can’t fire you for that.”

She sighed. “I really don’t want to talk about it. This was
a sucky night even before I got fired. All I want is to go home and shower for an eternity or two.”

“You said you needed this job.”

Her eyes filled with tears again. He wished he hadn’t pushed.

“I do,” she said. “I’m not really sure what I’ll
… There has to be something else. I’ll find something else.” She sniffled again but squared her shoulders. “I’ll find something else,” she repeated with renewed determination.

Kiley was
stronger than she looked. It was a trait he admired, even if it drove him crazy. “You could work for me. I could use a housekeeper, a little help in the vegetable garden.” The words were out before he’d given them much thought.

She shook her head. “I’m not going to be your housekeeper, Cole.”

“Of course not. Too good for that, right?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No. I just
…it would be too weird.”

Her eyes were still glossy with tears. He’d come back to yell at her, to get off his chest a few of the perfect insults he’d come up with over the past few years, but he couldn’t do it with her crying. “Go get in the truck. I’ll bring you home.”

“I can walk. It’s not far.”

Cole
closed his eyes and exhaled slowly through his nose. “I’m not letting you walk home alone after you’ve been parading around in front of a bunch of drunk asses wearing that.” He pointed to the low cut front of her dress. Some jerk had put his hands on her. He could barely think through the red haze of his anger.

Kiley’s
eyes flashed. “It’s not your place to let me do anything. I make my own choices. I don’t need—”

“Yeah, yeah. I get it. You’re a superhero
, and I’m a Neanderthal for wanting to see you home safe.”

“
Arrghh! I didn’t say that!”

“Then will you please get in the truck?” He was almost begging.

Kiley always reduced him to a bizarre mix of desperation, adoration, and annoyance. He barely remembered a time he wasn’t trying to impress her. It had taken a long time for him to understand what that need meant about the true nature of his feelings for her. But the day he’d figured it out, he acted on it. Cole had bought a bunch of bright red roses from the pharmacy. Holding them out like the proverbial heart on his sleeve, he’d asked his best friend to the prom. She’d turned him down flat.

“Please,” he repeated quietly.

She looked away, her back straight, jaw lifted. She was going to argue again. Instead, Kiley walked over, opened the passenger-side door, and stepped up into his truck without another word.

Cole exhale
d for the first time all night.