“I don’t have the kids today,” she mentioned slyly, earning a look from me.

“You don’t?”

“No. Their dad called last minute and said he’d keep them for the weekend.” She glanced up from her work at the sink and raised her eyebrows repeatedly. “Mayhem isn’t that expensive.”

“I probably shouldn’t be spending money when I have a perfectly good bottle of wine at home,” I said. I hadn’t been back at work long and my checking account was still crippled.

“I’ll buy you two drinks. One of my guys left me an extra good tip as a wedding gift, and I’m not having a bachelorette party. Let’s do it. You and me, one last time before I become a married woman again.”

I knew where she was going with this and I approved. “Two drinks, no more?”

“Only two,” she confirmed.

To give us credit, we were both straight-faced as we recited the greatest lie ever told.

* * *

“One more!”

“No!”

“One more!”

“No!”

“Come on!”

My face was hot and I’d hit the giggly level two drinks ago. “One more, and that’s it! I’m not kidding this time!” I finally agreed, such a total fucking sucker.

What was this? Drink number four? Number five? I had no clue.

Watching as Ginny leaned over the bar and asked the bartender, who had been very attentive to us tonight, for two more whiskey sours, I wiggled out of the soft button-down shirt I’d put on over a lacey camisole for work that morning. I was hot. So damn hot considering the November temperatures had dropped. The bar was packed. It was Friday night after all, and we’d fought for our two spots at the counter, smashed in between two burly men with motorcycle club vests on and two guys we’d learned a drink ago who worked at Ginny’s uncle’s garage.

What happened to our two-drink limit? Ginny’s uncle happened. The most weathered-looking man I had ever seen in my life had come straight for us the second we sat down and told the bartender the drinks were on him tonight. The man, I learned moments later, was named Luther, put a hand on the back of the chair I was sitting on and said to me, “I heard what you did for Miss Pearl. You’re good here anytime you want.”

“You really don’t have to do that,” I told this man I’d never even seen before.

His intense attention didn’t budge for a second. “My grandson is in love with you. You’re good,” he decided.

Oh my God. Dean.

The man named Luther continued on, “Ginny, I can’t afford your drunk ass. Consider tonight a wedding gift,” he drawled, patting his niece’s shoulder as she choked on a laugh.

And then, just like that, the Alcohol Fairy was gone. And Ginny and I silently said “fuck it” and decided to take advantage of it, which was why and how I found myself five drinks in to an evening at a biker bar, laughing my ass off with someone I loved.

I was fanning myself when Ginny turned with two glasses of the yellowish concoction. Reaching back, I started tying my hair up. “Is it hot or is just me?” I asked.

“It’s hot,” she confirmed, sliding the drink over the counter in my direction. “Last one and we’ll go home.”

I nodded, smiling at her, my facial muscles feeling pretty tingly. “Last one. Seriously.”

“Serious,” she promised.

The much older man to my right, the big biker Ginny and I talked to for half an hour earlier, turned in his seat to look down at me. His bushy gray beard was long and in definite need of a trim. “What’cha drinking now?”

“A whiskey sour,” I replied, taking a sip.

He scrunched up his nose and looked back and forth between Gin and me. “That’s an awful lot of liquor you’ve had for being so small.”

“I’m okay,” I told him, taking another sip. “I’m just going to call a cab.”

He looked horrified. “Honey, that sounds like a bad idea.”

“Why?” Ginny piped up from her spot next to me. She’d been talking to him too over the course of the last couple hours we’d been at the bar.

“Two drunk girls in the car with a stranger?”

Well, when he put it that way…. We’d taken a cab the last time and it was fine. Plus, how many other times in the past had I done the same thing?

“Ginny, have Trip drive you two home. I know his ass hasn’t drunk that much tonight. He’s upstairs dealing with club shit. I’ll go get him for you, or shit, call Wheels. He’ll come get you. No problem.”

She shook her head. “He’s asleep. I don’t want to wake him up.”

“I can take y’all home,” a man sitting on the other side of Ginny, one of the two mechanics, offered.

I didn’t need to look at my boss and friend to know that, though the guy seemed nice enough, we weren’t idiots. We’d learned not to get into cars with strangers. Shit, we’d taught our kids not to get into cars with strangers.

“No. I’m taking you both home,” a new voice claimed from somewhere behind me unexpectedly.

I felt the two arms come down on either side of my chair before I saw the twin columns of heavily muscled forearms cage me in. It was the beautiful brown and black lines of a bird’s wing stamped onto the inside of the biceps by my face that told me who was in my space. I didn’t have to look up to know who was talking. It was Dallas.

I’d like to think it was all the alcohol that led me to drop my head back as far as I could. “Hi.”

Dallas tipped his face down to look at me, his expression harsh, no-nonsense even through my hazy brain. “Diana,” he said my name solidly without a single trace of the familiar affection we’d grown for each other.

“I didn’t know you were here,” I said, still looking at him upside down.

He might have blinked, but his mouth was drawn so tight I couldn’t look past it. “I’ve been here the entire time.”

I swallowed and only managed to nod, my face getting hot all over again. Even in that position, I could see his eyes flick over my face and my throat and some other place I couldn’t confirm. “You could have come said hi. We’re friends. We can sit next to each other in public.” And that was how I would later on know I was drunk. What the hell was I thinking saying that?

“You’ve been busy,” he stated in that same detached, almost mean voice.

“What?”

“You’ve had enough to drink,” Dallas said. “I’m taking you both home.”

“But we just got this drink!” Ginny protested.

“I’ll give you the ten bucks. Let’s go, now,” he demanded. Without warning, the arms on either side of me moved, his hands going to the handles of the stool I was on right before he jerked it away from the bar, making it scrape against the floor.

Some reasonable part of Ginny’s and my brains must have recognized that we’d overdone the drinking, because neither one of us grumbled much at his order. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed my boss pushing her chair back, not forced out of it like I had been. Turning the stool around so I could get out and grabbing my purse at the same time, I came face-to-face with Dallas’s body standing centimeters from my knees. Glancing up at his face, ready to ask him to back up so I could get down, I couldn’t help but smile at the scowl on his face.