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  “Yes, do that.” The woman flopped into the chair by the open window and fired up one of those smokeless cigarette things. “Make it fast. You know, how I showed you yesterday.”

  “Right.” Kayla pushed the cleaning cart into the dingy alcove between the bed space and the bathroom. As she stared at the filthy sink area, overflowing with empty beer bottles and pizza boxes, she gave herself the usual mantra-like reminder that this was her life now.

  Employed. Drug-free. Poor as shit, but other than that, without any real worries.

  “Don’t fuck it up, K,” she said under her breath as she shook out a fresh garbage bag and started scraping the detritus of what looked like a nice party into it. The bottles clinked together as wafts of old beer and pot filled her senses, triggering her synapses even as she used all her mental power not to grab the bottles and turn them up into her mouth.

  Once the sink was cleaned out with near straight bleach so strong she’d gone home the last few nights with her fingertips faded, she turned her attention to the toilet and tub. With a sigh, she put on fresh gloves and picked up three used condoms, an empty tube of lube, more beer bottles. The tub was disgusting, ringed with dirt, while the fiberglass shower walls were streaked with God knew what. She sprayed, wiped, splashed hot water all over it, then set herself to the task of cleaning the toilet and the floors.

  “Hurry up in there,” her minder called.

  She emerged, eyes streaming and nose running from the strength of the chemicals. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever found in a room?”

  “Girl, you do not want to know that.” The woman heaved herself up from the chair and checked her clipboard. “Come on. We’re behind. You’re taking too long on those toilets.”

  “It was pretty gross.”

  “They’re all gross. People are disgusting. Ask any hotel room maid.” The woman tucked the clipboard under her arm and glared at Kayla. “But we’re on the clock, and the manager doesn’t pay overtime. Let’s go.”

  Kayla nodded and pushed the cart out of the room, after looking back once, recalling all the times she’d disgusti-fied a hotel room, leaving behind way worse than what she’d found in this one. Shutting the door on the room, and the memories before she allowed them to take hold and pull her into a mire of longing for those days, she turned, resigned to another long day of sheets, bleach and berating.

  “Hello, I’m looking for Kayla Hettinger.” A stranger was standing on the balcony of the one-and-a-half-star no-tell motel where she now worked. The stranger was a strikingly beautiful woman with long black hair and light-brown skin, a Latina, Kayla figured, but without a trace of any accent.

  Her minder turned toward the newcomer, her usual frown etched deeper into her dark skin. She took a quick look at the other woman and launched into a barrage of rapid-fire Spanish which was met with a response in kind. Kayla stood between them, waiting for the angry conversation to end, studying her ragged fingernails and jonesing for a hit, a pop, anything to get her through this day that stretched out in front of her like an endless, empty highway.

  “Come with me,” the strange, gorgeous woman said, grabbing her arm and tugging her away from the cleaning cart.

  “Um, what?”

  “You go with her, you’re fired, do you hear me, girl?”

  “Hang on a second,” she said, yanking herself out of the other woman’s grip. “What the hell is going on? I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing but I need this job right now, lady.”

  The woman sighed. “I’m sorry, Kayla. I’m Melody Rodriguez.” The woman waited, as if seeking acknowledgment of this fact of her name. Kayla blinked at her, feeling her boss’s gaze on the back of her neck like a pair of lasers.

  “Yeah? So?” She took a step back, hand to her neck. Bleach smells filled her nose.

  “I’m… I know your brother, Trent. And I think he’d love to know you’re alive. Much less working here in Grand Rapids.”

  “My brother.” Her voice remained flat as she allowed her brain to open that tiny room she’d shut off long ago. The one where she had a brother, a house, a mother. A life.

  Her supervisor-slash-tormenter made a throat-clearing noise. But Kayla barely heard it. “I don’t think…”

  The other woman—Melody—smiled at her. “I run a bar. The FitzPub, over at Fitzgerald Brewing. Come with me and we can talk about a job, maybe?”

  Kayla recoiled from the woman’s outstretched hand. In her near forty years of life, no one had ever offered her a single kindness, one iota of helpfulness without an ulterior motive. She stared down at the cracked concrete balcony for a few seconds.

  “You don’t want this one working at your bar,” her minder scoffed. “She’s a junkie. She’ll drink up all your profits.”

  Kayla glanced over at the woman. Her pulse raced. Her mouth felt packed with cotton.

  Melody spat something in Spanish at her supervisor, who called her a whore. Kayla knew enough Spanish to recognize that word. “Come on, Kayla,” Melody said, turning slightly to indicate Kayla should precede her away from the dirty hotel rooms and hateful fellow employees.

  “Don’t come back,” her former minder grumbled behind her.

  Kayla kept her gaze pinned to Melody’s dark one. Her heartbeat hammered in her ears. She tried to swallow past the lump in her throat.

  “It’s all right,” Melody insisted. “You’re safe with me.”

  The woman behind them harrumphed again. Kayla peeled off her latex gloves, tossed them into the rolling trashcan and followed Melody without looking back.

  “We did you a favor. Don’t come back here looking for any more charity.” The sound of the hotel employee’s voice followed her across the balcony, down the steps and to Melody’s car. She hesitated, her fingertips resting on the door handle.

  Her brother. She was going to see Trent.

  Tears burned her eyes but long years spent not giving away any emotion stood her well. She blinked them back, got in the strange woman’s car and stared straight ahead. Luckily, she’d also had plenty of practice getting into strange cars on a whim, or in search of something better.

  Melody turned to face her. “I’m…um…dating your brother,” she said, her pretty face flushing at the words. “He may kill me for doing this, but after he told me about you I went off on my own to track you down.”

  Kayla raised an eyebrow, amused and yet anxious at the same time. “So, he doesn’t know I’m here, back in town?”

  “Nope, not yet anyway.” She put the car in gear. “But he loves you and was so worried and I…well, I guess I wanted to do something to make him happy.”

  “Lucky guy.” Kayla couldn’t even picture him anymore, much less as a grown man with a grown woman for a girlfriend. He’d only been eleven when she’d run away—escaped—from the hell she’d been inhabiting.

  “Yes, well, he’s had some troubles, too. He has a daughter. She lives with him most of the time. Taylor. She’s seventeen, you know, going on thirty.”

  “Hmm,” Kayla said, her mind spinning as her skin began to crawl with a need to escape. She couldn’t handle this right now. She’d moved back to Grand Rapids without a thought to even contacting Trent, even as her subconscious mind reminded her daily that she should reach out to him, to let him know she was alive, and more or less well. As she squeezed her fingers together, she started her inner counting trick.

  Count to a hundred. Then two hundred. If you still want to bolt after that, do it.

  Nine times out of ten, she didn’t.

  It was that tenth time that always got her in deep shit.

  Breathless, even after a two hundred count, she defaulted to her old faithful method, pressing her short fingernails on her left hand into her right upper arm, triggering the pain. The blessed, mind-calming pain.

  Chapter Three

  “Here, hold Her Highness for me,” Evelyn said, handing Rose to him over the top of the cluttered work table. Brock took the baby in one arm and set the computer
tablet in front of his sister-in-law. “Thanks.” She tugged the tablet closer to study it while he walked around the large office, jiggling the fussy kid.

  He’d discovered his inner nurturer as Uncle Brock and never turned down the opportunity to hold his niece. If anything, it calmed him. His therapist had walked him through endless discussions about it but he preferred to simply appreciate the sensation of her warm, milky-smelling body in his arms, the scent of her light-blonde hair, the way she would grin at him, flail her arms and bop him on the nose with a giggle.

  Now that she was mobile, she couldn’t stand to be held, which kept his brother and Evelyn on their toes. They had a full-time nanny but if they were both working late, she would bring the baby to the brewery after five, like she’d done today.

  The brewery was in the middle of a massive ramp-up of product as the decision to export beer overseas had been made, in light of the domestic competition in the craft beer sector. They had high hopes for a massive sales rise, but in the interim it meant running the brewery on a twenty-four-seven cycle. Something that had necessitated bringing in Ross Hoffman, the guy who was the biological father of the little girl who was attempting to climb his shoulders.

  “We are fucking certifiable,” Evelyn groaned before putting her head down on her arms. “We’ll never meet this goal. I don’t care how many people Ross runs through in there.”

  “Well, he’s not really doing the running through, you know. Hey, cut it out.” He pulled Rose off his head, wincing as she brought two handfuls of his hair with her. He tucked her under one arm like a flour sack, making her squeal and giggle as he galloped around the space a few times.

  “I know. It’s Elle. Between them, she and Ross are gonna make this happen, but I’m not sure at what cost, personnel-wise.”

  “I guess it’s a good thing their, ah, chemistry worked out so well.”

  She shot him an arch look as he flopped onto the couch, exhausted from a four a.m. run, and a full day of work as the official brewery gopher. Rose clambered up his torso again, then settled herself on the back of the couch, kicking at his shoulder, sucking her thumb and studying her mother from across the room.

  “Yes. I suppose that it is.”

  His phone buzzed with a text. As he dug it from his pocket, he felt the regular evening ritual creep up on him. The ant army was mustering along his spine, readying themselves for the march up to his scalp. He sighed and stared down at the message, blinking when he realized who it was from.

  Hey, Brock. Wondering if you’d like to come over tonight for dinner. It would be safe. Other friends are coming, too. XO. Caro.

  His little niece chose that moment to straddle his neck and yank his hair, which was a perfect distraction. He tossed the phone down and stood, delighting the girl, who kicked and flailed and made word-like noises that sounded like “Bock! Bock!”

  Evelyn glanced up at her daughter, who was currently astride Brock’s shoulders. “Great. She says that before she says Ma or even Da?”

  “I have that sort of effect on ladies, you know.”

  “Or she could be doing her chicken imitation. She’s somewhat fascinated by them, or at least videos of them.” She returned her focus to the tablet screen, scrolling through the production and sales projections for the coming weeks.

  “Nice. Way to crush my tender ego, evil bitch,” he said as he headed for the door. Sitting was no longer an option. Caroline’s invitation remained on his phone, burning a hole in his brain. He needed to move around. “Want anything?”

  “What?” She glanced up. “Oh, sure. If you don’t mind.”

  “The usual?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Don’t drop my kid in the mash tun on the way.”

  “I’ll do my best.” He held on to the girl’s legs as he made his way down the metal steps from Evelyn’s office to the original brewery floor. Elle, their new lady brewer, a petite German chick with wild-ass dreadlocks, tatts and piercings as far as his eye could see and an attitude just shy of a four-star general, had demanded that they run production not only in the main, modern brewery one building over, but also in this smaller, original version. Brewer-types scurried around, ramping up for the second shift as he wandered among them, allowing Madam Rose to soak up her fair share of attention.

  He heard a door slam, a loud curse and a string of German. He walked over to let Elle see whose tender ears she was abusing before heading into the pub to fetch a beer for Evelyn and a ginger ale for himself.

  Ginger ale. So lame.

  But it was his only option, now.

  Elle smiled up at the little girl as he took a few seconds to admire her in her labeled T-shirt, cargo shorts and rubber boots—the de rigueur brewer’s uniform. But on her it was especially nice since she always cut the neck of the T down to the black sports bra and sliced off the sleeves, leaving her lean, inked arms in full view.

  “Looking good, as always, m’lady,” he said, tipping an invisible hat to her when he heard the answering growl of German behind him. Ross, the just-as-bossy prima donna German brewer Austin had met in school in Munich and who had, somehow, inserted himself in the middle of Austin and Evelyn’s relationship a few years prior. Resulting in the precocious girl now yanking on his hair again like a horse jockey.

  He knew everyone was stressed beyond belief and making small talk at this point was useless. Besides, he’d spent a fair bit of energy flirting with the exotic, sexy Elle only to receive her firm rebuff—before she turned her attentions to Ross.

  “God damn it, Hoffman, I knew you were a complete idiot, but I…” she was saying in accented English.

  He wandered away, leaving them to their German-English tangle of argument. As he walked through the empty hallway behind the brewery that connected to the FitzPub, he hummed and chatted with Rose. Which allowed him to keep the evening ant-march at bay.

  He rounded the corner and headed into the kitchen, pulling Rose down off his shoulders. There was too much hot grease and other crap flying around in there to be safe, much to Her Highness’ chagrin of course.

  “Chill, sister. You’ll have plenty of other reasons to be pissy at me. Save it for a future moment.” He held on to the girl, waved at the cooks and other staff, then emerged behind the bar. The smell of beer hit him hard as it always did. He choked down the urge to fill a pitcher of Fitzgerald’s finest anything and drink it all at once.

  Melody, the hot little Hispanic number who ran the place, was laughing with some patrons at the far end. The three bartenders were pouring, taking food orders, the usual. Once he set Rose on the bar near Melody, she proceeded to try to crawl down the expanse of sealed concrete.

  “Whoa there, Miss Thing,” he said, snatching her back up and installing her on his shoulders once more. It seemed to be the safest place. “Jesus, she wears me out.”

  Melody bumped his shoulder. “Everyone’s worn out these days, eh?”

  “You can say that again.” He smiled when a woman he’d never seen before approached him and put down a coaster. “Hel-lo there,” he said with a grin, at the precise moment Rose sneezed. He felt the splatter against his cheeks and the top of the hand he had out to greet the lovely, strange new FitzPub employee.

  “Gross,” the woman said, handing him a napkin. She didn’t even acknowledge the girl sitting on his shoulders. Odd, since that was the first thing most women noticed. As he swiped at the Rose snot, he watched her pour two beers for someone else, then turn back to face him.

  She was tall, very thin, with huge, greenish-brown eyes, full lips and sharp cheekbones. Despite the heat, she wore a long-sleeved version of the FitzPub T-shirt, which engulfed her as if she were playing dress-up with someone else’s clothing. She smiled at him—if he could call it that since it was more a soft lifting of the corners of her lips for a few seconds, before she busied herself, pulling empty glassware out of the bar-level dishwasher and stacking them on their appropriate shelves.

  “Who is that,” he whispered to Melody.

  �
��Huh?” She looked up from her phone. “Oh, that’s Kayla. She’s Trent’s sister.”

  “Trent? Your main man? Captain Business?”

  She rolled her dark eyes at him. “Yes. Him.”

  “Ah, I see.” He eyed the new chick’s rear view as she stretched to reach the highest shelves with the clean glasses. “I also see the resemblance.”

  Melody shot him a look. “Hands off, lover boy,” she warned. “That girl is a hot mess.”

  “Yeah? And I’m not?”

  “Whatever. Listen, Trent and I are having people out to the lake house in a few weeks, once this craziness is done here. You’re invited. Bring a date.” She blew him a kiss and headed around the bar and into the kitchen, talking six miles a minute en Español.

  “We’re a regular United Nations around here, aren’t we, Princess?” He kissed Rose’s chubby knee and sat for a few minutes, watching Kayla work. She was graceful, like a dancer, but never met anyone’s eyes for very long. She had a habit of tugging the already overstretched sleeves of the shirt even farther, as if hiding something.

  And like that, he realized he was gazing at a fellow junkie. “Takes one to know one, kid,” he said, raising a finger to get her attention.

  “Hi, I’m Brock Fitzgerald.” He held out the hand that hadn’t gotten befouled earlier. She did that weird almost-smile thing again and touched her fingertips to his before giving her sleeve another tug.

  “Kayla,” she said, her voice soft and sing-songy. “Nice to meet you. This is your place?” She gestured around the bar.

  “Ha! Hardly. Or better yet, I wish. It’s my brother Austin’s place. Well, his and Evelyn’s, I guess.” He pulled Rose down, mainly because his neck was getting a little too warm all of a sudden. “This beautiful creature is Rose Fitzgerald. My niece.”