“No. I’m on my own.”
“I could…” Her eyes slid to the chair Luis had vacated, but then she just flashed a wide smile. “I’ll check back on you later.”
Nate looked from the chair to her. “I wanted to talk to you, actually. Care for a drink?”
“Yes! I was just about to take my break. I’ll be right back.”
He watched her ponytail bounce as she hurried toward the bar. If someone had asked him an hour before, and if he’d allowed himself to be completely honest, he would’ve said that sitting down for a drink with Jenny Stone was the goal of the evening. But at this point, he had no idea if he should be satisfied or just embarrassed that he was so damn easy for her.
CHAPTER TWO
“I’M TAKING MY BREAK,” Jenny said to Benton, trying to hide the fact that she was slightly out of breath as she reached past him to grab a clean glass. “Can you survive without me for ten minutes?”
“No problem,” he said, his eye on the pitchers he was filling.
Thank God. Deputy Hendricks was… Wow. He was…making her blush from across the room.
She cleared her throat and glanced at Benton, hoping he couldn’t see her embarrassment. Because Nate Hendricks was so damn hot he made her thighs clench a little.
She’d spent so much time worried that he was hiding close-set bug eyes under his glasses that she hadn’t braced herself against the opposite possibility: that one glance from those icy gray eyes and she’d melt into a pile of awkward mush. She’d almost invited herself to have a drink with him. She kind of had.
Jenny took a deep breath. It didn’t matter. He’d come here to see her. Or maybe not. Maybe he’d come to interrogate her. Or tell her he’d changed his mind and she needed to come down to the station with him.
Oh, Jesus, what if she was about to get arrested?
“No,” she said to herself as she untied her serving apron and laid it on the counter. “Now you’re just being weird.”
“What’s wrong?” Benton called. “You being weird again?”
“Shut up, B.”
“Whatever you say, freak.”
Jenny had always appreciated that Benton was like a pain-in-the-ass little brother to her. That appreciation was being strained tonight. She started away before he could say more, but not quickly enough.
“Hey!”
She turned warily back.
He tipped his head in the direction of Nate Hendricks’s table. “I’ve got condoms under the register if you’re making a move on that guy.”
“Shut up!” she repeated. “It’s not like that. He’s my…um…deputy.”
“Ah. Of course he is. That girl over in the corner there is my librarian. I still use condoms when she invites me over, though. When you sleep with one public servant, you sleep with every public servant. Or something like that.”
“I hate you.” Her face felt as if it were the color of the maraschino cherry Benton pop
ped in his mouth. “I really do.”
“Go get ’im, tiger.”
She’d get Benton back somehow, she thought as she made herself walk toward Nate. The problem with Benton was that he was utterly shameless. Even Rayleen, the dirty old woman who owned the saloon, couldn’t embarrass him, not that she ever stopped trying.
Speaking of…Jenny kept her eyes straight ahead and didn’t look toward Rayleen’s table. Hopefully the old lady wouldn’t look up from her game of solitaire long enough to notice anything.
“Hi,” she said stupidly when she reached his table and took a seat.
Nate immediately poured her a beer. “I thought you were the bartender here.”