Whisky on My Mind (5 page)

“That’s not what you’re suggesting by using your share of the bar as capital.”

Okay, so on paper, technically, it looked that way. God damn it,
Whisky swore silently. “I should be able to use my share of a very profitable business as some kind of collateral.”

“I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do.”

“I thought Christians weren’t supposed to go around judging people?” she snapped.

He gave a small shrug. “This is business.”

Whisky stood, and gathered her paperwork quickly, refusing to look at the self-important asshole across the desk. Her cheeks were warm, but she forced herself to ignore the fact she’d been dismissed without a fair hearing. “I
will
have a successful business one day, and you’ll be sorry you don’t have me as a customer. There’s plenty of other banks out there.”

“I’m afraid you’re only setting yourself up for disappointment. No one around here is about to back an outlaw biker club. You should be prepared for that.”

“Asshole,” she muttered under her breath as she left the bank and walked out into the bright sunshine. She sat in her car and gripped the steering wheel hard, as she forced herself to take a deep breath.
Ignore that jerk; he’s one man…with blue balls no doubt. Who cares what he thinks,
she said giving herself a mental pep talk.
Pick yourself up and dust yourself off.

She spent the rest of the morning making appointments for the next day and tried to think positive. Next time she’d be prepared. It may be proving a little more difficult than she originally thought, but she wasn’t about to give up yet. She couldn’t, this is what she’d been working toward for the last few years and she was not about to give up the fight because of one lame rejection.

****

“You look like the weight of the
world’s on your shoulders girl.”

Whisky looked up and summoned a tired smile for her old boss, Joe. On a whim she’d decided to stop in at the coffee shop where she used to work and boost her sagging morale with a coffee. She’d only worked here a few months, but they were the best few months of work she’d ever done—despite the painful, high strung clientele that seemed to come along with coffee addicts as customers.
“Hi Joe. I haven’t seen you around the last few times I’ve been in. How you been?”

“Not too bad.”

“How are your kids?” Joe was a man of few words usually; the only exception was when he talked about his kids. She loved that about him.

“They’re doing well, my daughter had her baby, so now I’m Grand Daddy Joe,” he beamed. 

“That’s great news. Congratulations,” Whisky grinned.

“How’s things with you?” he said after thanking her.

Whisky gave a small groan. “Don’t ask,” she said. Where did she even start? Whisky knew Joe wasn’t the kind to sit in judgment, but she fought the urge to squirm in her seat anyway. He’d been a great comfort to her when she’d lost her father and understanding when she’d had to resign to take on the Bar and Grill not long after. “How’s business?” she asked, hoping to change the subject.

“Busy as always—you know this town—it survives on coffee fumes.”

“I actually miss this place,” she said, looking around the shop wistfully.

“Tell me that after the morning rush. I think you might have forgotten how crazy this place gets then.”

Even at its craziest, it was better than the crappy diner she’d been working in before this place. She was almost tempted to walk past and see if it was still there—but then her old boss would probably take great delight in pointing out his thoughts on bikers and the kind of people who hung around them. No, probably best to give that particular joy a miss today.

She watched as Joe made her coffee with an ease that belied the complexity of the task.  “So what’s got you down in the dumps?” he asked, surprising her and making her look up from
the  almost mesmerizing way his hands were moving across the big coffee machine, sliding levers and tapping filters, balancing jugs and cups and all while avoiding scalding steam.

“I think you’re confusing your job title with a barman.” From her experience, baristas  knew not to ask the ‘how are you?’ question…there was nothing worse than giving someone the go
-ahead to unleash more information than a stranger had a need to know about a person’s bowel habits or retained water problems. They usually just wanted to make you your coffee and serve the next customer with as little hassle as possible.

“I make an exception on the odd occasion.”

Whisky hadn’t intended to dump her frustrations all over the poor guy—but once she began talking, she found it hard to stop. Even as she heard the words tumbling from her lips she couldn’t stop, but after venting about prejudiced loan officers she had to admit she felt better. “Maybe I should have skipped the coffee and gone straight to a bar instead,” she said with a grimace, in the small silence that followed her rant.

“But a coffee won’t give you a hangover in the morning,” Joe grinned.

“Good point.”

“You’re a good girl,” Joe said
, and his Greek accent, a few generations back if she had to guess, slipped into his broad New York accent. “Things will work out in the end. You got a good head on your shoulders. All you got to do is stop over-thinking everything and let it all fall into place.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it,” he agreed, cleaning the machine and wiping down the counter.

Excellent, Whisky thought dryly. I’ll just sit here and drink my coffee and leave my future and dreams to the tooth fairy to sort out for me. “Thanks for the coffee and the talk, Joe,” she said
, pushing away from the counter. Although great advice on the surface, somehow she didn’t think anyone else was going to fill in at the bar for her tonight…letting things fall into place was a recipe for disaster in her life.

Chapter 4

She couldn’t believe it. She’d made appointments with every bank she could find locally and no one was willing to give her a loan. She’d given up telling Sawyer what her plans were for the day; it was too depressing to continue telling him she’d been turned down yet again.

“I told you, you didn’t have to go through all this, baby. Let the club back you. It’s a great investment.” Sawyer had repeated his offer more than once, but Whisky continued to refuse.

“This was my dream, Sawyer. I want something of my own…
outside
the club. Why is that so hard for you to understand?”

“Because you’re part of this club and I don’t understand why you won’t accept my help. It’s not like
it’s drug money. You know how we make our money.”

“I know that some of the money comes from the bar. I have no idea what else the club dabbles in.”

“Well, it’s not drugs,” he told her, taking a beer from the fridge. “You said you didn’t want to know what else we did,” he pointed out, watching her from his seat on the sofa.

“I didn’t.”

“So you want to know now? Would knowing what else we do make it easier to accept a loan?”

“I’m not accepting a loan from you, Sawyer…but I do want to know what you do.”

“Alright.” He stood up and disappeared out the door. He was gone so long that Whisky thought he might have decided to ignore her request after all, but eventually he came back carrying a thick file he must have gone and retrieved from his office.

“Here you go. This is everything the club’s invested in.”

Whisky accepted the file, and placed it on her lap. This was a big deal. She knew Sawyer wasn’t expected to divulge any club business to her. Club custom was still very much a man’s world, and the official club business was still run by the members and excluded women and any unpatched members.

In the front of the file was a list of company names. None of them sounded familiar and none gave away
any hint of what they were.

She turned the page and saw a more detailed contents file. She spent half an hour reading through the contents of the file, and was impressed with how organized and professional the records were. Slowly she handed back the file and let out a slow breath.

“Satisfied?” he asked, having not spoken a word as she read through the file.

She was relieved to see there was nothing illegal, as he’d promised, but some of the investments were not exactly things that she’d boast about at parties. Who knew porn was such a profitable investment
? The shares in adult websites and phone sex companies were mind-blowingly impressive. She’d like to use some of these figures in an assignment and present it to her professor, but she didn’t want to risk giving the old guy a heart attack.

“It’s not exactly what I was expecting…but you guys really know how to run a business.”

“Maybe if your so-called banking experts ran an investment risk assessment over these investments they wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss us. Baby, we’ve always come up against this crap. People see what they want to see. And that suits us just fine. We like to do things without all the attention, and happy to keep making money and doin’ our own thing. A lot of people think what we do is low, but the fact is…there’s a large chunk of mainstream, everyday suburban guys out there gettin’ their rocks off to the porn we’re bringin’ them. And the online sales of our adult shop is delivering a shit load of stuff to
Mrs stay at home mom
in ‘straight-laced, good Christian streets all over the United States every day. We don’t give a crap who buys the stuff we sell…but at least we’re not hiding who we are, which is more than ninety percent of the population is doing every day.”

Well
, that was true, she supposed. If there was one thing that Whisky couldn’t stand, it was a hypocrite.

“I know you want to help me,” she said on a sigh, tugging his hand as he stood in front of the sofa so that he sat down beside her. “But this is part of the only thing that kept me going…working in that crappy diner where you found me for all that time
. I hated it so much, but I just kept telling myself, one day everything I had planned would fall into place. I’d finish my degree, get a job, and one day open my own business. This is important to me, Sawyer. I feel like I’m cheating by taking your money to start up the coffee shop. I need to do this the right way…maybe I even need to experience all these knock backs as well, so that once I finally do it—I’ll appreciate it all the more.”

“You know you sound crazy right?” he said
, eyeing her dubiously.

“Maybe.
But then if I were sane, I probably wouldn’t be in love with a biker, would I?” she said, reaching across to thread her fingers through his.

“I suppose you got a point…you do have to be a special kind of crazy to do that,” he grinned and pulled her across so that she lay on his lap. “So how much longer do you plan on experiencing all this bullshit for?”

“As long as it takes,” she shrugged. She just prayed it wasn’t going to take too long…deep down she wasn’t entirely sure she felt as confident as she sounded.

****

It was nice to have Bella back but it brought with it changes to the rest of her schedule. She felt bad leaving her friend alone in the apartment but she missed Sawyer when she wasn’t with him. It was almost a relief when Sawyer had to go out of town again on club business a few days after Bell’s return; at least she didn’t have to feel torn between who to stay with—her best friend or her boyfriend.

There was another reason it was nice to be able to completely devote herself to her friend and not be pulled by guilt to also spend time with her boyfriend—she was beginning to notice Bella wasn’t the same happy girl who’d left so full of ambition and dreams to go
to Paris twelve months earlier.

Whisky had always been the more reserved of the two girls, but lately it seemed Bella was the quiet one. She was withdrawn and seemed…nervous. And as the days went by, Whisky saw her friend
’s spirits slip further and further.

Whisky guessed in a lot of ways she’d probably changed too…she’d lost her dad after an all too brief reunion, and had to deal with some pretty confronting stuff having come back into the club, but this thing with Bella was more than simply growing up and having to deal with life…it was something else and as hard as she tried, Whisky couldn’t quite put her finger on what was wrong.