“I’ll be there.” After she hung up the phone, she took a deep breath and held it in. Entering that bar would not be the same as every other crime scene she’d walked and explored and stood within. This was personal.
She let out her pent-up breath. She’d viewed the crime scene photos and read the reports. Twenty-nine years after the fact would not be a problem. She’d sat across a mesh barrier from killers who told her exactly what they’d do to her body if they ever got the chance. Compared to that nightmare, walking into Hennessy’s was going to be a piece of cake. No sweat.
Hennessy’s was painted a nondescript gray and was bigger than it looked from the outside. Inside it had two pool tables and a dance floor on either side of the long bar. In the middle, three steps led down to the sunken floor surrounded by a white railing and fitted with ten round tables.
Hennessy’s had never had the unruly-girls-gone-bad reputation of Mort’s. It was more laid-back and was known for good drinks and music. And for a time, murder. Hennessy’s had finally lived down the latter—until a certain true crime writer had blown into town.
Mick stood behind the bar and poured South Gin into a cocktail shaker. He glanced up at Maddie, at the light shining in her hair, picking out reddish brown strands in her ponytail. He returned his gaze to the tall clear bottle in his hand. “My great-grandfather built this bar in 1925.”
Maddie set her camera on the bar and glanced about her. “During Prohibition?”
“Yeah.” He pointed to the sunken middle. “That part was a restaurant dining room,” he said. “He made and sold grain alcohol out of the back.”
Maddie looked at him through those big brown eyes that turned all warm and sexy when he kissed her neck. At the moment her eyes were a little wide, like she was seeing ghosts. “Was he ever caught?” she asked but looked about once again, her mind clearly not on his masterful attempt at conversation. When he’d opened the back door and seen her standing there, she’d looked so tense, he’d had to check his first impulse to push her against the wall and kiss the breath out of her.
“Nah.” Mick shook his head. They both knew she was there to take photographs, and Mick was surprised at how uptight she was about being inside the bar. He thought she’d be happy. He was giving her what she wanted, but she didn’t look happy. She looked ready to break. “The town was too small and unimportant in those days, and Great-Grandfather was too well liked by everyone. When Prohibition ended, he gutted most of the place and turned it into a bar. Except for maintenance and a few necessary renovations, it’s been like this since.” He added a splash of vermouth, then put the lid on the cocktail shaker. “My grandfather turned the area over there into a dance floor and my father brought in the pool tables.” He shook the premium gin and vermouth with one hand and reached below the bar with the other. “I’ve decided to leave it as is.” He set first one and then another frosted martini glass on the bar. He added a few olives on toothpicks, and as he poured, his gaze lowered from the firm set of her jaw down her throat to her white blouse and the top button that look perilously close to popping open and giving him a great view of her cleavage. “I’ve put my money and energy into Mort’s. Next week my buddy Steve and I have a meeting with a couple of investors to talk about starting a business giving helicopter tours in the area. Who knows if it will pan out? Owning bars is what I know, but I really want to branch out and have other interests. That way I don’t feel as if I’m standing still.” He pushed the martini glass toward her and wondered if she was even listening to him.
Her fingers touched the stem. “Why do you feel as if you’re standing still?”
He guessed she had been listening. “I don’t know. Maybe because as a kid I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of here.” He reached for the toothpick in his martini and bit an olive off the end. “But here I am.”
“Your family is here. I don’t have family—well, except for a few cousins I’ve met briefly. If I had a brother or sister, I’d want to live by them. At least I hope I would.”
He recalled that her mother had died when she’d been young. “Where’s your father?”
“I don’t know. I never met him.” She stirred her martini with the olives. “How do you know what I drink?”
He wondered if she’d purposely changed the subject. “I know all your secrets.” She looked a bit alarmed and he laughed. “I remember what you were drinking the first night I saw you.” He walked around the end of the bar and sat next to her. She turned to face him and he planted one of his feet between hers on the rungs of her stool. She wore a black skirt and his knee forced the material up her smooth thighs.
“Really?” She picked up the drink and gazed at him over the top of the glass. She drained half of her drink. Sucking down his best gin as if it were water, and if she wasn’t careful, he’d have to drive her home. Which wasn’t a bad idea. “I’m surprised you remember anything beyond Darla’s tempting offer to show you her bare bottom,” she said and licked her bottom lip.
“I remember you were being a smart-ass that night too.” He took her hand and brushed his thumb across the backs of her knuckles. “I wondered what it would be like to kiss your smart mouth.”
“Now you know.”
“Yes.” He moved his gaze across her face, her cheeks, and jaw and wet lips. He looked back up into her eyes. “Now that I know, I think about all the places I didn’t get to kiss you the other night.”
She set her glass on the bar. “Lord, you’re good.”
“I’m good at a lot of things.”
“Especially at saying just the right thing to make a woman feel like you really mean it.”
He dropped her hand. “You don’t think I mean it?”
She grabbed her camera and spun around on her stool. Mick moved his foot and she stood. “I’m sure you do mean it.” She turned her back on him and raised her camera. “Every time you say it and to every woman you say it to.”
Mick picked up his glass and also stood. “You think I’ve said that to other women?”
She adjusted the focus and snapped a picture of the empty tables. The strobe flashed and she said, “Of course.”
That stung, especially since it wasn’t true. “Well, honey, you don’t give yourself enough credit.”
“I give myself a lot of credit.” Another click and flash, then she said, “But I know how things are.”
He took a drink and the cool gin warmed a path down his throat and settled next to a spot of irritation. “Tell me what you think you know.”
“I know I’m not the only woman you spend time with.” She lowered her camera and moved to one end of the bar.
“You’re the only woman I’m seeing right now.”
“Right now. You’ll move on. I’m sure we’re all interchangeable.”
Mick walked away as the strobe flashed. “I didn’t think you had a problem with that.” He moved into the dark shadows and leaned a hip into the jukebox.
“I don’t. I’m just saying that I’m sure we’re all the same in the dark.”
She was really starting to piss him off, but he had a feeling that was her point. He wondered why the hell he’d wanted to see her so damn bad. She believed the gossip about him, and he wondered why he cared. She didn’t mind if he saw other women, and he wondered why that bothered him. Maybe he should. Maybe he should kick her ass out and call someone else. The problem was he didn’t want to call someone else, and that ticked him off almost as much as her attitude.
She took several photos of the floor in front of the bar from different angles, then he said, “You’re wrong about that. Not all pussy is the same in the dark.”
She glanced over at him. He’d meant to offend her, but typical of Maddie, she didn’t act like other women. Instead, she took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Are you trying to make me mad?”