I flipped up the tap, and that rage in my chest lit up, spreading throughout my body. “Watch what I’m doing?”

His scowl deepened. “Yeah, you’re wasting beer. Jesus, who has my brother been hiring, idiots?”

I reacted before I could think better of it. I took the dark beer in my hand and upended it right over Ford Hardy’s head.

4

FORD

“What the fuck?” I wiped the foaming liquid out of my eyes. Had my brother hired some chick with rage issues? What was he thinking? No wonder the bar was struggling.

The woman in front of me was fuming. Her cheeks had turned a pretty shade of pink, eyes blazing. She looked gorgeous. A little bit crazy, but stunning, nonetheless. I needed my head examined. It was the little crinkling of her nose that had me sucking in a sharp breath.

Those little wrinkles that appeared on the bridge and between her brows as green eyes filled with tears had memories slamming into me with the force of a freight train. She always used to cry when she got mad. She might be yelling her head off at the same time, but if she was truly furious, her eyes would fill as she struggled to get her words out. This wasn’t a stranger. This was the girl who’d been like a little sister to me for most of my life. “Trouble?”

I might as well have jammed a knife into her chest from the look on her face, the pain in her eyes. She said nothing, just turned on her heel and fled.

“Oh, shit.” A familiar voice cut through the noise of the crowd, but I couldn’t drag my gaze away from the open doorway Isabelle had disappeared through. She was here. Working for my family. And she was drop-dead gorgeous. Fuck.

A hand clapped me on my shoulder. “Let me get you a towel.”

I shrugged off the grip. “Seriously, Hunter? You couldn’t have warned me?”

My not-so-little brother ground his teeth together. “The last thing you needed was another excuse to bail.”

His shot hit true. Right in the gut. “Get me a damn towel.”

He rounded the bar and tossed me a rag from the pile of clean ones on a shelf. “Here. Give me a minute. I’ll be right back.”

Within sixty seconds, the towel was soaked. I made my way around the bar, careful to avoid dripping on paying customers, and grabbed two more bar rags, doing my best to get as much of the beer off me as possible.

“What’d you do to piss that firecracker off?”