Whiskey Kisses (2 page)

He walks down to the far end of the bar, and I take the opportunity to further investigate Jemma’s skintight theory.

“They’re not bun-hugging.” I tilt my head to better inspect our friendly bartender’s rear assets. “They’re loose and sort of low hanging. And, by the way, I’m pretty sure Ron wouldn’t appreciate that.” Ron is Jemma’s latest spousal acquirement. At the ripe old age of twenty-seven, she’s managed to amass three of them in rapid gunfire succession. She’s two divorces up on me, and here I’ve yet to get out of the conjugal starting gate. Not that I’m looking to venture into that lawyer-laden not-so-great beyond. In fact, I’m pretty content right here in the singles stall with no desire to jump into the matrimonial spiral that seems to have swallowed up so many of my girlfriends. Jemma and I stopped juxtaposing our lives around the time she had baby number four with daddy number three.

Holt catches my eye again. He’s lean and mean and full of enough testosterone to let everyone in a ten-mile radius know he’s ready and willing to light any ripe coeds fire. But it’s me he keeps stealing glances at—lingering those silver eyes over mine like a skin graft.

He heads in this direction, and I straighten.

Jemma’s mouth opens to say something, and I covertly shake my head at her. Shit. Jemma is known to espouse all sorts of wild crap at the least opportune moments. Please God, let her pick another time to balance out the scales of tight-ass injustice.

“Hey, ladies.” Holt leans over my shoulder and the entire left side of my body erupts into flames like dry brush in August. “Can I get you something? We’ve just put in a full lunch menu.” He points to the laminated sheets that Jemma and I are currently resting our elbows on.

“Burger and fries. Throw on one of those fancy cocktails, too.” Jemma wets her lips as her gaze drops to his crotch. “How about a Scantily Clad Cabana Boy for starters?”

“Never heard of it, but I can look it up.”

“Oh, hon, you can make it any way you like.” Jemma shakes the girls when she says it, and I avert my eyes for fear of having one of them poked out by an errant nipple.

“How about you?” Holt kneels beside me with his silver eyes harnessing the light and mastering its wayward beams. “How’ve you been, Izzy?” He breaks out a warm grin all for me, and my body melts right into the seat.

“I’ve been good. And you?”

“Same story, different day.” He tweaks his brows, and my insides jump right along with them. “How about it? You up for inventing a new cocktail this afternoon?” He gives Jemma a quick wink at the dig.

“How about we keep it simple. Just a strawberry daiquiri for me. Make it a virgin.” Much like myself. Virgin—Izzy Sawyer, they’re interchangeable at this point. But just the reaction my body is having to Holt lets me know it might be time to rectify that. Maybe it is time to switch things up in my life.

That amber bottle my mother keeps in the kitchen flashes through my mind.

“You know—make it whiskey,” I say. It was my father’s favorite drink. My mother has kept his unfinished bottle of Jack Daniel’s just above the stove for the last twenty years, and I’ve hailed it as a shrine ever since.

“From virgin to whiskey in a single bound. Whiskey it is. How do you want that?” Holt growls it out like a sexual command, and my entire body responds.

“Make it any way you like,” I purr right back. I can’t help flirting a little with him. His brand of perfection demands it.

“That’s always a brave answer, sweetie.” He gazes at me a moment too long, and I drink him in with his dark stubble peppering his cheeks, his intense glowing eyes—lips of crimson—and my stomach squeezes tight.

He takes off, and Jemma starts in on a series of spastic kicks under the table.

“Would you stop?” I retract my feet and scoot back an inch. “I’m going to bruise. And I have a class to teach in a few hours.”

“He called you,
sweetie
.” She presses her lips together, but a laugh bubbles through anyway. “Oh, hon, he just tapped you on the shoulder and told you to get in his bed.” She shakes her head, pleased with her ability to connect the sexual dots—albeit incorrectly. “Ten bucks says you can have that shiny tight ass on a platter by midnight if you play your whiskey right.”

“Please. I’m not plating him or anybody else up by midnight, and I don’t plan on touching the whiskey.” Maybe just enough to wet my lips.

“Knew it.” Her eyes pull with sadness, an almost foreign emotion for Jem. “Does your daddy ever leave your mind?”

I slide down in my seat a few inches. Jemma Jackson has always had the uncanny ability to read me like a book—more like a picture book that shows the same heartbreaking scene on every single page.

“He does,” I whisper. “But lately he’s really been on my mind, and it makes me wonder what it means.”

“I know exactly what it means.” She touches her hand to mine. “It’s time to get you to a good therapist. Trust me, hon, this is long overdue.” She rakes her teeth over her bottom lip. “Make sure you get one of those touchy feely ones that know how to make you feel extra good when the session is through. We’ll find you someone who’s ready and willing to straighten you out a little.”

“I know where this is going, and I don’t need a sex therapist, Jem.”

Holt pops up like an apparition. “I should hope not.” His dimples dig in and—oh crap.

Turns out I don’t need to worry about Jemma’s wayward mouth. My own is quite capable of landing me in a steaming pile of humiliation.

He leans in, and his cologne washes over me like a heat wave at midnight. His cheek glides up one side as if all hell were about to break loose. And, judging by the way my thighs are quivering, it so is.

“Here you go.” Holt sets a pair of matching amber drinks in front of us and the vanilla rich scent permeates my senses. It’s a far cry from my usual catalog of virgin cocktails, and I’m pretty sure the only virgin in this scenario is me. It’s nothing I’m shouting out over the rooftops, but it’s something that’s been swirling around my mind now that Jemma so subtly suggested I see a therapist who might be bribed into a one-night stand with the hope he’ll
straighten me out a little.

Holt lands a plate of burger and fries in front of Jem before directing his attention to me.

“Thank you.” I give a weak smile. I’ve known Holt forever. His little sister, Annie, took private lessons at my mother’s dance studio for years. Annie is one of the sweetest kids I’ve ever had the pleasure to teach. She was born completely deaf, but her determination to live a full life has put it in her heart that she can do anything she sets her mind to, and, for a while, that happened to be dance.

“How’s Annie?” I drink him in. Holt is the all-American real deal—the perfect package for any princess in the market for a genuine prince charming. Six foot two, dirty blond hair, muscles for miles and, judging by that semi-lewd grin that knocks the girls off their feet, I’m guessing a quasi-dirty mind to boot.

“Annie is doing great. She’s headed to Whitney Briggs in the fall. Her dorm is all set to go, so it’s a done deal.”

“Really?” I clutch my chest without meaning to. In my mind, Annie is still that lanky thirteen-year-old who wears coke-bottle glasses with a mouth full of braces. “College?” I swear I’ve inadvertently discovered how to fast forward time without meaning to. Sometimes it feels as though my whole life is riding on the tail of a shooting star—evaporating to nothing right before my eyes.

“Yup. Her move-in date is mid August. Bryson is still hanging around campus, so he can keep an extra eye on her.” Bryson is Holt’s fraternal twin. Their parents own a string of bars, and the Black Bear happens to be one of them.

“Hard to believe. Please tell her I said hi.”

He glances toward the door and breaks out into his million-dollar smile. Aside from his eyes, and that decidedly perfect body, his big toothy grin is almost always guaranteed to melt a girl’s panties. I should know. I speak from experience.

“Looks like you’ll get to tell her yourself. She just walked in.” He gives my shoulder a playful tweak and heads over to his sister who’s currently being accosted by Bryson’s other half, Baya.

“He touched you.” Jemma gives that knowing look which is alarmingly always wrong.

“That’s because he’s comfortable with me.”

“Oh, trust me, that boy is interested in making you
real
comfortable. Did you see the way he looked at you?” Her pale eyes pierce into mine with all kinds of inappropriate thoughts flickering through them. “He’s interested in touching all of your comfort zones.”

“Trust
me
, he’s not interested. And would you leave my comfort zones out of this? See all those girls drooling over the bar?” I nod at a gaggle of coeds transfixed by Holt and his mixer-inspired magic tricks. “He can have any one of them—and, newsflash, he probably has.”

“And what exactly is wrong with
you
?” Jemma kicks me under the table once again. “You’ve got ten times what those girls have.”

“Would you stop using your stilettos as a gavel to prove your point? And for your information”—I glance back at Holt manning the bar while whipping the girls into an ethanol frenzy—“I’m no coed.” I twist back and inspect Jemma for the first signs of crow’s feet. Jemma’s heavily drawn in eyes and disparaging choice of blue-red lip color really prove my point. “We’re not on the same playing field as those girls. My mom always says—”

She holds up a hand quick to stop me. “No offense but your momma should be taken out back and shot on site for the welfare and safety of others. And then I should probably come back in and pistol whip you for believing a thing that woman has ever said.”

Jemma isn’t my mother’s biggest fan. Although I doubt the working end of a rifle is in my mother’s future either. They have a hostile relationship and still seem to get along better then she and I ever could.

“How is it that you call my mother ‘momma’ and yet want to hogtie her and riddle her body with bullets?”

“That’s the beauty of who we are. Good old Bobbie and I understand each other because, deep down, inside we’re the exact same person. We refuse to tell anything but the truth.” My mother legally changed her name from Roberta to Bobbie when she was eighteen. Her father used to call her Bobbie, and she refused to answer to anything but. I guess we have that in common—our father’s giving us pet names we prefer over the ones they originally gifted us with. Although if I called myself Little Bit, I wouldn’t run the risk of being mistaken as a man like my mother so often is, I’d be mistaken for a less-than-amply-endowed pole dancer.

“The truth, huh?” I’m blinded momentarily by my mother and her stab-you-in-the-heart brand of candor. I love her to death, but she’s honest as an assault rifle all day long. “Yeah, well, sometimes the truth feels a lot like a two-by-four.”

Jemma slinks down in her seat, examining me with a slight look of pity. I know what she’s thinking. About a decade ago I made the mistake of letting her in on my darkest hour. Sometimes I think the memory of it eats at her as much as it does me. But that’s one truth Jemma will never espouse because I made it clear as the crystal meth her husband smokes that it’s not her place to do so—it’s mine. And I never will. Some things are best forgotten. And as soon as I can figure out how to forget it I’ll be golden.

Jem picks at her food. “Rumor has it Greasy D is back in town—sniffing around old stomping grounds.”

Greasy D—Don, is my mother’s ex-fiancé who just so happened to remember our address last week and planted his drunk self on our couch.

“That he is.” I blow out an exasperated breath because I’m not ready to go there. My mother has had a string of ex-boyfriends, husbands, significant other pretenders. You name the scoundrel, my mother has already teased him out from under a rock and brought him home. Most of my mother’s suitors think they can make their way into my pants when she’s not looking—one of them did. I shake the past out of my head easy as clearing an Etch A Sketch.

Jemma raps her knuckles over the table pulling me from my momentary trance. “Never mind all this bullshit. We need to get back to the topic at hand—you and Mr. Comfortable.” She snatches the pickle from her plate and holds its long, bulbous body up for display. “Now—I know his type—things are going to move quickly. He’s going to flick his zipper and expect you to know what comes next. You’re gonna want to pay careful attention, sweetie, because this is one pop quiz you’re not going to want to fail.” She plunges the poor defenseless pickled veggie into her mouth and proceeds to pull it in and out.

“Would you stop?” I do a quick sweep of the facility to see exactly how mortified I should be.

“No teeth,” she barks over at me as if I were getting intimate with a cucumber myself.

“You can quit the tutorial. I won’t be pleasuring vegetables anytime soon.”

“You’re not pleasuring anyone.” She takes a hard bite. “Tell me this—you pleasing yourself?”

“I’m not doing this with you.” I sink lower in my seat and clamp my hands over my ears.

“Come over some time. I’ve got a closet full of peckers that are guaranteed to make you blush for weeks. Of course, you’ll have to get your own batteries. I wouldn’t trust—”

“Jemma, I’m blushing
now
. Can we end this? I’m no more in the market for one of your closet peckers than I am for pickle tutorial. But, trust me, the next time I’m in a relationship with mildly-processed produce you’ll be the first to know.”

“No teeth.” She bites the air. “One day you’ll find yourself playing with Holt Edwards’ pickle, and you’ll remember this very conversation.”

“God.” I lean in hard. “You just said his name and the word pickle in the same sentence.” I glance over at him still ten skanks deep as he shakes a martini mixer over his head. “Do you know people are able to hear their names at freakishly low decibels? He’s going to think we’re perverts, when we both know the only pervert around here is you.”

“Guess I’ll be his favorite.” She smashes the butt of her cigarette into the table as if she were putting it out. “The things I could teach you if you only let me. Believe me, I’ve got a sexual IQ that would baffle the scientific community.”