Jim cursed to himself and muttered, “I need a fucking drink.”

“You want me to beer you?” Adrian asked. “It’s five o’clock somewhere in the world.”

“Like England,” Eddie cut in. As Ad glared at him, he shrugged. “Scotland, too. Wales. Ireland—”

“Beer, Jim?”

Jim shook his head and planted his ass back on the floor, figuring that if his brain wasn’t working right, he wasn’t about to chance his knees anymore in the event they decided to take up the fad. As he stared out at the pair of Harleys in the drive, he realized he was in a rat-piss kind of mood and clearly paranoid. Neither of which was a newsflash.

Unfortunately, beer was only a short-term answer. And head transplants had yet to be approved by the FDA.

“Any chance you know how to work a socket wrench?” he said to Adrian.

“Yup.” The guy took off his leather jacket and cracked his knuckles. “And I got nothing better to do than get this piece of junk back on the road.”

As Vin stared across the table at Marie-Terese, the cascading daylight filtering through the diner window transformed her into a vision, the echoes of which resounded in the back of his mind.

Where did he know her from? he thought once again. Where had he seen her before?

God, he wanted to touch her hair.

Vin forked up the last bite of his pancakes, and wondered why she had asked him if he liked redheads. Then he remembered. “I don’t like red hair enough to be with Gina, if that’s what you want to know.”

“No? She’s beautiful.”

“To some…probably. Look, I’m not the kind of guy who—”

The waitress came up to the table. “More coffee? Or do you want the ch—”

“—fucks around with other women.”

Marie-Terese blinked and so did the waitress.

Shit. “What I mean is…” Stopping himself, Vin glanced up at the other woman, who seemed to be ready to hang around. “Are you pouring? Or what?”

“I—ah, I could do with some more coffee,” Marie-Terese said, holding up her mug. “Please.”

The waitress topped slowly, looking back and forth between them like she was hoping to hear the rest of the story. When Marie-Terese’s mug was full, the woman went to work on his.

“More syrup?” she asked him.

He pointed to his clean plate. “I’m finished.”

“Oh. Right.” She cleared what was in front of him and walked away with the same alacrity with which she’d worked the pot: Molasses moved faster.

“I don’t cheat,” he repeated when there was some privacy. “After watching my parents, I learned more than enough about what not to do in relationships, and that’s pretty much rule number one.”

Marie-Terese held out the sugar to him, and when he stared down at the bowl like he didn’t know what it was, she said, “You know, for your coffee. You put sugar in yours.”

“Yeah…I do.”

As he doctored up his java, she said, “So your parents’ marriage wasn’t a good one?”