Trading Down (Winner Takes All, #1) Read online

  Winner Takes All: 1

  Trading Down

  PJ Adams

  James Grieve Press

  Join the PJ Adams mailing list for all the latest news and deals.

  www.pollyjadams.com/about.php

  Contents

  Trading Down

  Afters: about the author, and hot samples from other books

  Trading Down

  1

  It was just a normal night until the stranger in the tux turned up at Pappy’s Lobster Bar.

  Old Bub was in his corner, in his checkered shirt and suspenders that hitched his pants almost up into his armpits, and that woolen cap on the crown of his head like a kippah. He’d been cradling that Bud for at least an hour, just like any other night. Finn was by the jukebox, feeding it enough coins for a steady stream of Billy Joel.

  Cassie stood behind the bar, her elbows leaning on its scuffed surface. She could recite the words from anything from 52nd Street thanks to Finn and his musical OCD.

  Cassie was slim and honey blonde, a silver stud in her nose, half a dozen rings and studs lined up around each ear lobe, and an oriental script tattoo on one exposed shoulder. She’d worked at Pappy’s for two seasons now, and by anybody’s reckoning that was probably a season too long for anyone who had an alternative.

  Over by the window a young couple in disposable plastic bibs wrestled with plates loaded with lobster. On a good day you could see across to Holbrook Island from where they sat but on a teeming night like tonight there was just a splattering of golfball-sized raindrops on the glass and the flickering lights of the trailer park, heading down to the bay.

  That rain was something. It was good Fall Maine kind of rain: giant drops hurled horizontal by the wind coming in off the bay. That was the kind of wind that made the glass rattle in the window-frames like either wood or glass would give way at any moment, the kind of wind that made trees grow leaning over flat as if they wanted to hug the ground.

  A week more and Pappy’s would be closed down for the winter. Not that the locals didn’t have a call for beer and good food in the winter months, but this was the kind of place where sensible folk put things by for winter rather than heading out. True, it was the kind of place where Finn and Old Bub would wrap up warm and trek through snow and ice to get here for the jukebox and beer, if the owner Lou was fool enough to stay open, but the delivery guys, well they were made of something far softer these days.

  So the place closed down for winter, and Lou and his family headed south to their Daytona Beach trailer home. That left the likes of Cassie to do whatever they could to get through a few fallow months.

  But closing down for a Maine winter was still a week away, and right now it was just the two grizzled regulars and a young couple who for some reason had thought late Fall in Maine was a good idea.

  It was not the kind of a night, or the kind of a place, where you would expect to find Denny McGowan.

  §

  “Hey, Bub. You going to drink that beer or shall I wrap it so you can take it home?” Same old line, same old grunt of a response. Old Bub would be there till ten, down the rest of his Bud in a single swallow, and then head out into the night.

  Cassie glanced across towards the window table. The young couple didn’t need anything yet. Back to her nails, hooker red and chipped. That kind of summed up how she felt right then. Cheap and worn. She liked it here at Pappy’s, but was she really going to be back in March to open up again? Was this her life now that she’d lasted more than a solitary season?

  She took a cloth and gave the bar a spray and a wipe, even though it already had enough shine that she could do her face in it.

  All this cleaning, it was wrecking her hands. The skin was dry. It made her feel old when she wasn’t even 25 until January. She hated this time of year, hated this sinking feeling, the Fall blues. She needed change. She needed something new.

  She needed this not to be it.

  Just then, with perfect timing, the door burst open, slamming against the wall as the gale took it. Standing there, framed in the doorway, was the guy Cassie would come to know as Denny McGowan.

  In that tailored tux he looked like he should be someplace else entirely, but yet... it looked like he had walked here. On a night like this! His patent leather shoes were scuffed and dirty, there was mud around the cuffs of his pants; his shirt was untucked, his undone bow tie hanging loose. His jacket hung heavy with the rain, and his black hair was plastered to his skull. Maybe there had been an accident, or his car had broken down back on the highway.

  Then, with a cheeky grin that cracked his face and put a sparkle in his eyes, he reached into his pocket, produced a fat roll of hundred dollar bills, and casually thumbed one free of the sodden mass of paper.

  “So tell me, what does a guy have to do to get a drink around here?” he asked in an accent somewhere between Boston and genuine Irish, and then he stepped inside, pulling the door shut behind him and shutting the wild storm out.

  §

  A pause, and then the slight raising of one eyebrow was the stranger’s response to the six pairs of eyes trained on him – even Lou had emerged from the kitchen to see who had let the storm in.

  “A bourbon and ice, no water,” the guy said, when it became clear that the silence and the hillbilly stares weren’t going to break so easily. “And a towel would be grand, if you have such a thing.”

  Cassie reached for a glass, clanking it loudly, finally breaking the spell. The poor guy was standing there, water dripping from him, and staring eyes weren’t going to dry him or warm him. She poured him a generous measure of nine year-old Knob Creek. It was that or Jack Daniel’s and he didn’t look like a JD kind of a guy.

  He came up to the bar, but Cassie didn’t hand him the drink. Instead she turned, stepped into the back room, what Lou liked to call his den, and then glanced back. She’d decided to spare him trying to get dry in the washrooms.

  The stranger followed her. She didn’t know how someone as wet as he was could still move the way he did, like a big cat, muscles and joints rolling smoothly as he walked.

  Gray eyes with a hint of blue... steel eyes that still had that smile in them.

  The guy had quite a presence, she’d give him that.

  She found a fresh hand-towel and tossed it to him. “You’ll have to go to Blue Rise Inn about half a mile up the highway if you want anything bigger to dry yourself with,” she said.

  He laughed, and started to scrub at his hair. “That’s about the kindest offer I’ve had all night,” he said. He pulled at one end of his bow-tie and it slid around his neck and then was free. When he started to unbutton his white dress shirt, Cassie turned away to place his drink on the desk.

  “I could see if Lou has any spare pants...?”

  His shirt hung open as he toweled at his torso and then under his arms. He was a leanly muscled man, not an ounce of spare fat, a belly that was flat and hard, with just the hint of a ripple as he flexed and turned. A fuzz of dark hair followed the contours of pecs, breastbone and down across his abs.

  “Thanks, but no,” he said. “Just a towel, a drink and some distraction’s all I’m after.”

  Distraction...

  Cassie realized she was staring at that abdominal ripple, the dark hair thickening down to where he’d freed his belt and the top button of his pants.

  Jesus, but what had gotten into her? You’d think she’d never seen a man’s body before. She tore her eyes away, looked up to meet those steely eyes, and said, “You want anything I’ll be just outside, you hear?”

  §

  “Did you see that roll of Benjamins?” Bub said to her, leaning across the bar and talking in a stage whisper. “I
thought when you went back there with him you were going to give the guy a good time for a one or two of those notes. Hell, I’d give the guy a good time for a one of those!”

  “How d’you know she didn’t?” said Finn, coming across to join them. “She sure wasn’t smilin’ like that before!”

  Cassie laughed at the two old-timers. “I was there half a minute,” she said, “I’m good, but I’m not that good.”

  She turned away, and the guy was standing there, leaning against the door-frame, bourbon in one hand, and that small, wet hand-towel trailing from the other. He’d fastened his shirt up. He’d even put his tie back on, knotted in a loose bow.

  Cassie didn’t know what this guy was doing here at Pappy’s Lobster Bar on a night like this, but she sure knew trouble when it was staring her right in the face with that disarming twinkle in its eye.

  §

  “So, you been someplace fancy tonight?”

  He sat on a tall stool, halfway down his second bourbon. “Nowhere fancier than this, I reckon.”

  Cassie looked at him, unsure how to take that. “You hungry, Lou’s still out back. Do you a steak, or a lobster. Got anywhere up to three and a half pounds, you want to see them.”

  “No stomach for food right now,” he said. “This is a whiskey and cigarettes kind of night if ever there was one. And Hell, I don’t even smoke.”

  “We got a machine over by the door, you want to start.”

  He cracked a smile again at that, then took another long pull of bourbon. That smile of his kind of stole over his entire face and made it a different kind of a face all together.

  “Maybe I will,” he said. “It’s not as if–”

  “Not as if what?”

  “Ach, it’s nothing. You don’t want to be standing there listening to me getting all maudlin, now.”

  It was Cassie’s turn to fix him with a raised-eyebrow stare.

  “A stranger in a bespoke tuxedo turns up in a bar halfway to freaking New Brunswick, walks in out of a storm peeling hundred dollar bills off a fat, soaking bundle he produces from his pocket... Guy does all that and then he sits staring into his drink like he wishes he’d found himself a bridge to jump off. You’re fooling with me, right? Save for Old Bub getting a new set of winter tires on his Chevy Apache, you’re the most interesting thing that’s happened in this neck of the woods since they paved the roads.”

  He laughed at that. She seemed to have found the knack for making him break out that big face-splitting grin. Not a bad skill to finally discover you have, all in all.

  “You’re not from round here, are you?” he asked.

  Cassie shook her head. She could smell someone changing the subject a mile off when they did it as clumsily as this guy, but she decided not to call him on it right now. “Me? No. Been here two seasons. I’m a Brooklyn girl.”

  “So what brings you here?”

  “Career,” she said, straight-faced. “It’s part of a long-term plan.”

  “Sure,” he said, “and I’m Mother fucking Theresa.”

  “You’re looking wicked good for your age. And your gender realignment. And, you know, being dead and all.” Then she softened. Guy was just looking to make a little conversation, after all. “Long dull story of bad luck and worse choices is what brought me here,” she explained. “We close for winter next week. Not sure what I’ll be doing after that.”

  “You got choices?”

  “I got choices. Maybe go back to school, maybe just head south and see where I end up. Get me some winter sun. Things usually work out okay.” She’d never really thought of it in that way before. She’d been getting too down recently – end of season blues. But it was true: things did usually work out okay. “So,” she said, “you dress like this every time you decide to go out walking in a storm?”

  “I do.” His turn to stay poker-faced. “I’m a better class of storm-hiker.”

  “Finest kind,” she said. She filled his empty glass without waiting to be asked, and then poured one for herself and said, “Thanks.”

  That raised eyebrow again.

  “It’s on your check,” she explained, “so thanks.” She raised her glass and took a sip, enjoying that first whiskey burn in the back of her throat.

  “Sláinte.” He raised his own glass and drank. “It sure has been a night to remember.” Then: “The kind of night to remember you really want to forget.”

  “A girl?”

  He nodded.

  “There’s always a girl.”

  Again, the raised eyebrow, the twinkle. “That your story, too: was it a girl?” he asked.

  Cassie shrugged. “Almost. Well, I guess yes, there was a girl in there. But no, it was a guy really. A guy, a BMW, a can of paint stripper. You know how it goes.”

  “Sounds far more interesting than mine,” he said. “Something tells me you’re not a girl to mess with.”

  Outside, a big gust shook the building to its foundations, and the rain came down as if someone was throwing buckets of water at the windows.

  He wasn’t easy work, this guy whose name she still didn’t know, but Cassie was never going to complain at the change of scenery before her. Those eyes, the smile, the square jaw, the even covering of dark stubble. The way his eyes would find hers, as if seeking some kind of connection. She could understand that: the connection thing, the need for there to be at least something.

  She needed more than this.

  “I’ve decided,” she said now. “This is it. My last season here. I’m going to move on and find something different.”

  He seemed to approve. “And what would that be? This ‘different’?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think? What do you see me doing?” It was said in all innocence, but...

  ...the eyebrow. Raised. The twinkle in the eye; the flash of white teeth. The tease in his look.

  “Yeah yeah,” she said. “In your dreams, buddy. In your dreams.”

  Maybe that was it: the moment when that connection thing between two strangers became something more, or at least something with the possibility of more.

  In your dreams.

  2

  You can tell a lot about a man from the way he treats the people beneath him.

  Cassie had worked in bars, restaurants and hotels the length of the Eastern Seaboard. She was used to seeing things from the other side, seeing how she was treated, or mistreated, or simply ignored.

  This guy, this stranger who said his name was Denny and that there was nothing more of interest about him... sure: nothing of interest about him in his tux and his roll of hundred dollar bills. Anyway: this guy, he’d treated her like an equal, or at least as if she was someone who could hold his interest for more than the time it took to order another drink. He’d flirted and joked, and seemed to enjoy himself. She was used to that, of course. She was young and slim and she knew she had the kind of looks that pressed buttons for a certain kind of man. A bit of the chat from a lonely customer was nothing new. Hell, she got that every night from Finn and Old Bub.

  But his true colors showed when the door flew open again and they had an unseasonal rush of customers – two families down from Bangor. After he’d got over that initial, weird as Hell moment of rabbit in the headlamps fright, he whirled into action, moving two long tables so they could all sit together, helping them with their chairs and their coats and joking about the wild night out there, just as if he’d worked here the last two seasons too.

  §

  That first reaction, though...

  As the door was pulled open a blast of cold, wet air rushed in, and the howl of the gale cut through any attempt at conversation. Everyone turned to look at the dark figure standing in the doorway, wrestling with the door.

  Denny stopped mid-sentence and twisted in his seat at the bar. His hand reached instinctively inside his tux, even though Cassie knew he wasn’t carrying. She’d seen him undressing: he was packing nothing more deadly than a tasty six-pack.

  As Denny’s eyes
skipped around the room, looking for alternative exits, the newcomer turned and shouted into the rain and then a bunch of laughing, giggling people pushed in past him and stood shaking themselves down underneath the moose head Lou insisted on keeping on the wall. It looked like three – no four, there was a baby tucked away inside one woman’s coat – generations of a family, determined to get out and make the most of being together, despite the near-hurricane blowing outside.

  Then Denny leaned across the bar to Cassie and said, “Looks like you could use some help.” With that, he downed the rest of his bourbon and stood, then strode over to help the first guy wrestle the door shut.

  It was over in an instant, that first reaction, the flash of fear... the indecision between fight or flight. But that reaction had definitely been there, and Cassie was reminded again of her initial impression that this enigmatic stranger looked like trouble.

  §

  “Well, I’m dressed like a waiter, so I guess...”

  He’d taken drinks orders as the newcomers took their seats, laughing and joking with them like an old hand, and then, while Cassie got the drinks he went back to take orders for food.

  All the time this was happening, Lou stood in the kitchen doorway with his arms folded across his barrel chest, and a bemused look on his face.

  “Hey, Lou,” said Denny, waving an order book in his direction, “you’d better get that griddle going. That’s a whole lot of steak.”

  Briefly, it was as if Denny had known him for years, then Lou snatched the order, turned on his heel and mouthed to Cassie: Who the fuck...?

  §

  “Well that was fun.” Denny raised a fresh glass of bourbon and chinked it with Cassie’s.

  That bow tie hung loose around his neck again, his shirt opened two buttons down, his tux draped over a nearby bar stool.

  “Looked like it’s not the first time you’ve done that.”

  He shrugged. “Long time ago,” he said. “Student days. It’s how I paid my way.”

  “Through...?”