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All of America sees Inez and Vance as some epic love story. The epitome of romance. But I know Inez well enough to recognize that something between her and this dude is not quite right.
“Seriously, what does everyone see in the guy?” I mutter to myself.
The new waitress passes by me, drinks sloshing around on the wobbly tray balanced on her palm. “You mean aside from the fact that he’s rich? And famous? And good-looking?” Suzy side-eyes me like I’m a dumbass.
Maybe I am. Ugh.
I turn back to my inventory sheet.
I’m acting weird. I get it. But it’s not like I’m jealous or anything. Hell naw. I just think that Inez deserves better. She deserves the best. And the most inconvenient truth? She definitely deserves more than a life out here in the Iowa backwoods.
Don’t get me wrong—I always paid her as well as I could. Hell, her paychecks were usually bigger than my own. But deep down, I always knew she deserved…more.
That’s why I didn’t try to stop her when she put in her notice and told me she was ready to move on from this bar.
She’s larger than life. Her pretty blue eyes. Her infectious laugh. The way she could make me feel alive by just walking into the room. She was always too much for Starlight Falls.
I glance around at the dark, dingy tavern. It was obvious from the start that Inez Machado was destined for bigger things. I always knew that fate would take her away from this place.
I just didn’t realize her absence would hit me this hard.
“Order up!” my cook, Joe, hollers from the back, ringing the service bell.
My attention is drawn to the plates he’s sliding through the tiny window that separates the kitchen from the seating area of the bar.
When I don’t notice any of my servers heading back to grab the plates, I ring the service bell again to get their attention.
“Anyone gonna get that?” I call out to my employees.
No one answers.Each and every one of them is ignoring me tonight, busy chatting and gossiping with their customers about the reality show.
Completely exasperated, I grunt resentfully. I grab the meals and drop them off to my waiting patrons before returning to my clipboard.
My oldest brother, Archer, saunters across the bar, coming to squeeze onto a stool at the counter. “You’re going soft, man,” the 36-year-old bearded lumberjack mumbles before taking a sip of his beer.
The rest of my siblings approach, all of them crowding around the bar.
“Tell me about it,” Darius says. He mindlessly grabs a tall chair from a nearby high-top table, his narrowed eyes focused on the screen of his phone as he speaks. It’s virtually impossible to rip that guy away from his phone. But who can blame him? At only 30 years old, he runs a billion-dollar empire from that thing. “Back in the day, you would have canned them all for slacking on the clock. What gives, brother?”
My shoulders heave in a defeated shrug. “Trust me—on nights like tonight, I’m ready to fire everybody and just start over. But the idea of going through more interviews and more training wears me out even more than picking up the slack for my incompetent staff.”
Ronan merges right into the conversation, not missing a beat. “Damn. You’ve really been a cranky asshole ever since Inez put in her notice and took off for Hollywood, huh, buddy?” He rounds the counter and gives my head a sympathetic ruffle.
I elbow my identical twin in the ribs to push him off me. “I’ve always been a cranky asshole,” I retort under my breath.
Being a divorced single father and struggling to run an under-funded business for the past few years will do that to a guy.
Felix pulls his fiancée, Daphne, into his lap and frowns at me. “Nah, you never used to be this cranky. You used to know how to crack a smile now and then. Ever since Inez left, you’ve been a permanently broody asshole.”
“Is that a medical diagnosis?” I snark, tossing my 32-year-old brother a side-eye. “You gonna write me a prescription, Dr. Brighton?” I hate when he talks to me in his doctor voice, like I’m one of his patients from the medical clinic.
With a snort, Ronan fills a pint glass from the beer tap and slides it across the counter to his girlfriend, Nicky.
“Stop being so hard on him, guys,” Nicky comes to my defense. But the pitying look she’s giving me makes me feel like even more of a loser.
Huffing through my nose, I turn my back on the lot of them. I hate how they always do this. They can take one tiny, little conversation and turn it into a full-blown Brighton family meeting in the blink of an eye. It’s annoying.
I don’t have time for this right now. I need to figure out how many cases of toilet paper and napkins I need to order. Because if I don’t do it, no-one else will. Again, I try to focus on my clipboard. But it’s all useless. I can’t think straight.
