both glanced toward the door as it opened and a flurry of snowflakes danced inside. A few more women hurried in and started shimmying out of their cold-weather gear. One wore a spaghetti-strapped blue sequin dress under her parka. The other had on a strapless red corset with rhinestone-studded jeans.
Both fluffed their hair as they focused on Jax behind the bar.
Ali had a hard time not rolling her eyes as she finished fanning one of the strawberry slices over a mound of cream. “I think I’m the only one here who’s never wanted to date you,” she told him.
He chuckled. “What about Greer?”
“Greer never dated anything except her textbooks. Besides, it would have been gross. You went out with Maddie.”
He deftly poured two glasses of wine, set them on a tray for Charlene and tossed the empty bottle into the bin beneath the bar top. “Yeah, but she married my big brother.” He shrugged and grinned. “No accounting for taste, sometimes.” He quickly prepared a gin-and-grapefruit, shaking out the last few drops of grapefruit juice from the plastic pitcher before tossing it into the stainless-steel sink, and added the glass to Charlene’s order. “No more grapefruit.” Then he picked up a knife and finished prepping the last daiquiri while she fussed with her second one. “You’re lagging, Ali.”
She rolled her eyes as she picked up the tray and headed around the bar again. After delivering the drinks, she went over to the newcomers, who were still hovering near the entrance. She didn’t recognize them. “Help you find a place to sit?”
One of them bit her deeply red lip. “We wanted the bar.”
Ali looked over her shoulder. There were a half-dozen bar stools and all were occupied.
By women.
“You’re welcome to wait, but I think it might be a while.” She gestured at a two-top in the far corner. It, and one other just like it, were the only vacant tables in the place. “If you change your mind, just grab one of those over by the pool table.” She barely paused as she spoke, since standing still for too long just reminded her how sore her feet were.
She made the rounds of her tables again and headed back to Jax with a fresh set of orders. Then she went into the small kitchen and dumped another bag of already breaded onion rings into one fryer basket and added similarly prepared chicken fingers to a second.
She left them bubbling merrily away in their vats of hot oil and nipped into the employee bathroom long enough to pee and wash her hands. Then it was back to the fryer, then to the drink station to fill some water glasses, and then out to see if Corset and Spaghetti had decided to forgo the coveted stools at the bar for a table.
They had, and she went to deliver water to them and collect their orders. “First time in?”
Corset nodded and fluffed her hair again. “We drove over from Weaver.”
Ali lifted her eyebrows. The thirty-mile drive between Braden and Weaver was tedious even without snowy conditions. “Hope you’re planning to spend the night in town. Probably going to be hard getting back there tonight. What can I get you?”
“Do you have a menu?”
Most people didn’t bother asking. “Sure.” She grabbed one from another table and returned with it. “It’s a full bar, so we can make most any drink you want.” She smiled. “Unless it takes fresh grapefruit juice. We ran out a few minutes ago.” It was obvious to her that they weren’t ready to make a decision since they were too busy ogling Jax. “I’ll come back in a few minutes and check on you.”
She headed back through the tables, only to stop short at the sight of her sergeant coming in. But then she straightened her shoulders. There was no rule against her working a second job, and plenty of the other guys did it to help supplement their public-servant wages. She headed toward him. “Good evening, sir. I’m afraid we’ve only got one table left—”
Gowler lifted his hand, cutting her off. His usual scowl was in place and he looked no more pleased to be there than she was pleased to see him. “Heard you were moonlighting here these days.”
No matter what logic told her, she felt the alarm like a swift, oily wave inside her stomach. “Temporarily.”
“Whatever,” he said, dismissing her reply. She didn’t even have time to draw a breath of relief before he plowed on. “Got a disabled vehicle out on the expressway. Need you to get on some real clothes and report for duty. Get things moving before we’ve got something worse on our hands.”
The “expressway” was Gowler’s favored term for the highway between Braden and Weaver. Mostly because it was in no way an express. The road was narrow. Winding. Just two lanes for most of the distance between the sister towns. And unfortunately, it was the site of increasingly frequent accidents. The more Weaver continued to grow—mostly because of people going there to work for Cee-Vid, an electronics and gaming manufacturer—the more people there were traveling back and forth between the sistering towns.
She stifled the “why me?” that hovered in her mind and nodded. She knew if Gowler had had a choice, he’d never have asked her to pull overtime. He hated when the excess pay screwed with his sacred budget. “I just need to let Jax know. He’ll have to call in another cocktail waitress.”
Gowler waved, looking impatient. But not even his mammoth-sized ego was large enough to think he could order her to do otherwise. Particularly where the Swift family was concerned. Swift Oil was integral to the town’s existence. “Do what you’ve got to do. Then get your rear out to mile post seventeen.” He turned on his boot heel and stomped back out the door.
Jax was a lot more understanding than Charlene when Ali broke the news that she had to leave. But then Jax wasn’t the one who had to cover all the tables until he found someone else to come in at the last minute on a Friday night.
As she rang up her last set of orders, her gaze fell on Greer. The onion-ring basket was half-empty and she had files spread out all over her table. Greer didn’t seem to be aware of anything going on around her as she bent her head over her work. Her dark hair was twisted up in one of her fancy chignons and the only movement she made was with her pen as she scrawled notes on a legal pad.
“Get Greer to fill in for an hour,” Ali suggested to Jax.
She left him giving her sister a speculative look and went to the employee bathroom again to change back into the uniform she’d just changed out of only a few hours earlier. She was dog-tired and didn’t really look forward to spending any time out on the dark, snowy highway. But there was one bright spot: she got to peel the high-heeled pumps that she had a hate-hate relationship with off her feet.
She rolled up the cocktail uniform and stuffed it in her carryall, pulled on her overcoat and headed out to the front again.
Greer spotted her and gave her the stink eye around Jax as he stood next to her table, clearly trying to talk her into emergency-waitressing for him. Ali smiled broadly as she headed out the exit. Greer would never be able to flat-out refuse their brother-in-law’s brother. And in Ali’s opinion, her legal-eagle sister could stand an hour or two slinging drinks like common folk.
The traffic was backed up so badly on the highway that it took Ali nearly an hour to work her way through it. She had to weave slowly between cars on both sides of the road with her beacon flashing before she got to the sight of
