I sat next to the handsome man at the bar and said, in a husky voice, “Lookin’ for a good time, cutie pie?”
Jayce smirked when he realized it was me. “Haven’t seen you in here before.”
“First time.” I jerked my head toward the door. “You didn’t want to ride the bike here?”
“They’re callin’ for rain.”
“With a busted window,” I pointed out, “you’ll get almost as wet in the truck.”
“Almost. But a littlewetnessnever hurt nobody.” He sipped from a glass of dark liquor, and then his grin slowly turned into a frown. “You okay, Peaches?”
“I’m just fine,” I lied. “Guess what I did tonight? I dropped an F-bomb.”
His cobalt eyes blinked in surprise. “Oh shit, no kidding?”
“Said it loud and with authority. You would’ve been proud.”
“Who was the unlucky recipient?”
“My ex.”
He nodded, unsurprised. “I’m sure he deserved it.”
“Oh, he did.”
Jayce looked over his shoulder at the other side of the bar. “There’s only a few people in here, but we shouldn’t… uh… you know. Seem too friendly.”
“Right, right,” I replied. “Wouldn’t want anyone seeing us chatting.”
“I’d hate to have to call you acuntagain,” he said with a disarming smile. “But at least this time, you’ll understand why.”
“Even then, I’d rather avoid it.” I moved down two barstools as the bartender, Flop, came out of the back. I raised my finger and asked for a beer.
“Yes ma’am, what’s your brand?”
“Whatever’s cheapest.”
“One can of Natural Light, coming right up for the young lady,” he said in a thick Georgia drawl.
I remembered Flop from the time I saw him drinking coffee in the diner. He didn’t have a single hair on his bald head, and his face was covered with so many freckles they almost blended together. “This is your bar, right?” I asked.
“Yes ma’am!” he announced while grabbing my beer from the fridge. He cracked it open and slid it across the bar, aluminum scraping on old wood. “We don’t have the best selection, but what we got is cold.”
“What more does a girl need?” I took a long pull. “Mind if I ask you something?”
“Don’t…” Jayce muttered under his breath.
“Depends on the question,” Flop replied.
“That’s not your real name, is it? Flop?”
Jayce groaned. Flop’s face lit up like a Christmas tree.
“That’s a great story!”
“Now you’ve done it,” Jayce said, rising from his barstool and walking away with his drink. He shook his head all the way to the table in the corner, as far from the bar as possible.
“It goes back to my time in Vietnam.” Flop leaned across the counter toward me. “I was a Huey pilot in seventy-two. That’s a helicopter. You know why they’re called Hueys? Well, it was made by Bell Helicopters, and its model designation was the Iroquois HU-1, which stood for a Helicopter of the Utility variant. On paper, HU-1 looks likeHuey, and bam, it got its nickname!”