The Sinner's Old Lady

The glass squeaked under the rag. Cassidy Monroe works the same stretch of mahogany bar for the third time, watching the pool table at the back of The Last Stop in the reflection off the bottles on the shelf. Five of them clustered round the felt. Preach at the head, his spiderweb tattoo crawling up into his collar as he leans over a shot. The prospect — new kid, barely twenty, already with that desperate hungry look — knocks it back and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. The club is patching him in tonight. Third one this month. August heat presses against the windows. The air-conditioning unit wheezes in the corner like it is dying. The jukebox cycles through something country and slow, the kind of song that makes men drink more than they meant to. She does not look at the man at the far end of the bar. Not directly. He came in two hours ago and ordered one drink. Jack is federal. Jack has been federal the entire time, including the night he pulled her out of something nobody else in that building would have, and including every conversation since. What follows: a locket never taken off, a root beer and a wire, a hospital visit that cannot be explained away, doughnuts and a debt, a two percent discrepancy in somebody's books, a rat in the stacks, a lock she cannot open, and a handler's ultimatum delivered with a file already open. *He's a federal agent who lied to you from the moment you met.* *He didn't coerce me. He saved my life.* He had been wearing a wire when he kissed her. He had been building a case when he promised to protect her. Contemporary motorcycle club romance with an undercover agent, a bartender who has been club property in everything but name since she was nineteen, a two percent accounting error that will get somebody killed, explicit scenes, and a hard-won happy ending.