LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter One

      “I’m getting married.”

      Jack Wright nodded his head in response. Three things had brought him to this conclusion. Number one, she was carrying a stack of bridal magazines. Number two, she was wearing a rock on her ring finger that was so large, he had to wonder if it needed its own zip code.

      But the truly telling sign was the fact that she had mentioned it no less than ten times in the five minutes she’d been talking to him in The Wright Drink, his dad’s bar.

       My bar.

      Jack silently admonished himself. He now owned the bar and had to start acting like an entrepreneur. First order of business—dealing with the bride-to-be.

      “Ms. Mitchell,” he began.

      “Soon to be Mrs. Cross,” she added brightly, clutching the magazines to her light pink dress. “But please call me Trina.”

      “Right. Trina. I still don’t see how I can help you.”

      “My fiancé, Nick, and I met here a little over a year ago. Right over there, at the jukebox.” She gestured in that direction, with a dreamy expression on her face.

      “So you’d like to have your wedding here?”

      The look of horror that flashed onto her face was so severe, you would have thought he’d suggested she get married in a maximum-security prison.

      “I’d actually like to have my bachelorette party here. And Nick, my fiancé, wants to start his bachelor-party night here, as well.”

      While he’d attended his fair share of bachelor shindigs, he knew next to nothing about bachelorette parties. Jack pushed a hand through his dark hair and glanced around the gloomy, dank, unappealing bar. The gloomy, dank, unappealing bar that he now owned.

      As if reading his mind, Trina blushed. “Although, I hope you don’t mind me saying, this place seems a bit, um, different than when Nick and I met here.”

      What a polite way of saying it was a dump.

      He sighed. “Well, my dad recently passed away.”

      “I’m so sorry,” Trina said with true sincerity.

      “The bar was left to me and it’s hit a rough spot. I’m not sure that hosting a party—of any kind—is the best idea at the moment.”

      Trina’s eyes widened. “Oh please don’t say that. How about this? Why don’t you think about it? I’ll leave my cell number and you can give me a call.” She grabbed a napkin from the bar, scribbled her number and handed it over.

      Jack took the flimsy paper gingerly. He knew he needed to be frank with her.

      “Trina, since you’ve mentioned it, I know how the bar looks now. I have to wonder why you’re still so interested in having these parties here when you could go to a much nicer place.”

      “Because this place is special to us,” she said simply.

      Something about the statement clenched at Jack’s heart and he had to take a deep, steadying breath. The place meant something to her. Shouldn’t he feel the same way?

      He couldn’t reply, so he nodded his head again. A smile blossomed on Trina’s face. “Okay, just think about it. If I don’t hear from you in a week, I’ll follow up. Plenty of other wedding plans to keep me busy in the meantime.”

      He’d have to take her word for it, since he was hardly any kind of wedding aficionado.

      “Talk to you soon,” she said before flouncing out the front door.

      Since the bar wasn’t open for business yet, Jack flipped the lock. Not that customers would be clambering to get in when he did open the doors for happy hour. Aside from the engaged Ms. Mitchell, soon to be Mrs. Cross, interest in The Wright Drink lay only with a handful of regulars who had been frequenting the place since Jack was a child.

      Not for the first time today, his fingers twitched as he reached for the MIA pack of cigarettes he gave up six months ago.

      He walked to the back of the room and glanced at the pile of bills spread across the long, wooden bar in front of him. Jack cracked his knuckles. He probably needed reading glasses. Just like his old man had worn.

      His old man.

      Jack still couldn’t believe he was gone. While he knew his dad loved him, they hadn’t been particularly close in years. No games of catch in the backyard, after dinner. After all, it was hard to do anything after dinner when you didn’t usually sit down for a traditional meal. But that’s what came of a dad who owned a bar. He’d spent all of his time at The Wright Drink when Jack was a kid. And the bar had thrived.

      If he believed Trina’s account, and he had no reason not to, the bar had taken a turn for the worse within the last year. According to several of his dad’s friends, that’s when his father’s health had started to deteriorate. Not surprising for someone who had smoked for well over forty years. Still, no one could ever prepare for the call that their dad had passed away.

      Those same friends had also informed Jack that even though his dad’s health had been declining, he refused to stop working at the bar. He came in rain or snow, good health or bad. Looking around now, he could see that The Wright Drink had suffered as much as his dad.

      After high school graduation, Jack had gone off to college on a baseball scholarship and played in the minors for a couple of years, until a knee injury put an end to that. He’d decided to travel. Backpacked through Europe. Spent some time in both Brazil and Iceland—talk about polar opposites. Eventually he’d settled in Vegas. He’d begun dealing at the blackjack tables at a fancy casino, as a favor to a friend. He’d actually enjoyed interacting with different people every night. He had worked hard and moved up the ranks, until he was a supervisor, overseeing the whole casino floor.

      Jack began to pace; his long legs were eating up the distance from behind the bar, through the area of high-top tables and past the cluster of wall-mounted television sets. Another trait he’d inherited from his father.

      Still, no amount of walking was going to get him out of this jam. His father had died of a very sudden heart attack, and he’d left the bar and his house to Jack. The Wright Drink had seen better days. It needed a cosmetic overhaul. It also needed a financial miracle. The pile of bills wasn’t going to shrink itself.

      In their weekly—okay, sometimes more like biweekly—phone calls, James Wright had never let on that he was in trouble. If he had...

      Jack

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