Rachel Gibson: Tangled Up In You

She really hoped he’d showed up sooner rather than later. Before she had too many martinis and forgot why she was sitting on a barstool eavesdropping on needy passive-aggressive women and delusional men. Not that listening in on people with lives more pathetic than hers couldn’t be highly entertaining at times.

She set the glass back on the bar. Eavesdropping wasn’t her first choice. She much preferred the straightforward approach: digging into people’s lives and plumbing their dirty little secrets without distraction. Some people gave up their secrets without protest, eager to tell all. Others forced her to reach deep, rattle them loose or rip them out by the roots. Her work was sometimes messy, always gritty, but she loved writing about serial killers, mass murderers, and your everyday run-of-the-mill psychopaths.

Really, a girl had to excel at something, and Maddie, writing as Madeline Dupree, was one of the best true crime writers in the genre. She wrote blood and gore. About the sick and disturbed, and there were those who thought, her friends among them, that what she wrote warped her personality. She liked to think it added to her charm.

The truth was somewhere in the middle. The things she’d seen and written about did affect her. No matter the barrier she placed between her sanity and the people she interviewed and researched, their sickness sometimes seeped through the cracks, leaving behind a black tacky film that was hard as hell to scrub clean.

Her job made her see the world a little differently than those who’d never sat across from a serial killer while he got off on the retelling of his “work.” But those same things also made her a strong woman who didn’t take crap from anyone. Very little intimidated her, and she didn’t have any illusions about mankind. In her head, she knew that most people were decent. That given the choice, they would do the right thing, but she also knew about the others. The fifteen percent who were only interested in their own selfish and warped pleasure. Out of that fifteen percent, only about two percent were actual serial killers. The other social deviants were just your everyday rapists, murderers, thugs, and corporate executives secretly plundering their employees’ 401(k) accounts.

And if there was one thing she knew as certainly as she knew the sun would rise in the east and set in the west, it was that everyone had secrets. She had a few of her own. She just held hers closer to the vest than most people.

She raised the glass to her lips and her gaze was drawn to the end of the bar. A door in the back opened and a man stepped from the lit alley and into the dark hall.

Maddie knew him. Knew him before he walked from the shadows. Before the shadows slid up the wide chest and shoulders of his black T-shirt. Knew him before the light slipped across his chin and nose and shone in his hair as black as the night from which he’d come.

He moved behind the bar, wrapping a red bar apron around his hips and tying the strings above his fly. She’d never met him. Never been in the same room, but she knew he was thirty-five, a year older than herself. She knew he was six-two, one hundred and ninety pounds. For twelve years he’d served in the army, flying helicopters and raining Hellfire missiles. He’d been named after his father, Lochlyn Michael Hennessy, but he went by Mick. Like his father, he was an obscenely good-looking man. The kind of good-looking that turned heads, stopped hearts, and gave women bad thoughts. Thoughts of hot mouths and hands and tangled clothes. The whisper of warm breath against the arch of a woman’s throat and the touch of flesh in the backseat of a car.

Not that Maddie was susceptible to those thoughts.

He had an older sister, Meg, and he owned two bars in town, Mort’s and Hennessy’s. The latter had been in his family longer than he’d been alive. Hennessy’s, the bar where Maddie’s mother had worked. Where she’d met Loch Hennessy and where she’d died.

As if he felt her gaze, he glanced up from the strings of the apron. He stopped a few feet from Maddie and his eyes met hers. She choked on the gin that refused to go down her throat. From his driver’s license, she knew his eyes were blue, but they were more a deep turquoise. Like the Caribbean Sea, and seeing them looking back at her was a shock. She lowered her glass and raised a hand to her mouth.

The last strains of the honky-tonk song died out as he finished tying the strings, and he stepped closer until only a few feet of mahogany separated his gaze from hers. “You going to live?” His deep voice cut through the noise around them.

She swallowed and coughed one last time. “I believe so.”

“Hey, Mick,” the blonde on the next stool called out.

“Hey, Darla. How’re things?”

“Could be better.”

“Isn’t that always the case?” he said as he gazed at the woman. “Are you planning on behaving yourself?”

“You know me.” Darla laughed. “I always plan on it. Course, I can always be persuaded to misbehave.”

“You’re going to keep your underwear on tonight, though. Right?” he asked with a lift of one dark brow.

“You never can tell about me.” She leaned forward. “You never know what I might do. Sometimes I’m crazy.”

Just sometimes? Buying her own birthday card for her boyfriend to sign suggested a passive/ aggressive disorder that bordered on crazy as hell.

“Just keep your panties on so I don’t have to toss you out on your bare butt again.”

Again? Meaning it had happened before? Maddie took a drink and slid her gaze to Darla’s considerable behind squeezed into a pair of Wranglers.

“I just bet you all would love to see that!” Darla said with a toss of her hair.

For the second time that night, Maddie choked on her drink.

Mick’s deep chuckle drew Maddie’s attention to the amusement shining through his startling blue eyes. “Honey, do you need some water?” he asked.

She shook her head and cleared her throat.

“That drink too strong for you?”

“No. It’s fine.” She coughed one last time and set her glass on the bar. “I just got a horrifying visual.”

The corners of his lips turned up into a knowing smile that made two dents in his tan cheeks. “I haven’t seen you in here before. You just passing through?”

She forced the image of Darla’s big bare butt from her head and her mind back on the reason she was in Mort’s. She’d expected to dislike Mick Hennessy on sight. She didn’t. “No. I bought a house out on Red Squirrel Road.”

“Nice area. Are you on the lake?”

“Yes.” She wondered if Mick had inherited his father’s charm along with his looks. From what Maddie had been able to gather, Loch Hennessy had charmed women into the sack with little more than a look in their direction. He’d certainly charmed her mother.

“Are you here for the summer, then?”

“Yes.”

He tilted his head to one side and studied her face. His gaze slid from her eyes to her mouth and lingered for several heartbeats before he looked back up. “What’s your name, brown eyes?”

“Maddie,” she answered, holding a breath as she waited for him to connect her with the past. His past.

“Just Maddie?”

“Dupree,” she answered, using her pen name.

Someone down the bar called his name and he glanced away for a moment before returning his attention to her. He gave her an easy smile. One that brought out those dimples of his and softened his masculine face. He didn’t recognize her. “I’m Mick Hennessy.” The music started once more and he said, “Welcome to Truly. Maybe I’ll see you around.”

She watched him walk away without telling him the reason she was in town and why she was sitting in Mort’s. Now wasn’t the best time or place, but there was no “maybe” about it. He didn’t know it yet, but Mick Hennessy would be seeing a lot of her. Next time he might not be so welcoming.