Sweet Burn Read online

  The tiny bathroom steamed up while he worked through the unhappy revelation that somehow feelings had snuck up on him while he hung out at Mimi’s bar. Pointless, not-going-to-be-reciprocated-so-don’t-waste-your-time feelings. Since he preferred doing to thinking, he stripped down and stepped in, soaping up with the hotel freebies. The body wash was floral, the scent from the green and gold bottle both sweet and slightly harsh. The little pint-size bottles were never quite enough, but he made do, dumping the contents into his palm and then tossing the empty into the trash.

  He flattened his hands against the shower wall.

  It had been good.

  It was over.

  And if he had no idea what it was, he wasn’t going to admit it.

  Chapter Two

  The day after hightailing it home from Evan Donovan’s wedding, Mimi spent her Sunday afternoon at the bar, getting things into shape for the week. It was still her slow season, being March and not the drought-prone, heated-up months of summer, but business was decent even on the weeknights and she had more than enough work to keep her busy.

  Because March in Northern California was plenty warm, she’d propped the front door open to take advantage of the heat. She had country music playing on the radio (louder than she should), but, hey, that was a public service, right? If the radio was loud enough, no one could hear her singing. She liked to sing and if she wasn’t particularly talented in the vocal arena, that was okay. She’d never claimed to be perfect.

  Quite the opposite.

  Right then, however, her nemesis was a temperamental soda gun. The son-of-a-bitch wasn’t working, either sending the soda dribbling out or attempting to drill a hole in the bottom of the glass. All or nothing, just like her life.

  “Problems?” The rough voice behind her startled her enough to make her jump, and the soda gun flew out of her hand, hit the counter and launched a stream of brown cola at the mirrored display of booze bottles. Great. Now she could add cleaning to her to do list.

  “Don’t sneak up on a gal.” She played off her jumpiness, glaring at the malfunctioning soda gun. Of course, if she hadn’t diagnosed the problem in the fifteen minutes she’d spent taking the thing apart and reassembling it, she probably wasn’t going to do so now. She was out of her league and it was time to call the repair guy and hope the bar’s bottom line could handle the hit.

  “Uh-huh.” Not waiting for an invite (and she’d have made him wait a long time—they both knew that), Mack came around the far end of the counter. In the light of day, he didn’t look different than he had yesterday or the day before that—except that she now knew exactly what lay beneath the faded cotton T-shirt and jeans. She drank in the steady thud of his steel-toes over her floor as he came closer but, instead of reaching for her, he reached around her and pointed out her phone vibrating like mad on the counter.

  She didn’t give a damn about the phone.

  He, apparently, did because he turned down her music and nudged the phone toward her. He didn’t have the decency to stare at her, color up, or even hesitate some. Instead, Mack acted like nothing had happened and that made her want to push his buttons some, force him notice her.

  Right.

  Wrong.

  She swiped her phone from the counter and strolled to the open door, soaking up the sun like a lizard.

  “Mimi Hart? I’m calling from the Oakland District Attorney’s office.”

  And… there was the past she’d decided was the past and no part of her present or future. Like she was riding the roller coaster at the New York New York casino in Vegas, her stomach rattled around somewhere in the vicinity of her ribcage before dropping straight to her toes. She’d come to Strong with one plan: forgetting everything that had happened in Oakland. Two hundred miles clearly hadn’t been enough distance. This phone call proved that.

  Hanging up would be pointless.

  “That’s me.” She concentrated on inventorying the cars in the bar’s parking lot—and came up with Mack’s truck. Her own Harley was tucked out of sight alongside the building. There was nothing but asphalt and the dark blue pick-up with a coat of dust and odd nicks and dings from fire calls. Battle scars, Mack had told her when she’d asked why he didn’t fix those dents like he fixed everything else. The sun shone the same as before, but she felt cold deep in her bones. Damn it.

  She shot a quick look over her shoulder, but Mack had his head bent over the soda gun. He enjoyed fixing things and he was good at it. If it was her lucky day—and it sure didn’t look that way—she wouldn’t need to call a repairman if he could work his usual magic. The too smooth, too chipper voice on the other end of the line kept right on talking.

  “According to our records, you testified in the State vs. Martinez.”

  The speaker paused expectantly and she used the break to calculate whether or not she could still plead ignorance.

  “Ms. Hart?” Now the speaker sounded less pleasant and more determined. Evasion likely wasn’t an option.

  “I did.” She dropped onto the bench by the door. She’d put the thing there for her smokers and resuming their habit suddenly seemed attractive, even though it had been two years since her last cigarette. She needed something to do with her hands. Since cigarettes and a lighter weren’t part of her immediate future, she fiddled with a loose thread in the frayed hem of her shorts, pulling strands free with the hand not holding the phone.

  “Your testimony was critical in helping to convict Mr. Martinez, along with several of his associates.”

  Probably. Maybe. She certainly hadn’t wanted to go to court and share what she knew, but even she had limits. She might have spent a lifetime running from her responsibilities, but testifying had been the right thing to do. The gang member had busted into a convenience store, cleaned out the register, and then shot the store clerk in the back. She’d known that because Sal Martinez had come into her street shop and asked her to tattoo the crime scene onto his left shoulder.

  “Mr. Martinez is serving life in prison, but one of the gang members convicted on lesser charges came up for parole last month.” Another demanding pause filtered down the line, but she had no intention of filling up the silence. If the D.A.’s office wanted to have a conversation with her and had gone to all the trouble of tracking her down, then they could do the talking. She’d received a letter inviting her to attend the parole hearing and give her reasons for or against. She’d wanted to leave that life behind and she’d ignored it.

  “Sol Herring was granted parole,” the professional-sounding voice continued and… damn it. Maybe she should have spoken up again. Said something. Protested. She just didn’t know what good it would have done, besides ripping the mental Band-Aid off wounds she preferred to ignore. Her last year in Oakland had not been a pleasant one.

  “Got it,” she said, because maybe if she said something, this conversation would end faster.

  “No one spoke up against it and since he was convicted of a lesser weapons charge and perjury, he served five years of a ten year sentence.” Now the voice sounded vaguely disapproving, familiar ground for Mimi. Clearly, she had been expected to register an objection with the court. As if that would have kept Sol Herring behind bars.

  Drawers opened and closed behind her. She leaned around the door as the DA droned on, reprising the facts of the case. The way she’d seen it then, the good guys had won. The bad guys had lost. She hadn’t paid too much attention to the details beyond that. Mack, she was willing to bet, would have memorized every fact, every charge. His rifling through the bar stuff yielded gold as he discovered the stack of manuals she’d stashed in a bottom drawer.

  As if he’d felt her looking, he lifted his head and stared back at her. Great. Now she was imagining an invisible connection between them. Mack was big and bad-ass with a side of sweet. No way did she want to get on his bad side, but he was also precisely the man she wanted standing beside her in a fight. A fire. Or anything life might throw at her. No. She’d had her taste and they were d
one. Kaput. Over.

  He raised a brow, silently asking what was up, but this was none of his business. Hell, she didn’t want it to be her business. He frowned, but then started flipping through pages. Crisis averted. Mack savored manuals the way other guys got off on porn.

  “Given certain threats that were made by the main defendant, we felt you should be made aware of Mr. Herring’s parole.”

  Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me. The sentiment hadn’t been true in this particular instance. Martinez’s shouts as the bailiffs led him out of the courtroom after the jury had read their verdict? Yeah. His graphic threats had starred front and center in more than one nightmare.

  “Good thinking,” she said sweetly.

  “You should take sensible precautions. Watch out for unfamiliar cars, persons. Avoid situations that make you uncomfortable.”

  Right. Like that was happening.

  “If Herring’s on parole, aren’t you watching him?”

  There was another brief hesitation. Damn it. She knew she shouldn’t have gotten out of bed today.

  “Mr. Herring failed to check in with his parole officer,” the District Attorney’s assistant admitted.

  Great. “You lost him.”

  “We’ll get him back.” Determination filled the other woman’s voice and, if good intentions were all that it took, Herring would have been back under lock and key. Unfortunately, Mimi knew all too well the difference between good intentions and reality. “Until then, we recommend that you be careful and keep an eye out for trouble. I can have the local police department send patrol cars past your place.”

  She had to laugh at that offer. Strong was barely qualified as a small town since the place consisted of little more than a few streets and a handful of buildings. Strong also came with a historic firehouse, Faye Duncan-Donovan’s art gallery, and a handful of antique shops. The whole place was disgustingly picturesque, from the wooden sidewalks to the red geraniums sprouting from tin cans. Strong was the kind of old-time California place, part small town and all charm, that made drive-through tourists stop and take a second look.

  What Strong didn’t have was much in the way of crime.

  Mercedes Hernandez, the town’s lone deputy sheriff, doubled as the coroner and the fire marshal, backed up by two reserve deputies and a part-time dispatcher. Mercedes kept busy—Mimi had a fine collection of speeding tickets to prove it—but she could easily imagine the other woman’s reaction to be asked to take on what amounted to babysitting duties.

  “I’m fine,” she said, because the Oakland District Attorney’s office didn’t need the details of her life. And it was true. She was always fine.

  “If you change your mind or you feel threatened in any way, let us know,” the DA’s assistant said and finally wrapped up their call.

  Right. Like that was an option. Instead of answering—because, really, she’d said everything that needed saying—she tapped the Call End button. What did you do when the past refused to stay in the past?

  ***

  Mack ran an eye over the manual’s diagrams as he teased the soda gun apart. Whatever Mimi had done to it, the thing was jacked as hell. He turned a page and discovered the mother lode of information. Problem solved. His hands continued to work on autopilot while he tried to hear what was going on just outside the bar’s front door. Eavesdropping wasn’t nice, but he didn’t mind as much as he should have. Mimi’s face had gotten just a little bit pinched when she’d seen the number. Given her attitude towards worrying—he was pretty sure she’d kick back with a margarita if and when the zombie apocalypse hit—he therefore inferred that the caller probably had extremely unwelcome news.

  Secret babies. International political conspiracies. Neither was entirely outside the realm of possibility either. Or maybe she’d just outrun her credit limit. He wouldn’t know, of course, because Mimi didn’t believe in sharing information. Instead, he’d been reduced to hijacking her manual and fixing her soda gun. He was pretty sure that made him pathetic.

  Whoever had called her, she wasn’t interested in a long conversation. She padded back inside in under five minutes and hopped up on the counter, crossing her legs, the better to watch him work. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t have minded. He liked looking at Mimi.

  She’d worn a little black dress at Faye and Evan’s wedding (clearly, she hadn’t read the memo about not wearing black to a wedding or, more likely, hadn’t cared) paired with a pair of four-inch red fuck-me heels he was fairly certain would haunt his fantasies for decades to come. Today she had on a pair of cut-off shorts roughly the same length as those wicked heels, the soft denim fringe cupping her ass. She also sported a pair of cowboy boots and a faded T-shirt with the bar’s logo emblazoned over her very spectacular breasts.

  She’d piled her hair on top of her head in one of those complicated messy up-dos women sported. The style defied the laws of gravity, sexy wisps clinging to her neck where he could just see the edges of her tattoo. Her wedding hair had been fancier and smoother, but this hair made her look like she’d just rolled out of bed and he loved it. And she was beautiful no matter what she wore. Her long, tanned legs begged him to run a hand up their silky length. Down again. Hell, over and over if she’d only let him because her legs weren’t doing the begging—he was. Mentally, because he had some pride, but still. She had him tied in knots and he didn’t like it. Mimi Hart was the kind of woman who ate men for breakfast and letting her know she had the upper hand would be a disaster.

  There was a moment of silence as she looked at him. “Am I paying you to do that?”

  She didn’t sound all that curious and he didn’t look up from his work. “Nope. Consider it a freebie.”

  Over the past few months, they’d established a pattern. He came by and fixed little things for her or he BBQ-ed in the big kettledrum cooker she kept out back. They were almost… friends. And then he’d gone and screwed that up by sleeping with her last night. Of course, since she’d made it painfully clear she planned on ignoring the sex, perhaps the friendship avenue was still open to him.

  He waited, but of course she didn’t volunteer any information about her call. Instead, she watched as he screwed the last bolt back onto the gun and tested. The soda shot straight where it should go.

  He set the gun back in its holder and restored the manual to oblivion under the counter. “All fixed.”

  “Thanks.”

  He didn’t want thanks. He wanted information. He knew Mimi liked to take care of herself and, from all the evidence to date, she’d done a damned fine job of doing so. She owned her own bar, managing the books and the inventory as easily as she handled the occasional troublesome guest. He’d seen her show a mean drunk to the door, delivering the man to the parking lot and Sheriff Hernandez with smooth aplomb. Nothing fazed her except—he looked down at the soda gun—the odd mechanical issue and even then, he figured she was simply smart enough to let him do the heavy lifting there.

  But something about that call had shaken her. She didn’t look quite as confident or certain as she usually did. Putting his finger on the why wasn’t easy. She was the same gorgeous bombshell of a woman, but her shoulders took on a vulnerable curve as she hunched in on herself and watched him. He didn’t want to guess. No, he wanted her to tell him what had upset her, to open up just a little. Funny how they could have sex, her body open to his in the most intimate way possible, but Mimi herself was further away, more closed off than ever.

  “Are you in trouble?” He let the unspoken again hang in the air between them. Too bad if that particular truth pissed her off. He’d never known a woman who got into more trouble, so his guess seemed like a real safe bet.

  She didn’t look away or drop her gaze. “Are you listening to my phone calls now?”

  That wasn’t a no. He narrowed his gaze. Which, in Mimi parlance, meant hell yes. Great. He stepped toward her, slapping his hands down on either side of her. She’d made a tactical mistake when she’d parked h
er pretty ass on the counter, because it meant she couldn’t get away from him without an obvious retreat—and Mimi didn’t retreat. Ever.

  Sure enough, she glared at him and poked his chest with her finger. At some point between the wedding and now, she’d re-painted her nails. He had no idea when she found the time to do all these girly things, when he knew for a fact that running the bar singlehandedly had her working her ass off, but he liked the color. The red was a cheerful fuck you, with some kind of white flower with yellow centers. He hadn’t realized she had an artistic side, but that probably explained the tattoo.

  “In my space, Johnson.” She snapped the challenge at him, but her eyes still looked lost. “Back off.”

  He answered her by moving closer and putting a hand on her knee. Her skin jumped against his palm, because Mimi was ticklish. And sensitive. He’d learned that last night. He was taking advantage like this, but he didn’t care. That was the God’s honest truth. Mimi ate nice for breakfast and he wasn’t letting her walk all over him. Instead, he pushed gently on her knee, silently demanding she yield.

  “Too bad,” he growled. “I asked you a question. And, yeah, I listened. Close the door if you don’t want an audience.”

  Her naughty smile widened. “I don’t mind. Do you like to watch?”

  A blast of heat hit him hard, blood surging to his dick as erotic images jolted through his head and derailed his train of thought. Mimi, laid out on his bed, touching herself. Her fingers easing beneath her shorts and underneath her panties while she showed him exactly how she liked to pleasure herself… But that was the point, wasn’t it? She wanted him off-balance and thinking with his dick rather than his head. Sex was a great way to control a man but, unfortunately for Mimi, Mack was used to being in charge.