“Lucas, it’s me,” I said. “It’s Katie.”
The grin slipped off his face. His eyes widened with surprise and then darkened with something else as they moved from my eyes to my lips and then downward to the insanely tight black top I was wearing. Sally had wanted me to wear nothing but a black bra underneath the see-through material, but I’d insisted on wearing a camisole. She’d produced the laciest one I’d ever seen from her bag of tricks and pulled it over my head. I noticed Lucas’s gaze lingering on that lace stretched across my chest and the generous amount of cleavage just above it. More cleavage than I’d ever shown in my life, that was for sure. I felt my neck flushing, the redness creeping up to my cheeks. As much as being stared at made me want to break something, I had to admit the guy sure knew how to make a girl feel seen.
“Katie?” Lucas said. His voice was thick and at least two octaves lower than it had been a minute ago.
“You know, you might recognize me a little better if you looked at my face,” I snapped.
“Oh, I…right,” he said. Now his eyes were planted firmly on the bar in front of him. “You’re not wearing your glasses.”
“Emily made me put on these ridiculous blue contacts,” I replied. “She says brown eyes are boring.”
“She doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” Lucas muttered so low I wasn’t sure if I’d heard him correctly. He cleared his throat and suddenly he was all business. “What’ll you have?” he said, picking up a cocktail glass.
I recited the list of drinks and he didn’t even bat an eyelash, just began setting out the glasses in a row. I wondered if he thought Em and I were drinking them all ourselves and I was going to clarify that there were five of us in all, but I didn’t get the chance. The show going on in front of me was far too distracting.
First he dropped the glass in his hand twice then nearly dropped a full bottle of vodka when he set it down too close to the edge of the counter. I placed my chin in my palm, frowning at him. As I watched, he put double the amount of rum in Anita’s rum and Coke and then accidentally threw a lime wedge into the glass when I was pretty sure it was supposed to go on the rim. Then he asked me to repeat the names of the other drinks because he’d forgotten them. While all this was going on he didn’t look at me once.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I asked with some amusement as he dropped yet another glass. They just seemed to be slipping right through his fingers tonight.
“What? Nothing!” he said as he finished the last drink—a vodka cranberry, for me. He’d put three cherries in it, which I was pretty sure also wasn’t right, but I didn’t mention it. I was just glad he hadn’t made it a triple by accident—I wasn’t much of a drinker.
As I handed him the cash for the drinks he glanced down at the floor and shook his head, as though he couldn’t believe the mess around his feet. I couldn’t, either. Was he drinking on the job? Was that allowed? In movies bartenders were always doing shots with the patrons, but I was pretty sure in real life it was a no-no.
When I thanked him for the drinks he finally managed to look me in the face again. He held my gaze there, his eyes darting between mine, his chest heaving as though he’d run a mile. When he broke the gaze to look down at the drinks in front of me, I felt a physical loss and cursed myself for it.
Bad news, out of my league, one hundred percent trouble, I repeated silently to myself.
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