“You bring law enforcement trouble here?”
Samantha waited.
Grizzly did not finish.
He did not need to.
She nodded.
“Understood.”
The first three hours nearly destroyed her.
The Devil’s Keep did not have cocktails with citrus spirals and handmade syrups.
It had whiskey.
Beer.
More whiskey.
Shots with names Samantha suspected had been invented solely to embarrass new bartenders.
Men ordered three things simultaneously and then acted offended if she remembered only two.
Some tried crude jokes.
Some tried silence.
Others simply watched.
It was not flirtation.
Not mostly.
It was testing.
The room wanted to know whether she would panic.
Samantha had spent six years learning how to conceal fear from Reuben Bowman.
Compared with that, impatient bikers were almost straightforward.
At one point a massive member nicknamed Meat reached across the counter and caught her wrist while she was passing him a bottle.
Every nerve in Samantha’s body ignited.
For half a second, she was back in the kitchen at home.
Reuben’s hand.
Reuben’s voice.
Do not walk away from me.
She forced herself to stay in the present.
She looked down at Meat’s hand.
Then up at his face.
“If you spill that beer,” she said evenly, “you’re paying twice.”
The room paused.